Political Mandate Quotes

Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same... Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social dis-ease.

Many well-meaning Dutch people have told me in all earnestness that nothing in Islamic culture incites abuse of women, that this is just a terrible misunderstanding. Men all over the world beat their women, I am constantly informed. In reality, these Westerners are the ones who misunderstand Islam. The Quaran mandates these punishments. It gives a legitimate basis for abuse, so that the perpetrators feel no shame and are not hounded by their conscience of their community. I wanted my art exhibit to make it difficult for people to look away from this problem. I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that "Islam is peace and tolerance.

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

Muhammad introduced the concept of such Glorious and Omnipotent God in Whose eyes all worldly systems are pieces of straw. Islamic equality of mankind is no fiction as it is in Christianity. No human mind has ever thought of such total freedom as established by Muhammad.

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression...

Muhammad adhered meticulously to the charter he forged for Medina, which - grounded as it was in the Quranic injunction, "Let there be no compulsion in religion" (2:256) - is arguably the first mandate for religious tolerance in human history.

[P]eople only make decisions based on what they know. You can have everyone in the country vote freely and democratically and still come up with the wrong answer - if the information they base that decision on is wrong. People don't want the truth [when] it is complicated. They don't want to spend years debating an issue. They want it homogenized, sanitized, and above all, simplified into terms they can understand...Governments are often criticized for moving slowly, but that deliberateness, it turns out, is their strength. They take time to think through complex problems before they act. People, however, are different. People react first from the gut and then from the head...give that knee-jerk reflex real power to make its overwhelming will known as a national mandate instantly and you can cause a political riot. Combine these sins - simplification of information and instant, visceral democratic mandates - and you lose the ability to cool down. There is no longer deliberation time between events that may or may not be true and our reaction to them. Policy becomes instinct rather than thought.

Government in our democracy, state and national, must be neutral in matters of religious theory, doctrine, and practice. It may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of no-religion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another or even against the militant opposite. The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion. [Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97, 1968.]

Being radical is a choice, and it takes work. A person with a marginalized identity can engage in conservative, oppressive political work, and activists, organizers, and intellectuals living under capitalism, colonialism, anti-Black racism, and patriarchy require years of unlearning or decolonization.

Neither the great political and financial power structures of the world, nor the specialization-blinded professionals, nor the population in general realize that...it is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on earth at a “higher standard of living than any have ever known”. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival. War is obsolete.4 -R. Buckminster Fuller

Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our designed landscapes and even the managed ones -- the national parks, forests, refuges, recreation areas, and so on.

But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

A politics built around getting and spending money is sexier than a politics built around politics. And so, at a time of unprecedented freedom and power for women, at a time when we were more poised than ever to understand our lives politically, we got, instead of expanded reproductive protections and equal pay and federally mandated family leave and subsidized childcare and a higher minimum wage, the sort of self-congratulatory empowerment feminism that corporations can get behind. The kind that comes with merchandise: mugs that said 'male tears'; T-shirts that said 'feminist as fuck.

In short, the explosion in sub-prime lending was a thoroughly top–down, political project, mandated by Congress, implemented by government-sponsored enterprises, enforced by the law, encouraged by the president and monitored by pressure groups.

Christians are commanded to pray for those in political leadership, but they have no biblical mandate to use the Christian ministry or the cause of Christ to endorse or campaign for any politician. They are entitled to their own views and opinions, but they are not entitled to equate those views and opinions with Christian dogma.

Political mandates matter, but delivering on promises requires institutions. And it takes individuals to build those institutions, so expertise matters, as does the system’s openness to lateral induction of talent. For an idea to succeed, no matter how worthy on its own, all these elements must come together to form a unique constellation.

In 1904 Roosevelt pronounced what has come to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. It mandated that any nation engaged in “chronic wrong-doing”—that is, did anything to threaten perceived US economic or political interests—would be disciplined militarily by the United States, which was to serve as an “international police power.”8

Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call ‘the mandate of heaven’, but life for the peasant changes little.

The political imperative to use the Mandate for Palestine as a means to resolve the Jewish refugee crisis overrode the questions of law.

The values of solidarity, collectivism, and internationalism are not so much desirable as they are actually mandated by nature and reality itself.

Political correctness has thrown a veil of silence over our important discussions. Rather than asking those with whom we disagree to clearly state their case, we set up rules of political correctness that mandate that their perspective must be the same as ours. We then demonize those with whom we disagree and as a result fail to reach any consensus that might solve our problems.

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

Are the disjointed efforts of opinions, biases, cultural mandates, politically-correct notions, and all things vogue and trendy an effort to write ourselves sweeping permission to justify sweeping behaviors that will in time sweep us away?

Jesus was not just a moralist whose teachings had some political implications; he was not primarily a teacher of spirituality whose public ministry unfortunately was seen in a political light; he was not just a sacrificial lamb preparing for his immolation, or a God-Man whose divine status calls us to disregard his humanity. Jesus was, in his divinely mandated (i.e., promised, anointed, messianic) prophethood, priesthood, and kingship, the bearer of a new possibility of human, social, and therefore political relationships.

In our tribunal, we look only at personal criminal responsibility in a very tightly defined, narrow way and we demand proof beyond a resonable doubt about the involvement of the individual. We do no have a mandate to establish the moral responsibility of those who saw things happen and did nothing, including people who might have had the capacity to stop the process and did nothing. But we have to be careful in thinking that just because we focus on individual criminal guilt we therefore absolve the community. The old distinctions are too simplistic when we move up the chain of command and witness the merging of the collectivity into the personae of these charismatic political and military leaders.' -Louise Arbour, Chief Prosecutor for International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

An interesting example is found in an article by Dr. Jennifer Roback titled “The Political Economy of Segregation: The Case of Segregated Streetcars,” in the Journal of Economic History (1986). During the late 1800s, private streetcar companies in Augusta, Houston, Jacksonville, Mobile, Montgomery, and Memphis were not segregated, but by the early 1900s, they were. Why? City ordinances forced them to segregate black and white passengers. Numerous Jim Crow laws ruled the day throughout the South mandating segregation in public accommodations.

As you rusticate, you'll encounter beauty and ugliness, peace and danger. But it will be real and of the earth. I'm an optimistic person, but deep inside all optimists, there's a bound-and-gagged pessimist sitting in the basement, struggling to get out. I believe if we don't deconstruct our lives and learn to be more earthbound and earth-friendly and sustainable, and try to live with all God's creatures, even if they're not big-eyed and behind bars in a zoo, or on our screen savers, then sooner than expected we'll be forced to, through political mandate or economics or from overuse of our resources.

In short, the explosion in sub-prime lending was a thoroughly top–down, political project, mandated by Congress, implemented by government-sponsored enterprises, enforced by the law, encouraged by the president and monitored by pressure groups. Remember this when you hear people blame the free market for the excesses of the sub-prime bubble.

In every known culture, humans experience joy, sadness, disgust, anger, fear, and surprise. In every known culture, these emotions are indicated by the same facial expressions. This empirical observation, which is predicted and mandated by the structural logic of evolution, is known as the psychic unity of mankind. (I prefer the term “psychological unity of humankind,” but I didn’t invent it.)

George W. Bush’s legacy will always be defined by the events of September 11, 2001, which provided him with something of a delayed mandate. Without 9/11, there would have been no unconstitutional Patriot Act, no Homeland Security Department, no decade-long occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and no open-ended “war on terror.” As such, it is important to look closely at exactly what really happened on 9/11/2001.

Ants and neurons are democracies, that old political saw the Mandate works so hard to discredit. You have different groundswells of popular opinion gathering momentum, and picking up new adherents like a snowball, until one urge or impulse reaches a critical mass, after which the whole—the nest, the brain—adopts that tabled motion wholeheartedly. And here’s where the hive aspect comes in, because those elements which were rooting for the alternatives give in with good grace and wave flags for the winner. There’s no holdout of political grousers claiming someone else won the election. The whole institution acts in unison the moment that threshold is crossed. And that’s us. No demagogues having to harangue the crowd, no self-interested cult leader talking everyone into servitude. Just a group acting together, for everyone’s best benefit.

The British treated the Palestinians with the same contemptuous condescension they lavished on other subject peoples from Hong Kong to Jamaica. Their officials monopolized the top offices in the Mandate government and excluded qualified Arabs;46 they censored the newspapers, banned political activity when it discomfited them, and generally ran as parsimonious an administration as was possible in light of their commitments.

These studies showed that delaying the mask mandates and bar closures was associated with increased cases. On May 20th, we sent analysis to every governor and the mayor of every major city showing the significant benefit of early action. Too few changed their approaches but facing a rising sea of local doubters even many elected officials who didn't make changes were silently grateful for someone publicly pushing them to do the right things.

In September 2021, in a statement justifying COVID vaccine mandates to school children, Dr. Fauci dreamily recounted his own grade school measles and mumps vaccines—an unlikely memory, since those vaccines weren’t available until 1963 and 1967, and Dr. Fauci attended grade school in the 1940s.19 Dr. Fauci’s little perjuries about masks, measles, mumps, herd immunity, and natural immunity attest to his dismaying willingness to manipulate facts to serve a political agenda.

A succession of murders clears the field of most of the significant impediments, actual or potential, to Richard’s seizing power. But it is striking that Shakespeare does not envisage the tyrant’s climactic accession to the throne as the direct result of violence. Instead, it is the consequence of an election. To solicit a popular mandate, Richard conducts a political campaign, complete with a fraudulent display of religious piety, the slandering of opponents, and a grossly exaggerated threat to national security. Why

One could argue that people can only teach what they know. Or, looking at it from a different perspective, at some point we all lack knowledge about something until we choose or are forced to learn. Anyone committed to collective liberation must acknowledge ignorance and take up the work of comprehensive political education. For example, I have been out of my depth on disability justice and climate change, to name two topics, and so I follow the lead of people who are more knowledgeable. But this doesn’t let me off the hook: I still need to seek out knowledge on my own about these issues.

We may laugh now at the naiveté of the idea that nationalisation of industries actually benefits anybody. But it is instructive how the themes that Mrs Gandhi introduced to Indian politics in 1977 are still dominant in our political discourse. She painted the Syndicate as being in the grips of crony capitalists—and that is an idea that every party from the Left to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) recycles again and again. She spoke of ending an era of privilege, of breaking up cosy cartels and of sharing the national wealth. The very same ideas were to re-appear in one form or the other in the 2014 election.

[W]e can't attack hard enough those wretched criminals who would prefer to make religion provide political, or rather business, services for them. The impudent liars who do this profess their faith before the whole world in stentorian tones, so that all sinners may hear--not that they are ready to die for it, but rather that they may live all the better. They are ready to sell their faith for a single political swindle. For ten parliamentary mandates, they would ally themselves with the Marxists, who are the mortal foes of all religion. And for a seat in the cabinet, they would enter into marriage with the devil--if the latter hadn't still retained some traces of decency.

But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

In response to this direct challenge to British authority, the Mandate authorities deported virtually the entire Palestinian nationalist leadership, including the mayor of Jerusalem, Dr. Husayn al-Khalidi, my uncle. With four others (he and another two were members of the AHC) he was sent to the Seychelles Islands, an isolated location in the Indian Ocean that the British Empire frequently chose for exiling nationalist opponents.61 The men were held in a heavily guarded compound for sixteen months, deprived of visitors and outside contact. Their fellow prisoners in the Seychelles included political leaders from Aden in Yemen and Zanzibar. Other Palestinian leaders were exiled to Kenya or South Africa,

The rule through pandemic medical and emergency decrees is nothing more than a coup d’état on a worldwide scale and it therefore follows the same patterns, not necessarily in the same order, observed in banana republics: First, pointing to a threat, lockdown of the borders, and restrictions of the means of transportation; checked. Second, full control of the media; checked. Third, declaration of a state of emergency and deployment of forces on the ground; checked. Fourth, restrictions of assembly and civil rights; checked. Fifth, repressive measure for those not cooperating; checked. Sixth, changes to the figures and political scene as some go away and old ones come back; checked. Seventh, attempt to return to normalcy; checked. - On Tyranny Through Emergency Decrees

The term may have been coined in 1845, but the seeds of Manifest Destiny arrived with Christopher Columbus when he stumbled onto the shores of North America—the self-styled “New World.” Since then, the death grip of its ideology has been the operating principle of the American Empire—a fervent, fanatical, at times religious mandate to carry out economic and geo-political acts that will always benefit the chosen few, which, in today’s parlance is the “one percent.” In fact, this Draconian gospel of exceptionalism has been the all-powerful dogma fueling American imperialism and free-market fundamentalism at the core of U.S. armed atrocities—both domestic and foreign. Writer and cabinetmaker Charles Sullivan offers this allegory: “It is the unquestioned religion of America that also bears a strange resemblance to the ideology of the cancer cell.

The fixation with Israel/Palestine does sometimes return, but the magnitude of what is going on elsewhere has finally enabled at least some observers to understand that the problems of the region are not down to the existence of Israel. That was a lie peddled by the Arab dictators as they sought to deflect attention from their own brutality, and it was bought by many people across the area and the dictators’ useful idiots in the West. Nevertheless the Israeli/Palestinian joint tragedy continues, and such is the obsession with this tiny piece of land that it may again come to be considered by some to be the most pressing conflict in the world. The Ottomans had regarded the area west of the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Coast as a part of the region of Syria. They called it Filistina. After the First World War, under the British Mandate this became Palestine.

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own

The political forces arrayed on the side of capital have always wanted to treat labor as a commodity, driving down costs and demanding the freedom to move production to countries with the lowest wages. They have tried to prevent workers from forming unions and look for opportunities to break unions once they are formed. They have also tried to prevent governments from regulating working hours and conditions, imposing minimum wages or mandating family leave. On the other side, the workers have organized into unions, braving numerous bloody confrontations, in order to be able to bargain collectively for better wages and working conditions, and over the years have won a number of important concessions, such as laws that prohibit child labor and provide for a regulated work week, safer working conditions and so on. The heyday of this era was in the 1950s, when an assembly-line autoworker in Detroit was able to earn enough to afford a house and a car, raise a family and then retire comfortably. That era is now over.

Democrats are so keen on these “reforms,” why don’t they pursue them through the normal political channels? Why don’t the Democrats campaign to change the immigration laws? Go ahead and pass laws that allow open borders. Go ahead and limit or eliminate enforcement. Go ahead and mandate health coverage for illegals and all of Mexico, if you want to go that far. If it’s “democratic socialism” they are trying to impose, then do it through the democratic process. Yet interestingly the Democratic left seems to have no interest in this. Rather, they are in open defiance of existing laws. They portray enforcement of those laws, in a difficult atmosphere where they are flagrantly violated, as hateful, racist and Nazi-like betrayals of basic human decency. While exposing the holding facilities as overcrowded and understaffed, they work with activists in Central American countries to further overwhelm those facilities, apparently seeking the chaos that makes effective administration of the immigration laws more difficult so that more illegals get through.

Working class bodies (like any other) will only flourish as long as there is a sense of purpose in participating in them. If there is no real discussion, if everything of significance is decided in advance elsewhere, the organ atrophies and the participants vote with their feet. That kind of apathy and passivity is what capitalist society relies upon. Demanding that we put a cross on a piece of paper, to indicate our trust in representatives who can do what they like for five years, is the sole political duty of the “citizen”. Meanwhile the so-called democratic state represents only the interests of the propertied classes. Socialist society is different. It is not just about dispossessing the wealthy of their ownership of the means of production, even if abolishing both the law of value and exploitation are bedrocks on which a new mode of production must arise. Socialism demands the active participation of all producers in the decisions that affect their lives. Its democracy is direct and based on the ability to recall delegates if they do not fulfil the mandate they were given by the collectivity.

is dynamic. “Experts” frequently differ on scientific questions and their opinions can vary in accordance with and demands of politics, power, and financial self-interest. Nearly every lawsuit I have ever litigated pitted highly credentialed experts from opposite sides against each other, with all of them swearing under oath to diametrically antithetical positions based on the same set of facts. Telling people to “trust the experts” is either naive or manipulative—or both. All of Dr. Fauci’s intrusive mandates and his deceptive use of data tended to stoke fear and amplify public desperation for the anticipated arrival of vaccines that would transfer billions of dollars from taxpayers to pharmaceutical executives and shareholders. Some of America’s most accomplished scientists, and the physicians leading the battle against COVID in the trenches, came to believe that Anthony Fauci’s do-or-die obsession with novel mRNA vaccines—and Gilead’s expensive patented antiviral, remdesivir—prompted him to ignore or even suppress effective early treatments, causing hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths while also prolonging the pandemic

Dissent from liberal orthodoxy is cast as racism, misogyny, bigotry, phobia, and, as we’ve seen, even violence. If you criticize the lack of due process for male college students accused of rape, you are a “rape apologist.” End of conversation. After all, who wants to listen to a rape lover? People who are anti–abortion rights don’t care about the unborn; they are misogynists who want to control women. Those who oppose same-sex marriage don’t have rational, traditional views about marriage that deserve respect or debate; they are bigots and homophobes. When conservatives opposed the Affordable Care Act’s “contraception mandate” it wasn’t due to a differing philosophy about the role of government. No, they were waging a “War on Women.” With no sense of irony or shame, the illiberal left will engage in racist, sexist, misogynist, and homophobic attacks of their own in an effort to delegitimize people who dissent from the “already decided” worldview. Non-white conservatives are called sellouts and race traitors. Conservative women are treated as dim-witted, self-loathing puppets of the patriarchy, or nefarious gender traitors. Men who express the wrong political or ideological view are demonized as hostile interlopers into the public debate. The illiberal left sees its bullying and squelching of free speech as a righteous act. This

The depression which spread over the world like a great conflagration toward the end of 1929 gave Adolf Hitler his opportunity, and he made the most of it. Like most great revolutionaries he could thrive only in evil times, at first when the masses were unemployed, hungry and desperate, and later when they were intoxicated by war. Yet in one respect he was unique among history’s revolutionaries: He intended to make his revolution after achieving political power. There was to be no revolution to gain control of the State. That goal was to be reached by mandate of the voters or by the consent of the rulers of the nation—in short, by constitutional means. To get the votes Hitler had only to take advantage of the times, which once more, as the Thirties began, saw the German people plunged into despair; to obtain the support of those in power he had to convince them that only he could rescue Germany from its disastrous predicament. In the turbulent years from 1930 to 1933 the shrewd and daring Nazi leader set out with renewed energy to obtain these twin objectives. In retrospect it can be seen that events themselves and the weakness and confusion of the handful of men who were bound by their oath to loyally defend the democratic Republic which they governed played into Hitler’s hands. But this was by no means foreseeable at the beginning of 1930.

city builders and rebuilders (Jerusalem) and city-loving exiles (Babylon). In New Testament times, the people of God become city missionaries (indeed, New Testament writings contain few glimpses of nonurban Christianity). Finally, when God’s future arrives in the form of a city, his people can finally be fully at home. The fallen nature of the city — the warping of its potential due to the power of sin — is finally overcome and resolved; the cultural mandate is complete; the capacities of city life are freed in the end to serve God. All of God’s people serve him in his holy city. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REFLECTION 1. Keller writes, “The church should continue to relate to the human cities of our time, not as the people of God did under Abraham, Moses, or David, but as they did during the time of the exile.” In what ways is the situation of the Christian church different from that of the exiles in Babylon? In what ways is it similar? How does this affect the mission of the church today? 2. From Acts 17 through the end of the book of Acts, Paul has strategically traveled to the intellectual (Athens), commercial (Corinth), religious (Ephesus), and political (Rome) centers of the Roman world. What are the centers of power and influence in your own local context? How is your church seeking to strategically reach these different centers of cultural influence? 3. Keller writes, “Then, as now, the cities were filled with the poor, and urban Christians’ commitment to the poor was visible and striking.” Do you believe this is still true of the Christian church? If so, give an example. If not, how can this legacy be recaptured? 4. Keller writes, “Gardening (the original human vocation) is a paradigm for cultural development. A gardener neither leaves the ground as is, nor does he destroy it. Instead, he rearranges it to produce food and plants for human life. He cultivates it. (The words culture and cultivate come from the same root.) Every vocation is in some way a response to, and an extension of, the primal,

A daunting example of the impact that the loose talk and heavy rhetoric of the Sixties had on policy can be seen in the way the black family—a time-bomb ticking ominously, and exploding with daily detonations—got pushed off the political agenda. While Carmichael, Huey Newton and others were launching a revolutionary front against the system, the Johnson administration was contemplating a commitment to use the power of the federal government to end the economic and social inequalities that still plagued American blacks. A presidential task force under Daniel Patrick Moynihan was given a mandate to identify the obstacles preventing blacks from seizing opportunities that had been grasped by other minority groups in the previous 50 years of American history. At about the same time as the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Moynihan published findings that emphasized the central importance of family in shaping an individual life and noted with alarm that 21 percent of black families were headed by single women. “[The] one unmistakable lesson in American history,” he warned, is that a country that allows “a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder—most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure—that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable.” Moynihan proposed that the government confront this problem as a priority; but his conclusions were bitterly attacked by black radicals and white liberals, who joined in an alliance of anger and self-flagellation and quickly closed the window of opportunity Moynihan had opened. They condemned his report as racist not only in its conclusions but also in its conception; e.g., it had failed to stress the evils of the “capitalistic system.” This rejectionist coalition did not want a program for social change so much as a confession of guilt. For them the only “non-racist” gesture the president could make would be acceptance of their demand for $400 million in “reparations” for 400 years of slavery. The White House retreated before this onslaught and took the black family off the agenda.

Power is seeping away from autocrats and single-party systems whether they embrace reform or not. It is spreading from large and long-established political parties to small ones with narrow agendas or niche constituencies. Even within parties, party bosses who make decisions, pick candidates, and hammer out platforms behind closed doors are giving way to insurgents and outsiders—to new politicians who haven’t risen up in the party machine, who never bothered to kiss the ring. People entirely outside the party structure—charismatic individuals, some with wealthy backers from outside the political class, others simply catching a wave of support thanks to new messaging and mobilization tools that don’t require parties—are blazing a new path to political power. Whatever path they followed to get there, politicians in government are finding that their tenure is getting shorter and their power to shape policy is decaying. Politics was always the art of the compromise, but now politics is downright frustrating—sometimes it feels like the art of nothing at all. Gridlock is more common at every level of decision-making in the political system, in all areas of government, and in most countries. Coalitions collapse, elections take place more often, and “mandates” prove ever more elusive. Decentralization and devolution are creating new legislative and executive bodies. In turn, more politicians and elected or appointed officials are emerging from these stronger municipalities and regional assemblies, eating into the power of top politicians in national capitals. Even the judicial branch is contributing: judges are getting friskier and more likely to investigate political leaders, block or reverse their actions, or drag them into corruption inquiries that divert them from passing laws and making policy. Winning an election may still be one of life’s great thrills, but the afterglow is diminishing. Even being at the top of an authoritarian government is no longer as safe and powerful a perch as it once was. As Professor Minxin Pei, one of the world’s most respected experts on China, told me: “The members of the politburo now openly talk about the old good times when their predecessors at the top of the Chinese Communist Party did not have to worry about bloggers, hackers, transnational criminals, rogue provincial leaders or activists that stage 180,000 public protests each year. When challengers appeared, the old leaders had more power to deal with them. Today’s leaders are still very powerful but not as much as those of a few decades back and their powers are constantly declining.”3

It was patently obvious, then, that thwarting the Yucca Mountain project by stubborn noncompliance was “simply flouting the law.” The court took pains to reiterate that “the President and federal agencies may not ignore statutory mandates or prohibitions merely because of policy disagreement with Congress.

The president and his subordinates have violated the First Amendment’s guarantees of religious liberty and freedom of conscience. The president and his subordinates at the Department of Health and Human Services have promulgated a regulatory mandate, under the PPACA, requiring that the insurance policies that Americans are now compelled to purchase must cover FDA-approved forms of contraception, including abortifacients.

Here is a foundation for understanding today what was clear to only a few fifty years earlier. Now we can see how the state-mandated racial segregation that was the subject of the Brown litigation did not suddenly appear, as a former student, Nirej Sekhorn, put it, like a bad weed in an otherwise-beautiful racial garden, a weed the Court sought to eradicate with a single swing of its judicial hoe. It illustrates as well how segregation provided whites with a sense of belonging based on neither economic nor political well-being, but simply on an identification with the ruling class determined by race and a state-supported and subsidized belief that, as whites, they were superior to blacks.

Its eventual goals include the abolition of all drug laws (not just those against currently illegal narcotics and hallucinogens, but an end to prescription laws and the Food and Drug Administration as well), the abolition of the income tax, the abolition of all regulation of private sexual relations (from marriage to prostitution and everything in between), an end to public ownership and regulation of the airwaves, an end to overseas military bases and all warmaking not in direct defense of the homeland, an end to the welfare state, and an end to any legal restrictions whatsoever on speech and expression. Libertarians’ policy prescriptions are based on a simple idea with very complicated repercussions: Government, if it has any purpose at all (and many libertarians doubt it does), should be restricted to the protection of its citizens’ persons and property against direct violence and theft. In their eyes, most modern government functions, if done by private individuals, would be seen as violence and theft. Libertarians’ economic reasoning leads them to the conclusion that, left to their own devices, a free people would spontaneously develop the institutions necessary for a healthy and wealthy culture. They think that state interference in the economy, whether through taxing or regulation, makes us all poorer rather than richer. Their ideas and policy prescriptions seem unbelievably radical in the current political context. But in many ways, libertarians argue, the United States was founded on libertarian principles. The Constitution defined a role for the federal government much smaller than what it practices today, and it restricted government to a limited set of mandated powers.

Corporate investors, who have poured billions into the business of mass incarceration, expect long-term returns. And they will get them. It is their lobbyists who write the draconian laws that demand absurdly long sentences, deny paroles, determine immigrant detention laws, and impose minimum-sentence and Three-Strikes laws, which mandate life sentences after three felony convictions. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest owner of for-profit prisons and immigration detention facilities in the country, earned $1.7 billion in revenues and collected $300 million in profits in 2013.50 CCA holds an average of 81,384 inmates in its facilities on any one day.51 Aramark Holdings Corp., a Philadelphia-based company that contracts through Aramark Correctional Services, provides food for six hundred correctional institutions across the United States.52 Goldman Sachs and other investors acquired it in 2007 for $8.3 billion.53 The three top for-profit prison corporations spent an estimated $45 million over a recent ten-year period for lobbying to keep the prison business flush.54 The resource center In the Public Interest documented in its report “Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’ Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations” that private prison companies often sign state contracts that guarantee prison occupancy rates of 90 percent.55 If states fail to meet the quota they have to pay the corporations for the empty beds. CCA in 2011 gave $710,300 in political contributions to candidates for federal or state office, political parties, and so-called 527 groups (PACs and super PACs), the American Civil Liberties Union reported.56 The corporation also spent $1.07 million lobbying federal officials plus undisclosed sums to lobby state officials.57 The GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest for-profit prison management companies, donated $250,000 to Donald Trump in 2017.58 The United States, from 1970 to 2005, increased its prison population by about 700 percent, the ACLU reported.59 Private prisons account for nearly all newly built prisons.60 And nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to for-profit prisons, according to Detention Watch Network.61

Evropa je bila zabrinuta za kršenje i ugrožavanje dva osnovna principa na kojima egzistira punih 50 god i bez kojih nema trajnog mira kako na regionalnom tako i na svjetskom nivou. To su principi nepromjenjivosti granica i princip zaštite ljudskih prava. Zbog toga i naprijed navedenog mnoge zemlje, ne samo u Evropi već i u svijetu stale, su na stranu BiH uvjerene da su istovremeno stale na stranu Povelje UN i općeg medjunarodnog prava. Angažovanje SAD proporcionalno je raslo širenjem svijesti o etn čišćenju i strahotama razaranja u BiH kao i pritiskom sopstvenog javnog mnijenja koje je tražilo da se konačno nešto odlučnije poduzme. BiH i rješavanje krize u njoj bila je izuzetna prilika da se održi i poveća prestiž SAD nakon zaljevskog rata ne samo u SAD već i svijetu. Kada je situacija izgledala najbeznadežnija SAD su stavile svoj prestiž na kocku sa serijom visokorizičnih akcija počevši od sveobuhvatnog diplomatskog napora u avg, preko teškog bombardovanja srpskih položaja od strane NATO u sept, obustave vatre u okt, Daytona u nov, pa do rasporeda 20.000 američkih trupa u BiH u dec. Zahvaljujući ovakvom diplomatskom i vojnom angažovanju medj zajednice i uspjesima patriota BiH na frontu, rat je bio gotov - završen. NATO je prvi put u historiji poslao svoje snage izvan svog područja, a ruske trupe, pod amer zapovjedniptvom, bile su rasporedjene zajedno sa sanagama NATO-a. Dayton i BiH i aktivnosti u njoj stavili su SAD u epicentar svjetskih zbivanja. BiH je važna za SAD zbog činjenice da je svojevrstan test spremnosti djelovanja van NATO zone. Iskustva stečena u BiH biće značajna za rješavanje kriza u budućnosti, što je primjer Kosova i potvrdio. Ne treba zaboraviti činjenicu da se Daytonskim sporazumom sa stanovišta medjunarodnog prava kao ugovorne trave pojavljuju strane RBiH, RH i SRJ sa punim medj pravnim subjektivitetom. Sa BiH, njenim susjedom Kosovom, počeo je proces evropeizacije Balkana. Treba imati u vidu činjenicu da diplomatske akcije mogu biti od koristi ako iza njih stoji stvarna snaga odnosno moć. Vojno prisustvo medj zajednice u BiH rezultat je polit odluka, koje su produkt polit ciljeva glavnih činilaca u medj odnosima. Donošenjem poznate Rezolucije 1031 od 15.12.1995. NATO je dobio mandat da implementira vojne aspekte Mirovnog sporazuma za BiH.

A succession of murders clears the field of most of the significant impediments, actual or potential, to Richard's seizing power. But it is striking that Shakespeare does not envisage the tyrant's climactic accession to the throne as the direct result of violence. To solicit a popular mandate, Richard conducts a political campaign, complete with a fraudulent display of religious piety, the slandering of opponents, and a grossly exaggerated threat to national security.

At a political science convention which I attended some years ago, one of the speakers mentioned toward the end of his talk that the education code of every state in the Union gives the public schools a mandate to form moral character. In the discussion period that followed a young woman with a marked Southern accent protested: "Ah am shocked by what Ah just heard—it goes against everything Ah learned in graduate school!

There are seemingly parallel origins of Nature’s God in America and China’s Mandate of Heaven. These twin concepts created socio-political forces for public good and orderly governance, and a unique cultural ethos (related to the Creator of the Universe in America and the Son of Heaven in China) is deeply rooted in both societies. Each concept is physically yet stealthily manifested in the architectural designs of the two capital cities, Beijing and Washington.

To understand, however, how the received form of the Bible frames and presents them, we do well to refer to the way I introduced them in chapter 1: the laws are, first and foremost, treaty stipulations. They are the conditions and mandates set down by the sovereign king YHWH for His treaty with the vassal Israel.12 As such, they are prescriptive in nature, and are meant to be binding on the members of the covenantal community. It is on the basis of the fulfillment of these stipulations that Israel the vassal will be judged by the heavenly sovereign king, just as earthly sovereigns judged their vassals on the basis of their compliance with the treaty stipulations. It may well be, additionally, that Scripture intends that judges make quasi-statutory, analogical, or referential uses of some of these laws.13 At the same time, it is clear that judges, perforce, must have also engaged a comprehensive oral law, or set of unwritten norms and social customs. The

interchangeably. There are numerous biblical texts expressing Yahweh’s hatred and condemnation of all people who could be generically defined as witches: “diviners,” “pythons,” “conjurers,” “fortune-tellers.” We know that all Neolithic Goddess-worshiping peoples were identified by the Hebrew prophets and patriarchs as “evil,” “idolatrous,” and “unclean”—and Yahweh wanted them all dead. Christianity’s remarkably ugly record of religious intolerance begins in the Old Testament, where Yahweh’s people are directed, by him, to murder anyone practicing a rival religion. The five hundred years of European Inquisition and witch-burnings had their direct inspiration and sanctification from the Holy Bible, and there is no way to avoid this conclusion. The secular motives, and secular gains, of the witch-hunts, can be credited to the imperialism of the Roman Catholic church, to the equally power-hungry fanaticism of the Protestant Reformists—and to all the other European men who obtained advantage or sick thrills from the torture and destruction of the human body in general, and women’s bodies in particular. The Christian church used the Bible’s divine mandate for religious murder not only to survive the political turmoil of the Middle Ages, but to expand and secure one of the largest and most powerful secular institutions on earth: Western Christendom.

You'd be amazed at how many presidents, senators, congressmen, governors, even mayors get elected not because of their own merits or actions, but simply because someone else sees the potential in personal or political gain for themselves in having that candidate win a particular race. The candidate may think that his or her victory is some great mandate from the people to do whatever was promised during the campaign, but the truth is that someone else simply figured, hey, if he wins, then it pays off for me in the long run. It's really that simple, but you'd be amazed how many politicians never understand it.

The idea that the congressional Democrats have a responsibility for taking the national Democratic platform and program and trying to push it through the Congress is simply crazy. A political party at a national convention draws up a program to present to the voters. The voters can either accept it by giving the party full power, reject it by taking the party completely out of power, or give it qualified approval by giving one party the Congress and the other party the Presidency. And when we in the Congress have been given a qualified mandate, as we were in 1956, it means that we have a solemn responsibility to cooperate with the President and produce a program that is neither his blueprint nor our blueprint but a combination of the two. It is the politician’s task to pass legislation, not to sit around saying principled things.”10

A politics built around getting and spending money is sexier than a politics built around politics. And so, at a time of unprecedented freedom and power for women, at a time when we were more poised than ever to understand our lives politically, we got, instead of expanded reproductive protections and equal pay and federally mandated family leave and subsidized childcare and a higher minimum wage, the sort of self-congratulatory empowerment feminism that corporations can get behind, the kind that comes with merchandise - mugs that said "Male Tears", t-shirts that said "Feminist as Fuck".

Blackrock, the world’s largest manager and custodian of Index ETFs, is now the most important owner of multinational companies. Bizarrely, our capital market system, based on wide ownership of joint stock companies, has evolved to confer ownership on a group of fund managers with no intention, incentive or mandate to act in a responsible manner.

Brown v. Board of Education. This landmark decision mandating school desegregation launched one of the defining civil rights battles of the era. In response, many evangelicals took their children out of public school rather than have them attend with African Americans. Churches and other evangelical organizations founded “segregation academies,” private religious schools that were tax-exempt.

But this corruption of opportunity can end with us. — How can we, at last, end our embrace of segregation? The most important thing we can do is to replace exclusionary zoning policies with inclusionary ordinances, tearing down our walls and using the rubble to build bridges. There are two parts to this. The first is to get rid of all the devious legal minutiae we’ve developed to keep low-income families out of high-opportunity neighborhoods, rules that make it illegal to build multifamily apartment complexes or smaller, more affordable homes. We cannot in good faith claim that our communities are antiracist or antipoverty if they continue to uphold exclusionary zoning—our politer, quieter means of promoting segregation. Ending exclusionary zoning would make it legal for developers to build the kind of housing that low-income families need. But that’s no guarantee they will do so. That’s why the second part is necessary: passing inclusionary zoning mandates.

Confronting new challenges, the Boggses’ thinking adapted to a changing reality. They declared that the welfare state, the New Left, and the Black Power movement had all run their course. Thus, it was now necessary to move from redistributive justice to rebuilding our cities and reconstructing human relations from the ground up. This would mandate going beyond the politics of minority grievance to developing multiracial strategies to combat a system that was multinational in scope.

The ethnics caught up in the racial struggies oi the post-war period in Chicago were in the unenviable position of people who had the rules changed on them in mid-game. The Poles who settled Calumet Park as Sobieski Park had created their neighborhood enclaves under certain assumptions, all of which got changed when the environmentalist East Coast WASP internationalist establishment took power in 1941. Not only hadn’t they been informed of the rule change, they were doubly vulnerable because compared to their opponents who were further along on the scale of assimilation, they didn’t have a clear sense of themselves as Poles or Catholics or Americans or “white” people. They also feared the sexual mores of the invading black hordes but could not articulate this fear in polite language. As a result, each attempt to explain their position drove them further beyond the pale of acceptable public discourse. More often than not, the only people who were articulating their position were the American Civil Liberties Union and American Friends Service Committee agents sent into their neighborhoods to spy on them. One AFSC spy reported that fear of intermarriage “caused the intensity of feelings” in Trumbull Park.* Black attempts to use the community swimming pool were similarly seen in a sexual light. The ACLU agent who was paid to infiltrate bars in South Deering reported that the real motivation behind Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision mandating desegregation of Southern schools, was to move “niggers into every neighborhood” to intermarry and thereby send the “whole white race . . . downhill.” Deprived of their ethnic designation as Catholic by a Church that was either hostile (as in the case of Catholic intellectuals) or indifferent (as in the case of the bishops and their chancery officials), Chicago ethnics, attempting to be good Americans, chose to become “white” instead, a transformation that not only guaranteed that they would lose their battle in the court of public opinion, but one which also guaranteed that they would go out of existence as well, through the very assimilation process being proposed by their enemies.

The Americans had almost destroyed themselves with their COVID mandates; failed wars in a part of the world they would never understand; race riots; political upheaval; and a border policy of which Gromyko’s predecessors could only have dreamed. Russia

Though demonized by his Jewish and British enemies, Hajj Amin al-Husayni in fact cooperated well enough with the mandate administration. Only gradually did he use his religious authority to achieve a position of significant political influence contrary to British interests. It was a potent mix. The key event in this transformation was the so-called ‘Western Wall riots’ in 1929. The Western Wall was the only revealed section of what remained from the massive retaining wall built by Herod. This wall allowed Herod to enlarge the platform on which the Second Temple stood before being destroyed in 70 CE. Given this association, the wall became Judaism’s most important place of pilgrimage and prayer. The wall also was part of a Muslim religious trust (waqf): Muslim attachment to the wall and to the al-Haram al-Sharif (or ‘Noble Sanctuary’, as the Temple Mount is known in Arabic) is due to their association with the story of Muhammad’s night journey to heaven. The wall is known to Muslims as al-Buraq, because Muhammad tethered his horse there, and the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque, built in the 7th century, are two of Islam’s most revered buildings.

On the right and the left, persuading your opponents is out of fashion, replaced by the mandate to rile up your supporters.

The seminal case in American campaign finance is Buckley v. Valeo (424 U.S. 1 (1976)), in which the contribution and spending limitations enacted in the early 1970s with the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) were challenged on First Amendment grounds. The FECA was a significant, wide-ranging reform that had for the first time created a meaningful regulatory environment in federal campaign finance. The law implemented statutory campaign contribution limits, and also originally mandated spending limitations for congressional campaigns. Moreover, the FECA barred all expenditures made by either private citizens or groups “advocating the election or defeat of (a) candidate” in excess of $1,000 per annum. In Buckley, the Supreme Court held that while contribution limits were constitutional, there could be no prohibition on either individuals or candidates looking to spend their own money to directly communicate a political message. The distinction between contributions and direct spending in Buckley is based on two premises. First, the government has an interest in preventing instances of corruption, or even in limiting public perceptions of corruption. Second, money spent on election communications effectively equates to speech in the modern political realm, so more money spent in this manner is equivalent to more speech. In contrast, the act of contribution by an individual to a candidate, party, or PAC is itself an expressive act.

The activism that started with Covid mask mandates, the visuals of angry parents packing school board meetings and holding signs on street corners, revealed something important about power to national politicians.

As Americans were debating bailouts, individual mandates, and Michelle Obama’s finely toned arms, progressives knew they had a golden opportunity to sneak Common Core through the back door. And that’s just what they did. Remember what Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s first chief of staff, said: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Common Core was that political philosophy in action. The controllists’ plan was almost perfect. They knew they didn’t have to sell Common Core to lawmakers in individual state legislatures, where citizens would find out about it and demand it be stopped. Instead, they could just go to the individual state boards of education—entities that most Americans don’t even know exist—for permission. In Wisconsin, for example, all it took was one individual, the state superintendent of public instruction, to adopt the standards. It was a devious and brilliant plan, but that didn’t make it foolproof. It wasn’t a given that state school board members would agree to Common Core. Some might sense that it was a ploy to slowly nationalize their state’s education system. To counter that possibility, progressives wrote special funding for the Common Core “initiative” into President Obama’s nearly $800 billion stimulus plan via the “Race to the Top” program. This gave the administration the ability to bribe cash-starved states into adopting Common Core by making it a prerequisite for states to compete for seven-figure education grants. In addition, they delayed the testing component of the standards for several years, thereby giving state bureaucrats several years of zero accountability. Many of these bureaucrats no doubt knew they’d be retired or in a different position by the time the real pain came around.

I hear very little from evangelicals about the impact of gun proliferation on violent crime, much less an issue like nuclear disarmament. I hear almost nothing about health care for the poor and protecting widows and orphans, both biblical mandates, and scant mention of the thirteen million children who die worldwide from malnutrition in a year. I hear scornful dismissal of concerns about global warming, an issue viewed seriously by the vast majority of scientists. I hear talk about family values, but when an administration proposed legislation to allow mothers to take unpaid leave after childbirth, conservative religious groups opposed it.

Should churches exert any influence in politics? Should pastors preach about political questions? Is there only one “Christian” position on political issues? Does the Bible teach anything about how people should vote? I think there are some clear answers to these questions, but we have to recognize at the outset that dozens of other books and articles have already given their own answers to such questions. These books range from saying that the Bible gives outright support for many liberal Democratic positions to saying that the Bible supports conservative Republican positions.1 Some books argue that Christians have simply become far too entangled in political activities, while another important book argues that Christians have a biblical mandate to be involved in politics.2 Another widely influential book gives many real-life examples of remarkable Christian influence on laws and governments.3 One book that has received wide consideration in the United Kingdom proposes a rethinking of major political questions in light of the Bible’s priority of personal relationships.4 There have been a few recent books by theologians and biblical scholars dealing at a more theoretical level with the question of Christian perspectives on politics.5 In this book I start out by explaining what seem to me to be five clearly wrong (and harmful) views about Christians and politics: (1) “government should compel religion,” (2) “government should exclude religion,” (3) “all government is evil and demonic,” (4) “the church should do evangelism, not politics,” and (5) “the church should do politics, not evangelism.” As an alternative, I argue for what I think to be the correct view: (6) “significant Christian influence on government.

But the inspired writers, early in Old Testament history, recognized there is one exception or limitation to our divinely mandated obligation of civil obedience: whenever an ordinance or official command would require that we disobey God’s will or His Word. The

After running away from the United States government to pursue his antigovernment vision, Roger Ver had chosen to live in a place that was uniquely unreceptive to his brand of antiauthoritarian politics. Japan was a country that was still deeply wedded to traditional hierarchies with an educational system that taught its citizens from a young age to obey authority. This was evident in the country’s rigid business traditions—the bowing and exchanging of cards—and in the spiky-haired punks in Tokyo, who waited patiently for walk signals, even when there were no cars in sight. Roger had picked Japan, not because it would allow him to be around other like-minded people, but because he liked the orderliness of Japanese culture—and the women. He had met his longtime Japanese girlfriend at a gathering in California and even she had almost no interest in politics. As Roger discovered, the deferential culture made Japanese people uniquely skeptical about a project like Bitcoin that aimed to challenge government currencies. Japan was the only place Roger had encountered where people’s response, when he described Bitcoin, was to call it scary—rather than interesting or silly. This was due, Roger believed, to the way in which the virtual currency broke from the government’s mandates about how money should work. One of the only people with whom Roger had gotten any traction in Japan was a local pornography tycoon.

book The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction as a jumping off point, he takes care to unpack the various cultural mandates  that have infected the way we think and feel about distraction. I found his ruminations not only enlightening but surprisingly emancipating: There are two big theories about why [distraction is] on the rise. The first is material: it holds that our urbanized, high-tech society is designed to distract us… The second big theory is spiritual—it’s that we’re distracted because our souls are troubled. The comedian Louis C.K. may be the most famous contemporary exponent of this way of thinking. A few years ago, on “Late Night” with Conan O’Brien, he argued that people are addicted to their phones because “they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard.” (David Foster Wallace also saw distraction this way.) The spiritual theory is even older than the material one: in 1887, Nietzsche wrote that “haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself”; in the seventeenth century, Pascal said that “all men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”… Crawford argues that our increased distractibility is the result of technological changes that, in turn, have their roots in our civilization’s spiritual commitments. Ever since the Enlightenment, he writes, Western societies have been obsessed with autonomy, and in the past few hundred years we have put autonomy at the center of our lives, economically, politically, and technologically; often, when we think about what it means to be happy, we think of freedom from our circumstances. Unfortunately, we’ve taken things too far: we’re now addicted to liberation, and we regard any situation—a movie, a conversation, a one-block walk down a city street—as a kind of prison. Distraction is a way of asserting control; it’s autonomy run amok. Technologies of escape, like the smartphone, tap into our habits of secession. The way we talk about distraction has always been a little self-serving—we say, in the passive voice, that we’re “distracted by” the Internet or our cats, and this makes us seem like the victims of our own decisions. But Crawford shows that this way of talking mischaracterizes the whole phenomenon. It’s not just that we choose our own distractions; it’s that the pleasure we get from being distracted is the pleasure of taking action and being free. There’s a glee that comes from making choices, a contentment that settles after we’ve asserted our autonomy. When

Iran is the only country in the Middle East where a former head of state has stepped down from power at the end of his constitutionally mandated term of office and continues to live peacefully in his own home. The undeniable and serious flaws in their country’s electoral process have not prevented Iranians from learning about democratic practices and internalizing democracy-friendly values. Indeed, the debate over democracy has been near the heart of Iranian politics for a decade now. The years since the early 1990s have also been a time of intense discussions about religious reform in Iran. A group of Shia intellectuals, including some clerics, have questioned the authoritarian bent of Khomeini’s velayat-e faqih and argued for both limiting the powers of Iran’s clerical leaders and reconciling religion with democracy.

The most controversial part of the controversial legislation now derided by Republicans as “Obamacare”—the mandate that individuals buy health insurance—was originally proposed by Republican economists, championed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, introduced in Congress by Republican politicians, and enacted in Massachusetts under Republican governor Mitt Romney.16 Planned Parenthood, now anathema to Republicans because of its pro-choice policies, enjoyed the support of two of the biggest dynasties of Republican politics, the Goldwater and Bush families, until the rise of the Religious Right in the 1980s made the pro-life position a litmus test for the GOP. And Republican platforms from 1940 to 1976 endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment for women.

abortion will continue. Many opponents claim to be taking the moral high ground. However, by depriving them of their civil rights, opposition to abortion hurts women and is thus unethical. It condemns women to mandatory motherhood. This attitude is not new. The systematic maltreatment of women has been institutionalized by governments and religions for several millennia.56 57 58 The clarity and cogency of the argument against abortion should be sufficient to sway public opinion. However, over the past four decades, this has not been the case. Opponents of abortion have resorted to eight murders,59,60 arson, firebombing,61 intimidation of women and clinicians,62 governmental intrusion into the physician-patient relationship,63 imposition of obstacles that deter and delay abortion, and increased costs.64,65 A broad campaign of deception and chicanery, including crisis pregnancy centers and disinformation sites on the Internet,66 has influenced decisions about abortion and its safety. Without the smokescreen about abortion safety, the ongoing attack on women and health care providers might be recognized for what it is: misogyny directed against our wives, sisters, and daughters. Ironically, the same political conservatives who oppose “big government” and its interference in our daily lives are sponsoring anti-abortion legislation mandating more intrusion of government into the private lives—and bodies—of American women. While the ethical dimensions of abortion will continue to be debated, the medical science is incontrovertible: legal abortion has been a resounding public-health success.18,19 The development of antibiotics, immunization, modern contraception, and legalized abortion all stand out as landmark public-health achievements of the Twentieth Century.

But Jesus did not come to earth the first time to bring justice but rather to bear it. He came not with a sword in his hands but with nails through his hands...Jesus died on the cross in our place, taking the punishment our sins deserve, so that someday he can return to earth to end evil without destroying us all. Jesus did not come back the first time with a political program to cast off the Roman oppression- as good as that may have been. He did not want to do merely the thing we human beings can (and must do)- oppose and prevent the latest form of evil....His death and resurrection created a people in the world who now have a unique and powerful ability to diminish the evil in their own hearts as well as a mandate to oppose and endure without flagging the evil they find in their communities and society. And it was all because the Son of God entered into human suffering to turn evil on its head and eventually end evil, sin, suffering and death itself for good. The Bible says that Jesus is the light of the world. If you know you are in his love, and that nothing can snatch you out of his hand, and that he is taking you to God's house and God's future- then he can be a light for you in dark places when all other lights go out. His love for you now- and this infallible hope for the future- are indeed a light in the darkness, by which we can find our way.

May 14, 1948. Within a day of proclaiming its statehood, Israel was invaded by neighboring Arab states with the help of Arab Palestinians who were already fighting Jewish Palestinians.243 This began the First Arab-Israeli War.244 By 1949, Israel had defeated the Arab coalition, and the resulting armistices gave Israel control over most of the land of the Mandate.245 Only the Gaza Strip and so-called West Bank remained in Arab hands. The West Bank was occupied by Jordanian military forces, and the Gaza Strip was occupied by Egyptian forces until the Six-Day War in 1967, when those territories also came under Israeli control.246 Jordan continued to formally claim control over the West Bank until 1988, when King Hussein granted the request of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to renounce any Jordanian claims to the West Bank, after which the PLO became the sole Arab claimant of that territory.247 It is important to note that from 1967 until today, neither the PLO, the current Palestinian Authority (PA), nor any other Arab Palestinian political entity has exercised sovereign control over the West Bank. Further, prior to Israel’s acquisition of the territory in 1967, dating back to the rule of the Ottoman Turks, there had never been a lawfully recognized Arab Palestinian sovereign over the territory in the former Mandate for Palestine.248 Today, one can hardly talk about the Middle East without bringing up war, terror, and unrest. The region has become synonymous with geopolitical instability and territorial conflicts, specifically with regard to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian issue. Despite the fact that Arab Palestinians have no greater historical claim to the territories for which they are fighting than do Jewish inhabitants of the land of Palestine, the majority of the international community continues to demand that Israel relinquish control of these territories to allow the establishment of an independent Arab state ruled by a political entity whose ultimate goal is the utter destruction of Israel.249

ren, the necessity to treat others within the community with humanity. In its essence, it is similar to the “golden rule” of doing as you would be done by. Ren has important implications for leaders. If a leader fails to show ren, for instance by treating his subjects brutally, he loses his mandate to govern them and may be disobeyed.

Why didn't the Democrats accomplish more right after the 2006 elections that gave them control of Congress? It wasn't just that they didn't have votes to override a presidential veto or block a filibuster. They didn't use their mandate to substantially change how the public--and the media-- thought about issues. They just tried to be rational, to devise programs to fit people's interests and the polls. Because there was little understanding of the brain, there was no campaign to change brains. Indeed, the very idea of "changing brains" sounds a little sinister to progressives-- a kind of Frankenstein image comes to mind. It sounds Machiavellian to liberals, like what the Republicans do. But "changing minds" in any deep way always requires changing brains. Once you understand a bit more about how brains work, you will understand that politics is very much about changing brains-- and that it can be highly moral and not the least bit sinister or underhanded.

The mandate was the linchpin. In fact, in pushing for this plan beginning in 2005, Romney, citing the original Heritage Foundation article, would deride the “free riders” who refuse to buy insurance and call the mandate “the ultimate conservative idea” because it was rooted in the principle of individual responsibility. To

The United States is trapped in a bad equilibrium. Because Americans historically distrust the government, they typically aren’t willing to delegate to the government authority to make decisions in the manner of other democratic societies. Instead, Congress mandates complex rules that reduce the government’s autonomy and make decisions slow and expensive. The government then doesn’t perform well, which confirms people’s original distrust. Under these circumstances, they are reluctant to pay higher taxes, which they feel the government will waste. But while resources are not the only, or even the main, source of government inefficiency, without them the government won’t function properly. Hence distrust of government becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

Interest groups exercise influence way out of proportion to their place in society, distort both taxes and spending, and raise overall deficit levels through their ability to manipulate the budget in their favor. They also undermine the quality of public administration as a result of the multiple and often contradictory mandates they induce Congress to support. All of this has led to a crisis of representation, in which ordinary people feel their supposedly democratic government no longer truly reflects their interests but is under the control of a variety of shadowy elites. What is ironic and peculiar is that this crisis in representativeness has occurred in part because of reforms designed to make the system more democratic.

The mandate oozes hostility to religion (the sort of thing that, as detailed above, the president and his subordinates propose to ban when the religion in question is Islam).

The liberal constitutional experiment that the Egyptian political scene had witnessed in the 1930s and 1940s remained the province of Cairo's and Alexandria's elite and upper middle class. The liberal cultural fashions of the same period were detached from the crushing living standards of the peasants in the Delta and Al-Saeed, as well as the poor in the country's urban areas. It was no surprise then that the vast majority of people on the Egyptian street cheered Nasser's repudiation of the ‘bygone era'(which conveniently lumped together the monarchy, the aristocrats, the landed gentry and the different political parties – from the liberal and secular to the conservative and religious). Nasser's political and socio-economic plans emerged as the country's sole and compelling project with a substantial, expansive mandate.

The modern left proves how prescient the Framers were. The left’s class warfare strategies mean that election campaigns are actually conducted against the Constitution’s safeguards of freedom. Supporters of the Constitution’s federalist framework of limited central government and its protection of liberty and property rights are demagogued as enemies of social justice. Statist candidates construe electoral victories as a mandate to undo constitutional constraints that impede their authority to do “the right thing,” as Obama puts it. Winning office becomes a license for lawlessness.

As a federal district court in Texas recently ruled, federal law “mandates the initiation of immigration removal proceedings whenever an immigration officer encounters an illegal alien who is not ‘clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted.’” Moreover, the court explained, the Department of Homeland Security does not have “prosecutorial discretion” to ignore this requirement; Congress, not the president, has the plenary power to make immigration law; and the executive branch may not “implement measures that are incompatible with Congressional intent.

it is instructive how the themes that Mrs Gandhi introduced to Indian politics in 1977 are still dominant in our political discourse. She painted the Syndicate as being in the grips of crony capitalists—and that is an idea that every party from the Left to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) recycles again and again.

Rockefeller countered with a $50 million expansion of the state court system, including the creation of a hundred or more politically appetizing supreme court judgeships, each one paying $43,316. Pressed on whether appointing these justices violated the state constitution, which mandated their popular election, Rockefeller had a ready response: “It’s only unconstitutional if you call them a Supreme Court judge. Call them something else, it’s constitutional.