Massive Attack Quotes

SITTING TIGHT? Holing up? Waiting for answers? Those are things I'm not good at. Planning a massive attack against mechanical geeky-like things when i was already furious and itching to kill something? Piece o'cake

In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person's job was more likely to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure.

This situation was a heart attack waiting to happen. He just knew it. The stress of the job, now this. Yep, he was going to keel over. He could see the writing on his tombstone now: Sloane Brodie departed this world at age 37 due to massive coronary trauma as a result of idiot partner Dexter J. Daley. --Sloane

Everyone needs a superhero to champion them now and again, to rush to their aid when there's a fierce dragon approaching, a massive army attacking or a scary catacomb to navigate

Aiden smirked. "Wonder what this one is called?" The hellhound's ears twitched as the massive body lowered preparing for attack. I slid my hand to the middle of the blade, feeling my heart pound and the adrenaline kick my system into overdrive. In the pit of my stomach, the cord started to unravel. I swallowed. "Let's call this one... Toto." Three mouths opened in a growl that sent a cold chill down my spine, and a wave of hot, fetid breath smacked into us. Bile burned the back of my throat. "I guess it doesn't like the name," I said, moving slowly to the right. Aiden's powerful body tensed. "Here, Toto..." One head snapped in his direction. "That's a good Toto." I slipped around the ancient cross, creeping up on the hellhound from the right. The middle and left head focused on me, snapping and growlying. Aiden clucked his tongue. "Come on, Toto, I'm pretty tasty.

If it had been a heart attack, the newspaper might have used the word massive, as if a mountain range had opened inside her, but instead it used the word suddenly, a light coming on in an empty room. The telephone fell from my shoulder, a black parrot repeating something happened, something awful a sunday, dusky. If it had been terminal, we could have cradled her as she grew smaller, wiped her mouth, said good-bye. But it was sudden, how overnight we could be orphaned & the world became a bell we'd crawl inside & the ringing all we'd eat.

Several months ago there was a somewhat, in some people's eyes, relatively normal Cal--or by and large normal--the best he was able to be as half Auphe. Occasionally he did lose his shit, attacked and ate deer while on road trips through the woods, created massive holes in between dimensions to shove through malevolently murderous pucks, and once in a while ripped out an Auphe's throat with his teeth. He also opened a gate or two to save his friends, blew up an antihealer from the inside out to save the world, cleaned his guns while watching porn, and generally was a smart-ass to everyone. Normal.

What I remember most is that the laws of physics no longer seemed to apply. Gravity was backwards and the world was, I'm quite certain, moving in slow motion. His pull wasn't a pull; I was just falling upward, and he caught me. There really was no beginning or end to the kiss; it wasn't even really there- and because of that, it was tremendous. Our lips were just four sweet, shy people meeting, saying, "Hello, it's nice to meet you." But what passed between them was massive. Nuclear. And in an instant, every cobweb inside me was obliterated. My inner struggles, my uncertainty, my fear of tiger attack... gone. Just the feeling of being a newborn, a pure soul just waiting to be imprinted upon.

...This is the arena in which a spiritualized disobedience means most. It doesn't mean a second New Deal, another massive bureaucratic attack on our problems. It doesn't mean taking to the streets, throwing bricks through the window at the Bank of America, or driving a tractor through the local McDonald's. It means living differently. It means taking responsibility for the character of the human world. That's a real confrontation with the problem of value. In short, refusal of the present is a return to what Thoreau and Ruskin called "human fundamentals, valuable things," and it is a movement into the future. This movement into the future is also a powerful expression of that most human spiritual emotion, Hope. p.124

Finland’s crisis (Chapter 2) exploded with the Soviet Union’s massive attack upon Finland on November 30, 1939. In the resulting Winter War, Finland was virtually abandoned by all of its potential allies and sustained heavy losses, but nevertheless succeeded in preserving its independence against the Soviet Union, whose population outnumbered Finland’s by 40 to 1. I spent a summer in Finland 20 years later, hosted by veterans and widows and orphans of the Winter War. The war’s legacy was conspicuous selective change that made Finland an unprecedented mosaic, a mixture of contrasting elements: an affluent small liberal democracy, pursuing a foreign policy of doing everything possible to earn the trust of the impoverished giant reactionary Soviet dictatorship. That policy was considered shameful and denounced as “Finlandization” by many non-Finns who failed to understand the historical reasons for its adoption. One of the most intense moments of my summer in Finland unfolded when I ignorantly expressed similar views to a Winter War veteran, who replied by politely explaining to me the bitter lessons that Finns had learned from being denied help by other nations.

In discussion with Dr O I have learned that it blossoms from two things. The first is that this feeling of massive vulnerability and wretchedness still persists and I cannot stand it. I think this is peculiar to me because God has made me brilliant but He wishes to remind me of my mortality and therefore causes me to feel such a horrendous pain when I am attacked. It sickens me and leaves me wracked with agony.

The reason why Hitler gambled everything on a massive attack in 1940 was not because he was worried about making excessive demands on the German population, but simply because he thought that this was the only way that Germany could win the war.

Did you know that a mind full of malice and hate is able to actually attack another's body and mind? Thus preventing good from taking place (or at least delaying and disrupting the good)? It's true, and we can call it a "psi-attack" or simply an attack from negativism. The way to overcome these forms of attacks is through cultivating a true Positive Soul through the energy of Love. The Love Nature of your Soul is powerful enough to counteract such attacks, because that positive energy forms a blanket around you. Real life isn't much unlike the movies, aside from the fact that in real life, these things truly affect your life immensely, unlike sitting down in a cinema. The vampires of the world are those who can in fact launch massive psi-attacks on whoever they focus their negative energies onto, and for whatever reasons that may be.

Love, love is a verb Love is a doing word

Never argue with your critics if they attack you emotionally while working on your dream goal rather stay focused on it without taking their opinion personally because the best revenge is a massive success.

The investigation “did not support” the charges? The DOJ decided “not to file charges”? This phrasing massively misrepresents the content of the report on the shooting. It was not a question of evidence “not supporting” high-threshold civil rights charges; it was a question of evidence eviscerating virtually every aspect of the pro-Brown, anti-Wilson narrative. Under no imaginable standard of proof could Wilson be found guilty of civil rights violations—or, for that matter, murder. As the report states: “Multiple credible witnesses corroborate virtually every material aspect of Wilson’s account and are consistent with the physical evidence.” Those “material aspects” include Wilson’s testimony that Brown punched and grabbed him while Wilson was in his SUV, that Brown tried to seize his gun, and that Brown charged at Wilson after Wilson had exited his car.

And then it happened. This massive heart attack that brought the brilliant Julian Mantle back down to earth and reconnected him to his mortality. Right in the middle of courtroom number seven on a Monday morning, the same courtroom where we had won the Mother of All Murder Trials.

The sharks had, in fact, remained a constant presence throughout the men's ordeal, even during the daylight hours. Not long after [navy pilot] Gwinn showed up, a massive shark attack--involving an estimated thirty fish--had, in about fifteen minutes, taken some sixty boys perched on a floater net.

The split has widened because the right has moved right, not because the left has moved left. Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford all supported the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1960, the GOP platform embraced "free collective bargaining" between management and labor. REpublicans boasted of "extending the minimum wage to several million more workers" and "strengthening the unemployment insurance system and extension of its benefits." Under Dwight Eisenhower, top earners were taxed at 91 percent; in 2015, it was 40 percent. Planned Parenthood has come under serious attack from nearly all Republican presidential candidates running in 2016. Yet a founder of the organization was Peggy Goldwater, wife of the 1968 conservative Republican candidate for president Barry Goldwater. General Eisenhower called for massive invenstment in infrastructure, and now nearly all congressional Republicans see such a thing as frightening government overreach. Ronald Reagan raised the national debt and favored gun control, and now the Republican state legislature of Texas authorizes citizens to "open carry" loaded guns into churches and banks. Conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or liberal today.

Do you want to hold her?” Qhuinn asked. Xcor recoiled as if someone had inquired whether he’d like a hot poker in his hands. Then he recovered, shaking his head as he made a manly show of scrubbing his tears away like they were permanent marker on his cheeks. “I don’t think I’m quite ready for that. She looks…so delicate.” “She’s strong, though. She’s got her mahmen’s blood in her, too.” Qhuinn looked at Blay. “And she’s got good parents. They both do. We’re in this together, people, three fathers and one mom, two kids. Bam!” Xcor’s voice got low. “A father…?” He laughed softly. “I went from having no family, to having a mate, a brother, and now…” Qhuinn nodded. “A son and a daughter. As long as you are Layla’s hellren, you are their father, too.” Xcor’s smile was transformative, so wide that it stretched his face into something she had never seen. “A son and a daughter.” “That’s right,” Layla whispered with joy. But then instantly that expression on his face was gone, his lips thinning out and his brows dropping down like he was ready to go on the attack. “She is never dating. I don’t care who he is—” “Right!” Qhuinn put his palm out for a high five. “That’s what I’m talking about!” “Now, hold on,” Blay interjected as they clapped hands. “She has every right to live her life as she chooses.” “Yes, come on,” Layla added. “This double-standard stuff is ridiculous. She’s going to be allowed…” As the argument started up, she and Blay fell in beside each other, and Qhuinn and Xcor lined up shoulder to shoulder, their massive forearms crossed over their chests. “I’m good with a gun,” Xcor said like that was the end of things. “And I can handle the shovel,” Qhuinn tacked on. “They’ll never find the body.” The two of them pounded knuckles and looked so dead serious that Layla had to roll her eyes. But then she was smiling. “You know something?” she said to the three of them. “I really believe…that it’s all going to be okay. We’re going to work it out, together, because that’s what families do.” As she rose up on her tiptoes and kissed her male, she said, “Love has a way of fixing everything…even your daughter starting to date.” “Which is not going to happen,” Xcor countered. “Ever.” “My man,” Qhuinn said, backing him up. “I knew I liked you—” “Oh, for the love,” Layla muttered as the debate resumed, and Blay started laughing and Qhuinn and Xcor continued bonding. -Qhuinn, Xcor, Layla, & Blay

The worst terrorist attack in history by far was 9/11, and it claimed 3,000 lives; in most bad years, the United States suffers a few dozen terrorist deaths, a rounding error in the tally of homicides and accidents. (The annual toll is lower, for example, than the number of people killed by lightning, bee stings, or drowning in bathtubs.) Yet 9/11 led to the creation of a new federal department, massive surveillance of citizens and hardening of public facilities, and two wars which killed more than twice as many Americans as the number who died in 2001, together with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans.

This highlights the massive difference between criticism and cancel culture. Criticism attacks ideas, cancel culture punishes people. Criticism enriches discussion, cancel culture shuts down discussion. Criticism helps lift up the best ideas, cancel culture protects the ideas of the culturally powerful. Criticism is a staple of liberalism, cancel culture is the epitome of illiberalism

Thus, by 1888 it had become evident that a national cooperative movement could not succeed in America, at least not in the absence of sustained, massive and violent attack on the wage-system, far more massive and well-organized than the Knights’ movement had been. As Henry Sharpe said, what they were doing was not realistic. Small workshops with little capital and obsolete machinery in an age of rapid industrialization; insufficient institution-building to give financial and material support to co-ops; enslavement to the market at a time when competitors would stop at nothing to suppress working-class moves toward independence. Especially with the weak leadership of Terence Powderly and the mass desertion of former Knights after 1886, as they lost strike after strike, the great dream of building a national cooperative economy was effectively over.

Chapter Five: Elvi A few decades earlier and about two hundred thousand trillion kilometers from where she currently sat, a tiny node of active protomolecule in a biological matrix had entered the orbit of a planet called Ilus, hitchhiking on the gunship Rocinante. As the uncanny semisentient intelligence of the protomolecule tried to make contact with other nodes in the gate builders’ long-dead empire, it woke up mechanisms that had been dormant for millions—or even billions—of years. The end result had been an ancient factory returning to life, a massive robot attack, the melting of one artificial moon, and the detonation of a power plant that nearly cracked the planet in two. All in all, a really shitty experience. So when Elvi’s team took the catalyst out of isolation in unexplored systems to do a similar if slightly better-controlled reaching out to the artifacts and remains (..) Tiamat's Wrath

Left-leaning news media leaked classified national security secrets, destroying three major national security programs designed to protect Americans from terrorist attacks.8 Every day of the war, the New York Times and other left-leaning media provided front-page coverage of America’s body counts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and helped to fuel a massive “anti-war” movement, which attacked America’s fundamental purposes along with its conduct of the war. The goal of these campaigns was to indict America and its leaders as war criminals who posed a threat to the world.

Birmingham has proved that no matter what you're up against, if wave after wave of black people keep coming prepared to go to jail, sooner or later there is such confusion, such social dislocation, that white people in the South are faced with a choice: either integrated restaurants or no restaurants at all, integrated public facilities or none at all. And the South then must make its choice for integration, for it would rather have that than chaos. This struggle is only beginning in the North, but it will be a bitter struggle. It will be an attack on business, on trade unions, and on the government. The Negro will no longer tolerate a situation where for every white man unemployed there are two or three Negroes unemployed. In the North, Negroes present a growing threat to the social order that, less brutally and more subtly than the South, attempts to keep him "in his place." In response, moderates today warn of the danger of violence and "extremism" but do not attempt to change conditions that brutalize the Negro and breed racial conflict. What is needed is an ongoing massive assault on racist political power and institutions.

She moved back in with us three months after coming back. And every day, I waited for her to leave again. I knew she would. I knew it in the core of my soul. And the, one day, she did. But not the way I thought. She died. A massive heart attack at the age of forty-nine. And for the second time in my life, I'd been left by mu mother. But this time, it was for good. And it wasn't her fault, which was the hardest part of it to wrap my mind around. I couldn't hate her for leaving this time. But I could hate myself a little for failing to let her back in when I still had the chance.

Being unable to deal with the complexity of the world has seen us retreat into what Curtis calls a “static world”. Instead of looking to change the world for the better, we look either to change small things (our bodies, our own rights as an individual), or we fall back into the past. “This obsession with risk that politicians, terror experts and finance people have, it’s about going back into the past, looking for patterns – which computers now allow you to do – and adjusting everything to make sure things are stable. “When I was working with Massive Attack, I used an old Bauhaus song called Bela Lugosi’s Dead and [on the big screens] I constantly repeated the phrase, ‘If you like this, then you’ll love that.’ I think in a way that’s the motto of our time. We’ll give you tomorrow something very similar to what you had yesterday. And then the world will be stable. And that’s true in politics, finance and culture. “Look at the way culture plays it,” he continues. “I mean, look at me. Look at Edgar Wright: he makes movies constantly referencing things. We constantly play yesterday back to you in a slightly altered form, to try and make you feel stable and happy. And the world stays stuck and everyone gets ratty, which is why they all snark at each other on the internet.

The night before, Michael Chertoff, President Bush’s secretary of homeland security, had called to inform us of credible intelligence indicating that four Somali nationals were thought to be planning a terrorist attack at the inauguration ceremony. As a result, the already massive security force around the National Mall would be beefed up. The suspects—young men who were believed to be coming over the border from Canada—were still at large. There was no question that we’d go ahead with the next day’s events, but to be safe, we ran through various contingencies with Chertoff and his team, then assigned Axe to draft evacuation instructions that I’d give the crowd if an attack took place while I was onstage.

When Adolf Hitler heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he slapped his hands together in glee and exclaimed, “Now it is impossible to lose the war. We now have an ally, Japan, who has never been vanquished in three thousand years.” Germany and Japan were threatening the world with massive land armies. But Hitler and Hirohito had never taken the measure of the man in the White House. A former assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt had his own ideas about the shape and size of the military juggernaut he would wield. FDR’s military experts told him that only huge American ground forces could meet the threat. But Roosevelt turned aside their requests to conscript tens of millions of Americans to fight a traditional war. The Dutchman would have no part in the mass WWI-type carnage of American boys on European or Asian killing fields. Billy Mitchell was gone, but Roosevelt remembered his words. Now, as Japan and Germany invested in yesterday, FDR invested in tomorrow. He slashed his military planners’ dreams of a vast 35-million-man force by more than half. He shrunk the dollars available for battle in the first and second dimensions and put his money on the third. When the commander in chief called for the production of four thousand airplanes per month, his advisers wondered if he meant per year. After all, the U.S. had produced only eight hundred airplanes just two years earlier. FDR was quick to correct them. The

As Churchill predicted, the full might and fury of the Nazis were turned on Britain. The dreaded massive bombing of the Luftwaffe, which had terrorized other nations into surrender, failed to break the British. Hitler was stopped for the first time. Britain, though lacking the military forces to launch a major counter-attack, nevertheless stalled the Nazi timetable of conquest, thus buying time, not only for itself but also for an almost completely disarmed United States to begin preparing itself militarily for the ordeal ahead. Many nations, forces, and events contributed to the final victory over Germany and Japan. But what made it all possible was that Britain withstood the fire and blast of war and refused to surrender, even when the situation looked hopeless. It was indeed their finest hour. Freedom survives in the world today because of it.

NBC’s Bob Costas—when he is not out praising Vladimir Putin at the Olympics—is railing against the dangerous gun culture of America, perpetuated by (cue low piano keys) the villainous NRA. When it was pointed out to Costas by Greg Gutfeld that he was protected by armed security, Costas blanched. Costas responded, “In truth, Greg was accurate if you consider 180 degrees from the truth accurate. I have never had a personal bodyguard a single day in my life. There are security people at NFL games that the NFL employs, and there is always massive security at an Olympics, and there…is NBC security.” But Gutfeld never said that Costas had hired a personal bodyguard. Just pointing out that Costas was benefiting from the gun culture he was simultaneously attacking. He doesn’t have to be armed, because the companies he works for have the power and money to make other carry arms for him.

Looking at a situation like the Israel-Palestine conflict, Americans are likely to react with puzzlement when they see ever more violent and provocative acts that target innocent civilians. We are tempted to ask: do the terrorists not realize that they will enrage the Israelis, and drive them to new acts of repression? The answer of course is that they know this very well, and this is exactly what they want. From our normal point of view, this seems incomprehensible. If we are doing something wrong, we do not want to invite the police to come in and try and stop us, especially if repression will result in the deaths or imprisonment of many of our followers. In a terrorist war, however, repression is often valuable because it escalates the growing war, and forces people to choose between the government and the terrorists. The terror/repression cycle makes it virtually impossible for anyone to remain a moderate. By increasing polarization within a society, terrorism makes the continuation of the existing order impossible. Once again, let us take the suicide bombing example. After each new incident, Israeli authorities tightened restrictions on Palestinian communities, arrested new suspects, and undertook retaliatory strikes. As the crisis escalated, they occupied or reoccupied Palestinian cities, destroying Palestinian infrastructure. The result, naturally, was massive Palestinian hostility and anger, which made further attacks more likely in the future. The violence made it more difficult for moderate leaders on both sides to negotiate. In the long term, the continuing confrontation makes it more likely that ever more extreme leaders will be chosen on each side, pledged not to negotiate with the enemy. The process of polarization is all the more probably when terrorists deliberately choose targets that they know will cause outrage and revulsion, such as attacks on cherished national symbols, on civilians, and even children. We can also think of this in individual terms. Imagine an ordinary Palestinian Arab who has little interest in politics and who disapproves of terrorist violence. However, after a suicide bombing, he finds that he is subject to all kinds of official repression, as the police and army hold him for long periods at security checkpoints, search his home for weapons, and perhaps arrest or interrogate him as a possible suspect. That process has the effect of making him see himself in more nationalistic (or Islamic) terms, stirs his hostility to the Israeli regime, and gives him a new sympathy for the militant or terrorist cause. The Israeli response to terrorism is also valuable for the terrorists in global publicity terms, since the international media attack Israel for its repression of civilians. Hamas military commander Salah Sh’hadeh, quoted earlier, was killed in an Israeli raid on Gaza in 2002, an act which by any normal standards of warfare would represent a major Israeli victory. In this case though, the killing provoked ferocious criticism of Israel by the U.S. and western Europe, and made Israel’s diplomatic situation much more difficult. In short, a terrorist attack itself may or may not attract widespread publicity, but the official response to it very likely will. In saying this, I am not suggesting that governments should not respond to terrorism, or that retaliation is in any sense morally comparable to the original attacks. Many historical examples show that terrorism can be uprooted and defeated, and military action is often an essential part of the official response. But terrorism operates on a logic quite different from that of most conventional politics and law enforcement, and concepts like defeat and victory must be understood quite differently from in a regular war.

During the war in the Persian Gulf, massive bombing attacks became "efforts." Thousands of "weapons systems" or "force packages" "visited a site." These "weapons systems" "hit" "hard" and "soft targets." During their "visits," these "weapons systems" "degraded," "neutralized," "attrited," "suppressed," "eliminated," "cleansed," "sanitized," "impacted," "decapitated" or "took out" targets. A "healthy day of bombing" was achieved when more enemy "assets" were destroyed than expected. If the "weapons systems" didn't achieve "effective results" during their first "visit," a "damage assessment study" determined whether the "weapons systems" would "revisit the site." Women, children or other civilians killed or wounded during these "visits," and any schools, hospitals, museums, houses or other "non-military" targets that were blown up, were "collateral damage," which is the undesired damage or casualties produced by the effects from "incontinent ordnance" or "accidental delivery of ordnance equipment.

In 2009 the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence published a report of its members’, reserve soldiers’ and other soldiers’ preparation for Operation Cast Lead, when the attack on the dummy city was replaced by an assault on the real Gaza. The gist of the testimonies was that the soldiers had orders to attack Gaza as if they were attacking a massive enemy stronghold: this became clear from the firepower employed, the absence of any orders or procedures about acting properly within a civilian environment, and the synchronized effort from land, sea and air. Among the worst practices they rehearsed were the senseless demolition of houses, the spraying of civilians with phosphorus shells, the killing of innocent civilians by light weaponry and obeying orders from their commanders generally to act with no moral compass. ‘You feel like an infantile child with a magnifying glass that torments ants, you burn them,’ one soldier testified.4 In short, they practised the total destruction of the real city as they trained in the mock city

As soon as the hijackers’ names had been publicly released, Acxiom had searched its massive data banks, which take up five acres in tiny Conway, Arkansas. And it had found some very interesting data on the perpetrators of the attacks. In fact, it turned out, Acxiom knew more about eleven of the nineteen hijackers than the entire U.S. government did—including their past and current addresses and the names of their housemates. We may never know what was in the files Acxiom gave the government (though one of the executives told a reporter that Acxiom’s information had led to deportations and indictments). But here’s what Acxiom knows about 96 percent of American households and half a billion people worldwide: the names of their family members, their current and past addresses, how often they pay their credit card bills whether they own a dog or a cat (and what breed it is), whether they are right-handed or left-handed, what kinds of medication they use (based on pharmacy records) … the list of data points is about 1,500 items long.

From every direction, the place is under assault—and unlike in the past, the adversary is not concentrated in a single force, such as the Bureau of Reclamation, but takes the form of separate outfits conducting smaller attacks that are, in many ways, far more insidious. From directly above, the air-tour industry has succeeded in scuttling all efforts to dial it back, most recently through the intervention of Arizona’s senators, John Kyl and John McCain, and is continuing to destroy one of the canyon’s greatest treasures, which is its silence. From the east has come a dramatic increase in uranium-mining claims, while the once remote and untrammeled country of the North Rim now suffers from an ever-growing influx of recreational ATVs. On the South Rim, an Italian real estate company recently secured approval for a massive development whose water demands are all but guaranteed to compromise many of the canyon’s springs, along with the oases that they nourish. Worst of all, the Navajo tribe is currently planning to cooperate in constructing a monstrous tramway to the bottom of the canyon, complete with a restaurant and a resort, at the confluence of the Little Colorado and the Colorado, the very spot where John Wesley Powell made his famous journal entry in the summer of 1869 about venturing “down the Great Unknown.” As vexing as all these things are, what Litton finds even more disheartening is the country’s failure to rally to the canyon’s defense—or for that matter, to the defense of its other imperiled natural wonders. The movement that he and David Brower helped build is not only in retreat but finds itself the target of bottomless contempt. On talk radio and cable TV, environmentalists are derided as “wackos” and “extremists.” The country has swung decisively toward something smaller and more selfish than what it once was, and in addition to ushering in a disdain for the notion that wilderness might have a value that extends beyond the metrics of economics or business, much of the nation ignorantly embraces the benefits of engineering and technology while simultaneously rejecting basic science.

The Middengard Wyrm had arrived at last. Precisely according to Bryce’s plan. She’d been dripping blood for it all this way, leaving a trail, constantly scraping off her scabs to reopen her wounds—ones she’d intentionally inflicted on herself by “falling” into the stream. If the Wyrm relied on scent to hunt, then she’d left a veritable neon sign leading right to them. She hadn’t known when or how it would attack, but she’d been waiting. And she was ready. Bryce fell back as not only shadows, but blue light flared from Azriel—right alongside the ripple of silver flame from Nesta. Back-to-back, they faced the massive creature with razor-sharp focus. Ataraxia gleamed in Nesta’s hand. Truth-Teller pulsed with darkness in Azriel’s. Now or never. Her legs tensed, readying to sprint. Nesta’s eyes slid to Bryce’s for a heartbeat. As if understanding at last: Bryce’s “unhealing” hand. The blood she’d wiped on the walls. Her musing about the linked river system in these caves, sussing out what they knew regarding the terrain and the Wyrm. To unleash this thing—on them. “I’m sorry,” Bryce said to her. And ran.

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat was invited to spend more time in the White House than any other foreign leader—thirteen invitations.303 Clinton was dead set on helping the Israelis and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace. He pushed the Israelis to grant ever-greater concessions until the Israelis were willing to grant the Palestinians up to 98 percent of all the territory they requested. And what was the Palestinian response? They walked away from the bargaining table and launched the wave of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks known as the Second Intifada. And what of Osama bin Laden? Even while America was granting concessions to Palestinians—and thereby theoretically easing the conditions that provided much of the pretext for Muslim terror—bin Laden was bombing U.S. embassies in Africa, almost sank the USS Cole in Yemen, and was well into the planning stages of the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001. After President George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, bringing American troops into direct ground combat with jihadists half a world away, many Americans quickly forgot the recent past and blamed American acts of self-defense for “inflaming” jihad. One of those Americans was Barack Obama. Soon after his election, Obama traveled to Cairo, Egypt, where he delivered a now-infamous speech that signaled America’s massive policy shifts. The United States pulled entirely out of Iraq despite the pleas of “all the major Iraqi parties.”304 In Egypt, the United States actually backed the Muslim Brotherhood government, going so far as agreeing to give it advanced F-16 fighters and M1 Abrams main battle tanks, even as the Muslim Brotherhood government was violating its peace treaty with Israel and persecuting Egypt’s ancient Coptic Christian community. The Obama administration continued supporting the Brotherhood, even when it stood aside and allowed jihadists to storm the American embassy, raising the black flag of jihad over an American diplomatic facility. In Libya, the United States persuaded its allies to come to the aid of a motley group of rebels, including jihadists. Then many of these same jihadists promptly turned their anger on the United States, attacking our diplomatic compound in Benghazi the afternoon and evening of September 11, 2012—killing the American ambassador and three more brave Americans. Compounding this disaster, the administration had steadfastly refused to reinforce the American security presence in spite of a deteriorating security situation, afraid that it would anger the local population. This naïve and foolish administration decision cost American lives.

#14: SNAP OUT OF IT! One of the primary reasons for our unhappiness and discomfort is our attack thoughts. All day long, without even realizing it, we’re attacking ourselves and others. Attacks don’t have to be massive to inflict real damage—each small attack, from a negative thought about ourselves to a cold comment toward another person, adds up. Attack breeds attack. Attacking others in our mind or in our actions directly harms us. Our attack thoughts and actions are particularly dangerous because they can be so subtle and insidious that we might not realize how much they’ve taken over our minds. But as fiendish as they are, they’re surprisingly easy to let go of. All it takes is an ordinary rubber band. One day—today—wear a rubber band on your wrist. Whenever you notice an attack thought arise, flick your rubber band against your arm. Does this seem jarring? Good! It’s exactly what you need to literally snap yourself out of your unconscious attack thoughts. Once you’ve snapped out of the attack cycle, it’s time to clean up your thoughts. Use this exercise based on lesson 23 of A Course in Miracles: “I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts.” The moment you snap the rubber band, witness your attack thought and say to yourself: I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts about________. You can fill in the blank with whatever you’re attacking, whether it’s broad or very specific. Practice this exercise throughout the day. Notice your attack thought, snap out of it with your rubber band, and then use the Course message as a reminder that you can think your way out in an instant. Miracle

He has no friends that I know of, and his few neighbours consider him a bit of a weirdo, but I like to think of him as my friend as he will sometimes leave buckets of compost outside my house, as a gift for my garden. The oldest tree on my property is a lemon, a sprawling mass of twigs with a heavy bow. The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death. One can picture it in animal species, those million salmon mating and spawning before dropping dead, or the billions of herrings that turn the seawater white with their sperm and eggs and cover the coasts of the northeast Pacific for hundreds of miles. But trees are very different organisms, and such displays of overripening feel out of character for a plant and more akin to our own species, with its uncontrolled, devastating growth. I asked him how long my own citrus had to live. He told me that there was no way to know, at least not without cutting it down and looking inside its trunk. But, really, who would want to do that?

Before she could think of what to say, he grasped the axe and turned toward her, his face a mass of angles in the lanternlight. "Step back." This was a man who expected to be heeded. He did not wait to see if she followed his direction before he lifted the axe high above his head. She pressed herself into the corner of the dark room as he attacked the furniture with a vengeance, her surprise making her unable to resist watching him. He was built beautifully. Like a glorious Roman statue, all strong, lean muscles outlined by the crisp linen of his shirtsleeves when he lifted the tool overhead, his hands sliding purposefully along the haft, fingers grasping tightly as he brought the steel blade down into the age-old oak with a mighty thwack, sending a splinter of oak flying across the kitchen, landing atop the long-unused stove. He splayed one long-fingered hand flat on the table, gripping the axe once more to work the blade out of the wood. He turned his head as he stood back, making sure she was out of the way of any potential projectiles- a movement she could not help but find comforting- before confronting the furniture and taking his next swing with a mighty heave. The blade sliced into the oak, but the table held. He shook his head and yanked the axe out once more, this time aiming for one of the remaining table legs. Thwack! Penelope's eyes went wide as the lanternlight caught the way his wool trousers wrapped tightly around his massive thighs. She should not notice... should not be paying attention to such obvious... maleness. But she'd never seen legs like his. Thwack! Never imagined they could be so... compelling. Thwack! Could not help it. Thwack!

When Surkov finds out about the Night Wolves he is delighted. The country needs new patriotic stars, the great Kremlin reality show is open for auditions, and the Night Wolves are just the type that’s needed, helping the Kremlin rewrite the narrative of protesters from political injustice and corruption to one of Holy Russia versus Foreign Devils, deflecting the conversation from the economic slide and how the rate of bribes that bureaucrats demand has shot up from 15 percent to 50 percent of any deal. They will receive Kremlin support for their annual bike show and rock concert in Crimea, the one-time jewel in the Tsarist Empire that ended up as part of Ukraine during Soviet times, and where the Night Wolves use their massive shows to call for retaking the peninsula from Ukraine and restoring the lands of Greater Russia; posing with the President in photo ops in which he wears Ray-Bans and leathers and rides a three-wheel Harley (he can’t quite handle a two-wheeler); playing mega-concerts to 250,000 cheering fans celebrating the victory at Stalingrad in World War II and the eternal Holy War Russia is destined to fight against the West, with Cirque du Soleil–like trapeze acts, Spielberg-scale battle reenactments, religious icons, and holy ecstasies—in the middle of which come speeches from Stalin, read aloud to the 250,000 and announcing the holiness of the Soviet warrior—after which come more dancing girls and then the Night Wolves’ anthem, “Slavic Skies”: We are being attacked by the yoke of the infidels: But the sky of the Slavs boils in our veins . . . Russian speech rings like chain-mail in the ears of the foreigners, And the white host rises from the coppice to the stars.

ANOTHER GALAXY, ANOTHER TIME. The Old Republic was the Republic of legend, greater than distance or time. No need to note where it was or whence it came, only to know that … it was the Republic. Once, under the wise rule of the Senate and the protection of the Jedi Knights, the Republic throve and grew. But as often happens when wealth and power pass beyond the admirable and attain the awesome, then appear those evil ones who have greed to match. So it was with the Republic at its height. Like the greatest of trees, able to withstand any external attack, the Republic rotted from within though the danger was not visible from outside. Aided and abetted by restless, power-hungry individuals within the government, and the massive organs of commerce, the ambitious Senator Palpatine caused himself to be elected President of the Republic. He promised to reunite the disaffected among the people and to restore the remembered glory of the Republic. Once secure in office he declared himself Emperor, shutting himself away from the populace. Soon he was controlled by the very assistants and boot-lickers he had appointed to high office, and the cries of the people for justice did not reach his ears. Having exterminated through treachery and deception the Jedi Knights, guardians of justice in the galaxy, the Imperial governors and bureaucrats prepared to institute a reign of terror among the disheartened worlds of the galaxy. Many used the Imperial forces and the name of the increasingly isolated Emperor to further their own personal ambitions. But a small number of systems rebelled at these new outrages. Declaring themselves opposed to the New Order they began the great battle to restore the Old Republic. From the beginning they were vastly outnumbered by the systems held in thrall by the Emperor. In those first dark days it seemed certain the bright flame of resistance would be extinguished before it could cast the light of new truth across a galaxy of oppressed and beaten peoples … From the First Saga Journal of the Whills

You're a Parselmouth. Why didn't you tell us?" "I'm a what?" said Harry. "A Parselmouth!" said Ron. "You can talk to snakes!" "I know," said Harry. "I mean, that's only the second time I've ever done it. I accidentally set a boa constrictor on my cousin Dudley at the zoo once- long story- but it was telling me it had never seen Brazil and I sort of set it free without meaning to- that was before I knew I was a wizard-" "A boa constrictor told you it had never seen Brazil?" Ron repeated faintly. "So?" said Harry. "I bet loads of people here can do it." "Oh, no they can't," said Ron. "It's not a very common gift. Harry, this is bad." "What's bad?" said Harry, starting to feel quite angry. "What's wrong with everyone? Listen, if I hadn't told that snake not to attack Justin-" "Oh, that's what you said to it?" "What d'you mean? You were there- you heard me-" "I heard you speaking Parseltongue," said Ron. "Snake language. You could have been saying anything- no wonder Justin panicked, you sounded like you were egging the snake on or something- it was creepy, you know-" Harry gaped at him. "I spoke a different language? But- I didn't realize- how can I speak a language without knowing I can speak it?" Ron shook his head. Both he and Hermione were looking as though someone had died. Harry couldn't see what was so terrible. "D'you want to tell me what's wrong with stopping a massive snake biting off Justin's head?" he said. "What does it matter how I did it as long as Justin doesn't have to join the Headless Hunt?" "It matters," said Hermione, speaking at last in a hushed voice, "because being able to talk to snakes was what Salazar Slytherin was famous for. That's why the symbol of Slytherin House is a serpent." Harry's mouth fell open. "Exactly," said Ron. "And now the whole school's going to think you're his great-great-great-great-grandson or something..." "But I'm not," said Harry, with a panic he couldn't quite explain. "You'll find that hard to prove," said Hermione. "He lived about a thousand years ago; for all we know, you could be.

Over the course of two years, from June 2004 to June 2006, two separate deaths did nothing to ease my overall anxiety. Steve’s beloved Staffordshire bull terrier Sui died of cancer in June 2004. He had set up his swag and slept beside her all night, talking to her, recalling old times in the bush catching crocodiles, and comforting her. Losing Sui brought up memories of losing Chilli a decade and a half earlier. “I am not getting another dog,” Steve said. “It is just too painful.” Wes, the most loyal friend anyone could have, was there for Steve while Sui passed from this life to the next. Wes shared in Steve’s grief. They had known Sui longer than Steve and I had been together. Two years after Sui’s death, in June 2006, we lost Harriet. At 175, Harriet was the oldest living creature on earth. She had met Charles Darwin and sailed on the Beagle. She was our link to the past at the zoo, and beyond that, our link to the great scientist himself. She was a living museum and an icon of our zoo. The kids and I were headed to Fraser Island, along the southern coast of Queensland, with Joy, Steve’s sister, and her husband, Frank, our zoo manager, when I heard the news. An ultrasound had confirmed that Harriet had suffered a massive heart attack. Steve called me. “I think you’d better come home.” “I should talk to the kids about this,” I said. Bindi was horrified. “How long is Harriet going to live?” she asked. “Maybe hours, maybe days, but not long.” “I don’t want to see Harriet die,” she said resolutely. She wanted to remember her as the healthy, happy tortoise with whom she’d grown up. From the time Bindi was a tiny baby, she would enter Harriet’s enclosure, put her arms around the tortoise’s massive shell, and rest her face against her carapace, which was always warm from the sun. Harriet’s favorite food was hibiscus flowers, and Bindi would collect them by the dozen to feed her dear friend. I was worried about Steve but told him that Bindi couldn’t bear to see Harriet dying. “It’s okay,” he said. “Wes is here with me.” Once again, it fell to Wes to share his best mate’s grief.

Hellooo.” The ferry captain shot a thumb at her Jeep. “Gonna get it off ?” “Oh.” She laughed. “Sorry.” Releasing Nicole, she ran back onto the ferry and slid behind the wheel. By the time she revved the engine, Nicole was in the passenger’s seat, sliding a hand over the timeworn dashboard. “I am paying you for this.” Charlotte shot her a startled look and inched forward. “For this car? You are not.” “You wouldn’t have bought it if it weren’t for my book, and you won’t take money for that.” “Because it’s your book. I’m just along for the ride.” She laughed at her own words. “Can you believe, this is the first car I’ve ever owned?” She eased it onto the dock. “Is it real or what?” “Totally real,” Nicole said, though momentarily wary. “Safe on the highway?” “It got me here.” Charlotte waved at the captain. “Thank you!” Still crawling along, she drove carefully off the pier. When she was on firm ground, she stopped, angled sideways in the seat, and addressed the first of the ghosts. “I’m sorry about your dad, Nicki. I wanted to be there. I just couldn’t.” Seeming suddenly older, Nicole smiled sadly. “You were probably better off. There were people all over the place. I didn’t have time to think.” “A heart attack?” “Massive.” “No history of heart problems?” “None.” “That’s scary. How’s Angie?” Nicole’s mother. Charlotte had phoned her, too, and though Angie had said all the right words—Yes, a tragedy, he loved you, too, you’re a darling to call—she had sounded distracted. “Bad,” Nicole confirmed. “They were so in love. And he loved Quinnipeague. His parents bought the house when he was little. He actually proposed to Mom here. They always said that if I’d been a boy, they’d have named me Quinn. She can’t bear to come now. That’s why she’s selling. She can’t even come to pack up. This place was so him.” “Woo-hoo,” came a holler that instantly lifted the mood. “Look who’s here!” A stocky woman, whose apron covered a T-shirt and shorts, was trotting down the stairs from the lower deck of the Chowder House. Dorey Jewett had taken over from her father midway through Charlotte’s summers here and had brought the place up to par with the best of city restaurants. She had the gleaming skin of one who worked over steam, but the creases by her eyes, as much from smiling as from squinting over the harbor, suggested she was nearing sixty. “Missy here

sustain that unity of purpose and meet the challenges now confronting us. We need to design a balanced strategy for the long haul, to attack terrorists and prevent their ranks from swelling while at the same time protecting our country against future attacks.We have been forced to think about the way our government is organized. The massive departments and agencies

Osama bin Laden wanted to coax just the right response out of the United States by creating a situation in which the United States could not ignore him. His goal was to cross a threshold that Americans would deem intolerable (something bin Laden had failed to do with his previous attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa or the USS Cole in Yemen), causing a massive attack to be launched on the Islamic world that used the most advanced and sophisticated methods available. Bin Laden was confident that if the U.S. plunged into the Islamic world, he would get the uprising he wanted. He had studied the Afghan war against the Soviets carefully. He felt he knew how to survive the initial American attack and, over time, defeat the Americans. But first, he needed the Americans to attack.

Horror Harvest Pakistan pays a heavy price for nurturing terror. Can it destroy the killing machine now? asks Sajjad Khan. Sajjad Khan | 1472 words Relatives mourn at the funeral of Mohammed Ali Khan,15,one of the students killed in the Peshawar school attack; Courtesy: ReutersPeshawar. Terror. The rhyme is as much a cruel coincidence as it is tragic. The capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, one of South Asia's oldest cities and an ancient centre of learning, has suffered massively at the hands of terrorists since Pakistan got embroiled in the Afghan jihad nearly 35 years ago. But even for a city so used to the blood of its innocents being spilled, the horror of December 16 was incomparable: at least 132 students and nine staff members of the Army Public School and College (APSC) mowed down in cold blood by Taliban attackers on what should have been just another day at school.

this false conceptualization has been achieved by using an old socialist trick to obscure the massive environmental improvement that industrial capitalism brought. The trick is to criticize something by comparison to a nonexistent and impossible utopia. Socialists used this technique to criticize capitalism for causing poverty, even though capitalism inherited poverty—and cured it. Yet Marxists would attack capitalism’s incredible contribution to human life, including to the life of laborers, by comparing that contribution, not to its predecessors and not to any known alternatives, but to a fictional socialist utopia whose advertised results contradicted everything known (even then) about socialism’s destructive nature.

Another reason that this question hasn’t demanded an answer is that most people understandably consider it to be far less relevant than “How can nuclear terrorism be prevented?” Speculating on responses to a nuclear attack is a bit like contemplating the day after any number of disasters that involve an unprecedented scale of devastation. Does the national security community focus on the US government’s potential response to an asteroid striking the planet or the aftermath of a war between China and the United States? It does not, because these types of scenarios fall into the realm of the surreal or at a minimum envision a situation in which there is such massive social disruption and such a severe

During the winter of 1939-40, the Soviet Union attacked Finland and met with stiff resistance. Yet Finland was no match for the massive attacking troops of the enemy. They eventually ceded some territory - the second largest city Vyborg and a few islands in the Gulf of Finland. The war ended in March 1940.

The prospect of one day being hauled out of the canal by yet another old enemy was hard for France to swallow, even more so when British and French defence specialists discussed their exit strategy in case of an overwhelming Soviet attack, and the Brits proposed a massive evacuation via Dunkirk.

Stuxnet spurred the Iranians to create their own cyber war unit, which took off at still greater levels of funding a year and a half later, in the spring of 2012, when, in a follow-up attack, the NSA’s Flame virus—the massive, multipurpose malware from which Olympic Games had derived—wiped out nearly every hard drive at Iran’s oil ministry and at the Iranian National Oil Company. Four months after that, Iran fired back with its own Shamoon virus, wiping out 30,000 hard drives (basically, every hard drive in every workstation) at Saudi Aramco, the joint U.S.-Saudi Arabian oil company, and planting, on every one of its computer monitors, the image of a burning American flag. Keith

We'll never know. In the summer of 1971, against the advice of his mother, Howard Myers took a vacation to Florida. The combination of the heat and his medical condition combined to give him a massive heart attack which killed him. He was forty-one years old. There

While Diana and her mother started planning guest lists, wardrobe requirements and the other details for the wedding of the year, the media vainly attempted to discover her hiding-place. The one man who did know was the Prince of Wales. As the days passed, Diana pined for her Prince and yet he never telephoned. She excused his silence as due to the pressure of his royal duties. Finally she called him only to find that he was not in his apartment at Buckingham Palace. It was only after she called him that he telephoned her. Soothed by that solitary telephone call, Diana’s ruffled pride was momentarily mollified when she returned to Coleherne Court. There was a knock on the door and a member of the Prince’s staff appeared with a large bouquet of flowers. However there was no note from her future husband and she concluded sadly that it was simply a tactful gesture by his office. These concerns were forgotten a few days later when Diana rose at dawn and travelled to the Lambourn home of Nick Gaselee, Charles’s trainer, to watch him ride his horse, Allibar. As she and his detective observed the Prince put the horse through its paces on the gallops Diana was seized by another premonition of disaster. She said that Allibar was going to have a heart attack and die. Within seconds of her uttering those words, 11-year-old Allibar reared its head back and collapsed to the ground with a massive coronary. Diana leapt out of the Land Rover and raced to Charles’s side. There was nothing anyone could do. The couple stayed with the horse until a vet officially certified its death and then, to avoid waiting photographers, Diana left the Gaselees in the back of the Land Rover with a coat over her head. It was a miserable moment but there was little time to reflect on the tragedy. The inexorable demands of royal duty took Prince Charles on to wales, leaving Diana to sympathize with his loss by telephone. Soon they would be together forever, the subterfuge and deceit ended. It was nearly time to let the world into their secret. The night before the engagement announcement, which took place on February 24, 1981, she packed a bag, hugged her loyal friends and left Coleherne Court forever. She had an armed Scotland Yard bodyguard for company, Chief Inspector Paul Officer, a philosophical policeman who is fascinated by runes, mysticism and the after-world. As she prepared to say goodbye to her private life, he told her: “I just want you to know that this is the last night of freedom in your life so make the most of it.” Those words stopped her in her tracks. “They felt like a sword through my heart.

Scott squeaked approval, stayed her, and went to his car. Maggie sensed something was wrong by the change in his gait. She desperately wanted to follow, but Scott had stayed her. She obeyed, but whimpered anxiously when he crawled under the car. Maggie saw him tense, and the frantic way he scrambled to his feet, and heard the strain in his voice when he spoke to the woman. Then the woman shouted, and Scott ran to the street. His smell reached her, and was ripe with the thorny scents of danger and fear. Maggie trembled and quivered. Scott’s fear poured into her. Danger. Threat. Maggie broke from her stay, and ran to him. His thundering heart filled her with fury. Protect Scott. Defend. Scott pulled her close, but his closeness did not comfort her. His fear screamed they were in danger. She bunched and coiled, and tried to pull free to find the threat, but Scott held her close. Her huge ears swiveled and tipped, seeking their enemy. She sniffed frantically, searching the air, but found only Scott’s fear. His fear was enough. Scott was hers. Maggie growled, low and deep in her massive chest, a primal warning to whatever might hear. This pack was hers. The fur on her back and shoulders bristled like wire, and her nails raked the asphalt like claws. A danger she couldn’t see or smell or hear was coming, but a fire passed down from a hundred thousand past generations prepared her. Maggie knew what she needed to know. Hunt. Attack. Pull the threat down with her fangs, and destroy it. Maggie didn’t need to know anything else. Nothing else mattered.

Taylor spent a week at Point Isabel building the earthworks he should have finished a month before, then, on May 7, started back to relieve the fort. His West Pointers begged him not to take the massive train, which could be brought up later in complete safety, but he had no patience with textbook soldiers.… Well, what did he have? A sound principle: attack. A less valuable one which was to serve him just as well in this war: never retreat. Total ignorance of the art of war. And an instinct, if not for command, at least for leadership. He had been hardened in years of petty frontier duty, he had no nerves and nothing recognizable as intelligence, he was afraid of nothing, and he was too unimaginative to know when he was being licked, which was fortunate since he did not know how to maneuver troops. Add to this a dislike of military forms and procedures and a taste for old clothes and you have a predestinate candidate for the Presidency. The army and even some of the West Pointers worshiped him.

On a hot July morning in 1946, seven Irgun members disguised as Arab porters smuggled milk crates filled with 250 kilos of explosives into the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The hotel housed the Mandate’s headquarters. It was the very symbol of British rule in Palestine, the target Begin wished most to attack. At 12:37 p.m. a tremendous explosion shook West Jerusalem. The southwest wing of the King David Hotel bulged outward, and then all six floors collapsed. An Englishman relaxing in the bar’s hotel recalled: “There was the most appalling roar . . . Everything went completely black and there was the noise of smashing glass and wrenching furniture and through the blackness one could feel the atmosphere was full of smoke and dust . . . from above came the most terrifying sound I have ever heard: the sound of falling masonry, and we could only assume we were about to be crushed.”10 The massive blast killed ninety-one people, including British, Arabs, and Jews. The British government was outraged by the attack, but it had the effect that the Irgun had hoped it would: the British began to reevaluate their position in Palestine.

example to view the destroyed parts of the city with his own eyes. As far as “retribution” was concerned, the Führer intended to resume massive air attacks on London after Christmas. He was more optimistic, however, about the potential effect of Germany’s new flying bombs and missiles, which would first be deployed in February and March 1944. After a certain time, he vowed, life in London would “no longer be possible.”141 But the German V-1 and V-2 rockets would take several months longer than that to be deployable, and when they were ready, they would not have anywhere near the destructive power the Nazi leadership had hoped.

doom. The fading sunlight only accentuates it. Up ahead, a tall chain-link fence surrounds the factory. A security guard clears us and motions us forward to the main building. It’s absolutely massive. It reminds me of a giant warehouse, a thousand feet wide and seemingly with no end. Workers bustle about, focused on building the new ship’s modules. I look up at the high ceiling above us. “The building provides cover?” “Yeah. There are several decoys nearby. Basically, empty buildings, but identical. We even send people to each one every day to complete the charade, just in case they attack.

military aggression is defined as a crime against humanity, and international courts, when they are brought to bear, usually demand that aggressors pay compensation. Germany had to pay massive reparations after World War I, and Iraq is still paying Kuwait for Saddam Hussein’s invasion in 1990. Yet the Third World debt, the debt of countries like Madagascar, Bolivia, and the Philippines, seems to work precisely the other way around. Third World debtor nations are almost exclusively countries that have at one time been attacked and conquered by European countries—often, the very countries to whom they now owe money.

Do you want to hold her?” Qhuinn asked. Xcor recoiled as if someone had inquired whether he’d like a hot poker in his hands. Then he recovered, shaking his head as he made a manly show of scrubbing his tears away like they were permanent marker on his cheeks. “I don’t think I’m quite ready for that. She looks…so delicate.” “She’s strong, though. She’s got her mahmen’s blood in her, too.” Qhuinn looked at Blay. “And she’s got good parents. They both do. We’re in this together, people, three fathers and one mom, two kids. Bam!” Xcor’s voice got low. “A father…?” He laughed softly. “I went from having no family, to having a mate, a brother, and now…” Qhuinn nodded. “A son and a daughter. As long as you are Layla’s hellren, you are their father, too.” Xcor’s smile was transformative, so wide that it stretched his face into something she had never seen. “A son and a daughter.” “That’s right,” Layla whispered with joy. But then instantly that expression on his face was gone, his lips thinning out and his brows dropping down like he was ready to go on the attack. “She is never dating. I don’t care who he is—” “Right!” Qhuinn put his palm out for a high five. “That’s what I’m talking about!” “Now, hold on,” Blay interjected as they clapped hands. “She has every right to live her life as she chooses.” “Yes, come on,” Layla added. “This double-standard stuff is ridiculous. She’s going to be allowed…” As the argument started up, she and Blay fell in beside each other, and Qhuinn and Xcor lined up shoulder to shoulder, their massive forearms crossed over their chests. “I’m good with a gun,” Xcor said like that was the end of things. “And I can handle the shovel,” Qhuinn tacked on. “They’ll never find the body.” The two of them pounded knuckles and looked so dead serious that Layla had to roll her eyes. But then she was smiling. “You know something?” she said to the three of them. “I really believe…that it’s all going to be okay. We’re going to work it out, together, because that’s what families do.” As she rose up on her tiptoes and kissed her male, she said, “Love has a way of fixing everything…even your daughter starting to date.” “Which is not going to happen,” Xcor countered. “Ever.” “My man,” Qhuinn said, backing him up. “I knew I liked you—” “Oh, for the love,” Layla muttered.

Without even being aware that he was abandoning his original strategy, Grant developed a new plan for simultaneous massive attacks on the Confederate heartland by all the Union armies.

For Europe, as for other civilized lands, infections by familiar epidemic disease surely became more frequent, at least in the major ports and at other foci of communication; but infections that returned at more and more frequent intervals became, by necessity, childhood diseases. Older persons would have acquired suitably high and repeatedly reinforced levels of immunity through prior exposures. Thus by a paradox that is only apparent, the more diseased a community, the less destructive its epidemics become. Even very high rates of infant mortality were relatively easily borne. The costs of giving birth and rearing another child to replace one that had died were slight compared to the losses involved in massive adult mortality of the sort that epidemics attacking a population at infrequent intervals inevitably produce. Consequently, the tighter the communications net binding each part of Europe to the rest of the world, the smaller became the likelihood of really devastating disease encounter. Only genetic mutation of a disease-causing organism, or a new transfer of parasites from some other host to human beings offered the possibility of devastating epidemic when world transport and communications had attained a sufficient intimacy to assure frequent circulation of all established human diseases among the civilized populations of the world. Between 1500 and about 1700 this is what seems in fact to have occurred. Devastating epidemics of the sort that had raged so dramatically in Europe's cities between 1346 and the mid-seventeenth century tapered off toward the status of childhood diseases, or else, as in the case of both plague and malaria, notably reduced the geographic range of their incidence. The result of such systematic lightening of the microparasitic drain upon European populations (especially in northwestern Europe where both plague and malaria had about disappeared by the close of the seventeenth century) was, of course, to unleash the possibility of systematic growth. This was, however, only a possibility, since any substantial local growth quickly brought on new problems: in particular, problems of food supply, water supply, and intensification of other infections in cities that had outgrown older systems of waste disposal. After 1600 these factors began to affect European populations significantly, and their effective solution did not come before the eighteenth century - or later. All the same, the changing pattern of epidemic infection was and remains a fundamental landmark in human ecology that deserves more attention than it has ordinarily received. On the time scale of world history, indeed we should view the 'domestication' of epidemic disease that occurred between 1300 and 1700 as a fundamental breakthrough, directly resulting from the two great transportation revolutions of that age - one by land, initiated by the Mongols, and one by sea, initiated by Europeans.

It’s amazing how often this happens: an altruistic statesman does his civic duty by advising voters of the sinister forces seeking to attack them, and completely by accident the voters become convinced that this statesman is the right man to keep them safe and vote for him in massive numbers.

He lost the popular vote due to massive voter fraud. He agreed with Infowars’ Alex Jones that Hillary Clinton might have taken some form of drugs to enhance her debate performance and demanded, “I think we should take a drug test prior to the debate. I do.”24 Trump attacked his primary opponent Senator Ted Cruz by linking his father to the JFK assassination. He has said that a pillow was found on the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia’s face and he might have been murdered. He’s sided with the anti-vaccine conspiracy nuts. Most famously, he laid the groundwork for his campaign for the Republican nomination by promising he could prove President Barack Obama was born in Africa. He’s claimed President Obama wore a ring with an Arabic inscription. He’s said global warming is a “hoax,” that windmills cause cancer.

He then pointed to the right, and I turned to look. Exactly on cue, something massive came around the corner: a snaking, vehicular army that included a phalanx of police cars and motorcycles, a number of black SUVs, two armored limousines with American flags mounted on their hoods, a hazmat mitigation truck, a counterassault team riding with machine guns visible, an ambulance, a signals truck equipped to detect incoming projectiles, several passenger vans, and another group of police escorts. The presidential motorcade. It was at least twenty vehicles long, moving in orchestrated formation, car after car after car, before finally the whole fleet rolled to a quiet halt, and the limos stopped directly in front of Barack’s parked plane. I turned to Cornelius. “Is there a clown car?” I said. “Seriously, this is what he’s going to travel with now?” He smiled. “Every day for his entire presidency, yes,” he said. “It’s going to look like this all the time.” I took in the spectacle: thousands and thousands of pounds of metal, a squad of commandos, bulletproof everything. I had yet to grasp that Barack’s protection was still only half-visible. I didn’t know that he’d also, at all times, have a nearby helicopter ready to evacuate him, that sharpshooters would position themselves on rooftops along the routes he traveled, that a personal physician would always be with him in case of a medical problem, or that the vehicle he rode in contained a store of blood of the appropriate type in case he ever needed a transfusion. In a matter of weeks, just ahead of Barack’s inauguration, the presidential limo would be upgraded to a newer model—aptly named the Beast—a seven-ton tank disguised as a luxury vehicle, tricked out with hidden tear-gas cannons, rupture-proof tires, and a sealed ventilation system meant to get him through a biological or chemical attack.

Love is a verb.

First, local guides were engaged, and all three—Frank Carson, Les Hibble, and Sam Thompson—warned that the planned ramble was far riskier than the Northern men realized, even before the campers reached the massive Everglades. The region between Fort Myers and the ’Glades was prowled by panthers and bears. The panthers lurked in the brush and made sounds like babies crying. If you were fooled and went to look, you would be attacked.

However, in order for the State to raise the price of this or any other services, some degree of public support is needed. Thus, the State will tend to provoke or allow crime or the threat of foreign aggression to increase, so that it may cite these security threats when expanding its own budget for defense. Take, for example, the destruction of the twin World Trade Center towers. Subsequent to the terror attacks on 9/11, the Department of Defense budget was massively increased, federal agents took over the role of providing airport security, and the Department of Homeland Security was born.

Spiders are by no means the only creatures that need to fear the parasitic wasps’ coercive tactics. And drugs are not the wasps’ only weapons for gaining the compliance of their victims. Ampulex compressa, better known as the jewel wasp because of its iridescent blue-green sheen, performs neurosurgery to achieve its aims. Its quarry is the annoyingly familiar American cockroach (Periplaneta americana). Not to be confused with the comparatively diminutive German roach common up north, this species prefers warmer climes and can grow as big as a mouse. Though dwarfed in stature by its prey, a female jewel wasp that has caught the scent of an American roach will aggressively pursue and attack it—even if that means following the fleeing insect into a house. The roach puts up a mighty struggle, flailing its legs and tucking in its head to fend off the attack, but usually to no avail. With lightning speed, the wasp stings the roach’s midsection, injecting an agent that will temporarily paralyze it so that the behemoth will stay still for the delicate procedure to follow. Like an evil doctor wielding a syringe, she again inserts her stinger, this time into the roach’s brain, and gingerly moves it around for half a minute or so until she finds exactly the right spot, whereupon she injects a venom. Shortly thereafter, the paralytic agent delivered by the first sting wears off. In spite of having full use of its limbs and the same ability to sense its surroundings as any normal roach, it’s strangely submissive. The venom, according to Frederic Libersat, a neuroethologist at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, has turned the roach into a “zombie” that will henceforth take its orders from the wasp and willingly tolerate her abuse. Indeed, the roach doesn’t protest in the least when she twists off part of one of its antennae with her powerful mandible and proceeds to suck the liquid oozing from it like soda from a straw. The wasp then does the same thing to its other antenna and, assured that the roach will go nowhere, leaves it alone for about twenty minutes as she searches for a burrow where she’ll lay an egg to be nourished by the roach. Meanwhile, her brainwashed slave busies itself grooming—picking fungal spores, tiny worms, and other parasites off itself—providing a sterile surface for the wasp to glue its egg. When the wasp returns, she seizes the roach by the stump of one of its antennae and “walks it like a dog on a leash to her burrow,” said Libersat. Thanks to its cooperation, she doesn’t have to waste energy dragging the massive roach. Equally important, he said, she doesn’t “need to paralyze all the respiratory system, so the thing will stay alive and fresh. Her larvae need to feed five or six days on this fresh meat, which you don’t want to rot.” The

Nick saunters into the gym and my heart basically stops. He’s ridiculously cute in his PE shorts and dark green T-shirt; and people that good-looking seem vulnerable, almost like they can’t be real. He’s real, though. He’s all dark skin and dark hair and dark eyes. Okay. His eyebrows, like Devyn’s nose, are a little big and if you stare at him long enough you realize that his lips are a bit lopsided. I have kissed his lips. I have felt his breath in my ear and I know without a doubt that he’s real, even if he is a werewolf. The massive muscles in his legs redefine themselves as he walks toward me. He waves a late pass at the coach and yells, “Sorry I’m late. I’ve got a pass.” “Not a problem, buddy,” Coach yells back. He and Nick are all jock bonding. Nick pockets the note, which is probably a fake. I can smell his deodorant even though he’s still far away. There are these things called pheromones, odors that guys give off to attract women. I swear his pheromones have my freaking name written on them. They hone in and attack. “You are getting all swoony faced,” Issie tells me with her singsong voice. She pokes me in the ribs with her elbow, gently. She turns to Devyn, who is smiling like a crazy man, just hanging back in his wheelchair watching the scene. “Dev. Look at Zara. She’s got her lovey-dovey look on.” As Is gazes at Devyn with her own lovey-dovey look, he says, “Yeah. Teen love. So obvious. So hormonal.” “I am not hormonal.” I fake glare at him.

The sad reality is that every forty-three seconds someone has a heart attack; and every minute and twenty-three seconds someone in America dies from a massive heart attack.

The Marines were fearful of “banzai” attacks at night, a tactic frequently used by the Japanese that simply attempted to overwhelm Allied positions with massive numbers of men, so they were alert at all hours. To help prevent such attacks, the American navy would shell the island throughout the night in an effort to actually brighten the night sky and prevent Japanese soldiers from sneaking up on the American lines.

When the gods had defeated the Giants, Ge, whose anger was all the greater, had intercourse with Tartaros and gave birth to Typhon in Cilicia. He was part man and part beast, and in both size and strength he surpassed all other children of Ge. Down to his thighs he was human in form, but of such immense size that he rose higher than all the mountains and often even scraped the stars with his head. With arms outstretched, he could reach the west on one side and the east on the other; and from his arms there sprang a hundred dragons' heads. Below his thighs, he had massive coils of vipers, which, when they were fully extended, reached right up to his head and emitted violent hisses. He had wings all over his body, and filthy hair springing from his head and cheeks floated around him in the wind, and fire flashed from his eyes. Such was Typhon's appearance and such his size when he launched an attack on heaven itself, hurling flaming rocks at it, hissing and screaming all at once, and gushing mighty streams of fire from his mouth. Seeing him rush against heaven, the gods took flight to Egypt, and when they were pursued by him, transformed themselves into animals. While Typhon was still at a distance, Zeus pelted him with thunderbolts, but as the monster drew close, Zeus struck him with an adamantine sickle, and then chased after him when he fled, until they arrived at Mount Casion, which rises over Syria. And there, seeing that Typhon was severely wounded, he engaged him in hand-to-hand combat.

On December 16, 1940, “Operation Abigail Rachel” became the first deliberate, indiscriminate, bombing raid on Germany. Mannheim and nearby Ludwigshafen were bombed constantly from that time on until the end of the war. The massive amounts of bombs, dropped over Mannheim in the shortest interval possible, became known as “bomber streaming.” Despite the lack of any proven success, indiscriminate bombing was soon approved for similar raids throughout Germany. From that time on, the British no longer conducted attacks on just military targets but began “carpet bombing” entire cities, without regard to the civilian population in residential areas. Civilians became targeted every bit as much as the industrial centers and the incessant bombings became a total devastation of humanity. The largest raid on Mannheim was conducted on September 5th and 6th, 1943, during which a major part of the central city was completely destroyed. In 1944 an air raid attack destroyed the historical Mannheim Palace, leaving only one room out of over 500 rooms undamaged. During World War II, the people of Mannheim became the victims of over 150 air raids.

And in a more general context, after World War I, many air force leaders had come to see civilians as legitimate targets, often advocating far more massive and deadly attacks than those that actually took place on Spanish soil.

What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made? Investing in Cobra back in the early ’90s. My $ 1.8 million investment earned me $ 40 million after the company was bought by Acushnet. I rolled that money back into my business. The decision was a no-brainer for three reasons: My investment got me 12 percent of Cobra and the allocation of my investment was put to R& D. During this era, Callaway was the first to go to market with an oversize driver but neglected to follow up on oversize irons. We/ Cobra decided to attack this virgin market immediately by producing oversize irons for men and women, and we catered for the senior player, which had been left neglected. This decision was a solid rocket booster for Cobra’s massive growth in the marketplace. I was to remain an endorsed player representing Cobra for years to come, receiving an annual payment that would quickly recoup my initial investment. So, my ROI was always guaranteed, leaving me with 12 percent of a company that had hyper growth. I was the #1 player in the world during these halcyon times—a global player. So, fortunately for us, I was a needle-mover in regards to exposure in a sport that was booming in the ’80s, hence product promotion and awareness.

At the same time that we see a massive deployment of wireless radiation, we see the most violent attacks on modern society.

In the end, the fundamental idea that objectivity doesn’t exist, and that science is little more than a metanarrative of the dominant culture, whose elite use it to hang on to power, was perhaps postmodernism’s most corrosive contribution—one that informed and enabled a much more massive attack on science by religious ideologues and powerful industrial interests in the years to come.

General Foch was unwilling to commit troops in the numbers required to retake the lost ground. He had talked to his British counterpart of massive reinforcements but had ordered his subordinate, Putz, to carry out the attacks without anything approaching the strength required, in either infantry or artillery. Thus none of the French counterattacks had the slightest chance of success.

First digital-only full-length album release. In 1999, four years before the launch of iTunes, the quirky rock band They Might Be Giants released Long Tall Weekend via the music-download service eMusic. Though it was later released on CD, at the time, downloading the album was the only way to get it. The first album released in digital and CD formats simultaneously was Mezzanine by the electronic music act Massive Attack.

First digital-only full-length album release. In 1999, four years before the launch of iTunes, the quirky rock band They Might Be Giants released Long Tall Weekend via the music-download service eMusic. While a handful of promotional copies were pressed on CD for the music press, downloading the album was the only way to get it—a first. The first album released in digital and on CD simultaneously was Mezzanine by the electronic music act Massive Attack in April 1998.

Then, UltimateSword5 told me a story of Skeleton Steve approaching him on his lonely, little island where he'd spent months barely surviving on mushroom soup in the middle of a vast, underground lake. He told me about a valiant and devoted skeleton swordsman, Skonathan, who'd been following me around. I remembered Ulti mentioning the name before. As he finished his food, he told me about when I found him trapped deep underground near the Sleeping City, a place that I'd apparently built back when I was a monstrous thing called 'the Skeleton King' before I transformed into what I was today. I'd convinced him to escape the depths together. Ulti told me about dodging malfunctioning iron golems in the streets of the huge, silent city, and searching its storage building for wood. We really needed wood to make pick axes in order to get back to the surface. The lack of wood down at the bottom of the world was crippling. Then, he told me about him, Skonathan, and me all running around in terrifying darkness, trapping Glitch mobs with cobblestone because we had no other way to fight them. The Glitch mobs were very scary creatures that attacked everything they saw. They couldn't be killed except by overwhelming damage; enough to drop them in a single blow. Whenever the Glitch mobs were injured, they replicated, and became one injured, one not. Ulti told me about a Glitch creeper almost blowing us all up. It blew one of Skonathan's arms clean off! He also told me about a crazy battle in the streets of the Sleeping City where we pitted the Glitch against the golems, then barely contained a massive Glitch outbreak. Then, we found a way out of the city through a tunnel that Ulti had remembered from back when he and his Minecraftian friends had found the Sleeping City the first time. Ulti told me about us journeying through long tunnels,

As if he were a whoopie cushion, Bruce let out the loudest, nastiest fart Kate had ever heard. The massive cloud of green gas was so intense that when it floated over the creeper it made the mob so sick it forgot to explode. The creeper tried to run, but its nose had been attacked so fiercely that it wobbled all over the place, and eventually lunged off to the side where it finally exploded. Kate grabbed Bruce, and she and Jack jumped out of the blast zone.  “Whoa, good Kitty fart attack,

The War of Attrition began in March 1969, with an ever-spiraling cycle of violence. Egyptian guns would shell Israeli positions. Israel would respond with commando raids on the Egyptian side of the canal, blowing up enemy forts and capturing equipment. When this failed to stop the artillery attacks, Israel responded by using their planes as flying artillery. These attacks caused considerable damage to the Egyptian artillery forts, as well as the cities on the Egyptian side of the canal. A massive flight of civilians from the Egyptian Canal Zone ensued.

November 29, 1994 | by Don Terry | Reuters CHICAGO—Jeffrey L. Dahmer, whose gruesome exploits of murder, necrophilia and dismemberment shocked the world in 1991, was attacked and killed on Monday in a Wisconsin prison, where he was serving 15 consecutive life terms. Mr. Dahmer was 34, older than any of his victims, who ranged in age from 14 to 33. He died of massive head injuries, suffered sometime between 7:50 and 8:10 A.M., when he was found in a pool of blood in a toilet area next to the prison’s gym, said Michael Sullivan, secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. He was pronounced dead shortly after 9 A.M.

Cousin Mike, the person most people believe put Richard on the path he traveled, died of a massive heart attack in April of 1995. He was overweight and still haunted by the ghosts of things he’d done in Vietnam, regularly using heroin. The Army gave Mike a hero’s burial with a twenty-one-gun salute.

You are my angel Come from way above To bring me love

Strong people. Strong people are much more defenseless than the weak. During a hurricane, the flexible reed bends and rustles, and the pine just breaks and dies forever – the Chinese say, and the Chinese know what they say. Strong people are not responsible for themselves. And not even for their loved ones. They are responsible for the whole world that fell into their orbit. Because the force attracts to itself – so physicists say, and they also know what they are saying. Strong people are not at all healthier or stronger than everyone else. They just know for sure that they have no right to faint and die while someone is still dependent on them. During a massive heart attack, they are able to jump into the water, swim to a drowning child, pull him ashore, make sure that he is no longer in danger, and only then turn off. This is what doctors say – and doctors have seen much more miracles in their lifetime than physicists and Chinese combined. Strong people are also very lonely. And not at all because they do not tolerate anyone next to them. It’s just … They’re strong, aren’t they? It never occurs to anyone that they too are hurt, scared, lonely, just sad. Strong, silent people walk the earth. With them it is not always easy, not always pleasant, not always comfortable – but reliable. This is the very cavalry that always comes to the rescue at the last moment. Take care of strong people!

In retrospect, if our training had been geared to account for Body Alarm Reaction, we would have probably received less physical damage from our attackers. As your mind recognizes a potential threat to your well being, your body will start to react to this stress in a number of ways. One of the first reactions to potential physical harm is the secretion of large amounts of the hormone adrenaline into the bloodstream. Adrenaline is one many hormones that are “dumped” into the body during Body Alarm Reaction.9 Their functions are intended to be biologically protective. Unfortunately, the changes they produce can actually inhibit our ability to physically defend ourselves. The intent of the body’s automatic “call to arms’ is to provide the increases in strength and energy to either fight or run away from the threat. This is sometimes referred to as the “Fight-or-Flight” syndrome. It is a product of our evolution to develop mechanisms that allowed us to survive various physical threats. As the body continues down the path of automatic response the effects of the massive hormone “dump” will manifest itself in several different reactions. There will be an increase in both blood pressure and the heart rate.10 This is designed to increase the blood flow to the brain and the muscles, which will be placed under increased activity levels if you either defend yourself or run away. As blood flow increase to the brain and muscular system, they are the most important to survival at this particular moment, there is a decrease of blood flow to the digestive system, kidneys, liver, and skin. There will be an increase in the respiration rate to assimilate additional oxygen into the system. The increase of blood flow to the brain will induce a higher state of mental alertness and sensory perception. This is with the intent to aid our ability to mentally assess the situation at hand and to decrease our reaction time. It can have some negative effects like tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, and an impaired sense of time. There will be an increase in the level of extra energy in our blood with the higher amounts of cholesterol, fats, and blood sugar. In case we might be injured, our body also raises the level of platelets and blood clotting factors to help prevent hemorrhage. One other reaction, one that has serious implications for the martial artist, is that there will be a general increase in muscular tension. This aspect of Body Alarm Reaction alone has limiting effects on several martial skills. One in particular that we should recognize is that muscular tension equates to reduction of speed. So realistically, if we are in Body Alarm Reaction we can expect to be slower than when we are in a normal relaxed state. We can expect to have reduced ability to defend ourselves due to these automatic responses that are intended to provide assistance, but in actuality can greatly hinder that ability.11

When piloting a ship—any ship—there was a point where Alex’s sense of his body reached out to subtly include the whole vessel. Coming to know how that individual ship felt as she maneuvered—how the thrust gravity cut out as that particular drive shut down, how long the flip took at the midpoint of a run—all of it made a deep kind of intimacy. It wasn’t rational, but it changed how Alex felt about himself. His sense of who he was. When he’d gone from the massive, stately heft of the colony-ship-turned-ice-hauler Canterbury to the fast-attack frigate that had become the Rocinante, it had been like turning twenty years younger.

Wood Body Types Wood type people are generally tall and have a slender body. They are broad shouldered and often have a darkish face and skin tone. Wood types usually are fairly well muscled, but not in a massive way. They commonly have strong bones and are physically stronger than they might appear. A common characteristic is that they have an extremely straight back and rarely walk “hunched.”4 One association that I have made that simplifies Wood body types is thinking of them as basketball players. When you watch a NBA game on television notice the physical characteristics of the players. They are generally tall, lanky, well muscled (but not massive), and they walk very upright. This is a quick mental tool to utilize when thinking about Wood body types. Just think of a basketball player. Energetically, a Wood type has an abundance of energy in their Wood associated meridians, which are the Liver and Gall Bladder. This means that they will be extremely strong in those meridians. Once during a seminar, in a field test, I struck a Wood type on GB-31 to observe the effect. There was slight response, but nothing akin to the standard response common in the majority of people. I have found them to be sensitive in the Metal meridians, which are responsible for controlling the Wood meridians.5 Fire Body Types Fire type people generally have a reddish face, a small pointed head or pointed chin, and they usually have either curly hair or are balding. Another interesting common trait is that they often have small hands. They will generally walk fast and appear to be very energetic.6 I have often observed that they are quick to anger and when angry they flush red in their upper chest and face. That is indicative of the excessive Fire energy that is in their body. They are a little harder to classify with a group like basketball players for association. Many Fire types often have a “beer gut” and are often extremely focused on material wealth. Fire types are extremely sensitive to almost any form of pressure point techniques. I have observed several Fire types being knocked completely out during demonstrations by only slight strikes to points. From an energetic standpoint they are at a great disadvantage and according to the Chinese they often die at a young age.7

Today’s rebel groups rely on guerrilla warfare and organized terror: a sniper firing from a rooftop; a homemade bomb delivered in a package, detonated in a truck, or concealed on the side of a road. Groups are more likely to try to assassinate opposition leaders, journalists, or police recruits than government soldiers. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, masterminded the use of suicide bombings to kill anyone cooperating with the Shia-controlled government during Iraq’s civil war. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, perfected the use of massive car bombs to attack the same government. Hamas’s main tactic against Israel has been to target average Israeli citizens going about their daily business. Most Americans cannot imagine another civil war in their country. They assume our democracy is too resilient, too robust to devolve into conflict. Or they assume that our country is too wealthy and advanced to turn on itself. Or they assume that any rebellion would quickly be stamped out by our powerful government, giving the rebels no chance. They see the Whitmer kidnapping plot, or even the storming of the U.S. Capitol, as isolated incidents: the frustrated acts of a small group of violent extremists. But this is because they don’t know how civil wars start.

The gelding had a broad back, making for a comfortable ride. Yedan rode at a canter. Ahead, the hills thickened with scrub, and beyond was a forest of white trees, branches like twisted bones, leaves so dark as to be almost black. Just before them and running the length of the wooded fringe rose dolmens of grey granite, their edges grooved and faces pitted with cup-shaped, ground-out depressions. Each stone was massive, twice the height of a grown man, and crowding the foot of each one that he could see were skulls. He slowed his mount, reined in a half-dozen paces from the nearest standing stone. Sat motionless, flies buzzing round the horse’s flickering ears, and studied those grisly offerings. Cold judgement was never short of pilgrims. Alas, true justice had no reason to respect secrets, as those close-fisted pilgrims had clearly discovered. A final and fatal revelation. Minute popping sounds in the air announced the approach of dread power, as the buzzing flies ignited in mid-flight, black bodies bursting like acorns in a fire. The horse shied slightly, muscles growing taut beneath Yedan, and then snorted in sudden fear. ‘Hold,’ Yedan murmured, his voice calming the beast. Those of the royal line among the Shake possessed ancient knowledge, memories thick as blood. Tales of ancient foes, sworn enemies of the uncertain Shore. More perhaps than most, the Shake rulers understood that a thing could be both one and the other, or indeed neither. Sides possessed undersides and even those terms were suspect. Language itself stuttered in the face of such complexities, such rampant subtleties of nature. In this place, however, the blended flavours of compassion were anathema to the powers that ruled. Yet the lone figure that strode out from the forest was so unexpected that Yedan Derryg grunted as if he had been punched in the chest. ‘This realm is not yours,’ he said, fighting to control his horse. ‘This land is consecrated for adjudication,’ the Forkrul Assail said. ‘I am named Repose. Give me your name, seeker, that I may know you—’ ‘Before delivering judgement upon me?’ The tall, ungainly creature, naked and weaponless, cocked his head. ‘You are not alone. You and your followers have brought discord to this land. Do not delay me—you cannot evade what hides within you. I shall be your truth.’ ‘I am Yedan Derryg.’ The Forkrul Assail frowned. ‘This yields me no ingress—why is that? How is it you block me, mortal?’ ‘I will give you that answer,’ Yedan replied, slipping down from the horse. He drew his sword. Repose stared at him. ‘Your defiance is useless.’ Yedan advanced on him. ‘Is it? But, how can you know for certain? My name yields you no purchase upon my soul. Why is that?’ ‘Explain this, mortal.’ ‘My name is meaningless. It is my title that holds my truth. My title, and my blood.’ The Forkrul Assail shifted his stance, lifting his hands. ‘One way or another, I will know you, mortal.’ ‘Yes, you will.’ Repose attacked, his hands a blur. But those deadly weapons cut empty air, as Yedan was suddenly behind the Forkrul Assail, sword chopping into the back of the creature’s elongated legs, the iron edge cutting between each leg’s two hinged knees, severing the buried tendons—Repose toppled forward, arms flailing. Yedan chopped down a second time, cutting off the Assail’s left arm. Blue, thin blood sprayed on to the ground. ‘I am Shake,’ Yedan said, raising his sword once more. ‘I am the Watch.’ The sudden hiss from Repose was shortlived, as Yedan’s sword took off the top of the Forkrul Assail’s head.

Another lesson from these examples: attacking markets that have weak, unpopular incumbents is infinitely easier than chasing strong, popular occupants. Customers do not easily part with products that do the job for them. They have enough on their plate already. You need massive, not marginal differentiation, or they will simply filter you out as noise.

From a martial perspective, this point is generally difficult to hit, but situations when you move to the back of your opponent open the possibility of knee strikes aimed in the coccyx bone. These types of strikes are extremely effective in dropping an opponent. Hard knee strikes to this region not only shock the energy core of the body, but also shocks the entire nervous system with the connection of the coccyx bone to the spine. Besides immediately dropping an opponent, as they can no longer continue the fight from the energetic blast up their spinal column, it can cause the bowels and the bladder to empty. As stated numerous times, it is unwise to allow your opponent to gain position on your back. There are just too many devastating strikes that can be landed with little recourse. Your martial arts training needs to account for this. So, if you are training a lot of spinning type moves, or moves that put you into a position that would compromise you position by presenting your back, then you should seriously reconsider those techniques or methods. CV-4 A properly thrown strike into this Vital Point will cause your opponent to fold forward into a Yin body posture, which will allow easy access to several follow-up points. An easy way to remember this vital point is to think of striking an opponent just below the belt line, but not their genitals. Boxers some time refer to this area as the “bread basket.” It is located about three inches below the navel on the centerline of the body. CV-4 is the alarm point for the Small Intestine Meridian and an intersection point of the Spleen, Kidney, and Liver Meridians. Strikes to this point should be at a downward 45-degree angle, if possible, and can break the pubic bone causing great pain in the opponent. Downward aimed punches and hard driving straight kicks to this region can be effective in a combative situation. Striking this point can be conducted very deceptively, as the majority of opponents will not be expecting a strike aimed to a low region of the body. It is instinctive for a male to protect the genitals from attack, usually by twisting the hips to the side or narrowing the legs. CV-4 can still be accessible even if they twist their hips to avoid a genital strike. Once struck with adequate force, the body folds forward and exposes numerous points on the neck and back for additional attacks. A strike to this Vital Point attacks the energy center of the body and has a massive draining effect on an opponent. Defensively, protecting your centerline can not be expressed strongly enough.

A mixed group of workers on the land that was shared with the Wirrayaraay and nearby Europeans surprised the Aborigines with a violent attack. This led to the death of at least twenty-eight Wirrayaraay people of all ages and genders, even young children. Since Gipps had enacted laws that stated the Aborigines were British subjects, the offenders were put on trial, just as if they had killed European settlers. Despite the massive controversy, they were sentenced to be publicly hanged, which occurred at the end of 1838.