New Millennium Quotes

In the 1950s kids lost their innocence. They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term ---the generation gap. In the 1960s, kids lost their authority. It was a decade of protest---church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it. In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of me-ism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self. Self-image, Self-esteem, Self-assertion....It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference. In the 1980s, kids lost their hope. Stripped of innocence, authority and love and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future. In the 1990s kids lost their power to reason. Less and less were they taught the very basics of language, truth, and logic and they grew up with the irrationality of a postmodern world. In the new millennium, kids woke up and found out that somewhere in the midst of all this change, they had lost their imagination. Violence and perversion entertained them till none could talk of killing innocents since none was innocent anymore.

There is no greater power than that of a laugh and happiness is a force which can save a person from the horrors of the world.

I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond! I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial! I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail. But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!

Gold is the money of kings, silver is the money of gentlemen, barter is the money of peasants – but debt is the money of slaves.

It's like a fairy tale. . . on crack!

Except fang. I glared at him. "Go on, try to stop me, I dare you." It was like the old days when we used to wrestle, each trying to get the better of the other. I was ready to take him down, my hands curled into fist. "I was just going to say be careful," Fang told me. He stepped closer and brushed some hair out of my eyes. "And I've got your back." He motioned with his head toward the torpedo chamber. Oh my God. It hit me like a tsunami then, how perfect he was for me, how no one else would ever, could ever, be so perfect for me, how he was everything I could possibly hope for, as a friend, boyfriend, maybe even more. He was it for me. There would be no more looking. I really, really loved him, with a whole new kind of love I'd never felt before, something that made every other kind of love I'd ever felt feel washed out and wimpy in comparison. I loved him with every cell in my body, every thought in my head, every feather in my wings, every breathe in my lungs. and air sacs. Too bad I was going out to face almost certain death. Right there in front of everyone, I threw my arms around his neck and smashed my mouth against his. He was startled for a second, then his strong arms wrapped around me so tightly I could hardly breathe. "ZOMG," I heard Nudge whisper, but still fang and I kissed slanting our heads this way and that to get closer. I could have stood there and kissed him happily for the next millennium, but Angel, or what was left of her was still out there in the could dark ocean. Reluctantly, I ended the kiss, took a step back. Fang's obsidian eyes were glittering brightly and his stoic face had a look of wonder on it."Gotta go," I said quietly. A half smile quirked his mouth. "Yeah. Hurry back." I nodded and he stepped out of the air lock chamber, keeping his eyes fixed on me, memorizing me as he hit the switch that sealed the chamber. The doors hissed shut with a kind of finality, and I realized that my heart was beating so hard it felt like it was going to start snapping ribs. I was scared. I was crazily, deeply, incredibly, joyously, terrifyingly in love. I was on a death mission. Before my head simply exploded from so much emotion, I hit the large button that pressurized the air lock enough for the doors to open to the ocean outside. I really, really hoped that I would prove somewhat uncrushable, like Angel did. The door cracked open below me and I saw the first dark glint of frigid water.

Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions... So when we thing we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don't you think it's depressing?

Our challenge, as we enter the new millennium, is to deepen the commonalities and the bonds between these tens of millions, while at the same time continuing to address the issues within our local communities by two-sided struggles that not only say "No" to the existing power structure but also empower our constituencies to embrace the power within each of us to crease the world anew.

Statistically, if you're reading this sentence, you're an oddball. The average American spends three minutes a day reading a book. At this moment, you and I are engaged in an essentially antiquated interaction. Welcome, fellow Neanderthal!

Christians who understand biblical truth and have the courage to live it out can indeed redeem a culture, or even create one. This is the challenge facing all of us in the new millennium.

ignition! blast off!!! the vessel needs a new name! something more appropriate to a starship. apollo? gemini? enterprise. already taken. millennium falcon. trademarked. all rights reserved. no! wait, i have it! dragin star! thats it! dragon star!

Children of the new morning, criminal minds. Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind.

Faith requires at times marching into the waters before they part.

You are the generation that will be leading in the new century and the new millennium, so the challenge is to make sure that your influence is used to ensure that the entire world learns that Humanity transcends difference, that difference is indeed the very essence of Humanity.

A year later we were in a coffee shop, the kind taking a last stand against Starbucks with its thrift-store chairs, vegan cookies, and over-promising teas with names like Serenity and Inner Peace. I was curled up with a stack of causes, trying to get in a few extra hours of work over the weekend, and Andrew sat with one hand gripping his mug, his nose in The New York Times; the two of us a parody of the yuppie couple of the new millennium. We sat silently that way, though there wasn't silence at all. On top of the typical coffee-shop sounds - the whir of an expresso machine, the click of the cash register, the bell above the door - Andrew was making his noises, an occasional snort at something he read in the paper, the jangle of his keys in his pocket, a sniffle since he was getting over a cold, a clearing of his throat. And as we sat there, all I could do was listen to those Andrew-specific noises, the rhythm of his breath, the in-out in-out, its low whistle. Snort. Jangle. Sniffle. Clear. Hypnotized. I wanted to buy his soundtrack. This must be what love is, I thought. Not wanting his noises to ever stop.

We're much closer together in the world today than we were in the past. Given that it is a much smaller world, we are in a stronger position to shape that world. As we enter the new century, and a new millennium, let us create a world in which there is no longer any war or any conflict.

For three decades, Einstein sought a unified theory of physics, one that would interweave all of nature's forces and material constituents within a single theoretical tapestry. He failed. Now, at the dawn of the new millennium, proponents of string theory claim that the threads of this elusive unified tapestry finally have been revealed. String theory has the potential to show that all of the wondrous happenings in the universe—from the frantic dance of subatomic quarks to the stately waltz of orbiting binary stars, from the primordial fireball of the big bang to the majestic swirl of heavenly galaxies—are reflections of one grand physical principle, one master equation.

How do we pick and choose where to get involved? Canada and other peacekeeping nations have become accustomed to acting if, and only if, international public opinion will support them - a dangerous path that leads to a moral relativism in which a country risks losing sight of the difference between good and evil, a concept that some players on the international stage view as outmoded. Some governments regard the use of force itself as the greatest evil. Others define "good" as the pursuit of human rights and will opt to employ force when human rights are violated. As the nineties drew to a close and the new millennium dawned with no sign of an end to these ugly little wars, it was as if each troubling conflict we were faced with had to pass the test of whether we could "care" about it or "identify" with the victims before we'd get involved.

Unjust systems perpetuate themselves by means of institutionalized violence.

Marginless is the disease of the new millennium; margin is its cure.

That is the disease of the new Millennium. Obsession with self-image, obsession with estranging technologies.

THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ITINERANTS, drifters, hobos, restless souls. But now, in the second millennium, a new kind of wandering tribe is emerging. People who never imagined being nomads are hitting the road. They’re giving up traditional houses and apartments to live in what some call “wheel estate”—vans, secondhand RVs, school buses, pickup campers, travel trailers, and plain old sedans. They are driving away from the impossible choices that face what used to be the middle class. Decisions like: Would you rather have food or dental work? Pay your mortgage or your electric bill? Make a car payment or buy medicine? Cover rent or student loans? Purchase warm clothes or gas for your commute? For many the answer seemed radical at first. You can’t give yourself a raise, but what about cutting your biggest expense? Trading a stick-and-brick domicile for life on wheels?

In looking to understand the forces that have made us and nearly unmade us, and in hoping to recognize possible future sources of conflict in the new millennium, we have to realize that sometimes the best crystal ball is a rearview mirror.

Violent revolution fails because it is not revolutionary enough. It changes the rulers but not the rules, the ends but not the means.

As an old Tibetan proverb puts it, The next life or tomorrow—we can never be certain which will come first.

New York in the ‘80s is not a bad place. If you can’t make there, you can’t make it anywhere.

women had more prominence and power in society in the third millennium bce than they did 2,000 years later.

Richards remembered the day - that glorious and terrible day - watching the planes slam into the towers, the image repeated in endless loops. The fireballs, the bodies falling, the liquefaction of a billion tons of steel and concrete, the pillowing clouds of dust. The money shot of the new millennium, the ultimate reality show broadcast 24-7. Richards had been in Jakarta when it happened, he couldn't even remember why. He'd thought it right then; no, he'd felt it, right down to his bones. A pure, unflinching rightness. You had to give the military something to do of course, or they'd all just fucking shoot each other. But from that day forward, the old way of doing things was over. The war - the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more - the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are - would be fought by men like Richards: men with faces you didn't notice and couldn't remember, dressed as busboys or cab drivers or mailmen, with silencers tucked up their sleeves. It would be fought by young mothers pushing ten pounds of C-4 in baby strollers and schoolgirls boarding subways with vials of sarin hidden in their Hello Kitty backpacks. It would be fought out of the beds of pickup trucks and blandly anonymous hotel rooms near airports and mountain caves near nothing at all; it would be waged on train platforms and cruise ships, in malls and movie theaters and mosques, in country and in city, in darkness and by day. It would be fought in the name of Allah or Kurdish nationalism or Jews for Jesus or the New York Yankees - the subjects hadn't changed, they never would, all coming down, after you'd boiled away the bullshit, to somebody's quarterly earnings report and who got to sit where - but now the war was everywhere, metastasizing like a million maniac cells run amok across the planet, and everyone was in it.

Womanism is feminism's vulgate. It asserts that women are the oppressed or the victims and never the collaborators in the 'bad' things that men do. It entails a double standard around sexuality where women's sexual self-expression is seen as necessary and even desirable, but men's is seen as dangerous or even disgusting. Womanism is by no means confined to a tiny, politically motivated bunch of man-hating feminists, but is a regular feature of mainstream culture.

These shirts are perfectly serviceable.” I rolled my eyes. “Serviceable? Anyan, I get it that you’re utilitarian. If we were in the old country you’d write odes to factories. You’d sing the praises of the communal farm while you gnawed on a perfectly ‘serviceable’ radish. But this is the new millennium. In America. Buy a button-up.

Today you hear people saying that we invented heavy metal with the song ‘Black Sabbath’. But I’ve always had a bee up my arse about the term ‘heavy metal’. To me, it doesn’t say anything musically, especially now that you’ve got seventies heavy metal, eighties heavy metal, nineties heavy metal and new - millennium heavy metal – which are all completely different, even though people talk about them like they’re all the same.

Within this enclosed women's world, so to say, behind the walls and fortifications of it, I felt the presence of a great ideal, without which the garrison would not have carried on so gallantly; the idea of a Millennium when women were to reign supreme in the world. The old mother at such times would take on a new shape, and sit enthroned as a massive dark symbol of that mighty female deity who had existed in old ages, before the time of the prophet's God. Of her they never lost sight, but they were, before all, practical people with an eye on the needs of the moment and with infinite readiness of resource.

The ultimate weakness of violence,” observed Martin Luther King, Jr., “is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.

What is more, I have come to the conclusion that whether or not a person is a religious believer does not matter much. Far more important is that they be a good human being. I

Well, what do you know? Fakespeare!

Only with quantitative observations can one arrive at quantitative relationships, which are the heart of physics.

It was realized that technology is the highest wealth generator in the shortest possible period if it is deployed in the right direction

The gospel, then, is not a message about the salvation of individuals from the world, but news about a world transfigured, right down to its basic structures.

The great cancer facing all of us during this ‘new millennium’ is entitlement.

Congratulations to all my giveaway winners!! I look forward to hearing back from you all as to what you think of "New Millennium Love"! Chat soon :)

The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood.

I love the sense of vast transformation that hangs on us at this new millennium, the feeling that we are at the brink of knowing more than people have ever known before.

This concern for those left behind by the rise of what Pope Francis calls a “savage capitalism” is perhaps the defining mission of the church of the twentieth century, and our new millennium.

Truth is unchanging. The principles of morality are unchanging. The human essence is unchanging. Therefore there is no hope of a New Man, Heaven on Earth, Babel Rebuilt, a Brave New World, or Superman.

Salander was up at 5:00 the next morning and hacked into the NSF Major Research Instrumentation supercomputer at the New Jersey Institute of Technology—she needed all the mathematical skills she could muster.

If I had to choose an auspicious sign for the approach of the new millennium, I would choose this: the sudden nimble leap of the poet/philosopher who lifts himself against the weight of the world, proving that its heaviness contains the secret of lightness, while what many believe to be the life force of the times—loud and aggressive, roaring and rumbling—belongs to the realm of death, like a graveyard of rusted automobiles.

If the actors speaking Dothraki or High Valyrian or Castithan or whatever make a mistake, who would know but the creator? Who would care? The truth is probably one in a thousand people will notice, and of those who do, maybe a quarter will care. In the 1980s that amounts to nothing. In the new millennium, though, one quarter of 0.001 percent can constitute a significant minority on Twitter. Or on Tumblr. Or Facebook. Or Reddit. Or

He was rowed down from the north in a leather skiff manned by a crew of trolls. His fur cape was caked with candle wax, his brow stained blue by wine - though the latter was seldom noticed due to the fox mask he wore at-all times. A quill in his teeth, a solitary teardrop a-squirm in his palm, he was the young poet prince of Montreal, handsome, immaculate, searching for sturdier doors to nail his poignant verses on. In Manhattan, grit drifted into his ink bottle. In Vienna, his spice box exploded. On the Greek island of Hydra, Orpheus came to him at dawn astride a transparent donkey and restrung his cheap guitar. From that moment on, he shamelessly and willingly exposed himself to the contagion of music. To the secretly religious curiosity of the traveler was added the openly foolhardy dignity of the troubadour. By the time he returned to America, songs were working in him like bees in an attic. Connoisseurs developed cravings for his nocturnal honey, despite the fact that hearts were occasionally stung. Now, thirty years later, as society staggers towards the millennium - nailing and screeching at the while, like an orangutan with a steak knife in its side - Leonard Cohen, his vision, his gift, his perseverance, are finally getting their due. It may be because he speaks to this wounded zeitgeist with particular eloquence and accuracy, it may be merely cultural time-lag, another example of the slow-to-catch-on many opening their ears belatedly to what the few have been hearing all along. In any case, the sparkle curtain has shredded, the boogie-woogie gate has rocked loose from its hinges, and here sits L. Cohen at an altar in the garden, solemnly enjoying new-found popularity and expanded respect. From the beginning, his musical peers have recognized Cohen´s ability to establish succinct analogies among life´s realities, his talent for creating intimate relationships between the interior world of longing and language and the exterior world of trains and violins. Even those performers who have neither "covered" his compositions nor been overtly influenced by them have professed to admire their artfulness: the darkly delicious melodies - aural bouquets of gardenia and thistle - that bring to mind an electrified, de-Germanized Kurt Weill; the playfully (and therefore dangerously) mournful lyrics that can peel the apple of love and the peach of lust with a knife that cuts all the way to the mystery, a layer Cole Porter just could`t expose. It is their desire to honor L. Cohen, songwriter, that has prompted a delegation of our brightest artists to climb, one by one, joss sticks smoldering, the steep and salty staircase in the Tower of Song.

Indeed, we find that almost all the mental and emotional suffering which is such a feature of modern living—including the sense of hopelessness, of loneliness, and so on—lessens the moment we begin to engage in actions motivated by concern for others.

Maybe Christ will come again. Maybe seeds will be planted, maybe there’ll be harvests then, maybe early figs to eat, maybe new life, maybe fresh blood, maybe companionship and love and protection, safety from what’s outside, maybe the door will hold, or maybe . . . Maybe the troubles will come, and the end will come, and the sky will collapse and there will be terrible rains and showers of poison light, or maybe my life is really fine, maybe Joe loves me and I’m only crazy thinking otherwise, or maybe not, maybe it’s even worse than I know, maybe . . . I want to know, maybe I don’t. The suspense, Mr. Lies, it’s killing me.

An iron triangle of government, the universities, and the corporate world controls the careers of individual scientists. Consequently, the ideal of the lonely and disinterested seeker after truth has been superseded by that of the scientist-bureaucrat.

The kind of late where the 99% effective warnings on the side of condom boxes flashed before my eyes as I white knuckled my way down the 405, silently screaming, why me?  Why, oh why me?  I’m a new millennium girl.  I took copious notes in 6th grade Sex Ed.

The old 'qualities' of masculinity - a narrow focus on life, domestic incompetence signalling a mind on higher things, emotional reserve and acts of endurance - have become absurdities, signs more of incompetence, insensitivity, lack of intelligence than of strength.

Eldredge’s 2001 book, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul, set the tone for a new evangelical militancy in the new millennium. Eldredge’s God was a warrior God, and men were made in his image. Aggression, not tenderness, was part of the masculine design.

Following the horrors of 9/11, Fukuyama and his ideas were derided as triumphalist nonsense. But he was only half wrong. Fukuyama, a Hegelian, argued that Western democracy had run out of “contradictions”: that is, of ideological alternatives. That was true in 1989 and remains true today. Fukuyama’s mistake was to infer that the absence of contradictions meant the end of history. There was another possibility he failed to consider. History could well be driven by negation rather than contradiction. It could ride on the nihilistic rejection of the established order, regardless of alternatives or consequences. That would not be without precedent. The Roman Empire wasn’t overthrown by something called “feudalism”—it collapsed of its own dead weight, to the astonishment of friend and foe alike. The centuries after the calamity lacked ideological form. Similarly, a history built on negation would be formless and nameless: a shadowy moment, however long, between one true age and another.

Although it is interesting and worth while to study the physical laws simply because they help us to understand and to use nature, one ought to stop every once in a while and think, “What do they really mean?” The meaning of any statement is a subject that has interested and troubled philosophers from time immemorial, and the meaning of physical laws is even more interesting, because it is generally believed that these laws represent some kind of real knowledge. The meaning of knowledge is a deep problem in philosophy, and it is always important to ask, “What does it mean?

Mrs. Gamely had gotten a letter through, inviting them to visit as soon as they could, and reporting that, in these years just before the millennium Lake of the Coheeries had had had hard winters--yes--but also extraordinary summers which had made the village overflow with natural wealth, "in the agrarian and lexicographical senses of the word. There is so much food, everywhere," her friend had written for her, "and so many new and wonderful words being generated, that the storehouses and closets are overflowing. We are tubflooded with neologisms, smoked fish, and fruit pies.

There’s always a way to work out your problems if you’ll only take a look at them and then do what needs to be done. For instance, when I found that three mornings in a row I had shut off my new alarm and gone back to sleep, I put the switch in the kitchen and tied it in to the coffeemaker.

But as the web matured during the late 1990s, the dreams of a digital awakening went unfulfilled. The net turned out to be more about commerce than consciousness, more mall than commune. And when the new millennium arrived, it brought not a new age but a dispiritingly commonplace popping of a bubble of earthly greed.

The command to love our enemies reminds us that our first task towards oppressors is pastoral: to help them recover their humanity. Quite possibly the struggle, and the oppression that gave it rise, have dehumanised the oppressed as well, causing them to demonise their enemies. It is not enough to become politically free; we must also become human. Nonviolence presents a change for all parties to rise above their present condition and become more of what God created them to be.

From start to finish, the 2016 presidential race can best be understood as the political assertion of an unhappy and highly mobilized public. In the end, Trump was chosen precisely because of, not despite, his apparent shortcomings. He is the visible effect, not the cause, of the public’s surly and mutinous mood. Trump has been for this public what the objet trouvé was for the modern artist: a found instrument, a club near to hand with which to smash at the established order. To compare him to Ronald Reagan, as some of his admirers have done, or to the great dictators, as his opponents constantly do, would be to warp reality as in a funhouse mirror.

Amazed Generation! Found Generation! Diamond Generation! Brainwashed Generation! Amnesiac T.V. Bureaucracy Voidoids! New Wave Punk Generation! Neutron Bomb blast Babies! Apocalypse Spermatozoa! Did you grow up imbibing Microchip sex waters? Will you marry me in the next Millennium? Must I wait for the Great Year? - Listening to Susan Sontag

We would be able to map our lives against the destruction of the working class: the demise of the family farm, the dismantling of public health care, the defunding of public schools, wages so stagnant that full-time workers could no longer pay the bills. Historic wealth inequality was old news to us by the time it hit newspapers in the new millennium.

The myth of redemptive violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known…Its presence everywhere is not the result of a conspiracy of Babylonian priests secretly buying up the mass media with Iraqi oil money, but a function of values endlessly reinforced by the Domination System. By making violence pleasurable, fascinating and entertaining, the Powers are able to delude people into compliance with a system that is cheating them of their very lives.

So we see that a substance’s properties must be limited in a certain way; one cannot make up anything he wants, or he would be able to invent a substance which he could use to produce more than the maximum allowable work when he carried it around a reversible cycle. This principle, this limitation, is the only real rule that comes out of the thermodynamics.

Humanity increased its degree of control over nature, but at the price of most people becoming subject to control and exploitation by privileged minority groups.

There is nothing, from DNA to the United Nations, that does not have God at its core. Everything has a spiritual aspect. Everything is answerable to God. As

Divine judgment is intended not to destroy but to awaken people to the devastating truth about their lives.

Personal redemption cannot take place apart from the redemption of our social structures.

When we act to fulfill our immediate desires without taking into account others’ interests, we undermine the possibility of lasting happiness.

it's in the genes

إن الملك مغرم فقط بالكلمات لا يستطيع ترجمتها إلى أفعال

I really don’t get this whole oranges thing. It’s like, does he want to eat them or go out with them?

Under the perilous conditions of the Fifth Wave, governments cling more than they rule.

Negation, digitally amplified, has been the glue holding together a multifarious public.

life is meant to be lived rather than analyzed,

So I would borrow one more virtue from The Wizard of Oz: courage.

We should wipe out poverty by 2010 and become a developed nation by 2020.

I have seen enough of God’s wily ways with the Powers to stake my life on the side of hope.

It was the extension of the model of male power into more nebulous aspects of behaviour which eventually lost feminism much of its wider support.

The human race is being reprogrammed. Young people everywhere suddenly became pacifists in the 1960s after a millennium of violence. Our world was invaded, but not by the hordes of Martians and Venusians envisioned by the flying-saucer believers. We were invaded by new ideas and a new inner structure that would help guide us to the anticipated crises of the 1990s.

But what was really surprising was how early the dates were: at 2,800 years before the present, they pushed the occupation of New Caledonia back to the end of the first millennium B.C. IN

to have a physical body and to work with it and to work with the forces of nature to mold it into the highest expression of joy, and to keep it always by using it to learn how to overcome disease, impairment and as today’s cutting edge, non-funded, objective, purposeful science says, one day, even death?   What if short-term excitement and intensity created by the overblown desire to win at all cost could be replaced by a more durable excitement in an intensity springing from the heart of the physical athletic experience itself?  It would soon be discovered that sports and physical activities reformed and refurbished with integrity, not buy-offs are the best possible path to personal enlightenment and social transformation for this new millennium.

Afflictive emotion is the oxygen of conflict. It is thus essential that we remain sensitive to others and, recognizing their equal right to happiness, do nothing that could contribute to their suffering.

MEANWHILE, THERE’S THE New Millennium technology craze . . . holy moly, is there ever . . . the breathless infatuation with hi-def, 3D, 5G, glued to the hand, glued to the ear, twenty-first-century cyber gee-whizzery. They’re coming at us so fast—the gizmos, the doodads, the gimcracks, the wonderments—so ubiquitously, so overwhelmingly, we’ve not yet found how best to wrangle each new miracle into genuine usefulness.

Then, just at the peak of complacency, when it was assumed that the climate of the world had changed forever, when the conductor of the philharmonic played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and left out an entire movement, and when to children of a young age stories of winter were told as if they were fairy tales, New York was hit by a cataclysmic freeze, and, once again, people huddled together to talk fearfully of the millennium.

Nice hair.’ Olivier turned to Clara, hoping to break the tension. ‘Thank you.’ Clara ran her hands through it, making it stand on end as though she’d just had a scare. ‘You’re right.’ Olivier turned to Myrna. ‘She looks like a frightened doughboy from the trenches of Vimy. Not many people could carry off that look. Very bold, very new millennium. I salute you.’ Clara narrowed her eyes and glared at Myrna whose smile went from ear to ear.

The two perspectives, I fear, are not mutually exclusive, and may well be complementary. It is perfectly possible for the elites to lapse into paralysis while the public staggers into nihilism. Indeed, this could be our future.

Then as the decade made way for the new millennium, cable exploded with its own original content and film studios began to obsess over international box office sales. Somewhere along the line, we became unrelatable and invisible to the Hollywood system. Our images and diverse portrayals just weren’t worth the dollars and effort anymore. The images I had grown up with and grown so accustomed to seeing slowly disappeared, and it seemed to happen all at once.

Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority. Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust. Every presidential statement, every CIA assessment, every investigative report by a great newspaper, suddenly acquired an arbitrary aspect, and seemed grounded in moral predilection rather than intellectual rigor. When proof for and against approaches infinity, a cloud of suspicion about cherry-picking data will hang over every authoritative judgment.

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.

THE NAKBA REPRESENTED a watershed in the history of Palestine and the Middle East. It transformed most of Palestine from what it had been for well over a millennium—a majority Arab country—into a new state that had a substantial Jewish majority.

The qualities I would look for among elites to get politics off this treadmill are honesty and humility: old-school virtues, long accepted to be the living spirit behind the machinery of the democratic republic, though now almost lost from sight.

If we go exclusively by the information we receive on a daily basis through the news reports and the mainstream media, then our assessment of the state of human affairs in this new millennium will necessarily be overwhelmingly negative, and we will most likely come to the depressing conclusion that nothing has changed. After all, it continues to be true for millions of people that the greater part of human suffering is not due to natural disasters, but is inflicted by humans on one another.

No matter what I believe to be true, there always seems to be another side to the question. If you were to put me to the torture, I’d probably confess that this is my analytic ideal: to consider the question from as many relevant perspectives as the mind can hold.

The undisciplined mind is like an elephant. If left to blunder around out of control, it will wreak havoc. But the harm and suffering we encounter as a result of failing to restrain the negative impulses of mind far exceed the damage a rampaging elephant can cause.

Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world’s most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world’s squashes (except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica. Having secured their food supply, Mesoamerican societies turned to intellectual pursuits. In a millennium or less, a comparatively short time, they invented their own writing, astronomy, and mathematics, including the zero.

Oh, there had been divorced Presidents, even, late in the twentieth century, one who had survived a White House divorce to the extent of being re-elected. Of course old Gus Time hadn't made any mistake in the marital department. Sixty years of wedded bliss. The grin came and went. Old fox! They said when he was in his early twenties and so new in Washington he still smacked of the boondocks, he had cast his eyes around all the Washington wives: he picked Senator Black's wife Olive for her beauty, her brains, her organizational genius and her relish of public life, then simply stole her from the Senator. It worked, though she was thirteen years older than he. She was the greatest First Lady the country had ever known. But behind the scenes - Oh man, what a tartar! Not that he had ever heard old Gus complain. The public lion was perfectly content to be a private mouse. Gus do this, Gus don't do that - and he was so lost when she died that he abandoned Washington the moment her funeral was over, went to live in his home state of Iowa and died himself not two months later.

In learning any subject of a technical nature where mathematics plays a role, one is confronted with the task of understanding and storing away in the memory a huge body of facts and ideas, held together by certain relationships which can be “proved” or “shown” to exist between them. It is easy to confuse the proof itself with the relationship which it establishes. Clearly, the important thing to learn and to remember is the relationship, not the proof. In any particular circumstance we can either say “it can be shown that” such and such is true, or we can show it. In almost all cases, the particular proof that is used is concocted, first of all, in such form that it can be written quickly and easily on the chalkboard or on paper, and so that it will be as smooth-looking as possible. Consequently, the proof may look deceptively simple, when in fact, the author might have worked for hours trying different ways of calculating the same thing until he has found the neatest way, so as to be able to show that it can be shown in the shortest amount of time! The thing to be remembered, when seeing a proof, is not the proof itself, but rather that it can be shown that such and such is true. Of course, if the proof involves some mathematical procedures or “tricks” that one has not seen before, attention should be given not to the trick exactly, but to the mathematical idea involved.

Karma is a Sanskrit word meaning “action.” It denotes an active force, the inference being that the outcome of future events can be influenced by our actions. To suppose that karma is some sort of independent energy which predestines the course of our whole life is simply incorrect.

As to the time factor involved, those of us who are under seventy will see at least the basic structures of the new world government installed. Those of us under forty will surely live under its legislative, executive and judiciary authority and control. Indeed, the three rivals themselves—and many more besides as time goes on—speak about this new world order not as something around a distant corner of time, but as something that is imminent. As a system that will be introduced and installed in our midst by the end of this final decade of the second millennium.

I began to realize that if violence was my last resort, then I was still enmeshed in the belief that violence saves. And that meant that no matter how much I might object to any particular form of domination, I was still trusting domination and violence to bring about justice and peace.

Yet again I was reminded that the way in which things and events unfold does not always coincide with our expectations. Indeed, this fact of life—that there is often a gap between the way in which we perceive phenomena and the reality of a given situation—is the source of much unhappiness.

Feminism's self-image, as a beleaguered minority, does not help it to tolerate criticism. Women involved with feminism tend to feel they have never really had the chance to explain themselves or make a significant impact with their ideas, so what they really want is more support, not criticism.

In the tectonic depths of social and political life, the balance of power has fundamentally shifted between authority and obedience, ruler and ruled, elite and public, so that each can inflict damage on the other but neither can attain a decisive advantage. That is the non-utopian thesis of this book.

In the infinite universe of literature there are always other avenues to explore, some brand-new and some exceedingly ancient, styles and forms that can change our image of the world. And when literature fails to assure me that I’m not merely chasing dreams, I look to science to sustain my visions in which all heaviness dissolves . . .

Ten years ago a book appeared in France called D'Une foi l'autre, les conversions a l'Islam en Occident. The authors, both career journalists, carried out extensive interviews with new Muslims in Europe and America. Their conclusions are clear. Almost all educated converts to Islam come in through the door of Islamic spirituality. In the middle ages, the Sufi tariqas were the only effective engine of Islamisation in Muslim minority areas like Central Asia, India, black Africa and Java; and that pattern is maintained today. Why should this be the case? Well, any new Muslim can tell you the answer. Westerners are in the first instance seeking not a moral path, or a political ideology, or a sense of special identity - these being the three commodities on offer among the established Islamic movements. They lack one thing, and they know it - the spiritual life. Thus, handing the average educated Westerner a book by Sayyid Qutb, for instance, or Mawdudi, is likely to have no effect, and may even provoke a revulsion. But hand him or her a collection of Islamic spiritual poetry, and the reaction will be immediately more positive. It is an extraordinary fact that the best-selling religious poet in modern America is our very own Jalal al-Din Rumi. Despite the immeasurably different time and place of his origin, he outsells every Christian religious poet. Islam and the New Millennium

For no obvious reason, I began to look closely at the women on the stradone. Suddenly it seemed to me that I had lived with a sort of limited gaze: as if my focus had been only on us girls, Ada, Gigliola, Carmela, Marisa, Pinuccia, Lila, me, my schoolmates, and I had never really paid attention to Melina’s body, Giuseppina Pelusi’s, Nunzia Cerullo’s, Maria Carracci’s. The only woman’s body I had studied, with ever-increasing apprehension, was the lame body of my mother, and I had felt pressed, threatened by that image, and still feared that it would suddenly impose itself on mine. That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me. Yet they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls and that we accentuated with clothes, with makeup. They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings? Would Lila be misshapen like Nunzia? Would Fernando leap from her delicate face, would her elegant walk become Rino’s, legs wide, arms pushed out by his chest? And would my body, too, one day be ruined by the emergence of not only my mother’s body but my father’s? And would all that I was learning at school dissolve, would the neighborhood prevail again, the cadences, the manners, everything be confounded in a black mire, Anaximander and my father, Folgóre and Don Achille, valences and the ponds, aorists, Hesiod, and the insolent vulgar language of the Solaras, as, over the millenniums, had happened to the chaotic, debased city itself? I

Politics in modern countries, however, takes place beyond the immediate perception of the public. Political information is thus mediated rather than direct—almost always resembling the Iraq war example rather than the truck I can see with my own eyes. This sets up a large number of variables in the interaction between an individual, the mediator, and the information.

What else can you do with the law of gravitation? If we look at the moons of Jupiter we can understand everything about the way they move around that planet. Incidentally, there was once a certain difficulty with the moons of Jupiter that is worth remarking on. These satellites were studied very carefully by Rømer, who noticed that the moons sometimes seemed to be ahead of schedule, and sometimes behind. (One can find their schedules by waiting a very long time and finding out how long it takes on the average for the moons to go around.) Now they were ahead when Jupiter was particularly close to the earth and they were behind when Jupiter was farther from the earth. This would have been a very difficult thing to explain according to the law of gravitation—it would have been, in fact, the death of this wonderful theory if there were no other explanation. If a law does not work even in one place where it ought to, it is just wrong. But the reason for this discrepancy was very simple and beautiful: it takes a little while to see the moons of Jupiter because of the time it takes light to travel from Jupiter to the earth. When Jupiter is closer to the earth the time is a little less, and when it is farther from the earth, the time is more. This is why moons appear to be, on the average, a little ahead or a little behind, depending on whether they are closer to or farther from the earth. This phenomenon showed that light does not travel instantaneously, and furnished the first estimate of the speed of light. This was done in 1676.

I was twenty years old at the time. Three years earlier I had experienced for the first time the new life, the love, the joy of knowing Jesus Christ in a personal way. A crisis came, I called upon Him, and suddenly He was there, alive! In fact, two thousand years had not aged Him a bit! I found He still had the same power to transform men's lives and hold their loyalty that He had manifested in the Gospels two millenniums before.

Africans in the Diaspora are parodying Western notions of gender relations that are based on the racist and sexist myth of man as the breadwinner (a central tenet of capitalism) and, by extension, head of the household. When this presumption fails to materialize, the authority that that positionality should have provided the man is contrived by assuming psychological and emotional control, which may result in abuse and its discontents.

The concept itself likely grew out of the depiction of angels and devils in artwork, as well as human souls, that showed them winged. This would have naturally lent itself to the need for a visual aid to help an audience identify a character as Otherworldly. And while angels had bird wings and demons had bat wings fairies took on insect like wings, paralleling the wider associations growing between fairies and insects across this period

During the first millennium BC, religions of an altogether new kind began to spread through Afro-Asia. The newcomers, such as Jainism and Buddhism in India, Daoism and Confucianism in China, and Stoicism, Cynicism and Epicureanism in the Mediterranean basin, were characterised by their disregard of gods. These creeds maintained that the superhuman order governing the world is the product of natural laws rather than of divine wills and whims.

Recently I told a well-known, highly paid woman novelist the sub-title if this book: 'Is feminism relevant to the new millennium?' 'Of course it is,' she said without missing a beat. 'We still don't have equal pay.' Everywhere, powerful women repeat this mantra. Even Germaine Greer now says nothing has really changed. Influential feminists insist that because there are still many individual areas of injustice or unfairness, there is still an overarching system of sexual injustice with men always advantaged and women disadvantaged. One injustice, like the inequality which exists between the average pay of women and the average pay of men, is supposed to prove the rest. But this is no longer true in any simple way. Of course, women still suffer many injustices, discriminations and sometimes even outrages but it is no longer a simple coherent picture of male advantage and female disadvantage.

The myth of redemptive violence is, in short, nationalism become absolute. This myth speaks for God; it does not listen for God to speak. It invokes the sovereignty of God as its own; it does not entertain the prophetic possibility of radical judgment by God. It misappropriates the language, symbols, and scriptures of Christianity. It does not seek God in order to change; it embraces God in order to prevent change. Its God is not the impartial ruler of all nations but a tribal god worshiped as an idol. Its metaphor is not the journey but the fortress. Its symbol is not the cross but the crosshairs of a gun. Its offer is not forgiveness but victory. Its good news is not the unconditional love of enemies but their final elimination. Its salvation is not a new heart but a successful foreign policy. Its usurps the revelation of God's purposes for humanity in Jesus. It is blasphemous. It is idolatrous.

Succession to a name is sad like all successions and seems like an usurpation; and the uninterrupted stream of new Princesses de Guermantes would flow until the millennium, the name held from age to age by different women would always be that of one living Princesse de Guermantes, a name that ignored death, that was indifferent to change and heartaches and which would close over those who had worn it like the sea in its serene and immemorial placidity.

The 1990s to the present: feminism, historicism, postcolonialism, ethics There has never been a better time to study Virginia Woolf. Woolf studies, in the 1990s and in the new millennium, has continued to flourish and diversify in all its numerous and proliferating aspects. In this recent period the topics that occupied earlier critics continue in new debates, on her modernism, her philosophy and ethics, her feminism and her aesthetics; and there have also been marked turns in new directions. Woolf and her work have been increasingly examined in the context of empire, drawing on the influential field of postcolonial studies; and, stimulated by the impetus of new historicism and cultural materialism, there have been new attempts to understand Woolf ’s writing and persona in the context of the public and private spheres, in the present as well as in her own time. Woolf in the context of war and fascism, and in the contexts of modernity, science and technology, continue to exercise critics. Serious, sustained readings of lesbianism in Woolf ’s writing and in her life have marked recent feminist interpretations in Woolf studies. Enormous advances have also been made in the study of Woolf ’s literary and cultural influences and allusions. Numerous annotated and scholarly editions of Woolf ’s works have been appearing since she briefly came out of copyright in 1991, accompanied by several more scholarly editions of her works in draft and holograph, encouraging further critical scrutiny of her compositional methods. There have been several important reference works on Woolf. Many biographies of Woolf and her circle have also appeared, renewing biographical criticism, along with a number of works concerned with Woolf in geographical context, from landscape and London sites to Woolf ’s and her circle’s many houses and holiday retreats.

How many leaders in the Islamic world are really familiar with the ideas which underpin modernity? I have met some leaders of activist factions, and have been consistently shocked by their lack of knowledge. How many can even name the principal intellectual systems of our time? Structuralism, post-modernism, realism, analytic philosophy, critical theory, and all the rest are closed books to them. Instead they burble on about the 'International Zionist Masonic Conspiracy', or 'Baha'ism', or the 'New Crusader Invasion', or similar phantasms. If we want to understand why so many Islamic movements fail, we should perhaps begin by acknowledging that their leaders simply do not have the intellectual grasp of the modern world which is the precondition for successfully overcoming the obstacles to Islamic governance. A Muslim activist who does not understand the ideologies of modernism can hardly hope to overcome them. Islam and the New Millennium

None of us laughed at Helen. Maybe because in 1970 we listened more to new ideas, however sentimental or foolish they sound all these years later in the harsh light of the millennium’s end. We wanted to find new answers for old questions, or we just thought there were new answers. And even with all the death that came daily, the death that would come to our gathering in the meadow, life in America felt as if it were being recast, reshaped, even redeemed by some transcendent thing.

It is very likely an anxiety dream, brought on by your move out of your childhood home and the comfort of the reach of your family’s love and protection.” Gideon reached to stroke her hair soothingly. “I am only surprised it has not happened sooner.” “Are you sure?” Her nervousness was clear, but she was truly relaxing already. “Yes. And so are you. You know everything there is to know about psychology, you tell me what you think.” “But you thought it was this . . . new level of ability.” “And for the first time in a millennium my diagnosis is wrong. I do despise it when such bothersome things occur. Now I shall have to start the ‘No Mistakes’ clock all over again.” Legna giggled at him, which was of course his intention. She swung her arms around his neck, hugging him warmly. “You smell so good,” he murmured against her ear a long minute later. “I smell like sex,” she argued. He nodded, making a loud noise of appreciation as he sniffed and nibbled her neck. “You smell like very good sex,” he amended with a voracious growl and an eager mouth moving over her bare skin with bold appetite. “Gideon!” She squealed as he went straight for her waist, knowing she was ticklish there. The playful flicker of his tongue and the scrape of his teeth drove her mad, and she twisted as she screamed for him to stop. When he tickled her she absolutely could not use her classic escape method. She could barely catch her breath, never mind her concentration.

So it seems to me that midnight on December 31 is the only solid and reliable point we have in the entire sorry mess, and so perhaps we should be celebrating that just a little bit. And instead of saying that we have got the end of the millennium (or bi-millennium) wrong, we should say that our ancestors got the beginning of it wrong, and that we’ve only just sorted the mess out before starting a new mess of our own. What the hell does it matter anyway? It’s just an excuse for a party.

Jesus does not encourage Jews to walk a second mile in order to build up merit in heaven, or to be pious, or to kill the soldier with kindness. He is helping an oppressed people find a way to protest and neutralize an onerous practice despised throughout the empire. He is not giving a nonpolitical message of spiritual world transcendence. He is formulating a worldly spirituality in which the people at the bottom of society or under the thumb of imperial power learn to recover their humanity.

Even the United States owed its great-power status to military action rather than economic enterprise alone. In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US annexation of Texas. About 13,000 American soldiers died in the war, which added 2.3 million square kilometres to the United States (more than the combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy).4 It was the bargain of the millennium.

For American Catholics, a millennium that John Paul II had hailed as a “new springtime” for Christianity began instead with a wave of revelations about priestly sex abuse. There had been intimations of this crisis in the 1980s, when several high-profile instances of priestly pedophilia had surfaced in the media. But nothing prepared Catholic America for the flood of 2003, which began in New England but ultimately left no diocese or community untouched, reaching even to the doors of the Vatican itself. Horror upon horror, cover-up upon cover-up, and sacrilege piled on sacrilege—it was like an anti-Catholic polemic from the nineteenth century, except that it was all too terribly true. No atheist or anticlericalist, no Voltaire or Ingersoll or Twain could have invented a story so perfectly calculated to discredit the message of the Gospel as the depredations of Thomas Geoghan and the legalistic indifference of Bernard Cardinal Law. No external enemy of the faith, no Attila or Barbarossa or Hitler, could have sown so much confusion and dismay among the faithful as Catholicism’s own bishops managed to do.

Crusading outlived the Middle Ages, and remains today a favored trope of the alt-right, neo-Nazis, and Islamist terrorists, all of whom cleave to the decidedly shaky idea that it has defined Christian and Muslim relations for a millennium. They are not right, but they are not original in their error either. Crusading—a bastard hybrid of religion and violence, adopted as a vehicle for papal ambition but eventually allowed to run as it pleased, where it pleased, and against whom it pleased, was one of the Middle Ages’ most successful and enduringly poisonous ideas.

High Self High Self includes our moral virtues, philosophical ideas and spiritual values. It is the essence of sensitivity and feeling, the aspect of our being that recognises and determines our needs. It expresses itself as intuition, love and wisdom. It is our highest form of expression, the God within. Action through High Self is largely right-brained: creative, spiritual and compassionate. Many people confuse love with emotions. True love is a function of High Self. Physical attraction (Basic Self) and mental conditioning (Conscious Self) frequently accompany love, but not necessarily. Love has a depth that permeates every facet of positive human expression. It enjoys expression through the emotions, but it is not governed by the emotions. High Self is best facilitated through the development of our intuition, which leads to a depth of personal freedom. Attendant to such freedom is a newfound wealth and compassion. It leads to a depth of wisdom that is almost legendary in human expression. In numerology, High Self is represented as the Soul or Feeling Plane, comprising the numbers 2, 5 and 8. The new millennium (with every birth date at least including a two) will see a more genuine spirituality manifested in human affairs.

There are some feminist-inspired commentators who have charted society from the point of view of gender, often brilliantly, but there are many more clinging on to the old concepts, especially in politics, social policy and academia. There has been a collective reluctance to submit the whole area to scrutiny, and a widespread refusal to see this talk of crisis as anything other than sexist fearmongering. Instead of accepting that the old 'truths' of feminism are due for an overhaul, numerous attempts are made to breathe life into the old concepts and politics. This is somewhat worrying since women who think like this now have more influence than ever before in many western governments.

If you try to change things constructively in the social sciences or try to reconcile conflicts, rather than take sides, you’ll be attacked through character assassination and every other means of skullduggery not excluding physical assault. It is inevitable and inescapable. It will disgust you to the point of befuddlement and, at times, rage. That beautiful beatitude in the Bible should be changed to read: Blessed are the peacemakers in heaven; because on Earth, they shall catch hell. Nonetheless, I’ll stress that the time is finally right, on our planet, for the expansive light of true civilization. Well-informed voices both prophesying and forcing that maturation, suddenly, are being heard everywhere.

Hey - Duggie! Duggie! Duggie!" He came running up to me, sparkler in hand. I felt like sticking one on him, the cheeky bastard. Nobody called me Duggie. He held the sparkler up in front of my face and said, "Wait. Wait." I was already waiting. What else was there to do? "Here you are," he said. "Look! What's this?" At that precise moment, his sparkler fizzled out. I didn't say anything, so he supplied the answer himself. "The death of the socialist dream," he said. He giggled like a little maniac, and stared at me for a second or two before running off, and in that time I saw exactly the same thing I'd seen in Stubbs's eyes the day before. The same triumphalism, the same excitement, not because something new was being created, but because something was being destroyed. I thought about Phillip and his stupid rock symphony and I swear that my eyes pricked with tears. This ludicrous attempt to squeeze the history of the countless millennia into half an hour's worth of crappy riffs and chord changes suddenly seemed no more Quixotic than all the things my dad and his colleagues had been working towards for so long. A national health service, free to everyone who needed it. Redistribution of wealth through taxation. Equality of opportunity. Beautiful ideas, Dad, noble aspirations, just as there was the kernel of something beautiful in Philip's musical hodge-podge. But it was never going to happen. If there had ever been a time when it might have happened, that time was slipping away. The moment had passed. Goodbye to all that. Easy to be clever with hindsight, I know, but I was right, wasn't I? Look back on that night from the perspective of now, the closing weeks of the closing century of our second millennium - if the calendar of some esoteric and fast-disappearing religious sect counts for anything any more - and you have to admit that I was right. And so was Benjamin's brother, the little bastard, with his sparkler and his horrible grin and that nasty gleam of incipient victory in his twelve-year-old eyes. Goodbye to all that, he was saying. He'd worked it out already. He knew what the future held in store.

In the 1950s kids lost their innocence.They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term—the generation gap. In the 1960s, kids lost their authority. It was the decade of protest—church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting.Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it. In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of me-ism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self. Self-image, Self-esteem, Self-assertion . . . It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference. In the 1980s, kids lost their hope. Stripped of innocence, authority, and love and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future. To bring it up to date, I have added two more paragraphs: In the 1990s kids lost their power to reason. Less and less were they taught the very basics of language, truth, and logic and they grew up with the irrationality of a postmodern world. In the new millennium, kids woke up and found out that somewhere in the midst of all this change, they had lost their imagination. Violence and perversion entertained them till none could talk of killing innocents since none was innocent anymore.

The revolt of the public will not necessarily usher in an authoritarian age. It does not necessarily foster populism. It is not necessarily destructive of liberal democracy. The revolt of the public, as I envision the thing, is a technology-driven churning of new people and classes, a proliferation and confusion of message and noise, utopian hopes and nihilistic rage, globalization and disintegration, taking place in the unbearable personal proximity of the web and at a fatal distance from political power. Every structure of order is threatened—yes. Nihilism at the level of whole societies, in the style of ISIS, is a possible outcome. But no particular system is favored or disadvantaged—and nothing is ordained.

From the days of the Assyrians and the Qin, great empires were usually built through violent conquest. In 1914 too, all the major powers owed their status to successful wars. For instance, Imperial Japan became a regional power thanks to its victories over China and Russia; Germany became Europe’s top dog after its triumphs over Austria-Hungary and France; and Britain created the world’s largest and most prosperous empire through a series of splendid little wars all over the planet. Thus in 1882 Britain invaded and occupied Egypt, losing a mere fifty-seven soldiers in the decisive Battle of Tel el-Kebir. Whereas in our days occupying a Muslim country is the stuff of Western nightmares, following Tel el-Kebir the British faced little armed resistance, and for more than six decades controlled the Nile Valley and the vital Suez Canal. Other European powers emulated the British, and whenever governments in Paris, Rome or Brussels contemplated putting boots on the ground in Vietnam, Libya or Congo, their only fear was that somebody else might get there first. Even the United States owed its great-power status to military action rather than economic enterprise alone. In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US annexation of Texas. About 13,000 American soldiers died in the war, which added 2.3 million square kilometres to the “United States (more than the combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy). It was the bargain of the millennium.

In any event, should you doubt that your knowledge of Western history is distorted by the work of these distinguished bigots, consider whether you believe any of the following statements: The Catholic Church motivated and actively participated in nearly two millennia of anti-Semitic violence, justifying it on grounds that the Jews were responsible for the Crucifixion, until the Vatican II Council was shamed into retracting that doctrine in 1965. But, the Church still has not made amends for the fact that Pope Pius XII is rightfully known as “Hitler’s Pope.” Only recently have we become aware of remarkably enlightened Christian gospels, long ago suppressed by narrow-minded Catholic prelates. Once in power as the official church of Rome, Christians quickly and brutally persecuted paganism out of existence. The fall of Rome and the ascendancy of the Church precipitated Europe’s decline into a millennium of ignorance and backwardness. These Dark Ages lasted until the Renaissance/Enlightenment, when secular scholars burst through the centuries of Catholic barriers against reason. Initiated by the pope, the Crusades were but the first bloody chapter in the history of unprovoked and brutal European colonialism. The Spanish Inquisition tortured and murdered huge numbers of innocent people for “imaginary” crimes, such as witchcraft and blasphemy. The Catholic Church feared and persecuted scientists, as the case of Galileo makes clear. Therefore, the Scientific “Revolution” occurred mainly in Protestant societies because only there could the Catholic Church not suppress independent thought. ► Being entirely comfortable with slavery, the Catholic Church did nothing to oppose its introduction in the New World nor to make it more humane. Until very recently, the Catholic view of the ideal state was summed up in the phrase, “The divine right of kings.” Consequently, the Church has bitterly resisted all efforts to establish more liberal governments, eagerly supporting dictators. It was the Protestant Reformation that broke the repressive Catholic grip on progress and ushered in capitalism, religious freedom, and the modern world. Each of these statements is part of the common culture, widely accepted and frequently repeated. But, each is false and many are the exact opposite of the truth! A chapter will be devoted to summarizing recent repetitions of each of these statements and to demonstrating that each is most certainly false.

You didn't have to go back far to recall a culture that said: Yes, we like a drink at lunchtime. The political culture, he meant—Peter Judd was well aware that the culture in general was chucking booze down its neck like a mental hobo. But the political culture, meaning Westminster, had cleaned up its act since the millennium, a shift in which Judd himself had played no small part. A public disavowal of some of the more famous extravagances of his youth had, near as damn it, established a party line, or at least had drawn a line across which his party didnt dare tread... Once the House's reputation for being more or less sober during daylight hours had been salvaged, and his own status as architect of the "New Responsibility" (copyright, some broadsheet reptile) safely established, Judd was happy to revert to drinking at lunchtime when he felt like it.

Christianity had not started off as the ideology of an empire. Virtually nothing is known about its supposed founder, Jesus of Nazareth. There is not even any definite proof he was a historical rather than a mythical figure. Certainly the proof is not to be found in the Christian New Testament. It claims his birth was in Bethlehem in the Roman province of Judaea, where his family had gone for a census during the time of Augustus. But there was no census at the time stated and Judaea was not a Roman province at the time. When a census was held in AD 7 it did not require anyone to leave their place of residence. Similarly, the New Testament locates Jesus’s birth as in the time of King Herod, who died in 4 BC. Roman and Greek writers of the time make no mention of Jesus and a supposed reference by the Jewish-Roman writer Josephus is almost certainly a result of the imagination of medieval monks.100

In the countdown to a millennium , a rise in apocalyptic thinking may be inevitable . Still , the amplitude of the fantasies of doom that AIDS has inspired can't be explained by the calendar alone , or even by the very real danger the illness represents. There is also the need for an apocalyptic scenario that is specific to “ Western ” society, and perhaps even more so to the United States. (America, as someone has said, is a nation with the soul of a church — an evangelical church prone to announcing radical endings and brand-new beginnings.) The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster. The sense of cultural distress or failure gives rise to the desire for a clean sweep, a tabula rasa. No one wants a plague, of course. But, yes, it would be a chance to begin again. And beginning again — that is very modern, very American, too.

But what was really surprising was how early the dates were: at 2,800 years before the present, they pushed the occupation of New Caledonia back to the end of the first millennium B.C. IN THE YEARS that followed, Lapita sites would be discovered on the Mussau Islands off Papua New Guinea, the Reef and Santa Cruz Islands, Tikopia Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Futuna, and Samoa—in other words, virtually everywhere between the Bismarck Archipelago and the western edge of Polynesia. Dates from these sites confirmed the age of the culture represented by these ceramics, but they also revealed an unexpected pattern: Lapita settlements across a 2,500-mile swath of the western Pacific—from roughly the Solomon Islands to Samoa—seem to have appeared almost simultaneously around 1000 B.C. Furthermore, east of the Solomons, they appeared to represent a cultural horizon: no one predated them in these islands, archaeologically speaking; no cultural artifacts underlay theirs.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb..

What happens when the mediators lose their legitimacy—when the shared stories that hold us together are depleted of their binding force? That’s easy to answer. Look around: we happen. The mirror in which we used to find ourselves faithfully reflected in the world has shattered. The great narratives are fracturing into shards. What passes for authority is devolving to the political war-band and the online mob—that is, to the shock troops of populism, left and right. Deprived of a legitimate authority to interpret events and settle factual disputes, we fly apart from each other—or rather, we flee into our own heads, into a subjectivized existence. We assume ornate and exotic identities, and bear them in the manner of those enormous wigs once worn at Versailles. Here, I believe, is the source of that feeling of unreality or post-truth so prevalent today. Having lost faith in authority, the public has migrated to the broken pieces of the old narratives and explanations: shards of reality that deny the truth of all the others and often find them incomprehensible.

CREONTA: Rope! My rope! Hang those two thieves by the neck until they are dead. THE ROPE: Alack, but vile and ill-natured female! Upon wherein did thine affections tarry when I didst but lie here and rot for many a year? Nay, but those fellows tooketh care to remove the wetness that didst plagueth me of late and hath laid me upon the cool ground to revel in a state of dryness. Nay, I wouldst not delay them in their noble course for all thine base and bestial howling. CREONTA: Then, you, dearest donkey, precious beast of burden, tear those two apart and eat their flesh! DONKEY: Nay, but alas for many a season didst you but keep the food of the tummy from me and my mouth when it was that I required it of you. These fine gentlemen of fortune didst but give me carrots of which to partake which I did most verily and forthsoothe with merriment. I havest decided that thou dost suck most verily and no longer will I layth the smackth down in thine name but will rather let such gentlemen as these go free of themselves. TRUFFALDINO: [To the audience.] Well, what do you know? Fakespeare!

Think of the epidemics that wiped out ten, twenty, even thirty percent of populations in Europe: I read somewhere recently that the city of Leiden lost thirty-five percent of its population in a five-year period in the 1630s. What could it mean to live with such a possibility, with people of all ages dropping dead around you all the time? The thing is that we have no idea. In fact, when I read it, it was as a footnote in an article talking about something else, an article about painting or furniture. Families that lost three of their seven members were not at all unusual. For us, the concept of three million New Yorkers dead from illness within the first five years of the millennium is impossible to grasp. We think it would be total dystopia; so, we think of such historical realities only as footnotes. We try to forget that other cities in other times have seen worse, that there isn’t anything that immunizes us from a plague of one kind or another, that we are just as susceptible as any of those past civilizations were, but we are especially unready for it. Even in the way we speak about what little has happened to us, we have already exhausted ourselves with hyperbole.

He opened his eyes then, white fire flaring hotly within them. “Send me home, Legna,” he commanded her, his voice hoarse with suppressed emotion. She moved her head in affirmation even as she leaned toward him to catch his mouth once more in a brief, territorial kiss, her teeth scoring his bottom lip as she broke away. It was an incidental wound, one he could heal in the blink of an eye. But he wouldn’t erase her mark on him, and they both knew it. Finally, she stepped back, closed her eyes, and concentrated on picturing his home in her thoughts. She had been in his parlor dozens of times as a guest, always accompanied by Noah. His library, his kitchen, even the grounds of the isolated estate were well known to her. She could have sent him to any of those locations. But as she began to focus, her mind’s eye was filled with the image of a dark, elegant room she had never seen before. Hand-carved ebony-paneled walls soared up into a vast ceiling, enormous windows of intricate stained glass spilled colored light over the entire room as if a multitude of rainbows had taken up residence. It all centered around an enormous bed, the coverlet’s color indistinguishable under the blanket of colorful dawn sunlight that streamed into the room. She could feel the sun’s warmth, ready and waiting to cocoon any weary occupant who thrived on sleeping in the heat of the muted daylight sun. It was a beautiful room, and she knew without a doubt that it was Gideon’s bedroom and that he had shared the image of it with her. If she sent him there, it would be the first time she had ever teleported someone to a place she had not first seen for herself. The ability to take images of places from others’ minds for teleporting purposes was an advanced Elder ability. “You can do it,” he encouraged her softly, all of his thoughts and his will completely full of his belief in that statement. Legna kept his gaze for one last long moment, and with a flick of a wrist sent him from the room with a soft pop of moving air. She exhaled in wonder, everything inside of her knowing without a doubt that he had appeared in his bedroom, safe and sound, that very next second. Legna turned to look at her own bed and wondered how she would ever be able to sleep. Nelissuna . . . go to bed. I will help you sleep. Gideon’s voice washed through her, warming her, comforting her in a way she hadn’t thought possible. This was the connection that Jacob and Isabella shared. For the rest of the time both of them lived, each would be privy to the other’s innermost thoughts. She realized that because he was the more powerful, it was quite possible he would be able to master parts of himself, probably even hide things from her awareness and keep them private—at least, until she learned how to work her new ability with better skill. After all, she was a Demon of the Mind. It was part of her innate state of being to figure the workings of their complex minds. She removed her slippers and pushed the sleeves of her dress from her shoulders so that it sheeted off her in one smooth whisper of fabric. She closed her eyes, avoiding looking in the mirror or at herself, very aware of Gideon’s eyes behind her own. His masculine laughter vibrated through her, setting her skin to tingle. So, you are both shy and bold . . . he said with amusement as she quickly slid beneath her covers. You are a source of contradictions and surprises, Legna. My world has begun anew. As if living for over a millennium is not long enough? she asked him. On the contrary. Without you, it was far, far too long. Go to sleep, Nelissuna. And a moment after she received the thought, her eyes slid closed with a weight she could not have contradicted even if she had wanted to. Her last thought, as she drifted off, was that she had to make a point of telling Isabella that she might have been wrong about what it meant to have another to share one’s mind with.

The path of what was to come was awful. It was the enormous dying, a sea of blood. From it the new sun arose, awful and a reversal of that which we call day. We have seized the darkness and its sun will shine above us, bloody and burning like a great downfall. When I comprehended my darkness, a truly magnificent night came over me and my dream plunged me into the depths of the millennia, and from it my phoenix ascended. But what happened to my day? Torches were kindled, bloody anger and disputes erupted. As darkness seized the world, the terrible war arose and the darkness destroyed the light of the world, since it was incomprehensible to the darkness and good for nothing anymore. And so we had to taste Hell. I saw which vices the virtues of this time changed into, how your mildness became hard, your goodness became brutality; your love became hate, and your understanding became madness. Why did you want to comprehend the darkness! But you had to or else it would have seized you. Happy the man who anticipates this grasp. Did you ever think of the evil in you? Oh, you spoke of it, you mentioned it, and you confessed it smilingly; as a generally human vice, or a recurring misunderstanding. But did you know 1 what evil is, and that it stands precisely right behind your virtues, that it is also your virtues themselves, as their inevitable substance?7! You locked Satan in the abyss for a millennium, and when the millennium had passed, you laughed at him, since he had become a children's fairy tale.72 But if the dreadful great one raises his head, the world winces. The most extreme coldness draws near. With horror you see that you are defenseless, and that the army of your vices falls powerless to its knees. With the power of daimons, you seize the evil, and your virtues cross over to him. You are completely alone in this struggle, since your Gods have become deaf You do not know which devils are greater, your vices, or your virtues. But ofone thing you are certain, that virtues and vices are brothers. 73We need the coldness of death to see clearly. Life wants to live and to die, to begin and to end.74 You are not forced to live eternally; but you can also die, since there is a will in you for both. Life and death must strike a balance in your existence.75 Today's men need a large slice of death, since too much incorrectness lives in them, and too much correctness died in them. What stays in balance is correct, what disturbs balance is incorrect. But if balance has been attained, then that which preserves it is incorrect and that which disturbs it is correct. Balance is at once life and death. For the completion of life a balance with death is fitting. If I accept death, then my tree greens, since dying increases life. If I plunge into the death encompassing the world, then my buds break open. How much our life needs death!

The story of The Rape of the Lock, sylphs and all, could have been told, though not so effectively, in prose. The Odyssey and the Comedy have something to say that could have been said well, though not equally well, without verse. Most of the qualities Aristotle demands of a tragedy could occur in a prose play. Poetry and prose, however different in language, overlapped, almost coincided, in content. But modern poetry, if it ‘says’ anything at all, if it aspires to ‘mean’ as well as to ‘be’, says what prose could not say in any fashion. To read the old poetry involved learning a slightly different language; to read the new involves the unmaking of your mind, the abandonment of all the logical and narrative connections which you use in reading prose or in conversation. You must achieve a trance-like condition in which images, associations, and sounds operate without these. Thus the common ground between poetry and any other use of words is reduced almost to zero. In that way poetry is now more quintessentially poetical than ever before; ‘purer’ in the negative sense. It not only does (like all good poetry) what prose can’t do: it deliberately refrains from doing anything that prose can do. Unfortunately, but inevitably, this process is accompanied by a steady diminution in the number of its readers. Some have blamed the poets for this, and some the people. I am not sure that there need be any question of blame. The more any instrument is refined and perfected for some particular function, the fewer those who have the skill, or the occasion, to handle it must of course become. Many use ordinary knives and few use surgeons’ scalpels. The scalpel is better for operations, but it is no good for anything else. Poetry confines itself more and more to what only poetry can do; but this turns out to be something which not many people want done. Nor, of course, could they receive it if they did. Modern poetry is too difficult for them. It is idle to complain; poetry so pure as this must be difficult. But neither must the poets complain if they are unread. When the art of reading poetry requires talents hardly less exalted than the art of writing it, readers cannot be much more numerous than poets. The explication of poetry is already well entrenched as a scholastic and academic exercise. The intention to keep it there, to make proficiency in it the indispensable qualification for white-collared jobs, and thus to secure for poets and their explicators a large and permanent (because a conscript) audience, is avowed. It may possibly succeed. Without coming home any more than it now does to the ‘business and bosoms’ of most men, poetry may, in this fashion, reign for a millennium; providing material for the explication which teachers will praise as an incomparable discipline and pupils will accept as a necessary moyen de parvenir. But this is speculation.

else can you do with the law of gravitation? If we look at the moons of Jupiter we can understand everything about the way they move around that planet. Incidentally, there was once a certain difficulty with the moons of Jupiter that is worth remarking on. These satellites were studied very carefully by Rømer, who noticed that the moons sometimes seemed to be ahead of schedule, and sometimes behind. (One can find their schedules by waiting a very long time and finding out how long it takes on the average for the moons to go around.) Now they were ahead when Jupiter was particularly close to the earth and they were behind when Jupiter was farther from the earth. This would have been a very difficult thing to explain according to the law of gravitation—it would have been, in fact, the death of this wonderful theory if there were no other explanation. If a law does not work even in one place where it ought to, it is just wrong. But the reason for this discrepancy was very simple and beautiful: it takes a little while to see the moons of Jupiter because of the time it takes light to travel from Jupiter to the earth. When Jupiter is closer to the earth the time is a little less, and when it is farther from the earth, the time is more. This is why moons appear to be, on the average, a little ahead or a little behind, depending on whether they are closer to or farther from the earth. This phenomenon showed that light does not travel instantaneously, and furnished the first estimate of the speed of light. This was done in 1676.

We always speak of Canada as a new country. In one sense, of course, this is true. The settlement of Europeans on Canadian soil dates back only three hundred years. Civilization in Canada is but a thing of yesterday, and its written history, when placed beside the long millenniums of the recorded annals of European and Eastern peoples, seems but a little span. But there is another sense in which the Dominion of Canada, or at least part of it, is perhaps the oldest country in the world. According to the Nebular Theory the whole of our planet was once a fiery molten mass gradually cooling and hardening itself into the globe we know. On its surface moved and swayed a liquid sea glowing with such a terrific heat that we can form no real idea of its intensity. As the mass cooled, vast layers of vapour, great beds of cloud, miles and miles in thickness, were formed and hung over the face of the globe, obscuring from its darkened surface the piercing beams of the sun. Slowly the earth cooled, until great masses of solid matter, rock as we call it, still penetrated with intense heat, rose to the surface of the boiling sea. Forces of inconceivable magnitude moved through the mass. The outer surface of the globe as it cooled ripped and shrivelled like a withering orange. Great ridges, the mountain chains of to-day, were furrowed on its skin. Here in the darkness of the prehistoric night there arose as the oldest part of the surface of the earth the great rock bed that lies in a huge crescent round the shores of Hudson Bay, from Labrador to the unknown wilderness of the barren lands of the Coppermine

This, then, was the Old World on the eve of Columbus’s departure in 1492. For almost half a millennium Christians had been launching hideously destructive holy wars and massive enslavement campaigns against external enemies they viewed as carnal demons and described as infidels—all in an effort to recapture the Holy Land, and all of which, it now seemed to many, effectively had come to naught. During those same long centuries they had further expressed their ruthless intolerance of all persons and things that were non-Christian by conducting pogroms against the Jews who lived among them and whom they regarded as the embodiment of Antichrist—imposing torture, exile, and mass destruction on those who refused to succumb to evangelical persuasion. These great efforts, too, appeared to have largely failed. Hundreds of thousands of openly practicing Jews remained in the Europeans’ midst, and even those who had converted were suspected of being the Devil’s agents and spies, treacherously boring from within. Dominated by a theocratic culture and world view that for a thousand years and more had been obsessed with things sensual and sexual, and had demonstrated its obsession in the only way its priesthood permitted—by intense and violent sensual and sexual repression and “purification”—the religious mood of Christendom’s people at this moment was near the boiling point. At its head the Church was mired in corruption, while the ranks below were dispirited and increasingly disillusioned. These are the sorts of conditions that, given the proper spark, lend themselves to what anthropologists and historians describe as “millenarian” rebellion and upheaval, or “revitalization movements.”125

My sister and I grew older. My mother educated us herself, always reminding us that though the Daglan had been vanquished, evil lived on. Evil lurked beneath our very feet, always waiting to devour us. I believe she told us this in order to keep us honest and true, certainly more than she had ever been. Yet as we aged and grew into our power, it became clear that only one throne could be inherited. I loved Helena more than anything. Should she have wanted the throne, it was hers. But she had as little interest in it as I did. It was not enough for my mother. Possessing all she had ever wanted was not enough. “Classic stage mom,” Bryce muttered. My mother remembered the talk of the Daglan—their mention of other worlds. Places they had conquered. And with two daughters and one throne … only entire worlds would do for us. For her legacy. Bryce shook her head again. She knew where this was going. Remembering the teachings of her former mistress, my mother knew she might wield the Horn and Harp to open a door. To bring the Fae to new heights, new wealth and prestige. Bryce rolled her eyes. Same corrupt, delusional Fae rulers, different millennium. Yet when she announced her vision to her court, many of them refused. They had just overthrown their conquerors—now they would turn conqueror, too? They demanded that she shut the door and leave this madness behind her. But she would not be deterred. There were enough Fae throughout her lands, along with some of the fire-wielders from the south, who supported the idea, merchants who salivated at the thought of untapped riches in other worlds. And so she gathered a force. It was Pelias who told her where to cast her intention. Using old, notated star maps from their former masters, he’d selected a world for them.

Now, straight to the Word. Before let's just give a little word of thanks to the Lord Jesus. Our heavenly Father, we're just so grateful today for the--for You down here in this modern age, in the age of automobiles, airplanes, jets, the rockets, and--and all kind of science: telephone, television, and a modern atomic weapons, and so forth. You are still the supreme, almighty, omnipotent, omniscient God that created the heavens and earth and patterned out the sky. God, we can't explain it. We can't explain it. Neither can we explain why the sky doesn't have an end, how the world can revolve around, and so perfect till twenty years before, they can tell when the eclipse of the sun is coming; because Your machinery works exact. We can't produce a piece of machinery to be that exact. Oh, but great Jehovah, Who holds this earth here in space, it's perfect. And we love You, and all Your doings are just and right. And we submit ourselves to Thee this morning, the beginning of this new year, and ask that You fill us all with the Holy Spirit, Lord, and draw us close to Thee; and may Thy everlasting arms be around us and hold us, Lord, for the days are shaking and dark, but the Morning Star is leading the way. We shall follow, Lord. Where He leads me, I will follow. If it be some through the waters, some through the flood, some through deep trials, but all through the Blood. 8-1 O God, lead us by Thy everlasting hand until the victory finally is won, and Jesus returns to the earth. Sin, sickness, and sorrow will be ended, and we'll live this glorious millennium with Thee. We're longing for that great day. Come, Lord Jesus, to Thy Word today. Get into It. Circumcise the lips that speak, and the hearts that hear. And may the seed fall into the heart where the Holy Spirit will sow it, and bring forth a hundredfold. We ask in Jesus' Name. Amen. { See Message "Why are people so tossed about " - Preached on Sunday, 1st January 1956 at the Branham Tabernacle in Jeffersonville, Indiana, U.S.A - See Paragraph 7-7 to 8:1 ).

Those women who fought the original battles suffer more than most. Hated and opposed when originally pushing down the barriers, they now often have to face contempt from a society which takes for granted their achievements. At a recent party I witnessed one such woman being challenged by a young man who had no sense of feminism's history or her involvement in it. 'Do you really call yourself a feminist?' he asked belligerently. 'Yes,' she answered rather wistfully, 'I'd still call myself that.' 'But what on earth does it mean?' he continued. 'I mean, is there really any need for it? Isn't it just part of the way we are, part of our unconscious?' It was a difficult and poignant moment for me, because it encapsulated both sides of my relationship with feminism. I greatly respected the woman for what she had achieved and deplored the man's lack of respect for why she had placed herself as she did. In such circumstances, no wonder she dug her heels in. This continuing lack of credibility and acceptance explains why feminists react badly when the fundamental tenets of the movement are challenged. But when I began to examine feminist ideas critically and challenge the idea that nothing had changed, I too met with resistance. There is a real reluctance to submit feminism's fundamental assumptions to an audit to see just how relevant they are to changing realities. The problem is that, by and large, I also agreed with what the man at that party said. Somewhere along the line something remarkable has happened. Individual feminists still meet with resistance and problems, but feminism as a movement has been extraordinarily successful; it has sunk into our unconscious. Our contemporary social world — and the way the sexes interact in it — is radically different from the one in which modern feminism emerged. Many of feminism's original objectives have been met, including the principle of equal pay for equal work, and the possibility of financial independence. Girls now are growing up in a world radically different from the one described by the early feminists. Feminism no longer has to be reiterated but simply breathed.

The population, who are, ultimately, indifferent to public affairs and even to their own interests, negotiate this indifference with an equally spectral partner and one that is similarly indifferent to its own will: the government [Ie pouvoir] . This game between zombies may stabilize in the long term. The Year 2000 will not take place in that an era of indifference to time itself - and therefore to the symbolic term of the millennium - will be ushered in by negotiation. Nowadays, you have to go straight from money to money, telegraphically so to speak, by direct transfer (that is the viral side of the matter). A viral revolution, then, more akin to the Glass Bead Game than to the steam engine, and admirably personified in Bernard Tapie's playboy face. For the look of money is reflected in faces. Gone are the hideous old capitalists, the old-style industrial barons wearing the masks of the suffering they have inflicted. Now there are only dashing playboys, sporty and sexual, true knights of industry, wearing the mask of the happiness they spread all around themselves. The world put on a show of despair after 1968. It's been putting on a big show of hope since 1980. No more tears, alright? Reaganite optimism, the pump ing up of the dollar. Fabius's glossy new look. Patriotic conviviality. Reluctance prohibited. The old pessimism was produced by the idea that things were getting worse and worse. The new pessimism is produced by the fact that everything is getting better and better. Supercooled euphoria. Controlled anaesthesia. I should like to see the equivalent of Bernard Tapie in the world of business emerge in the world of concepts. Buying up failing concepts, swallowing them up, dusting them off (firing all the deadbeats who are in the way), putting them back into circulation with a dynamic virginity, sending them shooting up on the Stock Exchange and then abandoning them afterwards like dogs. Some people do this very well. It is perhaps better to save tired concepts by maintaining them in a super cooled state like unemployed labour, or locking them away in interactive data banks kept alive on a respirator.

It describes a significantly different way of life. For instance, the Manuscript predicts that we humans will voluntarily decrease our population so that we all may live in the most powerful and beautiful places on the Earth. But remarkably, many more of these areas will exist in the future, because we will intentionally let the forests go uncut so that they can mature and build energy. “According to the Ninth Insight, by the middle of the next millennium,” he continued, “humans will typically live among five hundred year old trees and carefully tended gardens, yet within easy travel distance of an urban area of incredible technological wizardry. By then, the means of survival—foodstuffs and clothing and transportation—will all be totally automated and at everyone’s disposal. Our needs will be completely met without the exchange of any currency, yet also without any overindulgence or laziness. “Guided by their intuitions, everyone will know precisely what to do and when to do it, and this will fit harmoniously with the actions of others. No one will consume excessively because we will have let go of the need to possess and to control for security. In the next millennium, life will have become about something else. “According to the Manuscript,” he went on, “our sense of purpose will be satisfied by the thrill of our own evolution—by the elation of receiving intuitions and then watching closely as our destinies unfold. The Ninth depicts a human world where everyone has slowed down and become more alert, ever vigilant for the next meaningful encounter that comes along. We will know that it could occur anywhere: on a path that winds through a forest, for instance, or on a bridge that traverses some canyon. “Can you visualize human encounters that have this much meaning and significance? Think how it would be for two people meeting for the first time. Each will first observe the other’s energy field, exposing any manipulations. Once clear, they will consciously share life stories until, elatedly, messages are discovered. Afterward, each will go forward again on their individual journey, but they will be significantly altered. They will vibrate at a new level and will thereafter touch others in a way not possible before their meeting.

At some point I tried willing things along, mentally focusing on a rapid delivery. That didn't work. I got up to walk around-walking is supposed to help you progress-then quickly got back in the chair. “Argh!!!!!” I groaned. And other stuff. The way I saw it, my baby should have been out by now, shaking hands with his dad and passing around cigars to the nurses. But he apparently had other plans. Labor continued very slowly. Very slowly. We were in that room for eighteen hours. That was a lot of contractions. And a lot of PG versions of curse words, along with the X-rated kind. I may have invented a whole new language. Somewhere around the twelve-hour mark, Chris asked if I’d mind if he changed the music, since our songs had been playing on repeat for what surely seemed like a millennium. “Sure,” I said. He switched to the radio and found a country station. That lasted a song or two. “I’m so sorry,” I told him. “I need Enya. I’m tuned in to it, and it calms me…ohhhhh!” “Okay. No problem,” he said calmly, though not quite cheerfully. I’m sure it was torture. Chris would take short breaks, walking out into the waiting room where both sides of our family were waiting to welcome their first grandchild and nephew. He’d look at his dad and give a little nod. “She’s okay,” he told everyone. Then he’d wipe a little tear away from his eye and walk back to me. Chris said later that watching me give birth was probably the most powerless feeling he’d ever had. He knew I was in pain and yet couldn’t do a whit about it. “It’s like watching your wife get stabbed and not being able to do anything to help.” But when he came into the room with me, his eyes were clear and he seemed confident and even upbeat. It was the thing he did when talking to me from the combat zone, all over again: he wasn’t about to do anything that would make me worry. I, on the other hand, made no secret of what I was feeling. An alien watermelon was ripping my insides out. And it hurt. Whoooh! Suddenly one of the contractions peaked way beyond where the others had been. Bubba had finally decided it was time to say hello to the world. I grabbed the side rail on the bed and struggled to remain conscious, if not exactly calm. Part of me was thinking, You should remember this, Taya. This is natural childbirth. This is beautiful. This is what God intended. You should enjoy this precious moment and remember it always. Another part of me was telling that part to shut the bleep up. I begged for mercy-for painkillers.

You would expect, in a time of uncertainty, a landscape crowded with frauds and con artists peddling positive formulas for happiness, love, sex, good health, and better government. You would expect, too, the most trivial assertions to be attended with much noise and thunder: absent authority, every message must be shouted to have a hope of being heard. Stridency will infect every mode of communication, but will be most disruptive of political rhetoric. Just to keep an audience, politicians and commentators will have to scream louder and take more aggressive positions than the competition.

Stieg Larsson’s three books—known as the Millennium Trilogy or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series—have sold more than eighty million copies, but his greatest achievement wasn’t writing thrillers. He devoted his entire adult life to fighting right-wing extremism. By the early 1990s, he was already warning about the threat posed by the newly started Sweden Democrats party, the very party that upended the status quo by garnering over 17 percent of the vote in the recent 2018 parliamentary elections, plunging parliamentary balance and the selection of a new prime minister into a period of months-long chaos.

Tho was Buffalo Bill Cody? Most people know, at the very least, that he was a hero of the Old West, like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson-one of those larger-than-life figures from which legends are made. Cody himself provided such a linkage to his heroic predecessors in 1888 when he published a book with biographies of Boone, Crockett, Carson-and one of his own autobiographies: Story of the Wild West and Campfire Chats, by Buffalo Bill (Hon. W.F. Cody), a Full and Complete History of the Renowned Pioneer Quartette, Boone, Crockett, Carson and Buffalo Bill. In this context, Cody was often called "the last of the great scouts." Some are also aware that he was an enormously popular showman, creator and star of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a spectacular entertainment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has been estimated that more than a billion words were written by or about William Frederick Cody during his own lifetime, and biographies of him have appeared at irregular intervals ever since. A search of "Buffalo Bill Cody" on amazon.com reveals twenty-seven items. Most of these, however, are children's books, and it is likely that many of them play up the more melodramatic and questionable aspects of his life story; a notable exception is Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire's Buffalo Bill, which is solidly based on fact. Cody has also shown up in movies and television shows, though not in recent years, for whatever else he was, he was never cool or cynical. As his latest biographer, I believe his life has a valuable contribution to make in this new millennium-it provides a sense of who we once were and who we might be again. He was a commanding presence in our American history, a man who helped shape the way we look at that history. It was he, in fact, who created the Wild West, in all its adventure, violence, and romance. Buffalo Bill is important to me as the symbol of the growth of our nation, for his life spanned the settlement of the Great Plains, the Indian Wars, the Gold Rush, the Pony Express, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and the enduring romance of the American frontier-especially the Great Plains. Consider what he witnessed in his lifetime: the invention of the telephone, the transatlantic cable, the automobile, the airplane, and the introduction of modem warfare, with great armies massed against each other, with tanks, armored cars, flame-throwers, and poison gas-a far cry from the days when Cody and the troopers of the Fifth Cavalry rode hell-for-leather across the prairie in pursuit of hostile Indians. Nor, though it is not usually considered

Labor’s dominance applies more broadly still among the million jobs listed by name in the earlier discussion of elite hours—finance-sector professionals, vice presidents at S&P 1500 firms, elite management consultants, partners at highly profitable law firms, and specialist medical doctors. These specifically identified workers collectively constitute a substantial share—fully half—of the 1 percent. The terms of trade under which they work—the economic arrangements that underwrite their incomes—are well known. All these workers contribute effectively no capital to their businesses and therefore again owe their income ultimately to their own industrious work, which is to say to labor. Comprehensive data based on tax returns corroborate that the new economic elite owes its income predominantly not to capital but rather, at root, to selling its own labor. The data themselves can be technical and even abstruse, but a clear message emerges from them nevertheless. The data confirm that the meritocratic rich (unlike their aristocratic predecessors) get their money by working. Even guarded estimates, which defer to tax categories that treat some labor income as capital gains, show a stark increase in the labor component of top incomes. According to this method of calculating, the richest 1 percent received as much as three-quarters of their income from capital at midcentury, and the richest 0.1 percent received up to nine-tenths of their income from capital. These shares then declined steadily over four decades beginning in the early 1960s, reaching bottom in 2000. In that year, both the top 1 percent and the top 0.1 percent received only about half of their incomes from capital (roughly 49 percent and 53 percent, respectively). The capital shares of top incomes then rose again, by about 10 percent, over the first decade of the new millennium, before beginning to fall again at the start of the second decade (when the data series runs out).

The first and better known is Mesoamerica, where half a dozen societies, the Olmec first among them, rose in the centuries before Christ. The second is the Peruvian littoral, home of a much older civilization that has come to light only in the twenty-first century.* Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world’s most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world’s squashes (except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica. Having secured their food supply, Mesoamerican societies turned to intellectual pursuits. In a millennium or less, a comparatively short time, they invented their own writing, astronomy, and mathematics, including the zero.

There is a deep reassurance for the frustrated in witnessing the downfall of the fortunate and the disgrace of the righteous. They see in a general downfall an approach to the brotherhood of all. Chaos, like the grave, is a haven of equality. Their burning conviction that there must be a new life and a new order is fueled by the realization that the old will have to be razed to the ground before the new can be built. Their clamor for a millennium is shot through with a hatred for all that exists, and a craving for the end of the world.

As Cosmic Vibration, all things are one; but when Cosmic Vibration becomes frozen into matter, it becomes many--including man's body, which is a part of this variously divided matter.* (*footnote: Recent advances in what theoretical physicists call 'superstring theory' are leading science toward an understanding of the vibratory nature of creation. Brian Greene, Ph.D., professor of physics at Cornell and Columbia Universities, writes in The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: Vintage Books, 2000): 'During the last thirty years of his life, Albert Einstein sought relentlessly for a so-called unified field theory--a theory capable of describing nature's forces within a single, all-encompassing, coherent framework...Now, at the dawn of the new millennium, proponents of string theory claim that the threads of this elusive unified tapestry finally have been revealed...' 'The theory suggests that the microscopic landscape is suffused with tiny strings whose vibrational patterns orchestrate the evolution of the universe,' Professor Greene writes, and tells us that 'the length of a typical string loop is...about a hundred billion billion (1020) times smaller than an atomic nucleus.')

For security reasons, dictators must control and restrict communications to a minimum. To make their rule legitimate, however, they need prosperity, which can only be attained by the open exchange of information. Choose.

As we enter the new millennium, perhaps it is worth reflecting on the fact that this could be a turning-point in the evolution of civilization, for our technologies have evolved to the point where there is no longer a need for an underclass of slaves, serfs, and wage-slaves. This division of society into a hierarchical order of upper and lower social classes did not exist until civilization was invented. The low level of technological development made this necessary to allow a class of specialists (mathematicians, inventors, poets, scientists, philosophers) the leisure for the creative work that is a prerequisite for the creation, maintenance, and further development of civilization. But slaves and underclasses are no longer needed in order to free up enough leisure time and energy for the elite to do work that is creative rather than alienated. Therefore we no longer need social classes and their concomitant, relative poverty and economic inequality, and their concomitant, violence. If we permit ourselves — and by ourselves I mean all of us, all human beings — to enjoy the fruits of the creative labor that has preceded us, we could create a society that would no longer need violence as the only means of rescuing self-esteem. Implicit in this argument is the idea that money is neither a necessary incentive for creative work, nor the main incentive. The play that infants and children engage in is clearly an inborn, inherent trait of human beings. Play has been called the work that children do, the mans by which they acquire the skills and knowledge that enable them to develop and mature into adults. Play has also been described, when applied to adults, as simply another name for work that one enjoys. We could use the word to refer to unalienated labor, creative work, work that is an end in itself. I believe that the wish and the need to engage in this creative work/play is only conditioned out of human beings by the alienating conditions to which the underclass and even the middle class in our society are subjected.

Cahokia was one big piece in the mosaic of chiefdoms that covered the lower half of the Mississippi and the Southeast at the end of the first millennium A.D.

it has only been possible to unite Europe once or twice in every millennium,

western monotheism during the first millennium a.d., this trend for what historians now call asceticism

traditional Christianity from the beginning universally and consistently forbade all forms of abortion and infanticide. Though New Testament scripture recorded no direct ban on the practices, the Church’s broader tradition did. It appeared in innumerable statements beginning as early as the second-century Didache. There was no ambiguity about the position of early Christians on this issue. Hippolytus, Athenagoras, Minucius Felix, and of course the moral firebrand Tertullian all provided an explicit witness to the Church’s tradition.

All of which is to say that, by the mid-fourth millennium bce,

But it was not until she started on Dimensions in Mathematics that a whole new world opened to her. Mathematics was actually a logical puzzle with endless variations—riddles that could be solved. The trick was not to solve arithmetical problems. Five times five would always be twenty-five. The trick was to understand combinations of the various rules that made it possible to solve any mathematical problem whatsoever.

In the new millennium, there is All Lives Matter and the more absurd Blue Lives Matter, anti-black counter-slogans that nonetheless cannot escape the rhetorical world black people made. Indeed, as scholars P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods have observed, “The meme has become a political Rorschach producing a cornucopia of identitarian hashtags . . . that, at the end of the day, effortlessly obscures or subsumes blackness’s grammar of suffering.

It should not trouble us that the New Testament for the most part does not foresee the millennial kingdom any more than the fact that the Old Testament does not clearly predict the Church Age.

We have argued above that Christ began his Messianic reign at his resurrection-ascension; but his present reign is invisible, unseen and unrecognized by the world, visible only to the eye of faith. The order of the Age to Come will involve a new heaven and a new earth, and will be so different from the present order that we can speak of it as beyond history

But he refuses to understand that the Old Testament is not complete apart from the New Testament and that the New Testament cannot be comprehended apart from the Old Testament.

Dispensationalism forms its eschatology by a literal interpretation of the Old Testament and then fits the New Testament into it. A nondispensational eschatology forms its theology from the explicit teaching of the New Testament

The dispensationalist interprets the New Testament in the light of the Old, whereas the nondispensationalist, it seems, comes to the New Testament with a system of interpretation which is not derived from the Old Testament and superimposes this upon the New Testament.

practical value "to enable God's people to live in the present in light of the future (2 Pet. 1:19)" (p. 39). Nowhere in any formal sense does the New Testament expound the theology of the millennium. But men are made aware of the fact that there is a new order of revelation and control during the kingdom.

There is no hint of coming back to the earth before the time of the new heaven and the new earth of the eternal state. Our natural bodies cannot enter the heavenly kingdom, and we may be sure that the resurrection bodies of the saints would be equally out of place if brought back to live again in this environment.

In accordance with this the entire system of Judaism has been abrogated, brought to an end and abolished. And in its place the New Covenant has become the authoritative and official instrument for God's dealings with his people, the church.

I agree that the church is often spoken of in the New Testament as spiritual Israel and that the basic dispensationalist principle of an absolute distinction between Israel and the church, involving two distinct purposes of God and two distinct peoples of God, has no biblical warrant.

But I do not agree that what is described in chapter 20 necessarily follows chronologically what is described in chapter 19, any more than what is described in chapter 12 (the birth of the man-child) follows chronologically what is described in the last verses of chapter 11 (the judging of the dead and the giving of rewards to the saints). The reasons why I believe that Revelation 20:1 takes us back to the beginning of the New Testament era are given in my essay, pages 156-60.

I have tried to show that the binding of Satan in Revelation 20:1-3 can be understood to mean that Satan cannot prevent the spread of the gospel during the present age, that he cannot gather Christ's enemies together to attack the church, and that this binding takes place during the entire era of the New Testament church (see pp.

Human performance anomalies arising from extremely rare genetic variations will be exploited for strategic and tactical purposes. Capabilities for a New Millennium, U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency classified document, serial no. 55-89-144, p. 87.

Twenty years later, meth is all over the news, the most talked about illegal substance since crack cocaine. The devil drug of the new millennium.

Politicians love to portray methamphetamine as the crack cocaine of the new millennium.

hate to say this but you could become the Pablo Escobar of the new millennium.

Put it to the test; which would cause the greater outcry, removing the American flag from your church sanctuary or removing the cross?

Isn't it about time we got serious about what we're willing to believe concerning God, Heaven/Hell, and the meaning of life. There are way too many versions of the truth for everybody to be right.

They—those experts who seem to know everything—say that online dating is the biggest change to the mating ritual in a millennium. Once upon a time, your dating pool was limited to a small group of say fifty-to-a-hundred-plus people. It was an intimate, if somewhat shallow pool—your neighborhood, town, school, church. The first big change was the rise of agriculture and the growth of cities and towns. The pool got bigger, but ways to connect remained somewhat consistent in that you had to meet someone somewhere, or through someone else you know. Close tie connections—family, friends, geography. Then, enter the internet and the rise of dating websites, and that pool grew to essentially everyone else in the world looking for—whatever. Sex. Love. The fulfillment of whatever other appetite, need, desire. Some might view this is as a positive thing—this new era of choice, of plenty. But the truth is that these loose tie connections are almost never lasting. There’s no social obligation to treat people well. You’re not going to find yourself sitting in the church pew next your Torch date’s grandmother on Sunday. So, when you’re done with someone, you can potentially discard him, and realistically expect to never see him or anyone he knows again.

The First Millennium, 1000–323 bce

by the first millennium bce, Aramaic had largely replaced Akkadian in Mesopotamia and Hurrian in Syria

By this time, the early second millennium bce, Ashur extended over about 40 hectares (about 100 acres)

Religions have held back the development of consciousness in civilizations throughout history. Thus, over time, humanity has been condemned to follow the rules of a game that has only benefited governmental, financial, political and religious systems. However, the new generations are breaking with this gap, freeing themselves from the chains and shackles inherited from their ancestors. In short, they are waking up and opening their eyes to take the reins of the new millennium. It will not be an easy task, as the ancient group still submits to non-human governments that decide the future of our civilization. No one can predict what will happen. But believe me when I say that this is only the beginning and that, without suffering, there will be no reward... ever!" From the book The Devil's Writer (A Novel for God).

Maya began to believe what other girls thought about her. She was, and this was the worst thing a girl can be in a new millennium: awkward.

Maya began to believe what other girls thought about her. She was, and this was the worst thing a girl can be in a new millennium: awkward.

At the start of the millennium, the United Stated held a near monopoly on military technology and might. It commanded the world’s reserve currency and with it, was able to control the assets of much of the industrial world. Following the occupation of the oil fields of Iraq, one power, the United States, now commanded a near monopoly on future energy resources. The Pentagon had a term for it– ‘full spectrum dominance.’ It meant that the U.S. should control military, economic and political developments, everywhere. They appeared to be well along in the project.

The average price of a slave remained relatively constant over the next millennium, at about 17 gold coins.

Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many con- sider to be the vitality of the times—noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring— belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty cars.

One may ask what makes Pai Hsien-yung's fiction still so compelling in the new millennium. I suggest that it is because instead of being a conservative, Pai impresses as a radical, one who relentlessly campaigns for the power of qing - feeling, sentience, love, affect - via a vis human adversities from national vicissitudes or erotic frustrations, and from fanaticism to the doom of life and death. "Qing is of source unknown, yet it grows ever deeper. The living may die of it, by its power the dead live again," wrote Tang Xianzu (1550-1616), the perennial spokesperson of the "cult of qing.

Can one unearth above-average fund managers, who can consistently or over time beat the market? Once again, the academic research is gloomy for the investment industry. Using the database first started by Jim Lorie’s Center for Research in Security Prices, S&P Dow Jones Indices publishes a semiannual “persistence scorecard” on how often top-performing fund managers keep excelling. The results are grim reading, with less than 3 percent of top-performing equity funds remaining in the top after five years. In fact, being a top performer is more likely to presage a slump than a sustained run.18 As a result, as Fernando’s defenestration highlighted, the hurdle to retain the faith of investors keeps getting higher, even for fund managers who do well.* In the 1990s, the top six deciles of US equities-focused mutual funds enjoyed investor inflows, according to Morgan Stanley.19 In the first decade of the new millennium, only the top three deciles did so, and in the 2010–20 period, only the top 10 percent of funds have managed to avoid outflows, and gathered assets at a far slower pace than they would have in the past.

I worked in information technology during Y2K and vividly remember watching my servers and systems quietly do nothing as the clock ticked gently into the new millennium.