Land Reform Quotes

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the land question in Zimbabwe is the single most decisive one.

There is only one kind of land reform today: expropriation.

Whereas land reform was the first act of the Bolsheviks, it was the last act of the Whites: that, in a peasant country, says it all.

In order to detach caste from the political economy, from conditions of enslavement in which most dalits lived and worked, in order to slide the questions of entitlement, land reforms and the redistribution of wealth, Hindu reformers cleverly narrowed the question of caste to the issue of untouchability. They framed it as an erroneous religious and cultural practice that needed to be reformed.

My life seems to be an increasing revelation of the intimate face of universal struggle. You begin with your family and the kids on the block, and next you open your eyes to what you call your people and that leads you into land reform into Black English into Angola leads you back into your own bed where you lie by yourself, wondering if you deserve to be peaceful, or trusted or desired or left to the freedom of your own unfaltering heart. And the scale shrinks to the size of a skull: your own interior cage.

Startled, he tried to comfort him. But Father said slowly, "I ask myself whether I am afraid of death. I don't think I am. My life as it is now is worse. And it looks as if there is not going to be any ending. Sometimes I feel weak: I stand by Tranquillity River and think, Just one leap and I can get it over with. Then I tell myself I must not. If I die without being cleared, there will be no end of trouble for all of you… I have been thinking a lot lately. I had a hard childhood, and society was full of injustice. It was for a fair society that I joined the Communists. I've tried my best through the years. But what good has it done for the people? As for myself, why is it that in the end I have come to be the ruin of my family? People who believe in retribution say that to end badly you must have something on your conscience. I have been thinking hard about the things I've done in my life. I have given orders to execute some people…" Father went on to tell Jin-ming about the death sentences he had signed, the names and stories of the e-ba ('ferocious despots') in the land reform in Chaoyang, and the bandit chiefs in Yibin. "But these people had done so much evil that God himself would have had them killed. What, then, have I done wrong to deserve all this?" After a long pause, Father said, "If I die like this, don't believe in the Communist Party anymore.

In your schoolbooks, you won't find anything about the Land Reform nor about the internal fighting of the Viet Minh. A part of our country's history has been erased, together with the lives of countless people. We're forbidden to talk about events that relate to past mistakes or the wrongdoing of those in power, for they give themselves the right to rewrite history. But you're old enough to know that history will write itself in people's memories, and as long as those memories live on, we can have faith that we can do better.

Why were we so full of hope in those days? Looking back, I see so clearly that violence was worsening. Living through that time, we didn’t see that. We believed in our capacity to grow a great country. A just society.

The Arab people need a century of peace. The Arab people need leadership, not of desert sheiks who own thousands of slaves, not of hate-filled religious fanatics, not of military cliques, not of men whose entire thinking is in the Dark Ages. The Arab people need leaders who will bring them civil liberties, education, medicine, land reforms, equality. They need leaders with the courage to face the real problems of ignorance, illiteracy, and disease instead of waving a ranting banner of ultranationalism and promoting the evil idea that the destruction of Israel will be the cure for all their problems. Unfortunately, whenever an enlightened Arab leader arises he is generally murdered. The Arabs want neither resettlement of the refugees, alleviation of their plight, nor do they want peace. Israel today stands as the greatest single instrument for bringing the Arab people out of the Dark Ages.

The bombastic bushy-bearded beatnik bard promised land reforms, social justice and pickled plantains on every plate—the standard stipends of welfare-waffled Commie commissars.

The new socialist government was undertaking a land reform movement that would transform private ownership of property across the entire country.

Every once in a while, however, the subordinates of this world contest their fates. They protest their conditions, write letters and petitions, join movements, and make demands. Their goals may be minimal and discrete — better safety guards on factory machines, an end to marital rape—but in voicing them, they raise the specter of a more fundamental change in power. They cease to be servants or supplicants and become agents, speaking and acting on their own behalf. More than the reforms themselves, it is this assertion of agency by the subject class—the appearance of an insistent and independent voice of demand — that vexes their superiors. Guatemala’s Agrarian Reform of 1952 redistributed a million and a half acres of land to 100,000 peasant families. That was nothing, in the minds of the country’s ruling classes, compared to the riot of political talk the bill seemed to unleash. Progressive reformers, Guatemala’s arch-bishop complained, sent local peasants “gifted with facility with words” to the capital, where they were given opportunities “to speak in public.” That was the great evil of the Agrarian Reform.

In his book Politics, which is the foundation of the study of political systems, and very interesting, Aristotle talked mainly about Athens. But he studied various political systems - oligarchy, monarchy - and didn't like any of the particularly. He said democracy is probably the best system, but it has problems, and he was concerned with the problems. One problem that he was concerned with is quite striking because it runs right up to the present. He pointed out that in a democracy, if the people - people didn't mean people, it meant freemen, not slaves, not women - had the right to vote, the poor would be the majority, and they would use their voting power to take away property from the rich, which wouldn't be fair, so we have to prevent this. James Madison made the same pint, but his model was England. He said if freemen had democracy, then the poor farmers would insist on taking property from the rich. They would carry out what we these days call land reform. and that's unacceptable. Aristotle and Madison faced the same problem but made the opposite decisions. Aristotle concluded that we should reduce ineqality so the poor wouldn't take property from the rich. And he actually propsed a visin for a city that would put in pace what we today call welfare-state programs, common meals, other support systems. That would reduce inequality, and with it the problem of the poor taking property from the rich. Madison's decision was the opposite. We should reduce democracy so the poor won't be able to get together to do this. If you look at the design of the U.S. constitutional system, it followed Madison's approach. The Madisonian system placed power in the hands of the Senate. The executive in those days was more or less an administrator, not like today. The Senate consisted of "the wealth of the nation," those who had sympathy for property owners and their rights. That's where power should be. The Senate, remember, wasn't elected. It was picked by legislatures, who were themselves very much subject to control by the rich and the powerful. The House, which was closer to the population, had much less power. And there were all sorts of devices to keep people from participation too much - voting restrictions and property restrictions. The idea was to prevent the threat of democracy. This goal continues right to the present. It has taken different forms, but the aim remains the same.

Communism — ladies and gentlemen, I say it without flinching: communism in eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba brought land reform and human services; a dramatic bettering of the living conditions of hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or never since witnessed in human history, and that's something to appreciate. Communism transformed desperately poor countries into societies in which everyone had adequate food, shelter, medical care, and education, and some of us who come from poor families who carry around the hidden injuries of class are very impressed; are very, very impressed by these achievements and are not willing to dismiss them as economistic. To say that socialism doesn't work is to overlook the fact that it did work and it worked for hundreds of millions of people. 'But what about the democratic rights that they lost?' We hear U.S. leaders talking about 'restoring' democracy to the communist countries, but these countries—with the exception of Czechoslovakia—were not democracies before communism. Russia was a Czarist autocracy; Poland was a right-wing fascist dictatorship under Piłsudski, with concentration camps of its own; Albania was an Italian fascist protectorate as early as 1927; Cuba was a U.S.-sponsored dictatorship under that butcher Batista; Lithuania, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria were outright fascist regimes openly allied with Nazi Germany in World War 2. So, what—exactly what democracy are we talking about restoring? The socialist countries did not take away any rights that didn't exist there in the first place.

Without any constitutional basis, public debate, or even the knowledge of most Americans, passing legislation through Congress had come to effectively require 60 votes in the Senate, or what was often referred to as a “supermajority.” By the time I was elected president, the filibuster had become so thoroughly integrated into Senate practice—viewed as an essential and time-honored tradition—that nobody much bothered to discuss the possibility of reforming or doing away with it altogether.

During the Government’s recent overhaul of GCSEs, I was asked to join a consultative group advising on the English Literature syllabus. It quickly became clear that the minister wanted to prescribe two Shakespeare plays for every 16-year-old in the land. I argued, to the contrary, that there should be one Shakespeare play and one play by anybody except Shakespeare. It cannot be in Shakespeare’s interest for teenagers to associate him with compulsion, for his plays and his alone to have the dreaded status of set books.

On Rachel's show for November 7, 2012: Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. and he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States, again. And the Bureau of Labor statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the congressional research service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not screwed to over-sample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad; Nate Silver was doing math. And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy, sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone's guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And you and election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism. Listen, last night was a good night for liberals and for democrats for very obvious reasons, but it was also, possibly, a good night for this country as a whole. Because in this country, we have a two-party system in government. And the idea is supposed to be that the two sides both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country. They both propose possible solutions to our real problems. And we debate between those possible solutions. And by the process of debate, we pick the best idea. That competition between good ideas from both sides about real problems in the real country should result in our country having better choices, better options, than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff. And if the Republican Party and the conservative movement and the conservative media is stuck in a vacuum-sealed door-locked spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good and denying the factual, lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived as a nation of the constructive debate about competing feasible ideas about real problems. Last night the Republicans got shellacked, and they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them in real time, in real humiliating time, not believe it, even as it was happening to them. And unless they are going to secede, they are going to have to pop the factual bubble they have been so happy living inside if they do not want to get shellacked again, and that will be a painful process for them, but it will be good for the whole country, left, right, and center. You guys, we're counting on you. Wake up. There are real problems in the world. There are real, knowable facts in the world. Let's accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let's move on from there. If the Republican Party and the conservative movement and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation. And in that spirit, congratulations, everyone!

In response to the question “Do you favor or oppose making sharia law, or Islamic law, the official law of the land in our country?” the nations with the five largest Muslim populations—Indonesia (204 million), Pakistan (178 million), Bangladesh (149 million), Egypt (80 million), and Nigeria (76 million)—showed overwhelming support for sharia. To be precise, 72 percent of Indonesian Muslims, 84 percent of Pakistani Muslims, 82 percent of Bangladeshi Muslims, 74 percent of Egyptian Muslims, and 71 percent of Nigerian Muslims supported making sharia the state law of their respective societies. In two Islamic nations that are considered to be transitioning to democracy, the number of sharia supporters was even higher. Pew found that 91 percent of Iraqi Muslims and 99 percent of Afghan Muslims supported making sharia their country’s official law.

Unlike all earlier Roman reformers, Gaius sponsored not just a single initiative but a dozen or so. He was the first politician in the city, leaving aside the mythical founding fathers, to have an extensive and coherent programme, with measures that covered such things as the right of appeal against the death penalty, the outlawing of bribery and a much more ambitious scheme of land distribution than Tiberius had ever proposed.

Contemporary attitudes toward urban parks fall into three levels of sophistication. The first, the most naive assumption, is that parks are just plots of land preserved in their original state. If asked to discuss the issue at all, many laymen have maintained this much, that parks are bits of nature created only in the sense that some decision was made not to build on the land. Many are surprised to learn that parks that an artifact conceived and deliberated as carefully as public buildings, with both physical shape and social usage taken into account. The second, a little more informed, is that parks are aesthetic objects and that their history can be understood in terms of an evolution of artistic styles independent of societal considerations. The third is the view that each of the elements of the urban park represents part of planners' strategy for moral and social reform, so that today, as in the past, the citizen visiting a park is subject to an accumulated set of intended moral lessons.

On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet led a successful coup that overthrew the elected socialist government of President Salvador Allende in Chile. Ruling in the name of economic liberty, the Pinochet junta became one of the most notorious authoritarian regimes in recent history. With mass killings, widespread torture, and systematic intimidation, Pinochet’s forces crushed the trade union movement, vanquished the rural farmers seeking land reform, stifled student activism, and imposed radical and unpopular changes in schooling, health care, social security, and more. As Orlando Letelier, the soon-to-be-assassinated Chilean ambassador to the United States, explained in The Nation, the economic program and the repression were inseparable: social and political “regression for the majorities and ‘economic freedom’ for small privileged groups” went together.1 The military coup obliterated the citizen-led organizing that had made Chile a beacon to the rest of Latin America of what might be achieved by democratic, electoral means.2

In so far as it is an institution intended to achieve, for the benefit of the greatest number, the social reforms to which landed suffrage is opposed, universal suffrage is powerless; especially if it pretends to legislate or govern directly. For, until the social reforms are accomplished, the greatest number is of necessity the least enlightened, and consequently the least capable of understanding and effecting reforms. In regard to the antinomy, pointed out by him, of liberty and government, — whether the latter be monarchic, aristocratic, or democratic in form.

Internally, when anticommunism is the ruling ideology, almost the national religion, any legitimate complaint from below can easily be dismissed as communist. Anything that would be an obvious inconvenience to the small clique of rich families that run the country can be easily categorized as dangerous revolution, and cast aside. This includes any whiff of socialism or social democracy, any land reform, and any regulation that would reduce monopoly power and allow for more efficient development and market competition. It includes unions and any normal demands for workers’ rights.

Surprising as it may seem today, classical ideas of creating a free market were to be achieved by “socialist” reforms. Their common aim was to protect populations from having to pay prices that included a non-labor rent or financial tax to pay landlords and natural resource owners, monopolists and bondholders. The vested interests railed against public regulation and taxation along these lines. They opposed public ownership or even the taxation of land, natural monopolies and banking. They wanted to collect rent and interest, not make land, banking and infrastructure monopolies public in character.

In a passage directed at abolitionists as well as temperance reformers, he had observed that it was the nature of man, when told that he should be “shunned and despised,” and condemned as the author “of all the vice and misery and crime in the land,” to “retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart.

Dissent and dissidence are overwhelmingly the work of the young. It is not by chance that the men and women who initiated the French Revolution, like the reformers and planners of the New Deal and postwar Europe, were distinctly younger than those who had gone before. Rather than resign themselves, young people are more likely to look at a problem and demand that it be solved.

In the land of historical romance novels, particularly the Regencies, there is no line more quoted than this: Reformed rakes make the best husbands. It's the sort of pithy one-liner a beloved character dashes off and everyone laughs a sparkling laugh, the heroine knits her brow, and the rogue in question scowls but we all know the truth: That bad boy will soon be reformed. And he will like it.

The Catholic struggle to hold the line against Protestantism brought thirty years of misery to millions of Europeans: opinions vary, but within the German lands one modern estimate is that 40 per cent of the population met an early death through the fighting or the accompanying famine and disease, and even the most cautious reassessment of the evidence comes up with a figure of 15-20 per cent.

After Moses's death, it fell to Joshua to conquer the Promised Land. The biblical book of Joshua still contains some ancient material, but this was radically revised by these same reformers, who interpreted it in the light of their peculiarly xenophobic theology. They give the impression that, acting under Yahweh's orders, Joshua massacred the entire population of Canaan and destroyed their cities.

The desire for property is as natural as hunger, as the urge to continue one’s kind, or as any other inborn characteristic of man,” and it must be satisfied. Peasant ownership of land is a guarantee of order in the state. The peasant without land of his own lends a ready ear to false doctrine, and is susceptible to those who urge him to satisfy his desire for land by force. The solid peasant on land of his own is a barrier against all destructive movements, against any form of communism, which is why all socialists are so desperately anxious not to see the peasant released from the slavery of the commune, not to let him build up his strength. (And of course overcrowded villages make the work of agitators easier.) Land reform will make the incendiarism of the Socialist Revolutionaries a thing of the past.

By teaching students of color that the best way to succeed is to respond to tests the way the state demands, determine the validity of an argument under the state’s rules, and examine essays only if they follow the state’s standards, we are creating education via deculturation, or stripping a culture, instead of transculturation, the merging of cultures. We didn’t land on education reform. Education reform landed on us.

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.

Reforms that advance the conditions of life for the general public are not as materially intractable or as dependent on capital resources as we have been led to believe. There is no great mystery to building a health clinic, or carrying out programs for food rationing, land redistribution, literacy, jobs, and housing. Such tasks are well within the capacity of any state—if there is the political will and a mobilization of popular class power.

A few months after the great crisis I had the joy of seeing the line of caravans re-form on the banks of the Orontes; the oases were again the resort of merchants exchanging news in the glow of their evening fires, each morning repacking along with their goods for transportation to lands unknown a certain number of thoughts, words and customs genuinely our own, which little by little would take possession of the globe more securely than can advancing legions.

It was in the library that he and May had always discussed the future of the children: the studies of Dallas and his young brother Bill, Mary's incurable indifference to "accomplishments," and passion for sport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward "art" which had finally landed the restless and curious Dallas in the office of a rising New York architect. The young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and business and taking up all sorts of new things. If they were not absorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the chances were that they were going in for Central American archaeology, for architecture or landscape-engineering; taking a keen and learned interest in the prerevolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and adapting Georgian types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the word "Colonial." Nobody nowadays had "Colonial" houses except the millionaire grocers of the suburbs.

India is a land where contradictions will continue to abound, because there are many Indias that are being transformed, with different levels of intensity, by different forces of globalization. Each of these Indias is responding to them in different ways. Consider these coexisting examples of progress and status quo: India is a nuclear-capable state that still cannot build roads that will survive their first monsoon. It has eradicated smallpox through the length and breadth of the country, but cannot stop female foeticide and infanticide. It is a country that managed to bring about what it called the ‘green revolution’, which heralded food grain self-sufficiency for a nation that relied on external food aid and yet, it easily has the most archaic land and agricultural laws in the world, with no sign of anyone wanting to reform them any time soon. It has hundreds of millions of people who subsist on less that a dollar a day, but who vote astutely and punish political parties ruthlessly. It has an independent judiciary that once set aside even Indira Gandhi’s election to parliament and yet, many members of parliament have criminal records and still contest and win elections from prison. India is a significant exporter of intellectual capital to the rest of the world—that capital being spawned in a handful of world class institutions of engineering, science and management. Yet it is a country with primary schools of pathetic quality and where retaining children in school is a challenge. India truly is an equal opportunity employer of women leaders in politics, but it took over fifty years to recognize that domestic violence is a crime and almost as long to get tough with bride burning. It is the IT powerhouse of the world, the harbinger of the offshore services revolution that is changing the business paradigms of the developed world. But regrettably, it is also the place where there is a yawning digital divide.

Men and women of today! if there be among you any pure, fresh flower, let it be laid on the altar of God. If there are among you any who, being young, do not desire to return into the world, let them give up! Let them renounce! This is the one secret of spirituality, renunciation. Dare to do this. Be brave enough to do it. Such great sacrifices are necessary. Can you not see the tide of death and materialism that is rolling over these Western lands? Can you not see the power of lust and unholiness, that is eating into the very vitals of society? Believe me, you will not arrest these things by talk, or by movements of agitation for reform; but by renunciation, by standing up, in the midst of decay and death, as mountains of righteousness. Talk not, but let the power of purity, the power of chastity, the power of renunciation, emanate from every pore of your body. Let it strike those who are struggling day and night for gold, that even in the midst of such a state of things, there can be one to whom wealth counts for nothing. Put away lust and wealth. Sacrifice yourselves.

He split his hands apart and the bullet that was headed for his face broke into a hundred shards, all of which flew wide. To prove that he still could, he wove his fingers back together and the bullet reformed behind him, hitting another tree with a righteous thump. He neatly sidestepped the falling tree. It landed with a crash. “I don’t have time to be shot at right now,” Merlin said to the machine. “Now would you please point me to the nearest spaceship? I need to get off this, as they said in the last age I lived through, hot mess of a planet.

After Luther’s revolution, Protestant states began to show signs of greater economic dynamism. Why was this? One answer is that, despite Luther’s desire to purify the Church, the Reformation led to a large-scale reallocation of resources from religious to secular activities. Two thirds of monasteries were closed in the Protestant territories of Germany, the lands and other assets mostly appropriated by secular rulers and sold to wealthy subjects, as also happened in England. A rising share of university students gave up thoughts of the monastic life, turning their attention to more worldly vocations.

The stigma attached to the charging of interest was simply incompatible with the commodification of land and labour and with the Great Reversal. It had to be overturned – and so it was. The Protestants, who broke away from the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, played a crucial role in this reversal. Protestantism emerged in opposition to the Pope and the cardinals’ monopoly of God. Protestants insisted that anyone could speak personally with the divinity, unmediated by an authoritarian, stifling Church. Suddenly, the person, the individual who is the director of his own affairs, became the pillar of that reformed Church.

in a chapter on “repairing God’s house,” they’ll find no new ideas for projects, programs, studies, procedures for nominating bishops, committees, structures, offices, synods, councils, pastoral plans, changed teaching, new teaching, budget realignments, sweeping reforms, or reshuffled personnel. None of those things matter. Or rather, none of them is essential. The only thing essential, to borrow a thought from the great Leon Bloy, is to be a saint. And we do that, as a Church and as individuals, by actually living what we claim to believe, and believing the faith that generations of Christians have suffered and died to sustain.

Doggerel by a Senior Citizen (for Robert Lederer) Our earth in 1969 Is not the planet I call mine, The world, I mean, that gives me strength To hold off chaos at arm’s length. My Eden landscapes and their climes Are constructs from Edwardian times, When bath-rooms took up lots of space, And, before eating, one said Grace. The automobile, the aeroplane, Are useful gadgets, but profane: The enginry of which I dream Is moved by water or by steam. Reason requires that I approve The light-bulb which I cannot love: To me more reverence-commanding A fish-tail burner on the landing. My family ghosts I fought and routed, Their values, though, I never doubted: I thought the Protestant Work-Ethic Both practical and sympathetic. When couples played or sang duets, It was immoral to have debts: I shall continue till I die To pay in cash for what I buy. The Book of Common Prayer we knew Was that of 1662: Though with-it sermons may be well, Liturgical reforms are hell. Sex was of course —it always is— The most enticing of mysteries, But news-stands did not then supply Manichean pornography. Then Speech was mannerly, an Art, Like learning not to belch or fart: I cannot settle which is worse, The Anti-Novel or Free Verse. Nor are those Ph.D’s my kith, Who dig the symbol and the myth: I count myself a man of letters Who writes, or hopes to, for his betters. Dare any call Permissiveness An educational success? Saner those class-rooms which I sat in, Compelled to study Greek and Latin. Though I suspect the term is crap, There is a Generation Gap, Who is to blame? Those, old or young, Who will not learn their Mother-Tongue. But Love, at least, is not a state Either en vogue or out-of-date, And I’ve true friends, I will allow, To talk and eat with here and now. Me alienated? Bosh! It’s just As a sworn citizen who must Skirmish with it that I feel Most at home with what is Real.

Do not allow your children to celebrate the days on which unbelief and superstition are being catered to. They are admittedly inclined to want this because they see that the children of Roman Catholic parents observe those days. Do not let them attend carnivals, observe Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras), see Santa Claus, or observe Twelfth Night, because they are all remnants of an idolatrous papacy. You must not keep your children out of school or from work on those days nor let them play outside or join in the amusement. The Lord has said, “After the doings of the land of Egypt, where you lived, shall ye not do: and after the doings of the land of Canaan, where I bring you, you shall not do: neither shall you walk in their ordinances” (Lev. 18:3). The Lord will punish the Reformed on account of the days of Baal (Hosea 2:12-13), and he also observes what the children do on the occasion of such idolatry (Jer. 17:18). Therefore, do not let your children receive presents on Santa Claus day, nor let them draw tickets in a raffle and such things. Pick other days on which to give them the things that amuse them, and because the days of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost have the same character, Reformed people must keep their children away from these so-called holy days and feast days.

The broad white road unrolled before the long procession, the sun and sky surveyed it cloudless, the wind tossed the tree boughs above it, and the twelve hundred children and one hundred and forty adults of which it was composed trod on in time and tune, with gay faces and glad hearts. It was a joyous scene, and a scene to do good. It was a day of happiness for rich and poor — the work, first of God, and then of the clergy. Let England’s priests have their due. They are a faulty set in some respects, being only of common flesh and blood like us all; but the land would be badly off without them. Britain would miss her church, if that church fell. God save it! God also reform it!

Holy Trinity (The Sonnet) Civilization is founded on 3 pillars, Conscience, courage and compassion. Without these three there is no society, Only a prehistoric mockery of civilization. When all three come together, lo and behold, Here rises the holy trinity - the holy trident! You can use it to plough the land of creation, Or use it to devour the divisions most obstinate. Wasting precious lifeforce chanting like a parrot, Do not go chasing fiction out in the wilderness. Wipe the rust off your heart that causes all the drag, And you my friend, shall be the incorruptible trident. However, in reality, there are no three, but only one. The spirit of love and oneness is beyond time and form.

SELKIE Alone, the cold body of the selkie man lay upon the sand, so like the drowned one the widow had called for. For her longing, he was hauled upon the sand, exposed to the moonlight. The selkie strained in fraught movements and human form broke from the gleaming seal fur. Undeniably he bore the image of the widow’s lost husband and spoke with the sounds of the dead man’s voice. She hailed back from the rocks. Shadows accumulating beyond the moon’s ability to reform. Colours were washed from sight and silver crashed through her, colder than snow dreams of being. In the dark, the ocean became the rolling flanks of a great beast drifting back across the horizon. Out deep soon, the land’s drop sharp.

He concluded that nothing could happen, not knowing that human love and love of truth sometimes conquer where love of beauty fails. A little disenchanted, a little tired, but aesthetically intact, he resumed his placid life, relying more and more on his second gift, the gift of humour. If he could not reform the world, he could at all events laugh at it, thus attaining at least an intellectual superiority. Laughter, he read and believed, was a sign of good moral health, and he laughed on contentedly, till Lilia's marriage toppled contentment down for ever. Italy, the land of beauty, was ruined for him. She had no power to change men and things who dwelt in her. She, too, could produce avarice, brutality, stupidity—and, what was worse, vulgarity.

I'll try. The Big Bang banged, a naked singularity. Lots happened in the first three minutes; I forget just what. Then eons passed: galaxies condensed and sprang away from one another like disenchanted lovers, at speeds proportional to the square of their distances, something like that. At last one solar system materialized, a nuclear family with planets nine. Earth's geology transpired; life; biological species evolved; Eocene, Pleistocene -- you know. We crawled out of the water, some of us, into the marshes, out of the marshes, some of us, onto dry land, and human history took place. Classic antiquity, Dark and Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment; then Modern Times, now about done. F. S. Key. E. A. Poe. Us. How'm I doing? I love you.

McConnell seemed an unlikely Republican leader. He showed no aptitude for schmoozing, backslapping, or rousing oratory. As far as anyone could tell, he had no close friends even in his own caucus; nor did he appear to have any strong convictions beyond an almost religious opposition to any version of campaign finance reform. Joe told me of one run-in he’d had on the Senate floor after the Republican leader blocked a bill Joe was sponsoring; when Joe tried to explain the bill’s merits, McConnell raised his hand like a traffic cop and said, “You must be under the mistaken impression that I care.” But what McConnell lacked in charisma or interest in policy he more than made up for in discipline, shrewdness, and shamelessness—all of which he employed in the single-minded and dispassionate pursuit of power.

Such is the lot of the knight that even though my patrimony were ample and adequate for my support, nevertheless here are the disturbances which give me no quiet. We live in fields, forests, and fortresses. Those by whose labors we exist are poverty-stricken peasants, to whom we lease our fields, vineyards, pastures, and woods. The return is exceedingly sparse in proportion to the labor expended. Nevertheless the utmost effort is put forth that it may be bountiful and plentiful, for we must be diligent stewards. I must attach myself to some prince in the hope of protection. Otherwise every one will look upon me as fair plunder. But even if I do make such an attachment hope is beclouded by danger and daily anxiety. If I go away from home I am in peril lest I fall in with those who are at war or feud with my overlord, no matter who he is, and for that reason fall upon me and carry me away. If fortune is adverse, the half of my estates will be forfeit as ransom. Where I looked for protection I was ensnared. We cannot go unarmed beyond to yokes of land. On that account, we must have a large equipage of horses, arms, and followers, and all at great expense. We cannot visit a neighboring village or go hunting or fishing save in iron. Then there are frequently quarrels between our retainers and others, and scarcely a day passes but some squabble is referred to us which we must compose as discreetly as possible, for if I push my claim to uncompromisingly war arises, but if I am too yielding I am immediately the subject of extortion. One concession unlooses a clamor of demands. And among whom does all this take place? Not among strangers, my friend, but among neighbors, relatives, and those of the same household, even brothers. These are our rural delights, our peace and tranquility. The castle, whether on plain or mountain, must be not fair but firm, surrounded by moat and wall, narrow within, crowded with stalls for the cattle, and arsenals for guns, pitch, and powder. Then there are dogs and their dung, a sweet savor I assure you. The horsemen come and go, among them robbers, thieves, and bandits. Our doors are open to practically all comers, either because we do not know who they are or do not make too diligent inquiry. One hears the bleating of sheep, the lowing of cattle, the barking of dogs, the shouts of men working in the fields, the squeaks or barrows and wagons, yes, and even the howling of wolves from nearby woods. The day is full of thought for the morrow, constant disturbance, continual storms. The fields must be ploughed and spaded, the vines tended, trees planted, meadows irrigated. There is harrowing, sowing, fertilizing, reaping, threshing: harvest and vintage. If the harvest fails in any year, then follow dire poverty, unrest, and turbulence.

THREE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER JESUS DIED ON A ROMAN cross, the emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Christians, who had once been persecuted by the empire, became the empire, and those who had once denied the sword took up the sword against their neighbors. Pagan temples were destroyed, their patrons forced to convert to Christianity or die. Christians whose ancestors had been martyred in gladiatorial combat now attended the games, cheering on the bloodshed. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. On July 15, 1099, Christian crusaders lay siege to Jerusalem, then occupied by Fatimite Arabs. They found a breach in the wall and took the city. Declaring “God wills it!” they killed every defender in their path and dashed the bodies of helpless babies against rocks. When they came upon a synagogue where many of the city’s Jews had taken refuge, they set fire to the building and burned the people inside alive. An eyewitness reported that at the Porch of Solomon, horses waded through blood. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Through a series of centuries-long inquisitions that swept across Europe, hundreds of thousands of people, many of them women accused of witchcraft, were tortured by religious leaders charged with protecting the church from heresy. Their instruments of torture, designed to slowly inflict pain by dismembering and dislocating the body, earned nicknames like the Breast Ripper, the Head Crusher, and the Judas Chair. Many were inscribed with the phrase Soli Deo Gloria, “Glory be only to God.” Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. In a book entitled On Jews and Their Lies, reformer Martin Luther encouraged civic leaders to burn down Jewish synagogues, expel the Jewish people from their lands, and murder those who continued to practice their faith within Christian territory. “The rulers must act like a good physician who when gangrene has set in proceeds without mercy to cut, saw, and burn flesh, veins, bone, and marrow,” he wrote. Luther’s writings were later used by German officials as religious justification of the Holocaust. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.

Sometimes, as in the case of the copper companies, the nationalizations were achieved through legislation that won overwhelming support. (By now, no one in Chile loved the American companies; even the head of Chile’s Roman Catholic bishops declared that nationalization was right and just.) At other times the methods skirted or even overstepped the bounds of legality. The government would simply approve the seizures of farms and factories, one of those “loopholes” Allende was relying on. Perhaps the most important—and pernicious—method was by squeezing the companies economically, as he tried to do with El Mercurio. The government had the authority to approve price hikes and wage increases. Companies that were targets for takeovers were prohibited from raising their prices but were forced to raise their workers’ pay. Moreover, as the government extended its control of the banks, credit for distressed companies dried up. Forced bankruptcies were a favorite tool of Allende’s Socialists. And who was there to run these companies once they were taken over? Ambassador Davis reports: “Government-appointed managers were usually named on the basis of a political patronage system that would have put Tammany Hall to shame.” Many formerly profitable companies were soon incurring heavy losses. In the countryside, where peasants—often illiterate—were seizing control of the estates, there was resistance even to the simplest methods of accounting and cost calculation. As Allende told Debray, “We shall have real power when copper and steel are under our control, when saltpeter is genuinely under our control, when we have put far-reaching land reform measures into effect, when we control imports and exports through the state, when we have collectivized a major portion of our national production.” But it wasn’t just the economy that Allende was trying to control. He was also taking steps to centralize the government and restrict political freedom. He saw his most important political reform as replacing the bicameral legislature with a single chamber in order to strengthen the presidency and weaken congress’s ability to block his objectives. It would also have the power to override judicial decisions. He called the proposed new body the “People’s Assembly,” but he never gained sufficient support from the “people” to call a plebiscite on the question.

In the light of the evidence it is hard to believe that most crusaders were motivated by crude materialism. Given their knowledge and expectations and the economic climate in which they lived, the disposal of assets to invest in the fairly remote possibility of settlement in the East would have been a stupid gamble. It makes much more sense to suppose, in so far as one can generalize about them, that they were moved by an idealism which must have inspired not only them but their families. Parents, brothers and sisters, wives and children had to face a long absence and must have worried about them: in 1098 Countess Ida of Boulogne made an endowment to the abbey of St Bertin 'for the safety of her sons, Godfrey and Baldwin, who have gone to Jerusalem'.83 And they and more distant relatives — cousins, uncles and nephews - were prepared to endow them out of the patrimonial lands. I have already stressed that no one can treat the phenomenal growth of monasticism in this period without taking into account not only those who entered the communities to be professed, but also the lay men and women who were prepared to endow new religious houses with lands and rents. The same is true of the crusading movement. Behind many crusaders stood a large body of men and women who were prepared to sacrifice interest to help them go. It is hard to avoid concluding that they were fired by the opportunity presented to a relative not only of making a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem but also of fighting in a holy cause. For almost a century great lords, castellans and knights had been subjected to abuse by the Church. Wilting under the torrent of invective and responding to the attempts of churchmen to reform their way of life in terms they could understand, they had become perceptibly more pious. Now they were presented by a pope who knew them intimately with the chance of performing a meritorious act which exactly fitted their upbringing and devotional needs and they seized it eagerly. But they responded, of course, in their own way. They were not theologians and were bound to react in ways consonant with their own ideas of right and wrong, ideas that did not always respond to those of senior churchmen. The emphasis that Urban had put on charity - love of Christian brothers under the heel of Islam, love of Christ whose land was subject to the Muslim yoke - could not but arouse in their minds analogies with their own kin and their own lords' patrimonies, and remind them of their obligations to avenge injuries to their relatives and lords. And that put the crusade on the level of a vendetta. Their leaders, writing to Urban in September 1098, informed him that 'The Turks, who inflicted much dishonour on Our Lord Jesus Christ, have been taken and killed and we Jerusalemites have avenged the injury to the supreme God Jesus Christ.

Testament prophet.39 However, what was this prophet doing? Why was he encouraging Israelites to be baptized in the Jordan River? The answer to these questions comes from John’s actions as well as from his words concerning his ministry. First, John appeared “baptizing in the wilderness and preaching a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. Then all the land of Judea, and those from Jerusalem, went out to him and were all baptized by him in the Jordan River” (Mark 1:4–5). There are two issues that merit attention: the significance of the Jordan River and the repentance of sins. The geographical location of John’s baptismal ministry is key. John could have chosen a number of places to perform his baptizing ministry, but he chose the Jordan, which was the gate to the Promised Land and the place where Israel re-enacted the Red Sea crossing. When the feet of the Levites touched the waters of the Jordan, the waters stopped flowing and the Israelites crossed the river on dry ground (Josh. 3:11–17). Just as the Holy Spirit in the glory cloud led Israel through the Red Sea, the ark of the Lord led Israel through the Jordan on dry ground to the Land of Promise. The connection between the two events is manifest in the word play in both narratives. The priests, for example, stood on dry ground (בחרבה) (Josh. 3:17), just as Moses turned the sea into dry land (לחרבה) (Ex. 14:21).40 Likewise, the waters of the Jordan “stood still, and rose in a heap” (קמו נד אחד) (Josh. 3:16), just as the waters of the Red Sea “stood upright like a heap” (נצבו כמו נד) (Ex. 15:8; cf. Ps. 78:13).41 Given these parallels between the Red Sea and Jordan River crossings, it seems that John’s activity in the Jordan was connected not only to the idea of a cleansing ritual, but also to the redemptive-historical significance of the Jordan. The connections between the Red Sea, the Jordan River, and John’s

Some scholars have stressed early Israelite religion as the quintessential period of pure Yahwism. Following in the footsteps of Albright, G. Mendenhall and J. Bright posit an early pure Yahwism that was polluted secondarily in the land by the cult of Baal and other idolatry. In their schemes, the monarchy was largely a negative influence. There are three major problems with this characterization of Israelite religion. First, some of the features that Mendenhall and Bright view as secondary idolatry belonged to Israel’s Canaanite heritage. The cult of Baal, the symbol of the asherah, the high places, and the cultic practices involving the dead all belonged to Israel’s ancient past, its Canaanite past. Second, the “purest form of Yahwism” belonged not to an early stage of Israel’s history but to the late monarchy. Differentiation of the cult of Yahweh did not begin until the ninth century and appeared in full flower only in the eighth century and afterward. Even this stage of reform was marked by other religious developments considered idolatrous by later generations; the cults of the “Queen of Heaven” and “the Tammuz” undermine any idealization of the late monarchy. The temple idolatry denounced in Ezekiel 8-11 probably constituted the norm rather than the exception for the final decades of the monarchy. The religious programs of Hezekiah and Josiah have been claimed as moments of religious purity in Judah, although even these policies had their political reasons.743 The pure form of Yahwism that Mendenhall and Bright envision was perhaps an ideal achieved rarely, if ever, before the Exile — if even then. Third, the monarchy was not the villain of Israelite religion that Mendenhall and Bright make it out to be. Indeed, the monarchy made several religious contributions crucial to the development of monolatry. In short, Mendenhall and Bright stand much of Israel’s religious development on its head.

The real improvements then must come, to a considerable extent, from the local communities themselves. We need local revision of our methods of land use and production. We need to study and work together to reduce scale, reduce overhead, reduce industrial dependencies; we need to market and process local products locally; we need to bring local economies into harmony with local ecosystems so that we can live and work with pleasure in the same places indefinitely; we need to substitute ourselves, our neighborhoods, our local resources, for expensive imported goods and services; we need to increase cooperation among all local economic entities: households, farms, factories, banks, consumers, and suppliers. If. we are serious about reducing government and the burdens of government, then we need to do so by returning economic self-determination to the people. And we must not do this by inviting destructive industries to provide "jobs" to the community; we must do it by fostering economic democracy. For example, as much as possible the food that is consumed locally ought to be locally produced on small farms, and then processed in small, non- polluting plants that are locally owned. We must do everything possible to provide to ordinary citizens the opportunity to own a small, usable share of the country. In that way, we will put local capital to work locally, not to exploit and destroy the land but to use it well. This is not work just for the privileged, the well-positioned, the wealthy, and the powerful. It is work for everybody. I acknowledge that to advocate such reforms is to advocate a kind of secession-not a secession of armed violence but a quiet secession by which people find the practical means and the strength of spirit to remove themselves from an economy that is exploiting and destroying their homeland. The great, greedy, indifferent national and international economy is killing rural America, just as it is killing America's cities--it is killing our country. Experience has shown that there is no use in appealing to this economy for mercy toward the earth or toward any human community. All true patriots must find ways of opposing it. --1991

By appealing to the moral and philosophical foundation work of the nation, Lincoln hoped to provide common ground on which good men in both the North and the South could stand. “I am not now combating the argument of necessity, arising from the fact that the blacks are already amongst us; but I am combating what is set up as moral argument for allowing them to be taken where they have never yet been.” Unlike the majority of antislavery orators, who denounced the South and castigated slaveowners as corrupt and un-Christian, Lincoln pointedly denied fundamental differences between Northerners and Southerners. He argued that “they are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up. . . . When it is said that the institution exists; and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself.” And, finally, “when they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them . . . and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives.” Rather than upbraid slaveowners, Lincoln sought to comprehend their position through empathy. More than a decade earlier, he had employed a similar approach when he advised temperance advocates to refrain from denouncing drinkers in “thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,” for denunciation would inevitably be met with denunciation, “crimination with crimination, and anathema with anathema.” In a passage directed at abolitionists as well as temperance reformers, he had observed that it was the nature of man, when told that he should be “shunned and despised,” and condemned as the author “of all the vice and misery and crime in the land,” to “retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart.” Though the cause be “naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel,” the sanctimonious reformer could no more pierce the heart of the drinker or the slaveowner than “penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him.” In order to “win a man to your cause,” Lincoln explained, you must first reach his heart, “the great high road to his reason.” This, he concluded, was the only road to victory—to that glorious day “when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth.” Building on his rhetorical advice, Lincoln tried to place

{Excerpt from a message from one of the Cherokee chiefs - Onitositaii, commonly known as Old Tassle} ... 'If, therefore, a bare march, or reconnoitering a country is sufficient reason to ground a claim to it, we shall insist upon transposing the demand, and your relinquishing your settlements on the western waters and removing one hundred miles back towards the east, whither some of our warriors advanced against you in the course of last year's campaign. Let us examine the facts of your present eruption into our country, and we shall discover your pretentions on that ground. What did you do? You marched into our territories with a superior force; our vigilance gave us no timely notice of your manouvres [sic]; your numbers far exceeded us, and we fled to the stronghold of our extensive woods, there to secure our women and children. Thus, you marched into our towns; they were left to your mercy; you killed a few scattered and defenseless individuals, spread fire and desolation wherever you pleased, and returned again to your own habitations. If you meant this, indeed, as a conquest you omitted the most essential point; you should have fortified the junction of the Holstein and Tennessee rivers, and have thereby conquered all the waters above you. But, as all are fair advantages during the existence of a state of war, it is now too late for us to suffer for your mishap of generalship! Again, were we to inquire by what law or authority you set up a claim, I answer, none! Your laws extend not into our country, nor ever did. You talk of the law of nature and the law of nations, and they are both against you. Indeed, much has been advanced on the want of what you term civilization among the Indians; and many proposals have been made to us to adopt your laws, your religion, your manners, and your customs. But, we confess that we do not yet see the propriety, or practicability of such a reformation, and should be better pleased with beholding the good effect of these doctrines in your own practices than with hearing you talk about them, or reading your papers to us upon such subjects. You say: Why do not the Indians till the ground and live as we do? May we not, with equal propriety, ask, Why the white people do not hunt and live as we do? You profess to think it no injustice to warn us not to kill our deer and other game for the mere love of waste; but it is very criminal in our young men if they chance to kill a cow or a hog for their sustenance when they happen to be in your lands. We wish, however, to be at peace with you, and to do as we would be done by. We do not quarrel with you for killing an occasional buffalo, bear or deer on our lands when you need one to eat; but you go much farther; your people hunt to gain a livelihood by it; they kill all our game; our young men resent the injury, and it is followed by bloodshed and war. This is not a mere affected injury; it is a grievance which we equitably complain of and it demands a permanent redress. The Great God of Nature has placed us in different situations. It is true that he has endowed you with many superior advantages; but he has not created us to be your slaves. We are a separate people! He has given each their lands, under distinct considerations and circumstances: he has stocked yours with cows, ours with buffaloe; yours with hogs, ours with bear; yours with sheep, ours with deer. He has indeed given you an advantage in this, that your cattle are tame and domestic while ours are wild and demand not only a larger space for range, but art to hunt and kill them; they are, nevertheless, as much our property as other animals are yours, and ought not to be taken away without consent, or for something equivalent.' Those were the words of the Indians. But they were no binding on these whites, who were living beyond words, claims ...

Hillary was even better. Like many people, I’d spent the 1990s observing the Clintons from afar. I’d admired Bill’s prodigious talent and intellectual firepower. If I wasn’t always comfortable with the specifics of his so-called triangulations—signing welfare reform legislation with inadequate protections for those who couldn’t find jobs, the tough-on-crime rhetoric that would contribute to an explosion in the federal prison population—I appreciated the skill with which he had steered progressive policy making and the Democratic Party back toward electability. As for the former First Lady, I found her just as impressive, and more sympathetic. Maybe it was because in Hillary’s story I saw traces of what my mother and grandmother had gone through: all of them smart, ambitious women who had chafed under the constraints of their times, having to navigate male egos and social expectations. If Hillary had become guarded, perhaps overly scripted—who could blame her, given the attacks she’d been subjected to? In the Senate, my favorable opinion of her had been largely confirmed. In all our interactions, she came across as hardworking, personable, and always impeccably prepared. She also had a good, hearty laugh that tended to lighten the mood of everyone around her.

But if my team and I could take pride in the substance of what we’d achieved, we also had to acknowledge what had become obvious even before the bill was signed: Dodd-Frank’s historic reforms weren’t going to give us much of a political lift. Despite valiant efforts by Favs and the rest of my speechwriters, it was hard to make “derivative clearinghouses” and “proprietary trading bans” sound transformational. Most of the law’s improvements to the system would remain invisible to the public—more a matter of bad outcomes prevented than tangible benefits gained.

I’d asked our economic team to develop legislative reforms that would make a future crisis less likely. As far as Rahm was concerned, the sooner we got such a “Wall Street reform” bill drafted and up for a vote, the better. “It puts us back on the side of the angels,” he said. “And if the Republicans try to block it, we’ll shove it up their ass.

Within the time span of a single generation surrounding the year 1500, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael created their many masterworks of the High Renaissance, revealing the birth of the new human as much in da Vinci's multiform genius and the godlike incarnations of the David and the Sistine Creation of Adam as in the new perspectival objectivity and poietic empowerment of the Renaissance artist; Columbus sailed west and reached America, Vasco da Gama sailed east and reached India, and the Magellan expedition circumnavigated the globe, opening the world forever to itself; Luther posted his theses on the door of the Wittenberg castle church and began the enormous convulsion of Europe and the Western psyche called the Reformation; and Copernicus conceived the heliocentric theory and began the even more momentous Scientific Revolution. From this instant, the human self, the known world, the cosmos, heaven and earth were all radically and irrevocably transformed. All this happened within a period of time briefer than that which has passed since Woodstock and the Moon landing. (p. 4)

The question was one of emphasis. How much concern did we have for the people beyond our borders, and how much should we simply worry about our own citizens? How much was our fate actually tied to the fate of people abroad? To what extent should America bind itself to multilateral institutions like the United Nations, and to what extent should we go it alone in pursuit of our own interests? Should we align ourselves with authoritarian governments that help keep a lid on possible chaos—or was the smarter long-term play to champion the forces of democratic reform?

New version: A republican Government was established under George Lavoff, a member of the Royal Family. It failed to secure popular support and proved incapable of ending the war or of effecting social and economic reforms. At this time, Lenin arrived in Russia and this gave impetus to the Russian people. A new Government with Lenin as President was evolved. First, Lenin made the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. Then land and other capital goods were nationalised. All agricultural land was taken away from the landlords and divided among the peasants. All factories became the property of the State. The privileges of the clergy and the nobility were abolished. Mines, railways and banks were taken over by the Government. And thus to the astonishment of all, a new world, based upon Socialism, took shape in Russia and the dreams of Karl Marx were realized in this way. Old version: Lenin established a Workers’ Government. But the first election showed that the Bolsheviks had no majority. However, to maintain themselves in power, they dissolved the Duma on the ground that it was reactionary. Local Soviets who did not support the Bolsheviks were also disbanded. Private schools were forbidden and education was taken over by the State. Voting right was denied to the nobility and the clergy. Communism encourages violence, and does not believe in an omnipotent God. The Communists forget that man has a soul. It is a one-party Government that prevails in Communist Russia. There is neither freedom of opinion nor of religion. Many other defects in the System may also strike the eye of an observant critic.

It also fits with a surprising—and more general—pattern identified by the political scientist Michael Albertus. It turns out that autocratic governments are more likely to implement land reforms than are democratic governments.

It is interesting that almost all Villa's intellectuals were ex-maderistas, more concerned with education and political reforms than with land and labour, basically men who wished to return to the liberalism of Juarez. Angeles probably saw Villa as a tabula rasa on which he could imprint his ideology. The problem was that Villa had no taste for abstract thought; as Reed remarked ironically: `You had to be a philosopher to explain anything to Villa.

Morgan had described customary property owned by tightly bonded kin groups; real-world Communist regimes in the former USSR and China forced millions of unrelated peasants into collective farms. By breaking the link between individual effort and reward, collectivization undermined incentives to work, leading to mass famines in Russia and China, and severely reducing agricultural productivity. In the former USSR, the 4 percent of land that remained privately owned accounted for almost one-quarter of total agricultural output. In China, once collective farms were disbanded in 1978 under the leadership of the reformer Deng Xiaoping, agricultural output doubled in the space of just four years.

told the team we were staying the course. But honestly, my decision didn’t have much to do with how lucky I felt. Rahm wasn’t wrong about the risks, and perhaps in a different political environment, on a different issue, I might have accepted his idea of negotiating with the GOP for half a loaf. On this issue, though, I saw no indication that Republican leaders would throw us a lifeline. We were wounded, their base wanted blood, and no matter how modest the reform we proposed, they were sure to find a whole new set of reasons for not working with us. More than that, a scaled-down bill wasn’t going to help millions of people who were desperate, people like Laura Klitzka in Green Bay. The idea of letting them down—of leaving them to fend for themselves because their president hadn’t been sufficiently brave, skilled, or persuasive to cut through the political noise and get what he knew to be the right thing done—was something I couldn’t stomach.

devourer 1 for you, so that it will not destroy the fruits of your soil, and your vine in the field shall not fail to bear, says the LORD of hosts. 12 Then e all nations will call you blessed, for you will be f a land of delight, says the LORD of hosts.

Although liberal by American standards, Europe’s biggest economies were almost all led by center-right governments, elected on the promise of balanced budgets and free-market reforms rather than more government spending. Germany, in particular—the European Union’s one true economic powerhouse and its most influential member—continued to see fiscal rectitude as the answer to all economic woes. The more I’d gotten to know Angela Merkel, the more I’d come to like her; I found her steady, honest, intellectually rigorous, and instinctually kind. But she was also conservative by temperament, not to mention a savvy politician who knew her constituency, and whenever I suggested to her that Germany needed to set an example by spending more on infrastructure or tax cuts, she politely but firmly pushed back. “Ya, Barack, I think maybe that’s not the best approach for us,” she would say, her face pulling into a slight frown, as if I’d suggested something a little tawdry

in 2007, the maverick version of John McCain, along with his sidekick Lindsey Graham, had actually joined Ted Kennedy to put together a comprehensive reform bill that offered citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants while more tightly securing our borders. Despite strong support from President Bush, it had failed to clear the Senate. The bill did, however, receive twelve Republican votes, indicating the real possibility of a future bipartisan accord. I’d

Compared to the egregious pork-barreling, logrolling, and patronage-dispensing tactics Senate leaders had traditionally used to get big, controversial bills like the Civil Rights Act or Ronald Reagan’s 1986 Tax Reform Act, or a package like the New Deal, passed, Harry’s methods were fairly benign. But those bills had passed during a time when most Washington horse-trading stayed out of the papers, before the advent of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. For us, the slog through the Senate was a PR nightmare. Each time Harry’s bill was altered to mollify another senator, reporters cranked out a new round of stories about “backroom deals.” Whatever bump in public opinion my joint address had provided to the reform effort soon vanished—and things got markedly worse when Harry decided, with my blessing, to strip the bill of something called “the public option.

We’d been right about that—Lieberman had consistently supported my domestic agenda. But his apparent power to dictate the terms of healthcare reform reinforced the view among some Democrats that I treated enemies better than allies and was turning my back on the progressives who’d put me in office. I found the whole brouhaha exasperating. “What is it about sixty votes these folks don’t understand?” I groused to my staff. “Should I tell the thirty million people who can’t get covered that they’re going to have to wait another ten years because we can’t get them a public option?” It wasn’t just that criticism from friends always stung the most.

Still, there was no getting around the fact that we’d be asking House Democrats to swallow a version of healthcare reform they’d previously rejected out of hand—one with no public option, a Cadillac tax the unions opposed, and a cumbersome patchwork of fifty state exchanges instead of a single national marketplace through which people could buy their insurance. “You still feeling lucky?” Phil asked me with a grin. Actually, I wasn’t. But I was feeling confident in the Speaker of the House.

I was convinced that the logic of healthcare reform was so obvious that even in the face of well-organized opposition I could rally the American people’s support. Other big initiatives—like immigration reform and climate change legislation—would probably be even harder to get through Congress; I figured that scoring a victory on the item that most affected people’s day-to-day lives was our best shot at building momentum for the rest of my legislative agenda.

JUSTIFYING OPPRESSION While history has proven Malthusianism empirically false, however, it provides the ideal foundation for justifying human oppression and tyranny. The theory holds that there isn’t enough to go around, and can never be. Therefore human aspirations and liberties must be constrained, and authorities must be empowered to enforce the constraining. During Malthus’s own time, his theory was used to justify regressive legislation directed against England’s lower classes, most notably the Poor Law Act of 1834, which forced hundreds of thousands of poor Britons into virtual slavery. 11 However, a far more horrifying example of the impact of Malthusianism was to occur a few years later, when the doctrine motivated the British government’s refusal to provide relief during the great Irish famine of 1846. In a letter to economist David Ricardo, Malthus laid out the basis for this policy: “The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.” 12 For the last century and a half, the Irish famine has been cited by Malthusians as proof of their theory of overpopulation, so a few words are in order here to set the record straight. 13 Ireland was certainly not overpopulated in 1846. In fact, based on census data from 1841 and 1851, the Emerald Isle boasted a mere 7.5 million people in 1846, less than half of England’s 15.8 million, living on a land mass about two-thirds that of England and of similar quality. So compared to England, Ireland before the famine was if anything somewhat underpopulated. 14 Nor, as is sometimes said, was the famine caused by a foolish decision of the Irish to confine their diet to potatoes, thereby exposing themselves to starvation when a blight destroyed their only crop. In fact, in 1846 alone, at the height of the famine, Ireland exported over 730,000 cattle and other livestock, and over 3 million quarts of corn and grain flour to Great Britain. 15 The Irish diet was confined to potatoes because—having had their land expropriated, having been forced to endure merciless rack-rents and taxes, and having been denied any opportunity to acquire income through manufactures or other means—tubers were the only food the Irish could afford. So when the potato crop failed, there was nothing for the Irish themselves to eat, despite the fact that throughout the famine, their homeland continued to export massive amounts of grain, butter, cheese, and meat for foreign consumption. As English reformer William Cobbett noted in his Political Register: Hundreds of thousands of living hogs, thousands upon thousands of sheep and oxen alive; thousands upon thousands of barrels of beef, pork, and butter; thousands upon thousands of sides of bacon; and thousands and thousands of hams; shiploads and boats coming daily and hourly from Ireland to feed the west of Scotland; to feed a million and a half people in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and in Lancashire; to feed London and its vicinity; and to fill the country shops in the southern counties of England; we beheld all this, while famine raged in Ireland amongst the raisers of this very food. 16 “The population should be swept from the soil.” Evicted from their homes, millions of Irish men, women, and children starved to death or died of exposure. (Contemporary drawings from Illustrated London News.)

I signed into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It was a significant triumph: the most sweeping change to the rules governing America’s financial sector since the New Deal.

At times, I felt like the fisherman in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, sharks gnawing at my catch as I tried to tow it to shore. But as the weeks passed, the core of our reforms survived the amendment process remarkably intact.

Over time, though, the team was able to arrive at a coherent set of principles to guide a shift in strategy. Under the emerging plan, U.S. officials across agencies would be expected to deliver a consistent and coordinated message on the need for reform; they would develop specific recommendations for liberalizing political and civic life in various countries and offer a range of new incentives to encourage their adoption. By

The group was divided, almost entirely along generational lines. The older and more senior members of my team—Joe, Hillary, Gates, and Panetta—counseled caution, all of them having known and worked with Mubarak for years. They emphasized the role his government had long played in keeping peace with Israel, fighting terrorism, and partnering with the United States on a host of other regional issues. While they acknowledged the need to press the Egyptian leader on reform, they warned that there was no way of knowing who or what might replace him.

senator decided that he didn’t want to be the bad guy in the story. He spent Saturday huddling with West, sketching out a fresh offer for a climate bill, assembling a compromise he deemed worthy. When West passed along the document to Petrella and Deese, he told them that some fine-tuning might be required, but he thought it was a fair deal that Schumer and the White House could accept. As Petrella scanned the offer, he braced himself for the worst. But as he read, he absorbed the reality that Manchin had confounded his expectations. The plan was actually ambitious, not that far from the substance of their negotiations. Manchin had his demands, to be sure. They had covered most of this ground before. He wanted approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would transport natural gas from wells in north-central West Virginia, turning his state into a major player in that energy market. He asked for the Democratic leadership’s support for a separate bill reforming the process for permitting new energy infrastructure so that it could be built without having to surmount so many bureaucratic impediments. And he needed hundreds of millions of dollars set aside for deficit reduction, to assuage his centrist conscience. But that was just horse trading. The only thing that truly mattered was his proposing more than $300 billion in tax credits that would incentivize the nation to rapidly embrace clean energy. If Congress passed his proposal, carbon emissions would fall by 40 percent of the 2005 levels by 2030. Petrella, who felt at once elated and frustrated by Manchin’s wild swings, told West, “Lance, I’ve been sticking my neck out, defending you guys, saying that you were going to fucking do something here, for a year. I’m willing to do it one more time, but it’s got to be before the August recess, and this has got to be it. This is the deal. We’re locking arms.” West told Petrella that the document in his hands was the “flight plan.” They were going to finally land the plane. —

Dr. Torrey often mentions how the North Carolina mental hospital that reformer Dorothea Dix had founded in 1856 closed in October 2016 and was replaced by a jail on the very same plot of land.

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics Volume 3. Pg 215-216 "...the Old Testament is also to be viewed as one in essence and substance wth the New Testament. For though God communicates his revelation successively and historically and makes it progressively richer and fuller, and humankind therefore advances in the knowledge, possession, and enjoyment of revelation, God is and remains the same. The sun only gradually illumines the earth, but itself remains the same, morning and evening, during the day and at night. Although Christ completed his work on earth only in the midst of history and although the Holy Spirit was not poured out till the day of Pentecost, God nevertheless was able, already in the days of the Old Testament, to full distribute the benefits to be acquired and applied by the Son and the Spirit. Old Testament believers were saved in no other way than we. There is one faith, one Mediator, one way of salvation, and one covenant of grace." Page 221-222 "The benefits granted to Israel by God in this covenant (Sinai) are the same as those granted to Abraham, but more detailed and specialized. Genesis 3:15 already contains the entire covenant in a nutshell and all the benefits of grace. God breaks the covenant made by the first humans with Satan, puts enmity between them, brings the first humans over to his side, and promises them victory over the power of the enemy. The one great promise to Abraham is "I will be your God, and you and your descendants will be my people" *Gen 17:8 paraphrase). And this is the principle content of God's covenant with Israel as well. God is Israel's God, and Israel is his people (Exod 19:6; 29:46; etc.). Israel, accordingly, receives a wide assortment of blessings, not only temporal blessings, such as the land of Canaan, fruitfulness in marriage, a long life, prosperity, plus victory over its enemies, but also spiritual and eternal blessings, such as God's dwelling among them (Exod. 29:45; Lev. 26:12), the forgiveness of sins (Exod. 20:6, 34:7; Num. 14:18; Deut. 4:31; Pss. 32; 103; etc.), sonship (Exod. 4:22; 19:5-6, 20:2; Deut. 14:1; Isa 63:16; Amos 3:1-2; etc.), sanctification (Exod. 19:6, Lev. 11:44, 19:2), and so on. All these blessings, however, are not as plainly and clearly pictured in the Old Testament as in the New Testament. At that time they would not have been grasped and understood in their spiritual import. The natural is first, then the spiritual. All spiritual and eternal benefits are therefore clothed, in Israel, in sensory forms. The forgiveness of sins is bound to animal sacrifices. God's dwelling in Israel is symbolized in the temple built on Zion. Israel's sonship is primarily a theocratic one, and the expression "people of God" has not only a religious but also a national meaning. Sanctification in an ethical sense is symbolized in Levitical ceremonial purity. Eternal life, to the Israelite consciousness, is concealed in the form of a long life on earth. It would be foolish to think that the benefits of forgiveness and sanctification, of regeneration and eternal life, were therefore objectively nonexistent in the days of the Old Testament. They were definitely granted then as well by Christ, who is eternally the same....The spiritual an eternal clothed itself in the form of the natural and temporal. God himself, Elohim, Creator of heaven and earth, as Yahweh, the God of the covenant, came down to the level of the creature, entered into history, assumed human language, emotions, and forms, in order to communicate himself with all his spiritual blessings to humans and so to prepare for his incarnation, his permanent and eternal indwelling in humanity. We would not even have at our disposal words with which to name the spiritual had not the spiritual first revealed itself in the form of the natural.

Ultimately, the most powerful way to rebalance the interests of private owners and the common good is by shifting the focus towards taxes on wealth - that is, asking those who have accummulated substantial assets down the years (or with inherited wealth, down the centuries) to make a fairer contribution. The case is indisputable: since 2008, average earnings have hardly risen, while the amount of wealth held by the better-off has sky-rocketed. Clearly paying for shocks such as the 2008 crash or the Covid-19 pandemic should not fall solely on those dependent on their immediate income. A Land Value Tax could also play an important role: a policy that would be difficult to evade, and would tackle the vast windfall profits that come from the development of land. It's an idea that has long enjoyed support from all sides of the political spectrum, including Winston Churchill, as well as from economists as divergent as Milton Friedman, Adam Smith and J.K. Galbraith. Given its elegant simplicity and essential fairness, the fact that it has not been introduced in England is a case-book example of the landowners' ability to block reform.

They all had been infected with dangerous ideas during the Arbenz era because, in the words of one observer, “they believed [that] in a democracy the people chose the government, Guatemala needed land reform, and workers deserved protection under the law.

This was not the world we young reformers had sought to create when we sat talking at those endless dinners in each other’s houses. We had once believed with Erasmus that faith and charity would be enough to settle religious differences between men; but by that early winter of 1537 it had come to rebellion, an ever-increasing number of executions and greedy scrabblings for the lands of the monks.

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

Mr. Williams observes, that the attempts for a reformation in England, by the power of the magistrate, filled their country with blood and confusion for a hundred years. For, says he, “Henry the Seventh leaves England under the slavish bondage of the Pope’s yoke. Henry the Eighth reforms all England to a new fashion, half Papist, half Protestant. King Edward the Sixth turns about the wheels of state, and works the whole land to absolute Protestantism. Queen Mary, succeeding to the helm, steers a direct contrary course, breaks in pieces all that Edward wrought, and brings forth an old edition of England’s reformation, all Popish. Mary not living out half her days, (as the prophet speaks of bloody persons), Elizabeth (like Joseph) is advanced from the prison to the palace, and from the irons to the crown; she plucks up all her sister Mary’s plants, and sounds a trumpet, all Protestant. What sober man is not amazed at these revolutions!” [Bloody tenet, p. 197.]

Serious theological strife and strategic political reversals had confined Lutheranism to the German and Scandinavian lands. Anabaptists such as the Mennonites remained a marginalized, often fugitive, people. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Reformed varieties of Protestantism continued to expand in Holland, Switzerland, the British Isles, and for a time in France. But

Reflecting on the rapid series of events, Margaret wrote to her American readers, “The revolution, like all genuine ones, has been instinctive, its results unexpected and surprising to the greater part of those who achieved them.” In a subsequent session, the assembly voted to call Mazzini to Rome, where he would soon become the most powerful of three triumvirs selected to lead the young republic through its infancy, as the new government prepared to implement a program of drastic reform. A punitive tax on flour would be repealed, a national railway system constructed, church properties claimed for inexpensive housing, and papal lands outside Rome divided among the contadini (Italy’s peasant class).

Harare Voices and Beyond is remarkable as a black writer’s handling of Zimbabwe’s land reform from a white perspective...it is a rare writer who will imagine what it is to be on the other side.

• to leave the old parents of the psyche, descend to the psychic land unknown, while depending on the goodwill of whomever we meet along the way • to bind the wounds inflicted by the poor bargain we made somewhere in our lives • to wander psychically hungry and trust nature to feed us • to find the Wild Mother and her succor • to make contact with the sheltering animus of the underworld • to converse with the psychopomp (the magician) • to behold the ancient orchards (energic forms) of the feminine • to incubate and give birth to the spiritual childSelf • to bear being misunderstood, to be severed again and again from love • to be made sooty, muddy, dirty • to stay in the realm of the woodspeople for seven years till the child is the age of reason • to wait • to regenerate the inner sight, inner knowing, inner healing of the hands • to continue onward even though one has lost all, save the spiritual child • to re-trace and grasp her childhood, girlhood, and womanhood • to re-form her animus as a wild and native force; to love him; and he, her • to consummate the wild marriage in the presences of the old Wild Mother and the new childSelf

That is why Samuel Zwemer, groundbreaking missionary to Muslim lands, could utter his famous saying, “Prayer is the gymnasium of the soul.” The idea is not that prayer becomes intrinsically superior and potentially more effective when it is offered up in a frenzy of sweat. Nor is there likely any direct allusion to the account of Jacob wrestling with God (Gen. 32:22–32).2 The idea, rather, is that Paul understands real praying to include an element of struggle, discipline, work, spiritual agonizing against the dark powers of evil. Insofar as the Roman Christians pray this way for Paul, they are joining him in his apostolic struggle.

Thousand Naskars (The Sonnet) When one Naskar dies in body, Thousand Naskars will take his place. Cowards seek comfort in reincarnation, While the brave step in to fill the void. Don't you dare make a cult of me, Waiting for yet another second coming! Reclaim your life from the land of myths, Wishful inaction is most unbecoming. Charge up your mind with facts and reason, Charge up your heart with love and vision. Backbone alive repels cowardly inaction, Even if peddled by thousand year tradition. When one Naskar dies in body, Thousand Naskars will take his place. Naskar the person died a long time ago, What speaks to you is Naskar the oneness.

I would tax unaccountable private land ownership through land value taxation, and use the proceeds to finance community buyouts. Unless they serve community in ways that local communities want, get the lairds to finance their own clearance!

Since Brazil became a democracy in 1975 over 1700 Activists and small Farmers have been murdered in Brazil alone over land reforms and the rainforest !

The strategic level is concerned with the use of military force to achieve national objectives. In the new American style of war, it has come to be interpreted as the highest political and diplomatic level at which decisions are made to collect and deploy military forces to a distant theater. The size of strategic land forces varies, depending on the nature of the topography and the seriousness of the enemy threat. In past limited wars, deployments involved relatively large armies consisting of multiple corps of 50,000 soldiers each. The numbers of soldiers deployed in more recent campaigns have been considerably smaller. The strategic challenge in the years ahead will center on "time versus risk"-that is, the decisions that must be made to balance the size of the strategic force to be projected versus the time necessary for the force to arrive ready to fight. The United States must be able to overcome the problems of distance and time without unnecessarily exposing early arriving forces to an enemy already in place within a theater of war. The operational level of warfare provides a connection between strategic deployments and the tactical engagements of small units. The "art" of maneuvering forces to achieve decisive results on the battlefield nest here. As with the deployments of strategic level forces, the basic elements of operational maneuver have shrunk as the conflict environment has changed since the end of the Second World War. During the Cold War, corps conducted operational maneuver. More recently, the task has devolved to brigades, usually self contained units of all arms capable of independent maneuver. An independent brigade consists of about 5,000 soldiers. At the operational level, ground forces will face the challenge of determining the proper balance between "firepower and maneuver" resources and technologies to ensure that the will of the enemy's army to resist can be collapsed quickly and decisively. Battles are fought at the tactical level. In the past, the tactical fight has been a face-to-face endeavor; small units of about company size, no more that several hundred soldiers, are locked in combat at close range. The tactical fight is where most casualties occur. The tactical challenge of the future will be to balance the anticipated "ends," or what the combat commander is expected to achieve on the battlefield, with the "means," measured in the lives of soldiers allocated to achieve those ends. Since ground forces suffer casualties disproportionately, ground commanders face the greatest challenge of balancing ends versus means. All three challenges must be addressed together if reform of the landpower services - the Army and the Marine Corps - is to be swift and lasting. The essential moderating influence on the process of change is balance. At the strategic level, the impulse to arrive quickly must be balanced with the need for forces massive and powerful enough to fight successfully on arrival. The impulse to build a firepower-dominant operational forces will be essential if the transitory advantage of fires is to be made permanent by the presence of ground forces in the enemy's midst. The impulse to culminate tactical battle by closing with and destroying the enemy must be balanced by the realization that fighting too close may play more to the advantage of enemy rather than friendly forces.

I'd like you to see that we are interfering too drastically. WE can't just assume so completely that Azerbaijan is in the hands of dangerous men and vicious Bolsheviks. I suppose it's all in the way you see Iran. I'd like you to see that Iranians are just as serious about their politics as we are: perhaps more so. The Iranian is a vigorous individual with definite ideas about the right and wrong done to him. It's easy for these journalists to laugh at the idea of political spontaneity among the Iranians because they look on these people as dirty, stupid, childlike natives who stare open-mouthed while the wonders of the west are offered to them. …... They are not like that at all. They want proper government, the same as anybody else. They have certainly tried hard enough to get it, but they haven't had a chance. We have done a great deal to prevent them getting real government. It may shock you, but we have always wanted corrupt administrations. Since the Reuter concessions sixty years ago we have begaved like American gangsters using threats, money, and even war to extort privileges and concessions which amounted to owning the country. At one time we had complete control over the administration, over the entire wealth of the land, the banks, and the army. It's rather silly to say the Iranians are un-political when you realize how quickly we had to hand back those concessions. This country rose to a man against us. We gave in hastily, but we managed to cling desperately to our oil concessions. [MacGregor] I think you are worrying yourself unduly [Essex]. We can't be too bad an influence. We may not be reformers ourselves... but we do not fight people who are really trying to improve the country. You must admit that we did not resist the last Shah, and he certainly reformed the place as best as it could be reformed. [MacGregor] It has become a habit to pass all compliments to Reza Shah,...even though we dethroned him. All reforms and modernizations are supposed to be his idea. Yet he simply took over the power of a popular revolution which we resisted at the time. He took power as a despot and he was little better than his predecessors. These people are getting fed up with despots. They obviously want to achieve some kind of better government, particularly in Azerbaijan.… That revolt in Azerbaijan doesn't have to be a Russian idea. It is really the continuation of five or six revolutions, all of them trying to get rid of corrupt governments. This time they seen to be succeeding. Our idea is to stop it.... Every level of government in Iran is corrupt from top to bottom, including the court, the police, and the parliament. Government is organized corruption. The ministers prey on the population like buzzards; they arragne taxes, laws, finances, famines; everything to the purpose of making money. The last Shah might have wiped out some of it; but that meant he became the biggest grafter of them all. He controlled the little fellows, and took the best of everything for himself. By the end of his rule he owned about a fifth of this entire country. He is not the hero we think he is, and his police regime was as brutal as anything the Germans had. Though we co-operated with him, he was a little tougher than the others and he always held out for more. Once, he threatened to wipe out our oil concession but we brought him off. He could always be bought off, like all the other grafters.

Development is the strategy of evasion. When you can’t give people land reform, give them hybrid cows. When you can’t send children to school, try non-formal education. When you can’t provide basic health to people, talk of health insurance. Can’t give them jobs? Not to worry, just redefine the words ‘employment opportunities’. Don't want to do away with using children as a form of slave labor? Never mind. Talk of 'improving the conditions of child labor'. It sounds good. You can even make money out of it.

Supposedly troubled that women would no longer be treated as property, these man saw the hujum as another kind of expropriation, much like the land and water redistribution. One was quoted as saying that unveiling was merely an extension of Soviet land reform, since it aimed to seize the second, third, and fourth wives of bois and transfer them to the poor landless peasants who had to hire themselves out as field hands. (This was a common view, as many Uzbeks also saw the hujum as transferring women from male control to that of the state.)

industrial corridors and smart cities. It has to create large cities where 35 to 40 per cent of GDP comes from manufacturing. Land lawsThis government appears to be fairly determined to drive manufacturing, and there's a lot of energy and vibrancy. But there's also an unfinished agenda of the government. For large-scale manufacturing to take off, there are several other things that need to be done. There are certain legacies of the past which need to be corrected. For example, we have one of the worst labour regimes. We need to set that right. An EXIM Bank study says that only Pakistan has worse labour laws than us. In the past six months, certain labour reforms have been carried out. The expectations are so high that we need big-ticket reforms. The last government had messed up badly on land laws. When I talk about land acquisition laws, I am not talking about not giving a higher price to the farmer but the present act is anti-farmer because it is full of procedures and processes which never allow farmer to monetize the land value. It will work against his interest. Everything is at a standstill. The government needs to quickly reverse this whole process. Also, the government needs to roll out the goods and services tax (GST) and resolve problems plaguing the energy sector. In

John’s activities have been previously observed by others. Geerhardus Vos (1862–1949) explains: Notwithstanding the preeminence thus ascribed to John, it is plain from the reason given for this preeminence that he was not so much a revealer of new truth as a recapitulator of the old. At the point where the old covenant is about to pass over into the new, John once more sums up in his ministry the entire message of all preceding revelation and thus becomes the connecting link between it and the fulfillment which was to follow.42  It appears that John was re-enacting Israel’s post-exodus entry to the Promised Land. However, given Israel’s sinfulness, he was calling the nation to repentance.43 Israel needed to prepare for the second (or eschatological) exodus that would come by the ministry of Christ. Evidently, John was preparing for this eschatological exodus because of his description of Christ’s ministry. John told the people that he baptized only with water, but the One who was to come would baptize them with the Holy Spirit (Mark 1:8).44 This statement, as well as John’s overall activity, is reported on the heels of what some have called the thesis statement of the Gospel of Mark, namely, the quotation of Isaiah 40:3: “Prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God” (cf. Matt. 3:3; Luke 3:4; John 1:23). God drove Israel into exile, but He promised in the book of Isaiah that they would return to the land in a second exodus, the exodus from Babylon. However, the ultimate goal of the typical second exodus was the final exodus led by the Anointed of the Lord. It was the Servant of the Lord on whom God would put His Spirit (Isa. 42:1; 61:1; Matt. 3:13–17; 12:18–21).45 This Servant would lead Israel on the final exodus, and

and John explained that Christ would baptize with the Holy Spirit. In the broader context of Isaiah 40–55, there is a close connection between the outpouring of the Spirit and the resulting new creation: “For I will pour water on him who is thirsty, and floods on the dry ground; I will pour My Spirit on your descendants, and My blessing on your offspring” (Isa. 44:3; cf. Gen. 49:25; Ezek. 34:26–27; Joel 2:14; Mal. 3:10–11). Here the dry and thirsty land receives the outpouring of water, which brings rejuvenation, and this imagery is tied to the outpouring of the Spirit. Concerning this verse, though, John Goldingay explains, “Yhwh’s renewal of the people is an act of new creation.”46 This conclusion seems warranted, especially in light of Isaiah 44:2: “Thus says the LORD who made you and formed you from the womb [עשך ויצרך], who will help you.” E. J. Young explains, “The expression Creator [יצר] used of God as the Creator of His people is found only in Isaiah, as also the parallels Maker and Former.”47 This language is used, for example, in the creation account of man (Gen. 2:7). All of this imagery comes with a kaleidoscope of ideas that ties together creation, exodus, new creation, and the eschatological outpouring of the Spirit.48 These observations are not new. J. Luzarraga, commenting on Isaiah 31:5, explains that this verse, as well as the others thus far surveyed, refer to: a “return,” a second exodus, a new exodus, which…comes described with features taken from the first exodus, projecting upon an eschatological future, for the gifts that God has granted in the past are only a symbol of his provision in the future. As in the days past, so also in the ones to come, “Like birds hovering, so the LORD of hosts will protect Jerusalem; he will protect and deliver it; he will spare and rescue

Especially in the Deep South, where Democratic victory was impossible without the neutralization of part of the black electorate, it also implied a revival of political violence. And, a noticeable shift away from support for state-sponsored modernization (the economic corollary of the discredited New Departure) accompanied the reemergence of white supremacist rhetoric. The depression heightened the attractiveness of retrenchment and tax reduction to white voters who associated expensive government with new state programs that primarily benefited corporations and blacks, and who feared that high taxes threatened both planters and yeomen with the loss of their land. And with Republicans proposing as an economic program little more than a milder version of “reform,” they had little to offer white voters to counteract Democrats’ racist appeals.64

The financial alternative to classical economics calls itself “neoliberalism,” but it is the opposite of what the Enlightenment’s original liberal reformers called themselves. Land rent has not ended up in government hands, and more and more public services have been privatized to squeeze out monopoly rent. Banks have gained control of government and their central banks to create money only to bail out creditor losses, not to finance public spending.

Between 1978 and 1983, the entire basis of the agricultural economy was changed by the adoption of the “household responsibility system.” The origins of this shift lay in a village in Anhui province, where a group of farmers got together in secret and signed an agreement to dissolve their collective and divide up their farmland into individual plots. This innovation rapidly spread, and the province’s party secretary, Wan Li, realized he was facing a powerful popular revolt against an immiserating system. Rather than crush it, he decided to promote this land-to-the-tiller reform. The party secretary of Sichuan province, Zhao Ziyang, made a similar decision. At the national level, the December 1978 party plenum that launched the reform era raised agricultural prices and gave a blessing to rural collectives experimenting with different ways of management, but it still condemned private farming. By 1980, however, Zhao Ziyang had become premier and Wan Li was vice premier in charge of agriculture policy. Together they rammed through a national policy to disband the communes and return to family farming. By the end of 1982 virtually all agricultural collectives were gone, and family farmers had been assigned rights to cultivate individual plots of land. The effect on agricultural output and farm incomes was spectacular. By 1984 grain output was over 400 million tons, a third higher than it had been just six years before; production of oilseeds and cotton sustained annual growth rates of 15 percent; and meat production was growing by 10 percent a year. Rural per capita income more than doubled between 1979 and 1984. Per capita cash savings by rural families rose from essentially zero in 1979 to 300 renminbi (Rmb) by 1989. Rapid gains in agricultural output and incomes continued throughout the 1980s, as farmers continued to diversify their crops and apply new technologies that increased yields. Use of chemical fertilizer, which had risen gradually in the 1970s, tripled between 1978 and 1990. So did the use of farm machinery, notably pumps, small tractors, and food processing equipment.3

The new government kicked off their own brand of reformations, and the process of change started with the renaming and reorganization of the previously Dutch-owned boroughs. Breuckelen was now “Brooklyn.” Heer Straat was now “Broadway.” The fertile flat lands surrounding Brooklyn were now to be called “King's County.” The patch of land north of King's County was now known as “Queens,” which fondly paid tribute to Queen Catherine.

As these were appearing, however, the official bull of excommunication, Exsurge Domini, was being posted throughout German lands, giving Luther sixty days to recant. Instead, on 10 December 1520 Luther burned the bull (and a copy of canon law) outside the Elster Gate in Wittenberg in protest.

The more we study the catastrophes and endings that befell individual churches in particular eras, the better we appreciate the surprising new births that Christianity achieves in these very years, in odd and surprising contexts. Just as Turkish power was reaching its height in the traditional Christian lands of the Middle East and the Balkans, so the seafaring Christian powers were bringing their faith to the New World and the Pacific. And while the 1915–25 period in the Middle East marked the extinction or ruin of ancient Christian communities, this was exactly the era in which the religion began its epochal growth in black Africa, arguably the most important event in Christian history since the Reformation. But the history can be appreciated in its fullness only by acknowledging the defeats and disasters alongside the triumphs and expansions.

The solution, Britain and its colonial leaders decided, was to import people who were loyal - but not necessarily inventive or talented or ambitious. The colonial administration was soon paying cashiered soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars and bankrupt but loyal British farmers to make the crossing. Reform politicians in Upper Canada complained that the colonial elite had issued a large number of land patents, often for sizable estates, to loyal Tories in Britain without regard for any other qualities….The strategy worked….But it also had the effect of choking the economic and civic life out of nascent Canada, at a moment when the Industrial Revolution was beginning to transform the rest of the Western world.

Here is why the wellbeing economy comes at the right time. At the international level there have been some openings, which can be exploited to turn the wellbeing economy into a political roadmap. The first was the ratification of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. The SDGs are a loose list of 17 goals, ranging from good health and personal wellbeing to sustainable cities and communities as well as responsible production and consumption. They are a bit scattered and inconsistent, like most outcomes of international negotiations, but they at least open up space for policy reforms. For the first time in more than a century, the international community has accepted that the simple pursuit of growth presents serious problems. Even when it comes at high speed, its quality is often debatable, producing social inequalities, lack of decent work, environmental destruction, climate change and conflict. Through the SDGs, the UN is calling for a different approach to progress and prosperity. This was made clear in a 2012 speech by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who explicitly connected the three pillars of sustainable development: ‘Social, economic and environmental wellbeing are indivisible.’82 Unlike in the previous century, we now have a host of instruments and indicators that can help politicians devise different policies and monitor results and impacts throughout society. Even in South Africa, a country still plagued by centuries of oppression, colonialism, extractive economic systems and rampant inequality, the debate is shifting. The country’s new National Development Plan has been widely criticised because of the neoliberal character of the main chapters on economic development. Like the SDGs, it was the outcome of negotiations and bargaining, which resulted in inconsistencies and vagueness. Yet, its opening ‘vision statement’ is inspired by a radical approach to transformation. What should South Africa look like in 2030? The language is uplifting: We feel loved, respected and cared for at home, in community and the public institutions we have created. We feel understood. We feel needed. We feel trustful … We learn together. We talk to each other. We share our work … I have a space that I can call my own. This space I share. This space I cherish with others. I maintain it with others. I am not self-sufficient alone. We are self-sufficient in community … We are studious. We are gardeners. We feel a call to serve. We make things. Out of our homes we create objects of value … We are connected by the sounds we hear, the sights we see, the scents we smell, the objects we touch, the food we eat, the liquids we drink, the thoughts we think, the emotions we feel, the dreams we imagine. We are a web of relationships, fashioned in a web of histories, the stories of our lives inescapably shaped by stories of others … The welfare of each of us is the welfare of all … Our land is our home. We sweep and keep clean our yard. We travel through it. We enjoy its varied climate, landscape, and vegetation … We live and work in it, on it with care, preserving it for future generations. We discover it all the time. As it gives life to us, we honour the life in it.83 I could have not found better words to describe the wellbeing economy: caring, sharing, compassion, love for place, human relationships and a profound appreciation of what nature does for us every day. This statement gives us an idea of sufficiency that is not about individualism, but integration; an approach to prosperity that is founded on collaboration rather than competition. Nowhere does the text mention growth. There’s no reference to scale; no pompous images of imposing infrastructure, bridges, stadiums, skyscrapers and multi-lane highways. We make the things we need. We, as people, become producers of our own destiny. The future is not about wealth accumulation, massive

But she’d been lucky to survive at all. The doomsday scenario Edmund Innes had outlined to her in 1969 hadn’t quite come to pass, but the Service was now a shadow of its former self. She was one of the few survivors of what was still referred to, on the rare occasions it was referred to at all, as ‘The Purge’. The prime minister had been unimpressed by Review Section’s report into Dark and the other traitors and had decided immediate root and branch reform was needed. Dozens of officers had been discreetly ‘retired’ as a result. A Conservative government had been elected a few months later, but any hope it might take a softer line had soon been dispelled by the new prime minister’s insistence that the agency immediately inform him of all the remaining skeletons in its filing cabinets or face the possibility of a full parliamentary inquiry.

it is no less since this same Confession of Faith was first subscribed and sworn to. And it has been still in use yearly to be subscribed and sworn to in some parts, among some in this land, to this day.

Logically, then, whatever Fidel Castro did in opposition to American policy was wrong, regardless of his intentions and strategy towards his own people. All of the revolution’s accomplishments in free education, free medical services, the re-distribution of wealth and agrarian land reforms were disregarded, and continue to be discredited. All actions by Fidel were seen through the prism of being against American interests, and were by definition wrong. The only way to deal with Castro and his revolution was to remove him and the disease. In whatever way possible.

The actions of both sides made it easier for that American wrath to be warranted as retribution of the aggrieved. The early months saw the United States refuse to buy Cuban sugar or refine oil purchased from the Soviets. The Cubans instituted land reform, confiscating American land (with offers of compensation that were refused), then turned to the nationalization of American industry. As more property was taken, more economic measures were instituted against Cuba. American aggression ran from the embargo, propaganda, isolation, and the Bay of Pigs military invasion. As the rhetoric increased, terrorist acts were formulated and carried out. In partial response to the terror and other hostilities, the revolution became increasingly radicalized. From the start, policy makers knew terrorism would put a strain politically and economically on the nascent Cuban government, forcing it to use precious resources to protect itself and its citizens. It was to be part of the overarching strategy of making things so bad that the Cubans might rise up and overthrow their government.17

April 27, 1978 coup that overthrew Mohammad Daoud's government ans led to the onset of the Afghan civil war. The communists cast the war as a fight of liberation against feudalism, armed opposition to powerful landowners (khans) who were exploiting the poor peasant-serfs (dehqan). The latter were, according to that narrative, subdued by religion and could not put up a fight for their rights. There was also a broader story as to how the Afghan communist movement was standing up to the preexisting regime's abuse and predation. .... On the opposing side were the mujahedin. They resisted what they perceived as a movement of forced modernization aiming to undermine Afghanistan's religion, culture, traditions, and family structure. They vehemently opposed a score of reforms the communists had tried to introduce, ranging from policies on land reform to education to family law. People were upset not only with the nature of the changes, but also with the style of their implementation. They joined the opposition willingly and in droves.

Due partly to the influence of the Genevan Academy and partly to the Institutes, Calvin’s theological influence was soon felt in various parts of Europe. Eventually, a number of churches appeared—in the Netherlands, Scotland, Hungary, England, France, and so forth—that followed the teaching of the Genevan reformer, and are now known as Reformed or Calvinistic. Significantly, in most of these countries Calvinism was joined with a zeal for reforming society that did not exist in Lutheran lands, for Calvinists were convinced that it was their duty to make the civil government conform to the law of God. Thus, one of the most lasting consequences of Calvinism—and one that Calvin most likely would never have imagined—was a series of revolutions that opened the way for the modern world.

let’s talk about the money your government takes from your paycheck through taxation to fund the very programs you find outrageous. Now your tax dollars fund the reformation of your children’s minds to embrace the ungodly principles of homosexuality, transsexuality, abortion on demand, and the rewriting of textbooks to remove exposure to historical information involving our Christian culture and beliefs. Your tax dollars will pay for litigation against your Christian beliefs and Constitutional rights. Your money, taken from your paycheck, will enable the promotion of the secular humanists’ agenda as the religion of our land. In

While the Reconstruction Era was fraught with corruption and arguably doomed by the lack of land reform, the sweeping economic and political developments in that period did appear, at least for a time, to have the potential to seriously undermine, if not completely eradicate, the racial caste system in the South. With the protection of federal troops, African Americans began to vote in large numbers and seize control, in some areas, of the local political apparatus. Literacy rates climbed, and educated blacks began to populate legislatures, open schools, and initiate successful businesses. In 1867, at the dawn of the Reconstruction Era, no black men held political office in the South, yet three years later, at least 15 percent of all Southern elected officials were black. This is particularly extraordinary in light of the fact that fifteen years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 - the high water mark of the Civil Rights Movement - fewer than 8 percent of all Southern elected officials were black.

In the social dilemma of the tragic commons, popularised by Garrett Hardin (1968),[51] a group of famers has access to a common grassed area upon which to sustain their individually owned herds of sheep. Each farmer, being rational, wishes to keep as many sheep as possible on the commons in order to make more money – the sheep being a mechanism for converting common property (grass) into individual wealth. However, if the grass is consumed faster than the rate at which it grows (because the number of sheep is unsustainable) the farmers are collectively disadvantaged. The dilemma is that a farmer who adds extra sheep to the commons receives all of the profit, while the cost of doing so is distributed to the group. Each farmer, therefore, has an individual incentive to increase their use of the land even though doing so reduces the productivity of the land, and affects them all adversely. The selfish, though rational, short-term individual preferences of the farmers undermine their longer-term individual interests. Furthermore, the agential behaviour of the farmers creates structural barriers to collective reform because once one farmer overuses the common resource without being punished the action becomes legitimised. The rational behaviour of individuals can thus create collective irrationality. Solving this collective-action problem is typically understood to require either the conversion of the common resource into privately owned property (the exploitation of which is, therefore, regulated by the private owners because they have incentives to maintain its productivity), or through the creation of a public authority that is capable of regulating the amount of the common resource available to an individual.[52] But there is also another option: that the farmers lobby wealthy landowners from the neighbouring village to give them more land and more grass and thus prevent an outbreak of violence between the famers that may affect those beyond the borders of the commons.

The Aftermath A lot of time has passed since that fateful day in August of 1965. I visited Oak Island a few months ago. Surprisingly, it felt really good to be there. Parts of the island, untouched by the lust for gold, are still beautiful. As I walked, I thought to myself, This is a good place. More than good. It is a wonderful place. But at the far end of the island--the Money Pit end--everything is different. The beaches have been scraped bare. The clearing, no longer a high, flat expanse, has been gouged out and re-formed into lopsided, jagged terrain. The Money Pit, once part of a 32-foot-high plateau, now sits on misshapen, uneven land, almost down to sea level. That end of the island is ugly, ruined. At home I pull out old photographs and letters and journals. I want to remember a time before the accident, before the deaths, a time when all of Oak Island was a beautiful and happy place; the time when my father, mother, and brothers first came to the island. They had been brimming with enthusiasm. They were embarking on a wonderful adventure, and the Restalls just might be the ones to solve this baffling, centuries-old puzzle. Here was a shot at fortune and fame. They lived in a bubble of good wishes, good cheer, and boundless expectations. It was an extraordinary time, when anything seemed possible. Of course, there was also the back-breaking labour and the endless frustration, but after all, what’s an adventure without adversity? I try to hang on to the good memories of Oak Island, but darker images keep creeping in--the disappointments and obstacles, one-by-one, year after year, that gradually wore the family down. In time, the hunt for treasure crowded out all else in their lives. Nothing mattered but Oak Island and its treasure--at least for my dad. Oak Island does that. Men go there seeking riches and fame, and forget who they are. During my family’s final year, only my father was still steadfast in his belief in the Restall hunt for treasure. By that time, conversations among the four of them were strained. Doubts, disagreements, and long silences had settled in. The hunt for treasure was like a job that took every thought, every bit of energy, every cent. Day after day, nothing but drab, drone-like hark work--no glamour here. It seemed to my mother and brothers that this job was one that would never be finished. Until it was finished--but with such a horrible ending.

The third revolutionary upheaval, that of the Protestant Reformation, was initiated when Martin Luther posted ninety-five theses on the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church in 1517, insisting on the individual’s direct relationship with God; hence individual conscience—not established orthodoxy—was put forward as the key to salvation. A number of feudal rulers seized the opportunity to enhance their authority by embracing Protestantism, imposing it on their populations, and enriching themselves by seizing Church lands. Each side regarded the other as heretical, and disagreements turned into life-or-death struggles as political and sectarian disputes commingled. The barrier separating domestic and foreign disputes collapsed as sovereigns backed rival factions in their neighbors’ domestic, often bloody, religious struggles. The Protestant Reformation destroyed the concept of a world order sustained by the “two swords” of papacy and empire. Christianity was split and at war with itself.

Looking back, it is striking to note how many in western Europe and the United States expressed enthusiasm for Mao Tse-tung’s dictatorially uniform ‘cultural revolution’ while defining cultural reform at home as the maximizing of private initiative and autonomy.

In Shanghai's prime, no city in the Orient, or the world for that matter, could compare with it. At the peak of its spectacular career the swamp-ridden metropolis surely ranked as the most pleasure-mad, rapacious, corrupt, strife-ridden, licentious, squalid, and decadent city in the world. It was the most pleasure-mad because nowhere else did the population pursue amusement, from feasting to whoring, dancing to powder-taking, with such abandoned zeal. It was rapacious because greed was its driving force; strife-ridden because calamity was always at the door; licentious because it catered to every depravity known to man; squalid because misery stared one brazenly in the face; and decadent because morality, as every Shanghai resident knew, was irrelevant. The missionaries might rail at Shanghai's wickedness and reformers condemn its iniquities, but there was never reason for the city to mend its errant ways, for as a popular Chinese saying aptly observed, "Shanghai is like the emperor's ugly daughter; she never has to worry about finding suitors." Other great cities - Rome, Athens, or St. Petersburg, for instance – might flatter themselves that they had been conceived for virtuous, even heroic, purposes. Not so the ugly daughter who reveled in her bastard status. Half Oriental, half Occidental: half land, half water; neither a colony nor wholly belonging to China; inhabited by the citizens of every nation in the world but ruled by none, the emperor's ugly daughter was an anomaly among cities. The strange fruit of a forced union between East and West, this mongrel princess came into the world through a grasping premise-the right of one nation to foist a poisonous drug upon another. Born in greed and humiliation, the ugly daughter grew up in the shadow of the Celestial Empire's defeat by outsiders in the Opium War. Nonetheless, within decades, she had become Asia's greatest metropolis, a brash sprawling juggernaut of a city that dominated the rest of the country with its power, sophistication, and, most of all money.

Of course, it's easy to be overly optimistic when it comes to Egyptian reform. The country has a history of false promises and backtracking dating to the 1970s.

Descriptive research may have first been used to document need for change by John Howard, who began to fret in 1773 over the inhumane conditions of the prisons in Bedford, England. In order to prove what he was saying, he traveled all over England, visiting jails and noting the exact number of prisoners, what crimes they had committed, the conditions under which they were held, and other matters concerning the prison system. After completing his descriptive study, he stood before the House of Commons and gave a detailed and precise report that became the basis for important prison reforms. Howard later compared English prisons with jails in other European countries. His book The State of Prisons (1777) was one of the first comparative-descriptive studies. After studying the prisons of the land, he went on to investigate the conditions in hospitals. In one of these places he contracted

The history of China’s “land reform” was written in the tears and blood of landowners like my great-grandfather. But the 300 million poor Chinese farmers were victims too. They gave the Communist Party their popular support, hoping to improve their living standards by taking property away from landowners. Instead, they became stepping stones for the Party to abolish private property rights once and for all.

Above all, the new Left-- and its overwhelmingly youthful constituency -- rejected the inherited collectivism of its predecessor. To an earlier generation of reformers from Washington to Stockholm, it had been self-evident that 'justice', 'equal opportunity' or 'economic security' were shared objectives that could only be attained by common action. A younger cohort saw things very differently. Social justice no longer preoccupied radicals. What united the '60s generation was not the interest of all, but the needs and rights of each. 'Individualism' - the assertion of every person's claims to maximized private freedom and the unrestrained liberty to express autonomous desires and have them respected and institutionalized by society at large - became the left-wing watchword of the hour. Doing 'your own thing', 'letting it all hang out', 'making love, not war': these are not inherently unappealing goals, but they are not of their essence private objectives, not public goods. Unsurprisingly, they led to the widespread assertion that 'the personal is political'.

For anyone born after 1945, the welfare state and its institutions were not a solution to earlier dilemmas: they were simply the normal conditions of life - and more than a little dull. The baby boomers, entering university in the mid-'60s, had only ever known a world of improving life chances, generous medical and educated services, optimistic prospects of upward social mobility and - perhaps above all - an indefinable but ubiquitous sense of security. The goals of an earlier generation of reformers were no longer of interest to their successors. On the contrary, they were increasingly perceived as restrictions upon the self-expression and freedom of the individual.

Conflict between these groups fueled the Mexican Revolution in 1910, and the country’s 1917 constitution included provisions to remedy the situation. Under Article 27, agricultural land was to be redistributed to the rural poor and held permanently as communal ejidos by local villages. But after the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s, reform efforts flagged. Periodically during the rest of the twentieth century, the government instituted redistribution schemes, but particularly in the southern states with weak central control, sharp inequalities persisted and most of the agrarian population remained destitute.

Land reform was enacted through enforcing a 100-acre ceiling on the size of any single family's holding; ending absentee ownership; capping rent on leased lands; strengthening the legal rights of peasants (al-fellahin); and, crucially, confiscating hundreds of thousands of fertile acres from major landowners and distributing them to millions of landless peasants. Today, almost five decades later, the footage of Nasser distributing landownership titles to poor peasants in drab jalabeyas is still a powerful – and moving – symbol of the rise of the poor classes (Al-Tabaquat Al-Fakeera) and the transformation of a feudal system into one based on ‘equity and progress’.

The combination of the land-reform programme and the creation of the public sector resulted in around 75 per cent of Egypt's gross domestic product (GDP) being transferred from the hands of the country's rich either to the state or to millions of small owners. The closest parallel to such a large-scale social programme had been in the early days of Mohamed Ali Pasha's rule in the early nineteenth century.

Some of the key pillars of Nasser's project proved greatly lacking. The public sector evolved into a Soviet-style system of sterile thinking, a deathbed for talent, a site of mediocre resource allocation, inefficiency, suffocating bureaucracy, waste and decrepit management; in no way could it support lasting economic development in the country. Many of Nasser's detractors argue that land reform precipitated a dramatic retreat of Egyptian agribusiness: that the replacement of sophisticated, well-capitalized large landowners by low-skilled and poor peasants resulted in lower quality products, no concern for the long-term subsistence of the land, poor marketing of strategic Egyptian crops such as cotton and a continued erosion of links to

The speed of these social changes outpaced the development of Egyptian society and the people. Land reform and asset nationalization resulted in a far more equitable land and asset distribution across the economy, but the new owners and managers were hardly on a par with the grand objectives of the developmental endeavour they were leading;

This makes it much easier to institute radical departures in public policy. In complex or divided societies, the chances are that a minority—or even a majority—will be forced to concede, often against its will. This makes collective policymaking contentious and favors a minimalist approach to social reform: better to do nothing than to divide people for and against a controversial project.

Georgi M. Derluguian's Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus tells the extraordinary story of Musa Shanib from Abkhazia, the leading intellectual of this turbulent region whose incredible career passed from Soviet dissident intellectual through democratic political reformer and Muslim fundamentalist war leader up to respected professor of philosophy, his entire career marked by the strange admiration for Pierre Bourdieu's thought. There are two ways to approach such a figure. The first reaction is to dismiss it as local eccentricity, to treat it with benevolent irony - "what a strange choice, Bourdieu - who knows what this folkloric guy sees in Bourdieu...". The second reaction is to directly assert the universal scope of theory - "see how universal theory is: every intellectual from Paris to Chechenia and Abkhazia can debate his theories..." The true task, of course, is to avoid both these options and to assert the universality of a theory as the result of a hard theoretical work and struggle, a struggle that is not external to theory: the point is not (only) that Shanib had to do a lot of work to break the constraints of his local context and penetrate Bourdieu - this appropriation of Bourdieu by an Abkhazian intellectual also affects the substance of the theory itself, transposing it into a different universe. Did - mutatis mutandis - Lenin not do something similar with Marx? The shift of Mao with regard to Lenin AND Stalin concerns the relationship between the working class and peasants: both Lenin and Stalin were deeply distrustful towards the peasants, they saw as one of the main tasks of the Soviet power to break the inertia of the peasants, their substantial attachment to land, to "proletarize" them and thus fully expose them to the dynamics of modernization - in clear contrast to Mao who, in his critical notes on Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (from 1958) remarked that "Stalin's point of view /.../ is almost altogether wrong. The basic error is mistrust of the peasants." The theoretical and political consequences of this shift are properly shattering: they imply no less than a thorough reworking of Marx's Hegelian notion of proletarian position as the position of "substanceless subjectivity," of those who are reduced to the abyss of their subjectivity.

as having sparked the Reformation, was the publication of Luther’s 95 Theses, occasioned by the selling of indulgences in the German lands.

For a number of reasons, the church has become widely viewed as either irrelevant, the object of contempt, or both. The situation is complex, but two factors stand out. First, a narrow approach to the idea of salvation, as expressed in the blood atonement and with Jesus as the exclusive divine Savior, has played into the hands of a church seeking political power at the expense of the inclusive wisdom of its own gospel. “Getting saved” not only is a static and highly individualistic phenomenon but narrows and domesticates the redemptive activity of God in ways that conform all too conveniently to the worldview of the new American empire. In a land of entitled bargain hunters, salvation becomes the ultimate bargain. Second, the notion of covenant as a collective expression of gratitude and mutuality has been trampled beneath a culture whose real devotion is to private ambition. The religious impulse, born in epiphanies that awaken us to our responsibilities to and for one another, is fundamentally corrupted when it is reduced to an individual balm. Faith is always supposed to make it harder, not easier, to ignore the plight of our sisters and brothers. In short, the church must make a crucial choice now between wisdom theology and salvation theology— between the Jesus who transforms and the Christ who saves. One is the biblical ethic of justice; the other is a postbiblical invention that came to fullness only after the Protestant Reformation.

Since Daniel eight suggests that the Antichrist will come from a new small and insignificant country, I personally believe that the Assyrians will soon create their new independent country. This new country will probably be born within the region of the Nineveh plains of Northern Iraq. This region is at the heart of the ancient Syrian division of the Grecian Empire. Perhaps this new small Assyrian country will encompass parts of modern Syria since the Nineveh Plains of Northern Iraq are near the Syrian border. The idea of an Assyrian independent state is not new.                              In 1931 and 1932, the League of Nations received at least five petitions from Assyrian groups. The first two petitions were dated October 20th and 23rd, 1931. These came from representatives of Assyrians in Iraq including Mar Eshai Shimun XXIII, the Patriarch of the Church of the East. They requested that the Assyrians in Iraq be transported to land under the rule of one of the Western nations or, failing that, to Syria, which was still a French Mandate. Neither Britain nor Iraq objected to this idea, but no country volunteered to take the Assyrians. Britain argued that creation of a homeland was unnecessary because once Assyrians abandoned their quest for an autonomous homeland; they would become an integrated and "useful" part of Iraq. The third petition sought the recognition of Assyrians as a millet (nation) within Iraq and the creation of an Assyrian region within Iraq by redrawing Iraq's border with Turkey to include within Iraq the Turkish regions that Assyrian refugees in Iraq had lived in prior to their expulsion from Turkey. Failing this, the petition requested a special homeland within the existing borders of Iraq, made up of the whole of the district of Amedia plus adjacent parts of Zakho, Dohuk and Aqra, for the Assyrian refugees from Turkey then in Iraq. The fourth petition, dated September 21, 1932, was signed by 58 people claiming to represent 2,395 families. The final petition, dated September 22, 1932, is another from Mar Shimun. It alleges that the Assyrians have a right to claim their original homes or suitable substitutes from the United Kingdom, for whom the Assyrians fought in the First World War. It requests the return of the Hakkiari province or resettlement along the lines sought in the third petition. The petition noted that the Assyrians had voted for Iraq in the plebiscite for the Mosul Liwa based on the League's 1925 recommendation that the Assyrians be given local autonomy.26 (Emphasis mine)

Josephus, a Jewish historian who lived at the time of Christ, records that Cyrus read the prophecy of Isaiah and was marveled saying:   "Thus saith Cyrus the King:  Since God Almighty hath appointed me to be king of the habitable earth, I believe that he is that God which the nation of the Israelites worship; for he foretold my name by the prophets; and that I should build him a house at Jerusalem, in the country of Judea"   Josephus continues:   “This was known to Cyrus by his reading the book which Isaiah left behind him of his prophecies; for this prophet said that God had spoken thus to him in a secret vision: "My will is, that Cyrus, whom I have appointed to be king over many and great nations, send back my people to their own land, and build my temple.  This was foretold before the temple was demolished" Accordingly, when Cyrus read this, and admired the divine power, an earnest desire and ambition seized upon him to fulfill what was so written; so he called for the most eminent Jews that were in Babylon, and said to them, that he gave them leave to go back to their own country, and to rebuild the city of Jerusalem" 18   The fulfillment of this prophecy is also recorded in the Bible in 2 Chronicles 36:22-23, Ezra 1:2-8 and 4:3.

3. The object of the gifts, as stated by Paul, was “for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come in the unity of the faith.” But they have been superseded in the popular churches by human creeds, which have failed to secure scriptural unity. It has been truly said, “The American people are a nation of lords.” In a land of boasted freedom of thought and of conscience, like ours, church force cannot produce unity; but has caused divisions, and has given rise to religious sects and parties almost innumerable. Creed and church force have been called to the rescue in vain.  The remedy, however, for this deplorable evil is found in the proper use of the simple organization and church order set forth in the New-Testament Scriptures, and in the means Christ has ordained for the unity and perfection of the church. We affirm that there is not a single apology in all the book of God for disharmony of sentiment or spirit in the church. The means are ample to secure the high standard of unity expressed in the New Testament. Christ prayed that his people might be one, as he was one with his Father. John 17. And Paul appeals to the church at Corinth in these emphatic words: “Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.” 1Cor.1:10. “Now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be like-minded one toward another according to Christ Jesus, that ye may with one mind and one mouth glorify God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Rom.15:5,6. The gifts were given to secure this state of unity.  But the popular churches have introduced another {345} means of preserving unity, namely, human creeds. These creeds secure a sort of unity to each denomination; but they have all proved inefficient, as appears from the New Schools and Reformed of almost every creed-bound denomination under heaven. Hence the many kinds of Baptists, of Presbyterians, of Methodists, and of others. There is not an excuse for this state of things anywhere to be found in the book of God. These sects are not on the foundation of unity laid by Jesus Christ, and taught by Paul, the wise master-builder. And the smaller sects who reject human creeds, professing to take the Bible as their rule of faith and practice, yet rejecting the gifts, are not a whit better off. In these perilous times they shake to fragments, yet cry, The Bible! the Bible! We, too, would exalt the Bible, and would say to those who would represent us as taking the gifts instead of the Bible, that we are not satisfied with a part of the sacred volume, but claim as ours the Bible, the whole Bible, the gifts and all.  All the denominations cannot be right, and it may not be wrong to suppose that no one of them is right on all points of faith. To show that they cannot have their creeds and the gifts too, that creeds shut out the gifts, we will suppose that God, through chosen instruments taken from each sect, begins to show up the errors in the creeds of these different denominations. If they received the testimony as from Heaven, it would spoil their creeds. But would they throw them away and come out on the platform of unity taught by Christ, Paul, and Peter? Never! They would a thousand times sooner reject the humble instruments of God’s choice. It is evident that if the gifts were received, they would destroy {346} human creeds; and that if creeds be received, they shut out the gifts. 

The key to the Republic’s enduring popular support lay not only in its most tangible reforms – in the areas of land, labour and welfare – crucial though these were for the redistribution of social and economic power. It also lay in a qualitative change, in the change of social atmosphere that it wrought

For land and social welfare reforms cost money and the government was seeking to subsidize these by cutting the military establishment and thus its enormous salary bill.

In Denmark in the 1780s, for instance, prison and law reforms were carried through, poor relief established, land reform introduced, feudal labor services abolished, the slave trade outlawed, outmoded tariffs removed, and commerce liberated, all without the assistance of the mob and without a single riot or political execution.

When we asked him why he was so dedicated to reconciliation and to being willing to make concessions to his opponents, he did not hesitate to say that it had all been due to the influence and witness of the Christian churches. This was echoed by Tokyo Sexwale, the first Premier of the leading industrial province of Gauteng, when he too came to greet our synod as it was meeting in his province. Clearly the Church had made a contribution to what was happening in our land, even though its witness and ministry had been something of a mixed bag. Presumably without that influence things might have turned out a little differently. It could also be that at a very difficult time in our struggle, when most of our leaders were in jail or in exile or proscribed in some way or other, some of the leaders in the churches were thrust into the forefront of the struggle and had thereby given the churches a particular kind of credibility—people like Allan Boesak, formerly leader of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, Frank Chikane, former general secretary of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), Peter Storey, former head of the Methodist Church, Beyers Naudé, the most prominent Afrikaner church dissident and also a general secretary of the SACC, Denis Hurley, formerly Roman Catholic Archbishop of Durban, and leaders of other faith communities who were there where the people were hurting. Thus when they spoke about forgiveness and reconciliation they had won their spurs and would be listened to with respect.

But Louis XV, in arguably the biggest single blunder of his reign, capitulated to clerical pressure and to specious arguments such as the ‘donation of Constantine’, whereby the first Christian emperor had given land to the church unencumbered and in perpetuity. The problem did not go away: clerical resistance to taxation was to defeat Louis XVI’s major reforming initiative too.

COVENANT The basic structure of the relationship God has established with His people is the covenant. A covenant is usually thought of as a contract. While there surely are some similarities between covenants and contracts, there are also important differences. Both are binding agreements. Contracts are made from somewhat equal bargaining positions, and both parties are free not to sign the contract. A covenant is likewise an agreement. However, covenants in the Bible are not usually between equals. Rather, they follow a pattern common to the ancient Near East suzerain-vassal treaties. Suzerain-vassal treaties (as seen among the Hittite kings) were made between a conquering king and the conquered. There was no negotiation between the parties. The first element of these covenants is the preamble, which lists the respective parties. Exodus 20:2 begins with “I am the LORD your God.” God is the suzerain; the people of Israel are the vassals. The second element is the historical prologue. This section lists what the suzerain (or Lord) has done to deserve loyalty, such as bringing the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt. In theological terms, this is the section of grace. In the next section, the Lord lists what He will require of those He rules. In Exodus 20, these are the Ten Commandments. Each of the commandments were considered morally binding on the entire covenant community. The final part of this type of covenant lists blessings and cursings. The Lord lists the benefits that He will bestow upon His vasssals if they follow the stipulations of the covenant. An example of this is found in the fifth commandment. God promises the Israelites that their days will be long in the Promised Land if they honor their parents. The covenant also presents curses should the people fail in their responsibilities. God warns Israel that He will not hold them guiltless if they fail to honor His name. This basic pattern is evident in God’s covenants with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and the covenant between Jesus and His church. In biblical times, covenants were ratified in blood. It was customary for both parties to the covenant to pass between dismembered animals, signifying their agreement to the terms of the covenant (see Jeremiah 34:18). We have an example of this kind of covenant in Genesis 15:7-21. Here, God made certain promises to Abraham, which were ratified by the sacrificing of animals. However in this case, God alone passes through the animals, indicating that He is binding Himself by a solemn oath to fulfill the covenant. The new covenant, the covenant of grace, was ratified by the shed blood of Christ upon the cross. At the heart of this covenant is God’s promise of redemption. God has not only promised to redeem all who put their trust in Christ, but has sealed and confirmed that promise with a most holy vow. We serve and worship a God who has pledged Himself to our full redemption.

When nations break out of institutional patterns condemning them to poverty and manage to embark on a path to economic growth, this is not because their ignorant leaders suddenly have become better informed or less self-interested or because they’ve received advice from better economists. China, for example, is one of the countries that made the switch from economic policies that caused poverty and the starvation of millions to those encouraging economic growth. But, as we will discuss in greater detail later, this did not happen because the Chinese Communist Party finally understood that the collective ownership of agricultural land and industry created terrible economic incentives. Instead, Deng Xiaoping and his allies, who were no less self-interested than their rivals but who had different interests and political objectives, defeated their powerful opponents in the Communist Party and masterminded a political revolution of sorts, radically changing the leadership and direction of the party. Their economic reforms, which created market incentives in agriculture and then subsequently in industry, followed from this political revolution. It was politics that determined the switch from communism and toward market incentives in China, not better advice or a better understanding of how the economy worked. W

be passed where our children will be taught of the Lord (Isa. 54:13) and our nation be filled with the glory of the Lord (Hab. 2:14). Lord, anoint leaders to submit to Your lordship so that our economic situation can be healed. Let our people build houses and inhabit them (Isa. 65:21). Let them plant vineyards and eat the fruit of them (Isa. 65:21). Let them enjoy the work of their hands (v. 22). Let the enemies in our land be reconciled, but let reformation be the foundation.

It was decided to intern him in the laboratory where he worked and to monitor him closely for a year. Given the marvelous progress accomplished by science, the prisons and dungeons of old were long gone, and it is understandable that the new world took great pride in that reform, which placed men on a par with gods. To tell the truth, there was no difference between the condition of citizens submissive to the superhuman State and that of ancient convicts, except that the convicts of old enjoyed freedom of thought and the spectacle of nature. Prisons no longer had any utility in such circumstances.

However, during the East India Company’s rule, the system of land revenue auction was such that many Muslim landholders could not compete with the emerging Hindu and European elites to retain control of their lands. This was compounded by the fact that the British elites distrusted the Muslims and preferred the Hindus in their allocation of land revenue. Not surprisingly, one British observer referred to this policy as the: Most sweeping act of oppression ever committed in any country by which the landed property of the country had been transferred from the class of people entitled to it to a set of baboos, who had made their wealth by bribery and corruption.6

Even today, we connect the color white with purity and the color black with evil. It would be considered odd if a person made a story called Snow Black and the Seven Dwarves. Well, snow is white, but she was named that because of her white skin, and she was considered to be the most beautiful woman in the land, so as you could see, white seems to be connected to beauty.

Similarly, Koran 5:33 decrees that “the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] mischief is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land.” Islam’s scholars agree that “wage war” most definitely includes verbal war. In fact, verbal attacks on Islam are often perceived as worse than physical attacks. As Ibn Taymiyya put it, Muharaba [waging war against Islam] is of two types: physical and verbal. Waging war verbally against Islam may be worse than waging war physically—hence the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) used to kill those who waged war against Islam verbally, while letting off some of those who waged war against Islam physically. This ruling is to be applied more strictly after the death of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him). Mischief may be caused by physical action or by words, but the damage caused by words is many times greater than that caused by physical action; and the goodness achieved by words in reforming may be many times greater than that achieved by physical action. It is proven that waging war against Allah and His Messenger (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) verbally is worse and the efforts on earth to undermine religion by verbal means is more effective.8 This is not merely a medieval interpretation; many if not most of today’s Islamic scholars agree. After quoting the aforementioned crucifixion verse of the Koran (5:33), Dr. Zakir Naik asserted in Islamic Voice in 2006, “In Islam, a person who has committed blasphemy can either be killed or crucified, or his opposite hands and feet can be cut off, or he can be exiled from that land.”9 These brutal penalties are based on the fact that, as Taymiyya points out, Muhammad himself—who once declared “whoever curses a prophet, kill him”—ordered the execution of many people simply for criticizing, questioning, or mocking him.

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for example, had visited the Oval Office in March, and I’d found him impressive. A grizzled, engaging former labor leader who’d been jailed for protesting the previous military government and then elected in 2002, he had initiated a series of pragmatic reforms that sent Brazil’s growth rate soaring, expanded its middle class, and provided housing and education to millions of its poorest citizens. He also reportedly had the scruples of a Tammany Hall boss, and rumors swirled about government cronyism, sweetheart deals, and kickbacks that ran into the billions.

Similarly, Koran 5:33 decrees that “the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] mischief is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land.” Islam’s scholars agree that “wage war” most definitely includes verbal war. In fact, verbal attacks on Islam are often perceived as worse than physical attacks. As Ibn Taymiyya put it, Muharaba [waging war against Islam] is of two types: physical and verbal. Waging war verbally against Islam may be worse than waging war physically—hence the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) used to kill those who waged war against Islam verbally, while letting off some of those who waged war against Islam physically. This ruling is to be applied more strictly after the death of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him). Mischief may be caused by physical action or by words, but the damage caused by words is many times greater than that caused by physical action; and the goodness achieved by words in reforming may be many times greater than that achieved by physical action. It is proven that waging war against Allah and His Messenger (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) verbally is worse and the efforts on earth to undermine religion by verbal means is more effective.8

Some Northern evangelicals wanted to make Christianity the state religion. They believed the war was God’s judgment because the founders left God out of the Constitution. The group, the National Reform Association, proposed a so- called Bible amendment in 1863 in order to unite evangelical Protestantism to the Republic and proclaim a Christian nation. They met with Lincoln to propose changing the Constitution to read, “We the people of the United States humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power and civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to form a more perfect union.

Nicholas issued over six hundred anti-Jewish decrees designed to disrupt Jewish life. These included censoring Yiddish and Hebrew books, stifling religious education, mass expulsions, and the conscription of young boys into the army for periods of up to twenty-five years. Jews remained barred from the professions, barred from holding land, barred from living outside the Pale of Settlement. His son, the reformer Alexander I, reduced compulsory military service to five years, allowed Jews into some universities, and allowed Jewish businessman to travel to parts of Russia that had been off-limits. They were still not allowed to own land, enter the professions, or live outside the Pale. Nonetheless, the winds of change were blowing, even into the deepest recesses of the backward empire.

For some twenty years and more, spiritualism had been gaining converts among educated people on both sides of the Atlantic. The Fox Sisters and their much-publicized “Rochester Rappings” had marked the start of it in America. And in the time since, it had become an intensely serious body of beliefs that had a strange, powerful appeal to a surprising number of intensely serious people. For those of a doubting analytical turn of mind, it seemed to offer proof of the existence of a spiritual realm. To practical men of learning, whose faith in traditional doctrine had been shaken by the revelations of science, it seemed at least an alternative. Why Roebling turned to it he never explained. But in the final years of his life he believed devoutly in a “Spirit Land” and in the possibility of mortal communication with its inhabitants. Specifically, he believed in the afterworld described by Andrew Jackson Davis, “The Poughkeepsie Seer,” a pale, nearsighted son of an alcoholic shoemaker, who in Roebling’s estimate was one of the great men of all time. Davis had become a clairvoyant, healer, and overnight sensation in 1844, at age seventeen, when he took his first “psychic flight through space” while under hypnosis in Poughkeepsie, New York. For the next several years he traveled up and down the East delivering hundreds of lectures, taking his own attendant hypnotist along with him—to “magnetize” him for each performance—as well as a New Haven preacher who took down everything he uttered while under the spell, all of which was turned into books. (One such book ran to thirty-four editions.) His preachments were a strange mixture of occult mystery, science, or what passed for science, progressive social reform, intellectual skepticism, and a vaulting imagination. For Roebling the impact of all this was momentous. It was as though he had been struck by divine revelation. He wrote at length to Horace Greeley, proposing the establishment of an orphanage in which a thousand children would be “perfectly educated, physically and mentally” according to the Davis vision of the good life. An “earthly paradise” was still possible after all. The hereafter as pictured

Of the four key leaders, I knew Harry best, but I’d had my share of interactions with McConnell during my few years in the Senate. Short, owlish, with a smooth Kentucky accent, McConnell seemed an unlikely Republican leader. He showed no aptitude for schmoozing, backslapping, or rousing oratory. As far as anyone could tell, he had no close friends even in his own caucus; nor did he appear to have any strong convictions beyond an almost religious opposition to any version of campaign finance reform. Joe told me of one run-in he’d had on the Senate floor after the Republican leader blocked a bill Joe was sponsoring; when Joe tried to explain the bill’s merits, McConnell raised his hand like a traffic cop and said, “You must be under the mistaken impression that I care.” But what McConnell lacked in charisma or interest in policy he more than made up for in discipline, shrewdness, and shamelessness—all of which he employed in the single-minded and dispassionate pursuit of power.

It's possible to see the Green Revolution as a success...The political commitment to making food cheap through state subsidy and violence worked...Perhaps the greatest success was the effective quieting of peasant demands for land reform and urban demands for political change.

There was just one problem for Putin: Russia wasn’t a superpower anymore. Despite having a nuclear arsenal second only to our own, Russia lacked the vast network of alliances and bases that allowed the United States to project its military power across the globe. Russia’s economy remained smaller than those of Italy, Canada, and Brazil, dependent almost entirely on oil, gas, mineral, and arms exports. Moscow’s high-end shopping districts testified to the country’s transformation from a creaky state-run economy to one with a growing number of billionaires, but the pinched lives of ordinary Russians spoke to how little of this new wealth trickled down. According to various international indicators, the levels of Russian corruption and inequality rivaled those in parts of the developing world, and its male life expectancy in 2009 was lower than that of Bangladesh. Few, if any, young Africans, Asians, or Latin Americans looked to Russia for inspiration in the fight to reform their societies, or felt their imaginations stirred by Russian movies or music, or dreamed of studying there, much less immigrating. Shorn of its ideological underpinnings, the once-shiny promise of workers uniting to throw off their chains, Putin’s Russia came off as insular and suspicious of outsiders—to be feared, perhaps, but not emulated.

These words by Plutarch sum up the background of Lycurgus’s land reforms in Sparta.

I do so love books. I can’t think of many truer pleasures than settling into a fat armchair, letting my mouth fall open, and reading a novel. And I mean really reading one – not just skim-reading it before a live TV interview, or pretending to read Middlemarch while smiling sagely to look more attractive in a departure lounge – genuinely reading. For me, books aren’t just a feast for the eyes. I love the feel of books: the flaps of reformed pulp nestling compliantly in the crook of my hand, my fingers tracing their supple spines; I love the sound of books – I don’t mean audiobooks, I don’t like audiobooks, I’ve never liked audiobooks: If I want to hear Sam West reading Inspector Morse out loud I’ll go to one of his garden parties; no, I’ll only allow audiobooks if you’re operating heavy machinery or are just plain blind (and don’t forget they have been given braille) – I mean the sound of a book: The moth-like thrum of flicked pages, the gedoink of a thudding tome as it lands on a bedside table. But most of all, I love the stench of books; the thick odour that leaps from their pages. If I’m feeling a little low and I’m in a library, I’ve been known to open a book (just a little), slot my nose into its tempting crevice, and inhale a deep whiff of book until my eyes roll back in their sockets and I have to lie down in a section where no-one goes (such as African literature). For me, nothing beats the delight of quietly slipping my nose into the crack of a Brontë or A Few Good Men and letting the aroma tantalise my olfactory nerve endings. Oh, the smell! Oh! The! Smell! The trusty, musty, dusty, fusty, crusty, and (if it’s a Jilly Cooper) busty and lusty smell of literature!

She said I would lose my throne, but if I didn't continue the reforms, I would lose my country too. It had never been properly mine anyway, this throne, and it meant less to me than these lands and peoples who'd been entrusted to my hands.

I do not mean to say that even after you had set right this fundamental injustice, there would not be many things to do; but this I do mean to say, that our treatment of land lies at the bottom of all social questions. This I do mean to say, that, do what you please, reform as you may, you never can get rid of wide-spread poverty so long as the element on which and from which all men must live is made the private property of some men. It is utterly impossible. Reform government—get taxes down to the minimum—build railroads; institute co-operative stores; divide profits, if you choose, between employers and employed-and what will be the result? The result will be that the land will increase in value—that will be the result—that and nothing else.

The 1920s, ’30s, and early ’40s were a time of rising nationalism coupled with technology-driven angst and revulsion at governments that appeared to be both corrupt and relics of an earlier age. The widespread questioning and tottering of faith caused prospective Fascist leaders to test their training wheels and spurred movements and fads of every description, from mysticism and belief in fairies to flagpole-sitting and a flirtation across the political spectrum with eugenics and its accompanying racial theories. Mussolini’s early success energized those whose primary fear was Bolshevism or what they imagined to be Bolshevism: loud demands for higher wages, for example, or campaigns for land reform. In virtually every country, there were veterans who—regardless of which side they had fought on during the war—were contemptuous of civilian politicians. Anti-Semitism, whether casual or visceral, flourished in politics, the professions, academia, and the arts. The bewildering rush of globalization prompted many to find solace in the familiar rhythms of nation, culture, and faith; and people everywhere seemed to be on the lookout for leaders who claimed to have simple and satisfying answers to modernity’s tangled questions.

Years later, our scepticism has been vindicated. All this land grab did not improve our lot’s mundane lives. Our people continue to live a life of abject poverty and penury. They are still living a life of subsistence. A once feted jewel of Africa nation is now a basket case. One can’t help but ask: Aaah land reform, what was that all about? What was the point really?

One often overlooked aspect of the Ritz Carlton detentions was land reform, a topic more often associated with Egypt than Saudi Arabia. Because of high land prices, not construction costs, urban housing in Saudi Arabia is very expensive. In the United States the value of residential real estate is roughly 25 percent land and 75 percent the actual building. In Saudi Arabia, these ratios are reversed,

In the words of President Lyndon Johnson when he signed the 1965 immigration reform act: “This is a simple test, and it is a fair test. Those who can contribute most to this country—to its growth, to its strength, to its spirit—will be the first that are admitted to this land.”21

The AIFLD’s fingerprints were later found on a number of U.S. covert incursions in Latin America—including the toppling in 1954 of the labor-supported Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz, whose land reforms were opposed by the United Fruit Company, the CIA, and the AFL-CIO.

Richard’s Parliament, which concluded on 20 February, is remembered for introducing a catalogue of citizens’ rights and protections which was unparalleled in living memory. Jeremy Potter summarizes thus: There was a programme of law reform which included measures to correct injustice in the ownership and transfer of land, measures to safeguard the individual against abuses of the law in matters affecting juries and bail, measures to prevent the seizure of goods of those arrested but not yet found guilty, and the abolition of a much resented form of taxation known euphemistically as benevolences.

Varje land är mitt land, varje kultur är min kultur, varje religion är min religion.

His idea of shared interest and self-sufficiency among all parties was at its most developed when it came to leading the campaign for land reform and free homesteads, as he saw land as the solution to labor unrest within the growing market economy.

The estate on which my Uncle Sandy had been a tenant was one of those on which the relations of landlord and tenant were spoken of as being on a paternal footing; the idea of its being a commercial relationship was strongly resented and declared to be the suggestion of radicalism of a very red type, only fitted, if not designed, to excite prejudice against the landlord class, whose distinctive benevolence forbad their ever going farther than to take what they wanted, and proclaim the grand old doctrine of 'LIVE and let live.

Another notable achievement of Bernays’s liberal record was in the early 1950s when he was employed by the United Fruit Company, which virtually owned Guatemala, in fact much of Central America. In the early ’50s they were threatened by a new reformist democracy in Guatemala, which overthrew the dictatorship and intended to take unused lands owned by the fruit company and distribute them to poor peasants, along with other reforms. Bernays was hired to do something about that. He developed a very successful propaganda campaign to engineer consent among the American public for a military coup, the 1953 military coup, which ended these heresies and protected the power of the Fruit Company under the new military dictatorship

It appears that John was re-enacting Israel’s post-exodus entry to the Promised Land. However, given Israel’s sinfulness, he was calling the nation to repentance.43 Israel needed to prepare for the second (or eschatological) exodus that would come by the ministry of Christ.

CAN YOU NOT REMEMBER? When did this brutality grow? Can you not remember? Go back to the place where you left that man dying. This time you must bring him back with you. I see you in my dreams. Your face is edged with battle. I touch your forehead from a distant land. The Earth glare is so bright. It washes the white memory from your mind. Have you forgotten we come from the same place? Settle, settle, peace, peace. When did this brutality grow? Can you not remember? Go back to the place where you left that man dying. This time you must bring him back with you. You are looking for something, demanding to be found. Make your way back from that broken land. Return from that empty place. There is nothing there for you. It holds a million shadows. There are no friends there. Settle, settle, peace, peace. When did this brutality grow? Can you not remember? Go back to the place where you left that man dying. This time you must bring him back with you. It is warmer here. Can you see the light? Trust it. It is safe. It has lived a long time. It has seen much more than you. You fight a demon that you once knew but the demon is already slain. And from the corner of your eye you will see the scattered, sacred fire reform again. Settle, settle, peace, peace.

Worse yet, my administration was deporting undocumented workers at an accelerating rate. This wasn’t a result of any directive from me, but rather it stemmed from a 2008 congressional mandate that both expanded ICE’s budget and increased collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement departments in an effort to deport more undocumented immigrants with criminal records. My team and I had made a strategic choice not to immediately try to reverse the policies we’d inherited in large part because we didn’t want to provide ammunition to critics who claimed that Democrats weren’t willing to enforce existing immigration laws—a perception that we thought could torpedo our chances of passing a future reform bill. But by 2010, immigrant-rights and Latino advocacy groups were criticizing our lack of progress, much the same way LGBTQ activists had gone after us on DADT. And although I continued to urge Congress to pass immigration reform, I had no realistic path for delivering a new comprehensive law before the midterms.

He told them, that, when the patent was granted, the number of freemen was supposed to be (as in like corporations) so few, as they might well join in making laws; but now they were grown to so great a body, as it was not possible for them to make or execute laws, but they must choose others for that purpose: and that howsoever it would be necessary hereafter to have a select company to intend that work, yet for the present they were not furnished with a sufficient number of men qualified for such a business, neither could the commonwealth bear the loss of time of so many as must intend it. Yet this they might do at present, viz., they might, at the general court, make an order, that, once in the year, a certain number should be appointed (upon summons from the governor) to revise all laws, etc., and to reform what they found amiss therein; but not to make any new laws, but prefer their grievances to the court of assistants; and that no assessment should be laid upon the country without the consent of such a committee, nor any lands disposed of.[

TWO OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT technological developments in human history had brought the European medieval world to an end by the beginning of the sixteenth century and made the settlement of the New World possible. The printing press had greatly reduced the cost of books, and thus of knowledge. In the mid-fifteenth century there had been only about fifty thousand books in all of Europe, most of them controlled by the Church, which ran the universities. By the end of the century there were more than ten million books in Europe, on an endless variety of subjects, many of them technical and agricultural. They were largely in the hands of the burgeoning merchant class and the landed aristocracy. The Church’s monopoly of knowledge was broken and, soon, so was its monopoly of religion, as the Protestant Reformation swept over much of northern Europe in the early sixteenth century, setting off more than a century of warfare as a result.

In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe’s leadership and the country’s land reform initiatives serve as a notable example of efforts to reclaim historical narratives. While his presidency was often surrounded by controversy and significant economic challenges, Mugabe’s early messaging about land reclamation and addressing colonial land dispossession resonated deeply with themes of African identity and self-determination. His emphasis on sovereignty and independence, particularly regarding control over natural resources, was positioned as a deliberate rejection of the colonial systems that had left Zimbabwe economically reliant on foreign powers.

The Directorate of Plans was responsible for CIA clandestine operations, which included the removal from power of foreign leaders who were seen as a threat to US interests—such as Jacobo Arbenz, the president of Guatemala, whose 1952 land reform programme had enraged wealthy planters and the United Fruit Company, a huge American corporation. Arbenz was overthrown in 1954 in a CIA operation code-named PBSUCCESS.5

Wall Street: I’d start carrying guns if I were you.      Your annual reports are worse fiction than the screenplay for Dude, Where’s My Car?, which you further inflate by downsizing and laying off the very people whose life savings you’re pillaging. How long do you think you can do that to people? There are consequences. Maybe not today. Or tomorrow. But inevitably. Just ask the Romanovs. They had a nice little setup, too, until that knock at the door.      Second, Congress: We’re on to your act.      In the middle of the meltdown, CSPAN showed you pacing the Capitol floor yapping about “under God” staying in the Pledge of Allegiance and attacking the producers of Sesame Street for introducing an HIV-positive Muppet. Then you passed some mealy-mouthed reforms and crowded to get inside the crop marks at the photo op like a frat-house phone-booth stunt.      News flash: We out here in the Heartland care infinitely more about God-and-Country issues because we have internal moral-guidance systems that make you guys look like a squadron of gooney birds landing facedown on an icecap and tumbling ass over kettle. But unlike you, we have to earn a living and can’t just chuck our job responsibilities to march around the office ranting all day that the less-righteous offend us. Jeez, you’re like autistic schoolchildren who keep getting up from your desks and wandering to the window to see if there’s a new demagoguery jungle gym out on the playground. So sit back down, face forward and pay attention!      In summary, what’s the answer?      The reforms laws were so toothless they were like me saying that I passed some laws, and the president and vice president have forgotten more about insider trading than Martha Stewart will ever know.      Yet the powers that be say they’re doing everything they can. But they’re conveniently forgetting a little constitutional sitcom from the nineties that showed us what the government can really do when it wants to go Starr Chamber. That’s with two rs.      Does it make any sense to pursue Wall Street miscreants any less vigorously than Ken Starr sniffed down Clinton’s sex life? And remember, a sitting president actually got impeached over that—something incredibly icky but in the end free of charge to taxpayers, except for the $40 million the independent posse spent dragging citizens into motel rooms and staring at jism through magnifying glasses. But where’s that kind of government excess now? Where’s a coffee-cranked little prosecutor when you really need him?      I say, bring back the independent counsel. And when we finally nail you stock-market cheats, it’s off to a real prison, not the rich guys’ jail. Then, in a few years, when the first of you start walking back out the gates with that new look in your eyes, the rest of the herd will get the message pretty fast.

Kingdom (in stark contrast to the monolithic Najd). The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was the modern reformer of Hajj, and his personal efforts dispelled the heinous pre-Islamic associations with idolatry. He restored the Ka'aba as the House of God and cleansed it of statues and symbols of pagan worship, which were sometimes stored even within its hollow core. He returned monotheistic worship to Mecca, making Hajj the pinnacle of Islamic worship, as the Quran

Only one group, the intelligentsia, rose to challenge the dynasty. Educated people in all walks of life, especially those who had not been absorbed in officialdom, had no less reason than had the peasantry to be disappointed with the Tsar—the Emancipator. He had first aroused and then frustrated their craving for freedom as he had aroused and deceived the muzhiks’ hunger for land. Alexander had not, like his predecessor Nicholas I, chastised the intelligentsia with scorpions; but he was still punishing them with whips. His reforms in education and in the Press had been half-hearted and mean: the spiritual life of the nation remained under the tutelage of the police, the censorship, and the Holy Synod. By offering the educated a semblance of freedom he made the denial of real freedom even more painful and humiliating. The intelligentsia sought to avenge their betrayed hopes; the Tsar strove to tame their restive spirit; and, so, semi-liberal reforms gave way to repression and repression bred rebellion. Numerically

The Sinai covenant itself, then, is a law-covenant. The land is given to Israel, but for the purpose of fulfilling its covenantal vocation. Remaining in the land is there fore conditional on Israel's personal performance of the stipulations that people swore at Sinai...The ultimate promise of a worldwide family of Abraham--sinners justified and glorified in a renewed creation--is unconditional in its basis, while the continuing existence of the national theocracy as a type of that everlasting covenant depended on Israel's obedience...The Decalogue and Joshua 24 fit this suzerainty pattern, but as Mendenhall observe, "it can readily be seen that the covenant with Abraham (and Noah) is of completely different form." P.15

Ottoman lands became the center of a new eastern Sephardi diaspora, Christian Europe became the home of a western dispersion. Spanish exiles, as well as conversos who wanted to end the duplicity of their existence as outward Christians, made their way in the fifteenth century to Italy, France, England, Germany, and the Low Countries. Insofar as some of these countries had previously expelled their Jews, the new arrivals set about gingerly, revealing very gradually their Jewish origins and customs in cities from Venice to London. Some of these settings proved more tolerant than others, especially those that had fallen under the arc of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, whose guiding motto of Sola Scriptura indicated a renewed appreciation for the Bible, the Hebrew language, and, in some cases, Jews themselves.

He advocated land reform, breaking up the big estates, ‘the ranches’ and studying Denmark’s, Holland’s, and Germany’s farming methods so as to promote agri-business, specifically, meat processing, cheese-making and dairying and a range of downstream activities, including agricultural machinery.

Christian preachers [...] were intransigent. They, they said, were answerable to a higher power than the mere law of the land. Their eye was upon heaven. As they reminded their flocks, it was not the law of some imperial bureaucrat that mattered. It was the law of God. Anything that saved a soul – even if it did so at the expense of law, order or even the body that that soul inhabited – was an acceptable act. To attack the houses, bodies and temples of those afflicted by the ‘pagan error’ was not to harm these sinners but to help them. This was not brutality. This was kindness, education, reformation.

In this way, Gregory sowed broadside seeds that, when they bloomed, brought about the end of Christendom and the Reformation. The Bishop of Trier saw the danger. He charged Gregory with  destroying the unity of the church. The Bishop of Verdun said the pope was mistaken in his unheard-of arrogance. Belief belongs to one’s church, the heart belongs to one’s country. The pope, he said, must not filch the heart’s allegiance. This was precisely what Gregory did. He wanted all; he left emperors and princes nothing. The papacy, as he fashioned it, by undermining patriotism, undermined the authority of secular rulers; they felt threatened by the Altar. At the Reformation, in England and elsewhere, rulers felt obliged to exclude Catholicism from their lands in order to feel secure.

But also in particular, by and attour the Confession of Faith, do abolish and condemn the Pope's authority and jurisdiction out of this land, and ordains the maintainers thereof to be punished, Act 2, Parl. 1; Act 51, Parl. 3; Act 106, Parl. 7; Act 114, Parl. 12, King James VI.: do condemn the Pope's erroneous doctrine, or any other erroneous doctrine repugnant to any of the articles of the true and Christian religion, publicly preached, and by law established in this realm; and ordains the spreaders and makers of books or libels, or letters or writs of that nature to be punished, Act 46, Parl. 3; Act 106, Parl. 7; Act 24, Parl. 11 King James VI.: do condemn all baptism conform to the Pope's kirk, and the idolatry of the mass; and ordains all sayers, willful hearers and concealers of the mass, the maintainers and resetters of the priests, Jesuits, trafficking Papists, to be punished without any exception or restriction, Act 5, Parl. 1; Act 120, Parl. 12; Act 164, Parl. 13; Act 193, Parl. 14; Act 1, Parl. 19; Act 5, Parl. 20, King James VI.: do condemn all erroneous books and writs containing erroneous doctrine against the religion presently professed, or containing superstitious rites and ceremonies Papistical, whereby the people are greatly abused, and ordains the home-bringers of them to be punished, Act 25, Parl. 11, King James VI.: do condemn the monuments and dregs of bygone idolatry, as going to crosses, observing the festival days of saints, and such other superstitious and Papistical rites, to the dishonor of God, contempt of true religion, and fostering of great error among the people; and ordains the users of them to be punished for the second fault, as idolaters, Act 104, Parl. 7, King James VI.

The designated occasion for clearing Babylonia’s financial slate was the New Year festival, celebrated in the spring. Babylonian rulers oversaw the ritual of “breaking the tablets,” that is, the debt records, restoring economic balance as part of the calendrical renewal of society along with the rest of nature. Hammurabi and his fellow rulers signaled these proclamations by raising a torch, probably symbolizing the sun-god of justice Shamash, whose principles were supposed to guide wise and fair rulers. Persons held as debt pledges were released to rejoin their families. Other debtors were restored cultivation rights to their customary lands, free of whatever mortgage liens had accumulated.15 Over the next several thousand years, this same list—canceling the debts, destroying the records, reallocating the land—was to become the standard list of demands of peasant revolutionaries everywhere. In Mesopotamia, rulers appear to have headed off the possibility of unrest by instituting such reforms themselves, as a grand gesture of cosmic renewal, a recreation of the social universe—in Babylonia, during the same ceremony in which the king reenacts his god Marduk’s creation of the physical universe. The history of debt and sin was wiped out, and it was time to begin again. But it’s also clear what they saw as the alternative: the world plunged into chaos, with farmers defecting to swell the ranks of nomadic pastoralists, and ultimately, if the breakdown continued, returning to overrun the cities and destroy everything.

The heroic efforts and successes of the Reformers on the Continent, in the presence of Papal bulls and inquisitions, were a trumpet call to independence to the people of this priest-cursed land; and many responded right nobly, ready to stand amid the faggots at the stake rather than bear the iron heel that bruised them.

The European intellectual renaissance preceded the translations from the Arabic. The latter were not the cause, but the effect of that renaissance. Like all historical events, it had economic aspects (lands newly under cultivation, new agricultural techniques) and social aspects (the rise of free cities). On the level of intellectual life, it can be understood as arising from a movement that began in the eleventh century, probably launched by the Gregorian reform of the Church.…That conflict bears witness to a reorientation of Christianity toward a transformation of the temporal world, up to that point more or less left to its own devices, with the Church taking refuge in an apocalyptical attitude that said since the world was about to end, there was little need to transform it. The Church’s effort to become an autonomous entity by drawing up a law that would be exclusive to it – Canon Law – prompted an intense need for intellectual tools. More refined concepts were called for than those available at the time. Hence the appeal to the logical works of Aristotle, who was translated from Greek to Latin, either through Arabic or directly from the Greek, and the Aristotelian heritage was recovered.

In 1857, in response to the massive numbers of forced migrant Muslim Tatars from the Crimea, the Ottoman Sublime Porte promulgated a Refugee Code (also translated from Ottoman Turkish into English in some texts as the Immigration Law). Responding to the grave need to provide shelter and food for its subjects, expelled initially from the Crimea but also from other border-land regions with Russia, the Ottoman government set out to swiftly disperse and integrate its forced migrants. It aimed to provide ‘immigrant’ families and groups with only a minimum amount of capital, with plots of state land to start life anew in agricultural activity. Families who applied for land in Rumeli (the European side of the Ottoman Empire) were granted exemptions from taxation and conscription obligations for a period of six years. If, however, they chose to continue their migration into Anatolia and Greater Syria then their exemptions extended for twelve years. In both cases the new immigrants had to agree to cultivate the land and not to sell or leave it for twenty years. Ottoman reformers were eager to see the largely depopulated Syrian provinces revived by these new migrants after several centuries of misadministration, war, famine, and several pandemics of the plague (Shaw and Shaw 1977: 115). The twenty-year clause also meant that these newcomers were released from the pressure of nineteenth-century property developers, as there was a kind of lien on the property, prohibiting its onward sale for twenty years.

In every room against the brown backdrop, there would be St George Crosses and Union Jacks. Even the crockery would be adorned with symbols of this so-called great land.

IN 1934, AN African American pastor from Georgia made the trip of a lifetime, sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, through the gates of Gibraltar, and across the Mediterranean Sea to the Holy Land. After this pilgrimage, he traveled to Berlin, attending an international conference of Baptist pastors. While in Germany, this man—who was named Michael King—became so impressed with what he learned about the reformer Martin Luther that he decided to do something dramatic. He offered the ultimate tribute to the man’s memory by changing his own name to Martin Luther King. His five-year-old son was also named Michael—and to the son’s dying day his closest relatives would still call him Mike—but not long after the boy’s father changed his own name, he decided to change his son’s name too, and Michael King Jr. became known to the world as Martin Luther King Jr.

democratization, industrialization, bureaucratization, and the emergence of modern capitalism—gave rise to the land-grant colleges.

admissions for those with esoteric academic preparation), (c) equality of the students (i.e., fair treatment and equal campus opportunities for “aggie” students), and (d) the diffusion of knowledge from higher education to the masses (i.e., the distribution of new knowledge and best practices from land-grant colleges and experiment stations via extension and outreach).35

Big Sister Shen tells me this used to be a sleepy fishing village. But with the economic reforms and the opening up of China, urbanization brought construction everywhere. To get more compensation when the government exercised its eminent domain powers, villagers raced to build tall towers on their land so as to maximize the square footage of the residential space. But before they could cash in, real estate prices had risen to the point where even the government could no longer afford to pay compensation. These hastily erected buildings remain like historical ruins, witnesses to history.