Powerful Predators Quotes

Dominator culture teaches all of us that the core of our identity is defined by the will to dominate and control others. We are taught that this will to dominate is more biologically hardwired in males than in females. In actuality, dominator culture teaches us that we are all natural-born killers but that males are more able to realize the predator role. In the dominator model the pursuit of external power, the ability to manipulate and control others, is what matters most. When culture is based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent but it will frame all relationships as power struggles.

Learn to move fast and adapt or you will be eaten. The best way to avoid this fate is to assume formlessness. No predator alive can attack what it cannot see. OBSERVANCE

You know, the press is as much part of our democracy as Congress or the executive branch or the judicial branch. It has to keep things in check. And when the powerful control the press, or make the press useless, if the people can’t trust the press, the people lose. And the powerful can do what they want.

... He'd been about to turn away when she lifted her face to the moon and sang. It was not in any language that he knew. Not in the common tongue, or in Eyllwe, or in the languages of Fenharrow or Melisande, or anywhere else on the continent This language was ancient, each word full of power and rage and agony. She did not have a beautiful voice. And many of the words sounded like half sobs, the vowels stretched by the pangs of sorrow, the consonants hardened by anger. She beat her breast in time, so full of savage grace, so at odds with the black gown and veil she wore. The hair on the back of his neck stood as the lament poured from her mouth, unearthly and foreign, a song of grief so old that it predated the stone castle itself. And the the song finished, its end as butal and sudden as Nehemia's death had been. She stood there a few moments, silent and unmoving.

The consolidation of the states into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which has overwhelmed all that preceded it.

In fact, public speaking anxiety may be primal and quintessentially human, not limited to those of us born with a high-reactive nervous system. One theory, based on the writings of the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, holds that when our ancestors lived on the savannah, being watched intently meant only one thing: a wild animal was stalking us. And when we think we're about to be eaten, do we stand tall and hold forth confidently? No. We run. In other words, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution urge us to get the hell off the stage, where we can mistake the gaze of the spectators for the glint in a predator's eye.

Knowledge was power, but in the wrong hands, it was a weapon.

Predator and prey move in silent gestures, on the seductive dance of death, in the shadows cast by the vultures of the night. ☥

Science is a powerful tool, but like any tool, it doesn’t care whether it hurts you. Fire warms us, cooks our food, protects us from predators, but it will burn us if we let it. Fire is more than happy to eat us all alive. Science is fire writ large.

Wildlife, we are constantly told, would run loose across our towns and cities were it not for the sport hunters to control their population, as birds would blanket the skies without the culling services of Ducks Unlimited and other groups. Yet here they are breeding wild animals, year after year replenishing the stock, all for the sole purpose of selling and killing them, deer and bears and elephants so many products being readied for the market. Animals such as deer, we are told, have no predators in many areas, and therefore need systematic culling. Yet when attempts are made to reintroduce natural predators such as wolves and coyotes into these very areas, sport hunters themselves are the first to resist it. Weaker animals in the wild, we hear, will only die miserable deaths by starvation and exposure without sport hunters to control their population. Yet it's the bigger, stronger animals they're killing and wounding--the very opposite of natural selection--often with bows and pistols that only compound and prolong the victim's suffering.

To the sexual offender, possession is power, and total possession is absolute power.

You’ve got to be kidding me. I thought you were the most powerful of beings. Even the gods fear you. (Stryker) We all have predators. The entire universe exists in a system of checks and balances. I just met my zero balance. (War) Are you honestly telling me that the most powerful creature on this planet is a pathetic Cajun guttersnipe who offed himself because one of my men killed his mommy? (Stryker)

. . . Jennifer can’t be bought with money or threats. She wants this predator stopped. She wants the church to stop protecting or covering up for him. Settle this reasonably with no gag order or confidentiality clause. Do the right thing for a change. Only then will she consider a settlement.” “See you in court.

What is man if the signs that predate him have such power? A human race has to invent sacrifices equal to the natural cataclysmic order that surrounds it.

Predatory animals usually devour prey in order to convert flesh into fuel. Most human predators, however, seek power, not food. To destroy or damage something is to take its power. This applies equally to a political movement, a government, a campaign, a career, a marriage, a performance, a fortune, or a religion. To push a pie into the face of the world’s richest man is to take his power, if only for a moment.

I hope for a world in which predators are punished, not protected; victims are treated with compassion, not shamed; and powerful people face the same consequences as anyone else. I yearn, too, for a world in which perpetrators face more shame than their victims do and where anyone who’s been trafficked can confront their abusers when they are ready, no matter how much time has passed. We don’t live in this world yet

Look at them, the bugs. Humans have used everything in their power to extinguish them: every kind of poison, aerial sprays, introducing and cultivating their natural predators, searching for and destroying their eggs, using genetic modification to sterilize them, burning with fire, drowning with water. Every family has bug spray, every desk has a flyswatter under it… this long war has been going on for the entire history of human civilization. But the outcome is still in doubt. The bugs have not been eliminated. They still proudly live between the heavens and the earth, and their numbers have not diminished from the time before the appearance of the humans. The Trisolarans who deemed the humans bugs seemed to have forgotten one fact: The bugs have never been truly defeated. A small black cloud covered the sun and cast a moving shadow against the ground. This was not a common cloud, but a swarm of locusts that had just arrived. As the swarm landed in the fields nearby, the three men stood in the middle of a living shower, feeling the dignity of life on Earth. Ding Yi and Wang Miao poured the two bottles of wine they had with them on the ground beneath their feet, a toast for the bugs.

The power of monsters is their ability to fuse opposites, to merge contraries, to subvert rules, to overthrow cognitive barriers, moral distinction, and ontological categories. Monsters overcome the barrier of time itself. Uniting past and present, demonic and divine, guilt and conscience, predator and prey, parent and child, self and alien, our monsters are our innermost selves.

She'd never trusted her own natural impulses and instincts Among her greatest fears was the possibility that she might never discover and develop her deepest talents and intuitions. Her special gifts. Her life would be wasted in pursuing the goals set for her by other people. Instead, she wanted to reclaim a power and authority - a primitive, irresistible force - that transcended gender roles. She dreamed of wielding a raw magic that predated civilization itself.

Legends are very pretty but rarely touch on the important facts of life. Things like whether a 1969 red Mustang powered by a 351 Windsor can outrun a seventy-foot reptilian predator.

So many girls around the world—refugee girls in particular—suffer in silence after being sexually assaulted by someone they know. Most rapes happen at the hands of a relative or friend, not a stranger. I want girls to know that they have the power to speak out. They don’t have to stay quiet. No matter what culture or country you are from, there will always be pressure to remain silent, to never tell. But you don’t have to protect sexual predators. By speaking up, you are standing up for yourself. And you might be preventing it from happening again. Tell people what happened. The predators expect you to stay silent. You can prove them wrong.

Look at them, the bugs. Humans have used everything in their power to extinguish them: every kind of poison, aerial sprays, introducing and cultivating their natural predators, searching for and destroying their eggs, using genetic modification to sterilize them, burning with fire, drowning with water. Every family has bug spray, every desk has a fly-swatter under it... this long war has been going on for the entire history of human civilization. But the outcome is still in doubt. The bugs have not been eliminated.

. . . this predator used his position in furtherance of his crimes and disguised his depravity as a religious ritual. This man will soon reside in an Ohio prison, where he belongs. He is not only guilty of serious crimes against children. He is guilty of a serious betrayal of faith.

I had to de-program myself. From myself. Had to reinvent rituals of purification. So full of the vagrant pollutions of others. It was time to detox. Not only from alcohol, sex, and drugs, but from needy leeches who looked to swab me with their sores. Detox from my own needy lechery. Had to locate the center wound and cauterize. Undo the original sin, the origin of my sickness...Had to learn to replace Them, It, Want, Hurt, Anger, Sorrow, Loss, with Power, Healing, Wisdom, Fulfillment, Satisfaction.

She stalls for time, she bides her time, she plans her strategy and calls up her power internally, before she makes an external change. Sometimes it is just this kind of immense threat from the predator that causes a woman to change from being an adaptive dear to having the hooded eye of the watchful.

False accusations of rape are a form of rape itself. . . . . The power to falsely accuse a man of rape is a coveted power that permits women to destroy a man with a mere accusation . . . . notwithstanding widespread propaganda to the contrary, the real rate of false accusations of rape, according to FBI statistics sixty percent (60%).

Predators overcome their prey by the exploitation of weakness rather than by superior power.

Here goes my heart again—tick tick tick—and I was so afraid of animals that I forgot about the worst of all predators, the most power-hungry predators on this planet: humans.

Pride makes you a predator, not a person.

Black widows may be powerful predators, but every predator is somebody else's prey.

This monster needs to be locked up. Where did this predator come from? Has he done this before? How many young boys has he traumatized? How could the church expose unsuspecting children to such a man?

Perhaps loneliness—it is that loneliest time of the night, the predawn darkness when the worst dreams come, the sunrise seems far off, and the creatures that inhabit both the real world and the darker edges of the unconscious prowl with the impunity of predators who know that their prey is helpless and alone.

Thus on Predator Day we meditate on the Alpha Predator aspects of God. The suddenness and ferocity with which an apprehension of the Divine may appear to us; our smallness and fearfulness-may I say, our Mouselikeness-in the face of such Power; our feelings of individual annihilation in the brightness of that splendid Light. God walks in the tender dawn Gardens of the mind, but He also prowls in its night Forests. He is not a tame Being, my Friends: he is a wild Being, and cannot be summoned and controlled like a Dog."-Adam One

Rowan moved deeper into the entry hall, every step laced with power and death, coming to a stop at her side. “You can call me Rowan. That’s all you need to know.” He cocked his head to the side, a predator assessing prey. “Thank you for the oil,” he added. “My skin was a little dry.” Arobynn blinked – as much surprise as he’d show. It took her a moment to process what Rowan had said, and to realize that the almond smell hadn’t just been coming from her. He’d worn it, too.

Natural selection,” in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of “the struggle for life” when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.

Politeness as filtered through fragility and supremacy isn’t about manners; it’s about a methodology of controlling the conversation. Polite white people who respond to calls for respect, for getting boots off necks with demand for decorum, aren’t interested in resistance or disruption. They are interested in control. They replicate the manners of Jim Crow America, demanding deference and obedience; they want the polite facade instead of disruption. They insist that they know best what should be done when attempting to battle and defeat bias, but in actuality they’re just happy to be useless. They are obstacles to freedom who feel no remorse, who provide no valuable insight, because ultimately, they are content to get in the way. They’re oppression tourists, virtue-signaling volunteers who are really just here to get what they can and block the way, so no others can pass without meeting whatever arbitrary standards they create. And if you get enough of them in one place, they can prevent any real progress from occurring while they reap the benefits of straddling white supremacy and being woke. They have less power than they think, than anyone realizes, but like any small predator, they manage to be flashy enough to be seen.

To be fair, this slow-motion reputational collapse predated Trump; he did not author the cultural insecurities of the Church. But he did identify them, and prey upon them, in ways that have accelerated the unraveling of institutional Christianity in the United States.

Magic knows not light or darkness. It is the Power Elemental, that predates any such concerns,” he told her archly, somewhat sabotaged by the smug smirk that always crept onto his face when he was pontificating. “Besides, what need we fear the Dark, when we have you to show us the way to the Light?

The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their Iifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself.

The nub at the center of the notorious Roman Catholic sexual predation is an idolatry of the priest and of the priestly status that goes by the name of "clericalism." It is a malignity marked by a cult of secrecy; a high-flown theological misogyny that demeans all women and fosters an unbridled male supremacy; suppression of normal erotic desire; a hierarchical domination of priest over laypeople; and a basing of that power on threats of the doom-laden afterlife, drawn from a misreading of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire,43 and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

A predator’s intention…… It is my intention to cause you fear such as you have never known. It is my desire to take your fear to a whole new level of terror. I can smell your fear as its sweet scent flows through my universe. This small universe that I have created and am permitting you to exist in. I say these things because you only exist right now because I have allowed it, for if I should choose, I could snuff you out as if extinguishing a candle flame. I will make you thank me later for allowing you to breathe. I will mix you a concoction of fear, pain, uncertainty, and arousal, such as you have never known. You see my curious little prey these all create very similar physical reactions. My little prey… they have common traits on the emotional side too. Curious prey, curious prey, let me growl my intentions into your curious ear. I will keep you in a constant state of fear, pain, uncertainty, and arousal. I know exactly what I am doing; I am a skilled and professional predator. It is my full intention to own you! I will keep you in a constant emotional whirlpool. This is the universe of my making, and you exist in it by my power, and by my choice. I want you in a constant state of fear, physical discomfort, pain, uncertainty, and arousal. I am purposely blurring the lines between your emotions, and your physical sensations. As I do this… I am creating a desire and a craving within you to be man handled and taken by me. I am intentionally working you into a state of intense arousal, and desperation. I am conditioning you to crave your new life as my prey…

[..] neoproletariat caste, the future cybercattle of neurocracy, joyous sophisticate of the always-incomplete chain of predation, primed by silos of soya, stocks of onions, pork bellies…and completed by the global apotheosis of the Great Futures Market of neurolivestock, more volatile (and more profitable) than all the livestock of the Great Plains. Neurolivestock certainly enjoy an existence more comfortable than serfs or millworkers, but they do not easily escape their destiny as the self-regulating raw material of a market as predictable and as homogeneous as a perfect gas, a matter counted in atoms of distress, stripped of all powers of negotiation, renting out their mental space, brain by brain.

Trauma is so arresting that traumatized people will focus on it compulsively. Unfortunately, the situation that defeated them once will defeat them again and again. Body sensations can serve as a guide to reflect where we are experiencing trauma, and to lead us to our instinctual resources. These resources give us the power to protect ourselves from predators and other hostile forces. Each of us possesses these instinctual resources. Once we learn how to access them we can create our own shields to reflect and heal our traumas.

And when the powerful control the press, or make the press useless, if the people can’t trust the press, the people lose.

couldn’t let a fucking predator be the most powerful man in the country

The power of Orden predates the star shift.

Parscale’s team also ran voter suppression campaigns. They were targeted at three different groups of Democrats: young women, white liberals who might like Bernie Sanders, and Black voters. These voters got so-called dark posts—nonpublic posts that only they would see. They’d be invisible to researchers or anyone else looking at their feed. The idea was: feed them stuff that’ll discourage them from voting for Hillary. One made for Black audiences was a cartoon built around her 1996 sound bite that “African Americans are super predators.

Feed, Jacques. I offer my life freely to you as you have so many times done for me.” Mikhail slashed his wrist and held it out to his brother. The moment the richness spilled into his mouth, the taste and surge of power brought a rush of memories. Mikhail laughing, pushing Jacques from a tree branch playfully. Mikhail’s body crouched low, protectively, in front of his as a vampire with brown-stained teeth began to grow long, dagger-like nails. Mikhail holding Raven’s limp body, a river of blood, the earth and sky erupting all around them while Mikhail looked up at Jacques with the hopeless resolve to join his lifemate in her fate. Jacques’ eyes jumped to Mikhail’s face, examined every inch of it. This man was a leader, a dangerous, powerful predator who had skillfully steered their dying race through centuries of pitfalls. One whom such as Gregori chose to follow. Something stirred inside Jacques, the need to protect this man, to shield him. Mikhail. Mikhail’s head jerked up. He heard his name echo clearly in his head. The path had been there for one heartbeat, familiar and strong; then just as quickly it was lost.

On the contrary, across twenty-one years of research into slavery and child labor, I have never seen more extreme predation for profit than I witnessed at the bottom of global cobalt supply chains.

I come from a long line of powerful stag shifters. We have rituals. Secret ones, old ones. We don’t necessarily worship the same gods that you do. I think our gods predate this world, but I’ve never confirmed it.

We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures are huge advantages. It seems self-evident that these have made humankind the most powerful animal on earth. But humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures. Thus humans who lived a million years ago, despite their big brains and sharp stone tools, dwelt in constant fear of predators, rarely hunted large game, and subsisted mainly by gathering plants, scooping up insects, stalking small animals, and eating the carrion left behind by other more powerful carnivores.

He was part of the night, the creatures known to him, the restless, untamed land matching his hungry soul. Beau watched him,observing the utter stillness marking the dangerous predator, the merciless eyes moving constantly,missing nothing.The powerful, well-muscled body was deceptively relaxed but ready for anything. The face,harshy sensual, beautifully cruel, was etched with hardship and knowledge,rish and peril. Gregori stayed in the shadows,but the silver menace of his gaze glowed with a strange iridescent light in the dark of the night. Beau took the opportunity to study Savannah. She was everything up close that she had been on the stage, even more. Ethereal, mysterious, sexy. They very stuff of men's fantasies. Her face was flawless, lit up with joy, her eyes clear,like beautiful blue star sapphires. Her laughter was musical and infectious. She was small and innocent beside the predator in his boat. She would touch Gregori's arm, point to something on the embankment, her body brushing his lightly,and each time it happened,those pale eyes would warm to molten mercury and caress fer face intimately,hungrily.

As the most powerful people in history, we have climbed to the top of the world food chain, so to speak. Facing not one single enemy or predator who poses to us any danger of consequence, we've found the only prey left: ourselves.

I thought you were planning on talking him to death," Darius informed the golden bat dryly as he himself shape-shifted from a black bat to a feathered and much more powerful predator. "Someone had to do something while you were playing with your rock patterns," Julian replied easily, allowing iridescent feathers to erupt along his own body, becoming a raptor more than able to keep up with his companion's aggressive flight. They began to fly side by side easily toward the forest where they had left Desari. "I could do no other than protect the man of my sister's choosing." Darius managed to make it sound as if his sister had a hole in her head. Julian snorted. "Protect me? I do not think so,old man. You were the one standing back in the shadows while I destroyed the beast." "I had to ensure you came to no harm through other traps and snares. You certainly wasted enough time with the undead," Darius replied softly.

I'm afraid they're not very well-designed creatures, dragons." Vimes listened. "They would never have survived at all except that their home swamps were isolated and short of predators. Not that a dragon made good eating, anyway-once you'd taken away the leathery skin and the enormous flight muscles, what was left must have been like biting into a badly-run chemical factory. No wonder dragons were always ill. They relied on permanent stomach trouble for supplies of fuel. Most of their brain power was taken up with controlling the complexities of then-digestion, which could distill flame-producing fuels from the most unlikely ingredients. They could even rearrange their internal plumbing overnight to deal with difficult processes. They lived on a chemical knife-edge the whole time. One misplaced hiccup and they were geography. And when it came to choosing nesting sites, the females had all the common sense and mothering instinct of a brick." Vimes wondered why people had been so worried about dragons in the olden days. If there was one in a cave near you, all you had to do was wait until it self-ignited, blew itself up, or died of acute indigestion.

We seek compensation, true, but we also seek to prevent future abhorrent conduct by this or any other priest. We seek to punish a vicious predator of children and the religious institution that stands idly by and watches while a whole generation of God’s precious children are physically and psychologically raped of their childhood, their faith, and their trust in role models. This is about a hierarchy whose solution to the problem is to send the offending priest packing, quietly pay off victims, and actively cover up crimes. The cover-up is responsible for a vicious cycle of crime upon crime. This lawsuit says we will not go quietly like those who came before us. The vicious cycle stops here and now.

Humans are predators by nature. This instinct may have been bleached out by the cleansing power of civilization, but it cannot be taken away from us completely. The thrill of the hunt and the pleasure of the kill lie dormant in each of us.

Parscale’s team also ran voter suppression campaigns. They were targeted at three different groups of Democrats: young women, white liberals who might like Bernie Sanders, and Black voters. These voters got so-called dark posts—nonpublic posts that only they would see. They’d be invisible to researchers or anyone else looking at their feed. The idea was: feed them stuff that’ll discourage them from voting for Hillary. One made for Black audiences was a cartoon built around her 1996 sound bite that “African Americans are super predators.” In the end, Black voters didn’t turn out in the numbers that Democrats expected. In an election that came down to a small number of votes in key swing states, these things mattered.

The perfect boyfriend. Evolutionary psychologists often opine that bad boys are the ultimate alpha males—powerful, potent, lethal. These predators represent the forbidden fruit! Ergo that makes them the ultimate taboo, which makes them the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Look at them, the bugs. Humans have used everything in their power to extinguish them: every kind of poison, aerial sprays, introducing and cultivating their natural predators, searching for and destroying their eggs, using genetic modification to sterilize them, burning with fire, drowning with water. Every family has bug spray, every desk has a flyswatter under it… this long war has been going on for the entire history of human civilization. But the outcome is still in doubt. The bugs have not been eliminated. They still proudly live between the heavens and the earth, and their numbers have not diminished from the time before the appearance of the humans. The Trisolarans who deemed the humans bugs seemed to have forgotten one fact: The bugs have never been truly defeated.

Our deep irrational feelings of death anxiety have been attributed to multiple sources. In part, they may arise from evolved self-protection mechanisms or survival responses of being a victim of predators. They might, conversely, stem from unconscious fear (or guilt) of retribution resulting from our own acts of harming or predation. According to existential psychologists, the most powerful form of death anxiety comes from our general ability to anticipate the future, coupled with conscious anticipation of inevitable personal demise.

In short, conquest is in no sense a necessary sign of higher human development, though conquistadors have always thought otherwise. Any valid concept of organic development must use the primary terms of ecology-cooperation and symbiosis-as well as struggle and conflict, for even predators are part of a food chain, and do not 'conquer' their prey except to eat them. The idea of total conquest is an extrapolation from the existing power system: it indicates, not a desirable end, accomodation, but a pathological aberration, re-enforced by such rewards as this system bestows. As for the climactic notion that "the universe will be man's at last"-what is this but a paranoid fantasy, comparable to the claims of an asylum inmate who imagines that he is Emperor of the World? Such a claim is countless light-years away from reality.

The west, and especially the United States, has shown no serious or sustained interest in the Middle East until the last half century. We tend to be comfortably ignorant of the history of Western interventionism in the region over centuries — or even over a millennium. We are only superficially aware of Middle Eastern critiques of Western policies that touch on oil, finances, political intervention, Western-sponsored coups, Western support for pro-Western dictators, and carte blanche American support for Israel in the complex Palestinian problem — which, after all, had its roots not in Islam, but in Western persecution and butchery of European Jews. European powers have also exported their local quarrels and parleyed them into two world wars that were fought out partly on Middle Eastern soil, as was much of the Cold War as well. All this suggests that many other causative factors are at work that have at least as much explanatory power for the current turmoil as does “Islam.” It is not simply a matter of “blaming the West” as some readers might rush to suggest here. I argue that deeper geopolitical factors have created numerous confrontational factors between the East and the West that predate Islam, continued with Islam and around Islam, and may be inherent in the territorial imperatives and geopolitical outlook of any states that occupy those areas, regardless of religion.

They have less power than they think, than anyone realizes, but like any small predator, they manage to be flashy enough to be seen. In general, feminism as a career is the province of the privileged; it’s hard to read dozens of books on feminist theory while you’re working in a hair salon or engaged in the kinds of jobs that put food on the table but also demand a lot of physical and mental energy. For many who are coming to feminism in the way that I did, through lived experience, the work that feminists do in the community is more relevant than any text.

All of them looked at me with utter disgust. I knew what it was to walk into a room and know that everyone there wanted to kill me. That is what it was to be prey in a world of predators. This was different. These people wanted to kill me not because I was weak, but because I was powerful.

In the next chapters, you will find a collection of the most powerful persuasive and manipulative techniques used by advertisers, emotional predators, vendors, politicians and all those who are able to change the thoughts of an individual or a group of people. You can use these techniques both to protect

If envious humanity sought godlike power and fell from grace, it might be true that some race before us did the same, that we share this broken world with predators who were once beings of light and promise, but transformed themselves into creatures that worship the outer dark and wish the world to be one vast graveyard.

As long as they are carnivorous and/or humanoid, the monster's form matters little. Whether it is Tyrannosaurus rex, saber toothed tiger, grizzly bear, werewolf, bogeyman, vampire, Wendigo, Rangda, Grendel, Moby-Dick, Joseph Stalin, the Devil, or any other manifestation of the Beast, all are objects of dark fascination, in large part because of their capacity to consciously, willfully destroy us. What unites these creatures--ancient or modern, real or imagined, beautiful or repulsive, animal, human, or god--is their superhuman strength, malevolent cunning, and, above all, their capricious, often vengeful appetite--for us. This, in fact, is our expectation of them; it's a kind of contract we have. In this capacity, the seemingly inexhaustible power of predators to fascinate us--to "capture attention"--fulfills a need far beyond morbid titillation. It has a practical application. Over time, these creatures or, more specifically, the dangers they represent, have found their way into our consciousness and taken up permanent residence there. In return, we have shown extraordinary loyalty to them--to the point that we re-create them over and over in every medium, through every era and culture, tuning and adapting them to suit changing times and needs. It seems they are a key ingredient in the glue that binds us to ourselves and to each other.

I hope it's the good kind of dilemma," Reginald broke Patricia's reverie. "Whatever one you're on the horns of." ... "I was just thinking," she said. "There are so many scary problems in the world. Like, I was just reading that we could be seeing the last of the bees in North America soon. And if that happened, food webs would just collapse, and tons more people would starve. But suppose you had the power to change things? You still might not be able to fix anything, because every time you solve a problem you'd create another problem. And maybe all these plagues and droughts are nature's way of striking a balance. We humans don't have any natural predators left, so nature has to find another way to handle us." ... "I am, as you know, a fan of nature," said Reginald. "And yet, nature doesn't 'find ways' to do anything. Nature has no opinion, no agenda. Nature provides a playing field, a not particularly level one, on which we compete with all creatures great and small. It's more that nature's playing field is full of traps.

But conserving mental effort is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment, we might fail to notice something important, such as a predator hiding in the bushes or a speeding car as we pull onto the street. So our basal ganglia have devised a clever system to determine when to let habits take over. It’s something that happens whenever a chunk of behavior starts or ends.

The Sumerians considered themselves destined to “clothe and feed” such gods, because they viewed themselves as the servants, in a sense, of what we would call instinctive forces, “elicited” by the “environment.” Such forces can be reasonably regarded as the Sumerians regarded them—as deities inhabiting a “supracelestial place,” extant prior to the dawn of humanity. Erotic attraction, for example—a powerful god—has a developmental history that predates the emergence of humanity, is associated with relatively “innate” releasing “stimuli” (those that characterize erotic beauty), is of terrible power, and has an existence “transcending” that of any individual who is currently “possessed.” Pan, the Greek god of nature, produced/represented fear (produced “panic”); Ares or the Roman Mars, warlike fury and aggression. We no longer personify such “instincts,” except for the purposes of literary embellishment, so we don't think of them “existing” in a “place” (like heaven, for example). But the idea that such instincts inhabit a space—and that wars occur in that space—is a metaphor of exceeding power and explanatory utility. Transpersonal motive forces do wage war with one another over vast spans of time; are each forced to come to terms with their powerful “opponents” in the intrapsychic hierarchy. The battles between the different “ways of life” (or different philosophies) that eternally characterize human societies can usefully be visualized as combat undertaken by different standards of value (and, therefore, by different hierarchies of motivation). The “forces” involved in such wars do not die, as they are “immortal”: the human beings acting as “pawns of the gods” during such times are not so fortunate.

But humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures. Thus humans who lived a million years ago, despite their big brains and sharp stone tools, dwelt in constant fear of predators, rarely hunted large game, and subsisted mainly by gathering plants, scooping up insects, stalking small animals, and eating the carrion left behind by other more powerful carnivores.

The sexual abuse of children is an ancient and pervasive crime, one that is committed wherever adults have power over the young. Schoolteachers, scoutmasters, other clergy, family members, even fathers and mothers are known to physically exploit their vulnerable charges. The home can be the cockpit of abuse. Defenders of the clerical status quo insist on this broader context, as if predation in the sacristy is no big deal. Alas, as I noted earlier, Pope Francis himself displayed this impulse to relativize the priestly crime. But the exploitation of children by Catholic priests stands apart — in its worldwide range, in the enabling complicity of church authorities, and in its deeper meaning a sacrilege — because of how God is so often invoked to seduce and coerce victims. The crime of sexual exploitation, especially of children, has shown itself to be endemic to the priesthood.

Good, evil, these are human concepts, ways people have for understanding what it means to be alive,” Nick said. “Before people came along, this planet was teeming with life, fighting to survive, to live long enough to reproduce, completing the circle of life.” “I’m with you so far,” Elphaba said. “The circle of life is an essential Wiccan principle, in spite of The Lion King.” Nick ignored Elphaba’s bit of humor as his mood became more serious. “Precisely so. And in this circle of life, you have predators and prey. The predators must kill to eat. If they don’t, they starve. Are the predators evil?” “No, of course not. They’re simply acting on their nature.” “What is human nature, then? Are we a species that builds societies of trust and cooperation, or are we a species that seeks power over our fellow man, even if that means fighting wars or otherwise killing him?” Elphaba frowned, carefully considering her answer. “I’d like to think we are a species of trust and cooperation.” “Our entire history is a story of war, of murder and mayhem, of blood running in the streets,” Nick said quietly. “Yes, yes it is.” Elphaba leaned back, grimacing. “We are both,” Nick said. “A species of cooperation, and a species of strife. We fight wars, and we also establish the rule of law to mete out justice to the criminals in our midst. Humans are both good and evil.

By our very nature, we humans are linear thinkers. We evolved to estimate a distance from the predator or to the prey, and advanced mathematics is only a recent evolutionary addition. This is why it’s so difficult even for a modern man to grasp the power of exponentials. 40 steps in linear progression is just 40 steps away; 40 steps in exponential progression is a cool trillion (with a T) – it will take you 3 times from Earth to the Sun and back to Earth.

It’s true I’m male and have some power, but I never asked to be born male. Maybe being male is like being born a predator, and maybe the only right thing for the predator to do, if it sympathizes with smaller animals and won’t accept that it was born to kill them, is to betray its nature and starve to death. But maybe it’s like something else—like being born with more money than others. Then the right thing to do becomes a more interesting social question.

Within a few generations, he had explained to Rudgutter, the Weavers evolved from virtually mindless predators into aestheticians of astonishing intellectual and materio-thaumaturgic power, superintelligent alien minds who no longer used their webs to catch prey, but were attuned to them as objects of beauty disentanglable from the fabric of reality itself. Their spinnerets had become specialized extradimensional glands that Wove patterns in with the world. The world which was, for them, a web. Old stories told how Weavers would kill each other over aesthetic disagreements, such as whether it was prettier to destroy an army of a thousand men or to leave it be, or whether a particular dandelion should or should not be plucked. For a Weaver, to think was to think aesthetically. To act—to Weave—was to bring about more pleasing patterns. They did not eat physical food: they seemed to subsist on the appreciation of beauty.

Rowan moved deeper into the entry hall, every step laced with power and death, coming to a stop at her side. “You can call me Rowan. That’s all you need to know.” He cocked his head to the side, a predator assessing prey. “Thank you for the oil,” he added. “My skin was a little dry.” Arobynn blinked—as much surprise as he’d show. It took her a moment to process what Rowan had said, and to realize that the almond smell hadn’t just been coming from her. He’d worn it, too.

The ancient Greeks had an appropriate metaphor for this: the rider and the horse. The horse is our emotional nature continually impelling us to move. This horse has tremendous energy and power, but without a rider it cannot be guided; it is wild, subject to predators, and continually heading into trouble. The rider is our thinking self. Through training and practice, it holds the reins and guides the horse, transforming this powerful animal energy into something productive. The one without the other is useless. Without the rider, no directed movement or purpose. Without the horse, no energy, no power. In most people the horse dominates, and the rider is weak. In some people the rider is too strong, holds the reins too tightly, and is afraid to occasionally let the animal go into a gallop. The horse and rider must work together. This means we consider our actions beforehand; we bring as much thinking as possible to a situation before we make a decision. But once we decide what to do, we loosen the reins and enter action with boldness and a spirit of adventure. Instead of being slaves to this energy, we channel it. That is the essence of rationality. As an example of this ideal in action, try to maintain a perfect balance between skepticism (rider) and curiosity (horse). In this mode you are skeptical about your own enthusiasms and those of others. You do not accept at face value people’s explanations and their application of “evidence.” You look at the results of their actions, not what they say about their motivations. But if you take this too far, your mind will close itself off from wild ideas, from exciting speculations, from curiosity itself. You want to retain the elasticity of spirit you had as a child, interested in everything, while retaining the hard-nosed need to verify and scrutinize for yourself all ideas and beliefs. The two can coexist. It is a balance that all geniuses possess.

Women were sub manu – under the hand: they could technically be executed by their fathers and husbands and were expected to display pudicitia, chastity and fidelity, to ensure the bloodline of their children, while running the home and keeping out of politics – though of course they exerted power behind the scenes. Once the childbearing was done, it is clear they enjoyed affairs with other nobles and even sex with slaves – provided they did not flaunt their pleasures. The familia included the family’s slaves, who were expected to be loyal to the dominus (master) and his household even more so than to the state. Domestic slavery, male and female, always involved sexual predations by masters – and mistresses. The killing of slaves by masters was entirely legal. In a slave-owning society, with as many as 40 per cent of the population enslaved, family and slavery were entwined. But slaves were often educated, sometimes revered and loved by their masters. They were frequently freed and freedmen could become citizens, later even potentates.

Stories with Vasalisa as a central character are told in Russia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Poland, and throughout all the Baltic countries. In some instances, the tale is commonly called “Wassilissa the Wise.” I find evidence of its archetypal roots dating back at least to the old horse-Goddess cults which predate classical Greek culture. This tale carries ages-old psychic mapping about induction into the underworld of the wild female God. It is about infusing human women with Wild Woman’s primary instinctual power, intuition.

The presumption that a high rate of continuous economic growth is possible puts a premium on investment in the sorts of institutions and conditions that facilitate such growth, like political stability, property rights, technology, and scientific research. On the other hand, if we assume that there are only limited possibilities for productivity improvements, then societies are thrown into a zero-sum world in which predation, or the taking of resources from someone else, is often a far more plausible route to power and wealth.

In the face of the world's harshness and danger, organisms of any kind develop protection — a coat of armor, a rigid system, a comforting ritual. For the short term, it may work, but for the long term it spells disaster. People weighed down by a system and inflexible ways of doing things cannot move fast, cannot sense or adapt to change. They lumber around more and more slowly until they go the way of the brontosaurus. Learn to move fast and adapt or you will be eaten. The best way to avoid this fate is to assume formlessness. No predator alive can attack what it cannot see.

It is incomprehensible to hold a child responsible for other people's sexual thoughts to the point that she is expected to manage them. Sex-related emotional labor started for me, as for many others, years before I had even formulated the existence, let alone the boundaries, of my own sexuality and sexual agency. Carrying the effects of other people's sexual desires on our bodies is taught to us before we get to define our sexuality for ourselves. Sexual emotional labor performed for others predates much of our own sexuality—to the extent that our sexuality is often shaped by it.

In unfamiliar terrain, a plastic bag impaled on barbed wire is snapping in the breeze. Mules are skittish about that because they haven’t seen it before, and it reminds them of a predator. So the “muleteer” beats them there too. Eventually, when the mules tire of getting beaten, or are just fed up dealing with a less intelligent species, they use the tremendous power of their hind legs to kick out the tug chains and run away. For this, mules are known as “ornery.” In English we use the common phrase “stubborn as a mule,” a classic example of man ascribing stupidity to the beast instead of to himself.

from water. These were not trivial challenges to overcome. On the other hand, there was a powerful incentive to leave the water: it was getting dangerous down there. The slow fusion of the continents into a single landmass, Pangaea, meant there was much, much less coastline than formerly and thus much less coastal habitat. So competition was fierce. There was also an omnivorous and unsettling new type of predator on the scene, one so perfectly designed for attack that it has scarcely changed in all the long eons since its emergence: the shark. Never would there be a more propitious time to find an alternative environment to water.

Indigenous religious traditions around the world continue to provide an ancient yet living vision of nature as sacred, requiring human respect and entailing human responsibilities. Anymals are understood to be “people” living in community as humans live in community—all of whom are part of a larger community of living beings. Indigenous religious traditions teach people that we owe respect, responsibility, and compassion to our nonhuman kin, and remember a time of great peace, before predation began. Most indigenous peoples believe that all beings are endowed with souls. Anymals are generally thought to hold exceptional abilities and remarkable powers.

Bankers are seeking to capture government and make financial policy immune from democratic choice. What promised to be a progressive social democratic Europe half a century ago is turning into a power grab by financial predators. The EU has confronted Greece, Cyprus and other indebted economies with an option of suffering debt deflation or leaving the eurozone. Since Greece’s Syriza coalition took the electoral lead in opposing the financial and fiscal austerity, the creditor response has been to dare Greece to withdraw – and to suffer a transitional financial chaos if it tries to save itself from being crushed by unemployment, bankruptcy and emigration.

INFECTIOUS DISEASE IS all around us. Infectious disease is a kind of natural mortar binding one creature to another, one species to another, within the elaborate biophysical edifices we call ecosystems. It’s one of the basic processes that ecologists study, including also predation, competition, decomposition, and photosynthesis. Predators are relatively big beasts that eat their prey from outside. Pathogens (disease-causing agents, such as viruses) are relatively small beasts that eat their prey from within. Although infectious disease can seem grisly and dreadful, under ordinary conditions it’s every bit as natural as what lions do to wildebeests and zebras, or what owls do to mice.

But none of them compared to the dangerous stranger in her room. While the men she was used to were hotter than hell, what they lacked was the fierce aura of power that emanated from this man and his stern, steely features. It was as if he were the deadliest of predators. Feral. That was the only word to do him justice. Surely there wasn’t another soldier in the entire universe who could match him in terms of raw beauty or lethal demeanor. His blond hair was snow white and his features sharp and icy. He wore a pair of black shades that annoyed her since she couldn’t see the upper part of his face or the color of his eyes. Not that it mattered. She saw enough to know that in the land of gorgeous men, he had no competition. As a stark contrast to his white hair, his clothes were a black so deep they seemed to absorb all light, and they were trimmed in silver … No, not silver. Those were weapons tucked into the sleeves and lapels of his ankle-length coat. The left side of it was pulled back, exposing a holstered blaster that was strapped to his left hip. The tall flight boots had silver buckles going up the sides that were fashioned into the image of skulls. At least that’s what she saw at first glance, but as he moved closer she realized those could come off and double as weapons, too. Wow, he was either extremely paranoid or more lethal than a team of League assassins. And that said something.

Sometimes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are presented as a hunting expeditions (“As British close in on Basra, Iraqis scurry away”; “Terror hunt snares twenty-five”; and “Net closes around Bin Laden”) with enemy bases as animal nests (“Pakistanis give up on lair of Osama”; “Terror nest in Fallujah is attacked”) from which the prey must be driven out (“Why Bin Laden is so difficult to smoke out”; “America’s new dilemma: how to smoke Bin Laden out from caves”). We need to trap the animal (“Trap may net Taliban chief”; “FBI terror sting nets mosque leaders”) and lock it in a cage (“Even locked in a cage, Saddam poses serious danger”). Sometimes the enemy is a ravening predator (“Chained beast—shackled Saddam dragged to court”), or a monster (“The terrorism monster”; “Of monsters and Muslims”), while at other times he is a pesky rodent (“Americans cleared out rat’s nest in Afghanistan”; “Hussein’s rat hole”), a venomous snake (“The viper awaits”; “Former Arab power is ‘poisonous snake’”), an insect (“Iraqi forces find ‘hornet’s nest’ in Fallujah”; “Operation desert pest”; “Terrorists, like rats and cockroaches, skulk in the dark”), or even a disease organism (“Al Qaeda mutating like a virus”; “Only Muslim leaders can remove spreading cancer of Islamic terrorism”). In any case, they reproduce at an alarming rate (“Iraq breeding suicide killers”; “Continent a breeding ground for radical Islam”).

He wasn't like this when I knew him." "Yes, he was," Mr Crepsley disagreed. "He just had not grown into his true evil self yet. He was born bad, as certain people are. Humans will tell you that everybody can be helped, that everyone has a choice. In my experience, that is not so. Good people can sometimes choose badness, but bad people cannot choose good." "I don't believe that," Harkat said softly. "I think good and evil exist...in all of us. We might be born leaning more towards...one than the other, but the choice is there. It has to be. Otherwise, we're mere...puppets of fate." "Perhaps," Mr Crepsley grunted. "Many see it as you do. But I do not think so. Most are born with the freedom of choice. But there are those who defy the rules, who are wicked from the beginning. Maybe they are puppets of fate, born that way for a reason, to test the rest of us. I do not know. But natural monsters do exist. On that point, nothing you say can shake me. And Steve Leonard is one of them." "But then it isn't his fault," I said, frowning. "If he was born bad, he isn't to blame for growing up evil." "No more than a lion is to blame for being a predator," Mr Crepsley agreed. I thought about that. "If that's the case, we shouldn't hate him — we should pity him." Mr Crepsley shook his head. "No, Darren. You should neither hate nor pity a monster — merely fear it, and do all in your power to make an end of it before it destroys you.

As always, the dead will be made to pay the moral debt born of their killing. At the start of this campaign, one oft-parroted justification was the nonsensical contrivance that Palestinians in Gaza were subject to a collective guilt on account of their voting for Hamas. It is somewhat pointless to note that most Gazans are too young to have voted for Hamas in the most recent election, or that collective punishment of a civilian population for their electoral choices would be subject to a far higher standard of scrutiny if that population weren’t a politically powerless contingent of Brown people, or that the very same terror group had long received support from the Israeli government as a matter of strategy so as to keep an entity in power that at least partially shared the government’s disdain for peace or a two-state solution, or that the occupation and terror inflicted on Palestinians long predates the creation of Hamas. It is pointless, even, to make the obvious analogies, to imagine the response had almost any other country on earth killed hundreds or thousands of civilians on a hostage rescue mission, or flattened every hospital in a city on the hunt for a terror group, and then bragged about its success. Pointless because such things assume a conversation anchored in facts or reason or even the thinnest presupposition that the people being killed, like those killed on October 7, are human beings, their loss an utter indictment of the systems and leaders and world that allowed

There’s just no owning any success you achieve and stacking it in your win column. The force just won’t let it happen. What happens when imposter syndrome has you in its grip? You become terrified you’ll be found out. Despite all her acclaim and success, this is what Maya Angelou feared. “I have written 11 books, but each time I think, ‘Uh-oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’”1 You might be surprised to find out how many accomplished people think to themselves they’ll be “found out,” then ostracized and ridiculed. However, it’s irrational. It would only happen if you actually did have no skill, no ability, or no knowledge, but that isn’t the case for most people. This is the ultimate fear, isn’t it? Being found out and kicked out of our tribe? By nature, we’re tribal. Humans survived through the millennia because we were part of a tribe that hunted, gathered, sheltered, and protected one another from the elements, from predators, and from other tribes. You couldn’t be out hunting and watching the fire simultaneously. You needed other people if you had any hope of surviving through the night. If your tribe finds out you’re a fraud, it triggers that primordial “Uh-oh, they’re going to kick me out! I’m going to be caught in the wilderness alone!” When plagued by imposter syndrome, people don’t take themselves, their abilities, or their accomplishments seriously. If you don’t take yourself seriously on any Field of Play, you most likely won’t be getting the results you want.

Look at them, the bugs. Humans have used everything in their power to extinguish them: every kind of poison, aerial sprays, introducing and cultivating their natural predators, searching for and destroying their eggs, using genetic modification to sterilize them, burning with fire, drowning with water. Every family has bug spray, every desk has a flyswatter under it … this long war has been going on for the entire history of human civilization. But the outcome is still in doubt. The bugs have not been eliminated. They still proudly live between the heavens and the earth, and their numbers have not diminished from the time before the appearance of the humans. The Trisolarans who deemed the humans bugs seemed to have forgotten one fact: The bugs have never been truly defeated.

The 1.2 billion members of the church are expected to conduct themselves according to the morals foisted upon them by said church, but those in the church’s power structure do not hold themselves to the same standards. They don’t view themselves as beholden to the same morality as their parishioners, because they know what those parishioners don’t—that the morality they peddle is not about good or bad, it’s about maintaining power and control. So even the clergy that weren’t sexually preying on kids were defending those who did and working hard to see that predator priests were spared from the negative consequences of their insidious transgressions. The mantra of the powerful has always been: 'We are the powerful and we can do as we please. You are the subjects and you will do as you’re told'.

The analysis in this book does not just apply to the extreme cases it has examined, where the whole of government has morphed into a criminal organization bent to no other business than personal enrichment, and has retooled the crucial gears of state power to that end. To highlight the problem of kleptocracy only in places like Nigeria and Afghanistan is to reinforce a tacit superiority complex: those populations, of the global south, are somehow unsuited to rational government. They are culturally prone to predation. Reform is not possible, only containment. It is also to duck the significance of the global economic meltdown of 2008. The analysis here applies, and strikingly, to countries closer to home, where governments have been dangerously encroached upon in recent years—even partially colonized—by what John Locke would call “some party of men.

Nonetheless, if you’re trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blindspot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. The reason I believe that liberalism – which is done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity – is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

Humor can be such a good way to hide anger at racist, sexist degradation and to challenge white male authority sideways—without risking as much direct blowback—that it perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise that the comedian Tina Fey wrote jokes about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation—lines about being pinned under Weinstein, and turning down sex with him—that aired on her show 30 Rock in 2012, years before his behavior could be reported straight. In 2013, during the Oscars, the white male comedian Seth MacFarlane also made a Weinstein joke—about the lead actress nominees no longer having to pretend to be attracted to the producer. After 2017 reporting revealed the extent of Weinstein’s predation, MacFarlane explained that a friend of his, an actress who’d been harassed by Weinstein, had confided in him, prompting his joke. “Make no mistake,” he said at the time, his one-liner had come “from a place of loathing and anger.

In fact, public speaking anxiety may be primal and quintessentially human, not limited to those of us born with a high-reactive nervous system. One theory, based on the writings of the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, holds that when our ancestors lived on the savannah, being watched intently meant only one thing: a wild animal was stalking us. And when we think we’re about to be eaten, do we stand tall and hold forth confidently? No. We run. In other words, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution urge us to get the hell off the stage, where we can mistake the gaze of the spectators for the glint in a predator’s eye. Yet the audience expects not only that we’ll stay put, but that we’ll act relaxed and assured. This conflict between biology and protocol is one reason that speechmaking can be so fraught. It’s also why exhortations to imagine the audience in the nude don’t help nervous speakers; naked lions are just as dangerous as elegantly dressed ones.

Thiel has also contributed to a reactionary turn in our politics and society that has left the United States in a much more uncertain place than he found it in when he went into business for himself in the mid-1990s. He is a critic of big tech who has done more to increase the dominance of big tech than perhaps any living person. He is a self-proclaimed privacy advocate who founded one of the world’s largest surveillance companies. He is a champion of meritocracy and intellectual diversity who has surrounded himself with a self-proclaimed mafia of loyalists. And he is a champion of free speech who secretly killed a major U.S. media outlet. “He’s a nihilist, a really smart nihilist,” said Matt Stoller, the anti-monopoly activist and author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. “He’s entirely about power—it’s the law of the jungle. ‘I’m a predator and the predators win.’ ” That, more than anything, may be the lesson that Thiel’s followers have learned—the real meaning of “move fast and break things.

I left you with my address and you wrote me a gorgeous letter, but you included a photograph of yourself in a blue Polo shirt. "In front of my car," you'd written on the back, and the car was a cherry-red Lamborghini, but it was clearly also in motion, driving away from you. I was naïve but not entirely so, and it made me sad to think that you believed I'd believe this. And so I never answered, and I never discovered whether your gentleness that afternoon was truly kindness for a bedraggled stranger, or whether you were the predator two decades have taught me you might have been. But this is the power of memory: the person who owns it can morph it to her desire. I'd like to judge you for the intense courtliness with which you treated me, the conversation, the sunlight in which we sat. I won't ever know the truth, but I choose to believe you were good and that your arrival took me away from worse. So thank you, Enrico Ferrante, for what didn't happen, for what you didn't do, for what I didn't find in that menacing dreamland of Palermo, for the way your gentle intervention sent me away.

Public speaking phobia has many causes, including early childhood setbacks, that have to do with our unique personal histories, not inborn temperament. In fact, public speaking may be primal and quintessentially human, not limited to those of us born with a high-reactive nervous system. One theory, based on the writings of the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, holds that when our ancestors lived on the savannah, being watched intently meant only one thing: a wild animal was stalking us. And when we think we're about to be eaten, do we stand tall and hold forth confidently? No. We run. In other words, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution urge us to get the hell off the stage, where we can mistake the gaze of the spectators for the glint in a predator's eye. Yet the audience expects not only that we'll stay put, but that we'll act relaxed and assured. This conflict between biology and protocol is one reason that speechmaking can be so fraught. It's also why exhortations to imagine the audience in the nude don't help nervous speakers; naked lions are just as dangerous as elegantly dressed ones.

I see your birth. Your violent entrance into the barren and endless space. Sent here by accident or with purpose, Krona does not even know. Casting your presence across the entire universe. Light fighting back darkness by creating the stars and planets. Creating your shelter, earth, at the very spot you were thrust into the universe. The planet in which you made your home under molten rock -- and primordial waters. I see you touch the oceans, transforming them into seas of spontaneous life. Overflowing with evolution. Gaining complexity. Conjuring thought. I watch the first sentient creature in the universe to ever will itself to move...do just that. And it is the origin of Willpower itself. The creature ignites with emerald light and transforms, elevated above the others. It is Ion. Thousands of years fly before my eyes as the creature escapes earth's oceans and crawl to land. Some take to the air. Fleeing for survival, this thing transforms into the emotional power it emits. Fear is born. And thus Parallax. As Love ignites into existence, so does the Predator. As a creature eats what it does not need, Avarice consumes all it touches. Rage grows from murder. Hope from prayer. And at last, Compassion is offered to us all.

Racial stereotyping. For Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders, the sin of white racism was stereotyping all black people as inferior. It was a prejudice to be sure, but it was predicated on the assumption that all blacks were the same. King objected to stereotyping because he wanted blacks to be treated as individuals and not reduced exclusively to their racial identity (hence the meaning of his famous statement about the content of one's character taking precedence over the color of one's skin). The postmodern left turns the civil rights model on its head. It embraces racial stereotyping -- racial identity by any other name -- and reverses it, transforming it into something positive, provided the pecking order of power is kept in place. In the new moral scheme of racial identities, black inferiority is replaced by white culpability, rendering the entire white race, with few exceptions, collectively guilty of racial oppression. The switch is justified through the logic of racial justice, but that does not change the fact that people are being defined by their racial characteristic. Racism is viewed as structural, so it is permissible to use overtly positive discrimination (i.e., affirmative action) to reorder society. This end-justifies-the-means mentality of course predates the postmodern left. It can be found in the doctrine of affirmative action. But the racial theorists of identity politics have taken "positive" discrimination to a whole new level. Whereas affirmative action was justified mainly in terms of trying to give disadvantaged blacks a temporary leg up, the racial theorists of the postmodern left see corrective action as permanent. The unending struggle that ensues necessitates acceptance of a new type of racial stereotyping as a way of life and increasingly as something that needs to be enshrined in administrative regulations and the law. The idea of positive stereotyping contains all sorts of illiberal troublemaking. Once one race is set up as victim and another as guilty of racism, any means necessary are permitted to correct the alleged unjust distribution of power. Justice becomes retaliatory rather than color blind -- a matter of vengeance rather than justice. The notion of collective racial guilt, once a horror to liberal opinion, is routinely accepted today as the true mark of a progressive. Casualties are not only King's dream of racial harmony but also the hope that someday we can all -- blacks and whites -- rise above racial stereotypes.

Mulling it over that evening, I had to agree with him. Dalin embodied the anarchic nihilist, a type that is not all that rare. What was special about him was that he not only reacted with a general malaise, he also thought about it. Of course it made a difference whether he shot someone from the front or from the back—a difference not in the effect, but in the self-affirmation. I have noticed that a cat will turn up her nose at a piece of meat if I hand it to her, but she will devour it with gusto if she has "stolen" it. The meat is the same, but the difference lies in the predator's delight in recognizing itself. The anarchic nihilist is not to be confused with the socialist revolutionary. His aversion is not toward one person or another but toward order per se. Asocial and apolitical, he represents the destructive workings of nature. He would like to accelerate them. Compared with even the modest methods of our tyranny, Dalin seems like a kind of Don Quixote tilting at windmills. What was accomplished when a train derailed, a bridge exploded, a depart­ment store burned to the ground? True, one has to see this in different terms—say, as a paltry sacrifice to the delight of the powerful Shiva. A chemist seldom knows precisely what he is doing.

And what benefit do women derive from imprisoning men as date rapists apart from gratification of a desire for revenge? Seeing men punished may even confirm morally confused women in their mistaken sense of victimhood—resentment tends to feed upon itself, like an itch that worsens with scratching. Women are reinforced in the belief that it is their right for men’s behavior to be anything they would like it to be. They become less inclined to treat men with respect or to try to learn to understand or compromisse with them. In a word, they learn to think and behave like spoiled children, expecting everything and willing to give nothing. Men, meanwhile, respond to this in ways that are not difficult to predict. They may not (at first) decline sexual liaisons with such women, because the woman’s moral shortcomings do not have too great an effect upon the sexual act itself. But, quite rationally, they will avoid any deeper involvement with them. So women experience fewer, shorter and worse marriages and “relationships” with men. But they do not blame themselves for the predicament they are in; they refuse to see any connection between their own behavior and their loneliness and frustration. Thus we get ever more frequent characterizations of men as rapists and predators who mysteriously refuse to commit.

Let me state clearly that moral capital is not always an unalloyed good. Moral capital leads automatically to the suppression of free riders, but it does not lead automatically to other forms of fairness such as equality of opportunity. And while high moral capital helps a community to function efficiently, the community can use that efficiency to inflict harm on other communities. High moral capital can be obtained within a cult or a fascist nation, as long as most people truly accept the prevailing moral matrix. Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire,43 and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

There are four levels of predator that riders are capable of creating: Hider, Hunter, Marauder and Mythical.’ On the last of those words, Mitchell went a bit misty-eyed. ‘The Hiders are the least powerful – think of the types of animals that eat others but aren’t that big or scary, the ones that lie in wait to strike, like a snake. The Hunters are the next level up – like that jackal today. Then Marauders are even more impressive – like Rex’s cheetah. He must have studied cheetahs really closely in the library. And then—’ ‘Wait, Rex created that cheetah based on a book?’ Bobby interrupted. ‘Riders used to spend hundreds of hours in libraries poring over ancient illustrations brought by the first people to train here,’ Mitchell explained, and then he blinked rapidly. ‘I’ve just had a thought! Maybe that’s partly why elemental predators have stayed banned. After the Treaty, maybe the Island was worried that Mainlander riders would be better at creating them because Mainlanders can study the predators in real life.’ ‘That sounds very likely,’ Skandar said darkly. ‘Anyway,’ Mitchell continued, clearly wanting to finish his lecture, ‘the Mythicals are the fourth level of predator and hardly any riders in history have been able to create those. The First Rider could, and one of the silver brothers who started the ancient war with the spirit wielders. Erm, let me think…’ ‘Mythical? As in, they take the shape of mythical creatures?’ Skandar couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. ‘Yes. Phoenixes, griffins, krakens, thunderbirds, dragons—’ ‘Dragons?!’ Bobby looked very excited.

In effect, we know from Darwin that there are only four characteristics necessary in order to get adaptive evolution, right? If you have reproduction, variation, differential success, and an environment of limited resources, you're going to get adaptive evolution. When we set up an economic system, or a political system...*it evolves*. Things evolve within it. And if we don't anticipate that what we write down in our documents about what we're trying to accomplish does not have the capacity to overwhelm whatever niche we have set up and that we will ultimately see the creatures that are supported by the environment that we created, then we will never get this right. Because we will always be fooled by our own intentions, and we will create structures that create predators of an arbitrary kind. So we need to start thinking evolutionarily, because that's the mechanism for shaping society into something of a desirable type rather than a monstrous type. [...] So let's say we're talking about a political structure...and we know we don't like corruption...and we're going to set a penalty for attempting to corrupt the system. OK, now what you've done is you've built a structure in which evolution is going to explore the questions, 'What kind of corruptions are invisible?' and 'What kinds of penalties are tolerable from the point of view of discovering how to alter policy in the direction of some private interest?' Once you've set that up, if you let it run, evolutionarily it will create a genius corruptor, right? It will generate something that is capable of altering the functioning of the system without being spotted, and with being only slightly penalized -- and then you'll have no hope of confronting it, because it's going to be better at shifting policy than you will be at shifting it back. So what you have to do is, you have to build a system in which there *is no selection* that allows for this process to explore mechanisms for corrupting the system, right? You may have to turn the penalties up much higher than you would think, so that any attempt to corrupt the system is ruinous to the thing that attempts it. So the thing never evolves to the next stage, because it keeps going extinct, right? That's a system that is resistant to the evolution of corruption, but you have to understand that it's an evolutionary puzzle in the first place in order to accomplish that goal. [...] We sort of have this idea that we inherited from the wisdom of the 50s that genes are these powerful things lurking inside of us that shift all of this stuff that we can't imagine they would have control over, and there's some truth in it. But the larger truth is that so much of what we are is built into the software layer, and the software layer is there because it is rapidly changeable. That's why evolution shifted things in that direction within humans. And we need to take advantage of that. We need to be responsible for altering things carefully in the software, intentionally, in order to solve problems and basically liberate people and make life better for as many people as possible, rather than basically throw up our hands because we are going to claim that these things live at the genetic layer and therefore what can we do?

She heard nothing but experienced a sensation that prickled along her spine like a warm touch caressing her skin. Slowly, with the care of prey beneath a predator's survey, she turned her head- and met the gaze of the elegant gentleman lounging at the door. In her travels, she had seen many a striking and charming man, but none had been as handsome as this- and all had been more charming. This man was a statue in stark black and white, hewn from rugged granite and adolescent dreams. His face wasn't really handsome; his nose was thin and crooked, his eyes heavy lidded, his cheekbones broad, stark and hollowed. But he wielded a quality of power, of toughness, that made Eleanor want to huddle into a shivering, cowardly little ball. Then he smiled, and she caught her breath in awe. His mouth... his glorious, sensual mouth. His lips were wide, too wide, and broad, too broad. His teeth were white, clean, strong as a wolf's. He looked like a man seldom amused by life, but he was amused by her, and she realized in a rush of mortification that she remained standing on the stool, reading one of his books and lost to the grave realities of her situation. The reality that stated she was an imposter, sent to mollify this man until the real duchess could arrive. Mollify? Him? Not likely. Nothing would mollify him. Nothing except... well, whatever it was he wanted. And she wasn't fool enough to think she knew what that was. The immediate reality was that she would somehow have to step down onto the floor and of necessity expose her ankles to his gaze. It wasn't as if he wouldn't look. He was looking now, observing her figure with an appreciation all the more impressive for its subtlety. His gaze flicked along her spine, along her backside, and down her legs with such concentration that she formed the impression he knew very well what she looked like clad only in her chemise- and that was an unnerving sensation.

Do you ever think of the number of men that go out and kill women? I do. And when they are caught (if they are caught) and interviewed, sometimes they say that their mom used to beat and belittle them, or they couldn't live up to their fathers standards. Their first girlfriend cheated on them, or their dick is just so, so small. It's all bullshit. Nothing gets them as hard as curating fear, of terrifying something innocent, of peeling the wings off flies and tearing the legs off spiders, of drowning kittens, of putting a woman in her place. Demons are said to be most attracted to our fright. The energy of our terror let's them be something. I don't think men are that different. It's our fear and their force that keeps them in power. They say "not all men", and I say they're right. I've never known a trans man who's fed off my fear. I've never known a gay man to leer at me as if I'm little more than a meal. Just these heterosexual cis men who this world was built for, who it was built by. They don't seem to need a reason to hate us. As a society, we accept that there's a little murderous rapist in most of them. Something he just needs to get out of his system, like that thigh clenching need to come. It's why we tell our daughters to cover up, to keep an eye on her drink, to call when she gets there, to smile, to watch her mouth. But we tell our sons they can be whatever they want to be, as long as it's something masculine. Men are hardwired to spot vulnerable women, knowing just what to search for. They've been conditioned since birth, like wolf pups watching and observing how to be a predator. Social structures that reveal how to hunt with the greatest ease and practicality. They seem to sense these girls no one will realize are missing. These women who society already views as a lost cause, destined for turmoil. As if she was just put on this earth to satisfy a man's bloodthirsty need.

Even as the feminine principle was venerated for its fertile, life-giving properties, there are also many examples of Goddesses who embodied the entire life process: birth, life, death, and regeneration. This is important because it can be tempting to romanticise the Goddess as a sort of angelic Fairy Godmother or abundant Good Mother. The feminine principle is more complex and more powerful than that. There are many stories from mythology that tell of the different faces of the Goddess. One such myth tells of the ancient Sumerian goddess who “outweighed, overshadowed, and outlasted them all . . .Inanna, Queen of Heaven.”[xxvi] This story originated in ancient Mesopotamia, five or six thousand years ago. In the myth, Inanna, who rules as queen over the upper world (birth and life), decides to visit Ereshkigal, queen of the Underworld (death and transformation). As Inanna descends into her sister’s realm, she is stripped of all the symbols of her upper world sovereignty, so that she comes before Ereshkigal naked and bowed low. Her enforced stay in the Underworld and the return after three days predates the Christian story by thousands of years. It is one of the first stories of ritual descent from the realm of life to the realm of death and the return to life after a time of incubation in the Underworld. This is also the theme of most ancient initiation rituals like the Orphic mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries, and of much of the Egyptian sacred teachings. At the time when the story of Inanna’s journey first appeared, the increasingly male dominated Sumerian culture was separating from earlier matrilineal forms. Before the descent myth, another story tells how Inanna, in order to rule, had to take power from the God, Enki, assuming his symbols of sovereignty as her own. Ereshkigal, queen of the Underworld, represents the archaic feminine, the dark mysteries of the older religion which had been sent underground. The descent story can, therefore, be understood as Inanna balancing her heroic victories in the upper (masculine) world by reconnecting with the rhythms and cycles of the under (feminine) world. Based on clinical experience, one analyst called this a “pattern of a woman’s passage from cultural adaptation to an encounter with her essential nature”.

Gentleman,” I purr smoothly in greeting. Ezra and Cort circle me like sharks scenting blood. I know who they are, but not who is who since they’re wearing black hoods over their heads. It covers them to the shoulder and has holes for the eyes and mouth. Their clothing is identical Italian designer label suits. Even their shoes are the same. Their eyes glow like steel ball-bearings from the safety of their masks. The mouths are different- one serious, one snarky- both ruby-red and kissable. While they circle Fate and me several times taking our measure, the other Master stands in a sphere of his own confidence. He’s older and I don’t mean just in age, but knowledge. Ezra and Cortez feel like babies compared to this man. I bet he’s who I really have to impress. I wait, always meeting their eyes when their path moves them back to my face. I don’t follow them with my gaze- I wait. “Hello,” the hood with the serious lips speaks in a smooth deep tone. I know it’s not his true voice, but the one Kris calls The Boss. His eyes are kind and assessing. No one pays Fate any mind as she cowers at my thigh. I hold their undivided attention. Curly-locks is quiet- watchful- a predator sighting its quarry. Snarky mouth is leering at my chest and I smirk. Caught ya, Cortez Abernathy. “I seem to be at a disadvantage conversing with you while you’re hooded. I can’t see you, but you can see me.” I try to get them to out themselves. It’s a longshot. “And who are you, Ma’am?” Ezra asks respectfully. “Please call me Queen.” I draw on all of my lessons from Hillbrook to pull me through this conversation. The power in the air is stifling. I wonder if it’s difficult for them to be in the same room without having a cage match for dominance. I feel like I’m on Animal Planet and the lions are circling. “Queen, indeed,” Cort says snidely under his breath and I wince. I turn my face from them in embarrassment. I should have gone with something less- less everything. I know I’m strong, but the word also emulates elegance and beauty. I’m neither. Have to say, tonight has sucked for my self-esteem. First, the dominant one overlooks me for Fate and now Cortez makes fun of me- lovely. “What did you say to upset her?” Ezra accuses Cortez. “Nothing,” Cort complains in confusion. “Please excuse my partner. Words are his profession and it seems they have failed him this evening. I will apologize for not sharing our names, but this gentleman is Dexter.” He gestures to the dominant man. I wait for him to shake my hand like a civilized person. He does not- he actually crosses his arms over his chest in disobedience. This shit is going to be a piece of cake.

I saw a pretty shop across the Sidra the other day. It sold what looked to be lots of lacy little things. Am I allowed to buy that on your credit, too, or does that come out of my personal funds?' Those violet eyes again drifted to me. 'I'm not in the mood.' There was no humour, no mischief. I could go warm myself by a fire inside, but... He had stayed. And fought for me. Week after week, he'd fought for me, even when I had no reaction, even when I had barely been able to speak or bring myself to care if I lived or died or ate or starved. I couldn't leave him to his own dark thoughts, his own guilt. He'd shouldered them alone long enough. So I held his gaze. 'I never knew Illyrians were such morose drunks.' 'I'm not drunk- I'm drinking,' he said, his teeth flashing a bit. 'Again semantics,' I leaned back in my seat, wishing I'd brought my coat. 'Maybe you should have slept with Cresseida after all- so you could both be sad and lonely together.' 'So you're entitled to have as many bad days as you want, but I can't get a few hours?' 'Oh, take however long you want to mope. I was going to invite you to come shopping with me for said lacy little unmentionables, but... sit up here forever, if you have to.' He didn't respond. I went on, 'Maybe I'll send a few to Tarquin- with an offer to wear them for him if he forgives us. Maybe he'll take those blood rubies right back.' His mouth barely, barely tugged up at the corners. 'He'd see that as a taunt.' 'I gave him a few smiles and he handed over a family heirloom. I bet he'd give me the keys to his territory if I showed up wearing those undergarments.' 'Someone thinks mighty highly of herself.' 'Why shouldn't I? You seem to have difficulty not staring at me day and night.' There it was - a kernel of truth and a question. 'Am I supposed to deny,' he drawled, but something sparked in those eyes, 'That I find you attractive?' 'You've never said it.' 'I've told you many times, and quite frequently, how attractive I find you.' I shrugged, even as I thought of all those times- when I'd dismissed them as teasing compliments, nothing more. 'Well, maybe you should do a better job of it.' The gleam in his eyes turned into something predatory. A thrill went through me as he braced his powerful arms on the table and purred, 'Is that a challenge, Feyre?' I held that predator's gaze- the gaze of the most powerful male in Prythian. 'Is it?' His pupils flared. Gone was the quiet sadness, the isolated guilt. Only that lethal force- on me. On my mouth. On the bob of my throat as I tried to keep my breathing even. He said, slow and soft, 'Why don't we go down to that store right now, Feyre, so you can try on those lacy little things- so I can help you pick which ones to send to Tarquin.' My toes curled inside my fleece-lined slippers. Such a dangerous line we walked together.

It’s a perspective on story that may also shed light on why you and I and everyone else spend a couple of hours each day concocting tales that we rarely remember and more rarely share. By day I mean night, and the tales are those we produce during REM sleep. Well over a century since Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, there is still no consensus on why we dream. I read Freud’s book for a junior-year high school class called Hygiene (yes, that’s really what it was called), a somewhat bizarre requirement taught by the school’s gym teachers and sports coaches that focused on first aid and common standards of cleanliness. Lacking material to fill an entire semester, the class was padded by mandatory student presentations on topics deemed loosely relevant. I chose sleep and dreams and probably took it all too seriously, reading Freud and spending after-school hours combing through research literature. The wow moment for me, and for the class too, was the work of Michel Jouvet, who in the late 1950s explored the dream world of cats.32 By impairing part of the cat brain (the locus coeruleus, if you like that sort of thing), Jouvet removed a neural block that ordinarily prevents dream thoughts from stimulating bodily action, resulting in sleeping cats who crouched and arched and hissed and pawed, presumably reacting to imaginary predators and prey. If you didn’t know the animals were asleep, you might think they were practicing a feline kata. More recently, studies on rats using more refined neurological probes have shown that their brain patterns when dreaming so closely match those recorded when awake and learning a new maze that researchers can track the progress of the dreaming rat mind as it retraces its earlier steps.33 When cats and rats dream it surely seems they’re rehearsing behaviors relevant to survival. Our common ancestor with cats and rodents lived some seventy or eighty million years ago, so extrapolating a speculative conclusion across species separated by tens of thousands of millennia comes with ample warning labels. But one can imagine that our language-infused minds may produce dreams for a similar purpose: to provide cognitive and emotional workouts that enhance knowledge and exercise intuition—nocturnal sessions on the flight simulator of story. Perhaps that is why in a typical life span we each spend a solid seven years with eyes closed, body mostly paralyzed, consuming our self-authored tales.34 Intrinsically, though, storytelling is not a solitary medium. Storytelling is our most powerful means for inhabiting other minds. And as a deeply social species, the ability to momentarily move into the mind of another may have been essential to our survival and our dominance. This offers a related design rationale for coding story into the human behavioral repertoire—for identifying, that is, the adaptive utility of our storytelling instinct.

Father will bury us with both hands. He boasts of me to his so-called friends, telling them I’m the next queen of this kingdom. I don’t think he’s ever paid so much attention to me before, and even now, it is minuscule, not for my own benefit. He pretends to love me now because of another, because of Tibe. Only when someone else sees worth in me does he condescend to do the same. Because of her father, she dreamed of a Queenstrial she did not win, of being cast aside and returned to the old estate. Once there, she was made to sleep in the family tomb, beside the still, bare body of her uncle. When the corpse twitched, hands reaching for her throat, she would wake, drenched in sweat, unable to sleep for the rest of the night. Julian and Sara think me weak, fragile, a porcelain doll who will shatter if touched, she wrote. Worst of all, I’m beginning to believe them. Am I really so frail? So useless? Surely I can be of some help somehow, if Julian would only ask? Are Jessamine’s lessons the best I can do? What am I becoming in this place? I doubt I even remember how to replace a lightbulb. I am not someone I recognize. Is this what growing up means? Because of Julian, she dreamed of being in a beautiful room. But every door was locked, every window shut, with nothing and no one to keep her company. Not even books. Nothing to upset her. And always, the room would become a birdcage with gilded bars. It would shrink and shrink until it cut her skin, waking her up. I am not the monster the gossips think me to be. I’ve done nothing, manipulated no one. I haven’t even attempted to use my ability in months, since Julian has no more time to teach me. But they don’t believe that. I see how they look at me, even the whispers of House Merandus. Even Elara. I have not heard her in my head since the banquet, when her sneers drove me to Tibe. Perhaps that taught her better than to meddle. Or maybe she is afraid of looking into my eyes and hearing my voice, as if I’m some kind of match for her razored whispers. I am not, of course. I am hopelessly undefended against people like her. Perhaps I should thank whoever started the rumor. It keeps predators like her from making me prey. Because of Elara, she dreamed of ice-blue eyes following her every move, watching as she donned a crown. People bowed under her gaze and sneered when she turned away, plotting against their newly made queen. They feared her and hated her in equal measure, each one a wolf waiting for her to be revealed as a lamb. She sang in the dream, a wordless song that did nothing but double their bloodlust. Sometimes they killed her, sometimes they ignored her, sometimes they put her in a cell. All three wrenched her from sleep. Today Tibe said he loves me, that he wants to marry me. I do not believe him. Why would he want such a thing? I am no one of consequence. No great beauty or intellect, no strength or power to aid his reign. I bring nothing to him but worry and weight. He needs someone strong at his side, a person who laughs at the gossips and overcomes her own doubts. Tibe is as weak as I am, a lonely boy without a path of his own. I will only make things worse. I will only bring him pain. How can I do that? Because of Tibe, she dreamed of leaving court for good. Like Julian wanted to do, to keep Sara from staying behind. The locations varied with the changing nights. She ran to Delphie or Harbor Bay or Piedmont or even the Lakelands, each one painted in shades of black and gray. Shadow cities to swallow her up and hide her from the prince and the crown he offered. But they frightened her too. And they were always empty, even of ghosts. In these dreams, she ended up alone. From these dreams, she woke quietly, in the morning, with dried tears and an aching heart.

WHAT fire meant for hominids and ultimately for the rest of the natural world is presaged vividly by a cave excavation in South Africa.1 At the deepest and therefore oldest strata, there are no carbon deposits and hence no fire. Here one finds full skeletal remains of large cats and fragmentary bone shards—bearing tooth marks—of many fauna, among which is Homo erectus. At a higher, later stratum, one finds carbon deposits signifying fire. Here, there are full skeletal remains of Homo erectus and fragmentary bone shards of various mammals, reptiles, and birds, among which are a few gnawed bones of large cats. The change in cave “ownership” and the reversal in who was apparently eating whom testify eloquently to the power of fire for the species that first learned to use it. At the very least, fire provided warmth, light, and relative safety from nocturnal predators as well as a precursor to the domus or hearth.

The most popular origin story of Christian nationalism today, shared by many critics and supporters alike, explains that the movement was born one day in 1973, when the Supreme Court unilaterally shredded Christian morality and made abortion ‘on demand’ a constitutional right. At that instant, the story goes, the flock of believers arose in protest and through their support to the party of ‘Life’ now known as the Republican Party. The implication is that the movement, in its current form, finds its principal motivation in the desire to protect fetuses against the women who would refuse to carry them to term. This story is worse than myth. It is false as history and incorrect as analysis. Christian nationalism drew its inspiration from a set of concerns that long predated the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade and had little to do with abortion. The movement settled on abortion as its litmus test sometime after that decision for reasons that had more to do with politics than embryos. It then set about changing the religion of many people in the country in order to serve its new political ambitions. From the beginning, the ‘abortion issue’ has never been just about abortion. It has also been about dividing and uniting to mobilize votes for the sake of amassing political power.

Of all the preferences that evolution gave us, I suspect the desire to share the contents of our minds played the single most important role in elevating us to the top of the food chain.* We are the fiercest predator on the planet by virtue of the power of our minds, but even human minds aren’t that special on their own.

In this sense, grocery is a story still being written. In the beginning, there was nature, powerful and cruel—that original destroyer of worlds—drought and predation, wind and disease. And so we built tools to subdue her: from jamming sticks into anthills to charting out agronomist tables and plows. And we built these tools so well and for so long that now nature, real nature, is mostly a dream, an uneasy longing, repressed and turned kindly by submission, the way terrible fathers crumble into grandfathers. Then somewhere, after centuries, we woke to the fact that our tools had become too powerful—our monocultures, pesticides, and mine scalings—the tools just as fearsome as the nature they set out to rein in, and we found ourselves cowering once again. This is the typical end point, with our Frankensteins and atomic Godzillas. A daily alienation updated almost as a background app into our iPhone addictions and queasy feelings about social media we just can’t quit. But what we’ve begun to see, what I certainly learned writing this book, is that we’ve undertaken a new project. We decided that, caught between two awesome external forces—nature everlasting, and these new tools of our own creation—the one piece in the whole operation that was most malleable was us. Our selves. That we would happily trade away aspects of our lives—be it community or duty or eccentricity or care—for an ability to survive between them.

How subtly he made off with all the power, and how easily I gifted it to him. It still gives me a shot of shame, even though intellectually I know I did nothing wrong".

Micah’s smile was hideous. “She made no secret that she kept an eye on the synth trials, because she was keen to find a way to help her weak, vulnerable, half-human friend. You, who would inherit no power—she wondered if it might give you a fighting chance against the predators who rule this world. And when she saw the horrors the synth could bring about, she became concerned for the test subjects. Concerned for what it’d do to humans if it leaked into the world. But Redner’s employees said Danika had her own research there, too. No one knew what, but she spent time in their labs outside of her own duties.” All of it had to be on the flash drive Bryce had found. Hunt prayed she’d put it somewhere safe. Wondered what other bombshells might be on it. Bryce said, “She was never selling the synth on that boat, was she?” “No. By that point, I’d realized I needed someone with unrestricted access to the temple to take the Horn—I would be too easily noticed. So when she stole the synth trial footage, I had my chance to use her.” Bryce made it up another step. “You dumped the synth into the streets.” Micah kept trailing her. “Yes. I knew Danika’s constant need to be the hero would send her running after it, to save the lowlifes of Lunathion from destroying themselves with it. She got most of it, but not all. When I told her I’d seen her on the river, when I claimed no one would believe the Party Princess was trying to get drugs off the streets, her hands were tied. I told her I’d forget about it, if she did one little favor for me, at just the right moment.” “You caused the blackout that night she stole the Horn.” “I did. But I underestimated Danika. She’d been wary of my interest in the synth long before I leaked it onto the streets, and when I blackmailed her into stealing the Horn, she must have realized the connection between the two. That the Horn could be repaired by synth.” “So you killed her for it?” Another step, another question to buy herself time. “I killed her because she hid the Horn before I could repair it with the synth. And thus help my people.

It was like stepping through mud. But the wards allowed her through. Nesta took another step, arm extended behind her to hold Cassian’s hand. The pressure of the spells pushed against her calves, her hips, her body, squeezing her lungs. “These are like no wards I’ve felt before,” she whispered, standing still as she waited for any hint of a triggered trap. “They feel old. Incredibly old.” “They probably predate this place being used as a prison.” “What was it before?” “No one knows. It’s always been here. But this chamber …” He surveyed the space beyond her. “I didn’t know places like this existed here. Maybe …” He frowned. “Part of me wonders if the Prison was either built or stocked with its inmates to hide the Harp’s presence. There are so many terrible powers here, and the wards on the mountain itself … I wonder if someone hid the Harp knowing that it’d never be noticed with so much awful magic around it.” Her mouth had dried again. “But who put it here?” “Your guess is as good as mine. Someone who existed before the High Lords ruled. Rhys told me once that this island might have even been an eighth court.” “You don’t recognize these markings on the ground?” “Not at all.

Although [the Old Testament] writings predate the incarnation, they do not predate the preexistent Christ, who pervades them with his power and presence as the Word and Wisdom of the Father.

dominance—those who needed power over another for sexual gratification; hallucinatory—those compelled by voices or visions; objective oriented—those on a mission to exterminate a particular class of people like prostitutes or a racial minority group; and lust—those for whom violence and sex were the same things. No dominance was involved, as the victims had been unconscious during the entire interaction, and dominance killers needed their victims to know they were being dominated. Pharr and River were not from any ethnic, racial, or religious minority groups. The possibilities were that he was being compelled by hallucinations he believed were instructing him to carry out the killings; that he was a lust killer, though the evidence for sexual assault was sparse; or that this was not serial murder at all but murder for money, for revenge, or for hire, with the allusions to Sarpong thrown in to deceive law enforcement. Or this was an entirely unique type of serial predator as yet unidentified by the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. If he was a lust or hallucinatory killer, he wouldn’t stop until he was dead or in prison. Until then, all he could do was keep moving

And then there is the Löwenmensch – the Lion Man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel. In the hills between Nuremberg and Munich in Swabian Germany there are caves that have yielded one of the most important works ever crafted by an unknown artist. Around 40,000 years ago, a woman or man sat somewhere in or near that cave, with the detritus of a hunt scattered around. They took a piece of ivory, a tusk from a woolly mammoth, and carefully considered that it might be the right material, shape and size for something that they had been pondering. Now extinct, cave lions were fierce predators at that time, posing a threat to people, and also to the animals that people would hunt and eat. That person thought about the lions, and how formidable they are, and maybe wondered what it would be like to have the power of a lion in the body of a human. Maybe this tribe revered the cave lions out of fear and awe. Whatever the reason, this artist took that mammoth ivory, a flint knife, and patiently carved the tusk into a mythical figure. It is a chimaera, a fantastic beast that is made up of the parts of multiple animals. Chimaeras exist throughout all human cultures for most of history, from mermaids, fawns or centaurs, to the glorious monkey-man god Hanuman, to the Japanese snake-woman nure-onna, to the Wolpertinger, an absurd and mischievous Bavarian part-duck part-squirrel part-rabbit with antlers and vampire teeth. Today, we have reached the ultimate manifestation of a 40,000-year interest in hybrid creatures in genetic engineering, where elements from one animal are transposed into another, and hence we have cats that glow in the dark with the genes of deep-sea crystal jellyfish Aquorea victoria, and goats that produce dragline silk from the golden orb weaver spider in their udders. The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel

I have no plans to fuck you over. Either of you.” She faced Hypaxia, who was giving Bryce that more-than-princess look, too. “We’re allies. Not only politically, but … as females who have had to make some shitty, hard choices. As females who live in a world where most powerful males see us only as breeding tools.” Hypaxia nodded again, but Celestina continued to stare at Bryce. A predator surveying the best place to strike. Hunt rallied his power again. Bryce continued, “I’m no one’s prize mare. I took a gamble with this idiot”—she jerked a thumb toward Hunt, who gaped at her—“and luckily, it paid off. And I just want to say that”—she swallowed—“if you two want to make a gamble with each other, say fuck it to the arrangements with Ephraim and Ruhn, then I’m with you. We’d have to go against the Asteri, but … look what I did tonight. Whatever I can do, whatever clout I have, it’s yours. But let’s start by walking out of this closet in one piece.

For those who are the most directly victimized, the complicity and silence of bystanders—friends, relatives, and neighbors, not to mention officials of the law—feel like a profound betrayal, for this is what isolates them and abandons them to their fates. Survivors can perhaps accept the fact that some people are predators or psychopaths who seek absolute power.

The ancient Greeks had an appropriate metaphor for this: the rider and the horse. The horse is our emotional nature continually impelling us to move. This horse has tremendous energy and power, but without a rider it cannot be guided; it is wild, subject to predators, and continually heading into trouble. The rider is our thinking self. Through training and practice, it holds the reins and guides the horse, transforming this powerful animal energy into something productive. The one without the other is useless. Without the rider, no directed movement or purpose. Without the horse, no energy, no power. In most people the horse dominates, and the rider is weak. In some people the rider is too strong, holds the reins too tightly, and is afraid to occasionally let the animal go into a gallop. The horse and rider must work together.

And I doubted there would be such a time as you would ever see reason. Like a specialized predator, you have evolved to a point where you are immune to all forms of logic.” She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Also, given the rate and quality of your consumption, I had doubts that I had any alchemics powerful enough to subdue you.

All predators are limited in the kind and duration of suffering they can inflict and in the level of moral degradation of which they are capable. We are not.

Given enough time for the generations to evolve, the predator produces particular survival adaptations in its prey which, through the circular operation of feedback, produce changes in the predator which again change the prey—etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. . . . Many powerful forces do the same thing. You can count religions among such forces.

Hunter-killer drones like the Reaper and the Predator have one job: eliminate their targets—or fly home, having failed. The nature of the technology makes missions a matter of “all or nothing,” notes the French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou in A Theory of the Drone. “Either shoot to kill or take no action at all. Lethal force is the only option available.

Lorelei tossed her hair then planted a fist on her hip, jutting it to the side. “You think I’m going to abandon you, like ever? Let’s go rescue the kind of guy who desperately wants to bang your brains out but holds back on pressuring you during an unfair power dynamic. Come on. Those kinds of guys you gotta keep around.

The region was a veritable postage stamp, on which contemporary rivalries -- territorial, religious, and political -- predated the Great Powers' division of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, a carve-up that was based entirely on Western interests. Later, what had been historic Palestine became Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Israel now controlled swathes of territory previously held by Jordan, Syria, and Egypt.

But throughout history, while some humans have been our best friends and kept us safe, others have been our worst enemies. The major predators of human beings are other human beings. Our stress response systems, therefore, are closely interconnected with the systems that read and respond to human social cues. As a result we are very sensitive to expressions, gestures, and the moods of others. As we shall see, we interpret threat and learn to handle stress by watching those around us. We even have special cells in our brains that fire, not when we move or express emotions, but when we see others do so. Human social life is built on this ability to "reflect" each other and respond to those reflections, with both positive and negative results. For example, if you are feeling great and go to work where your supervisor is in a vile mood, soon you will probably feel lousy, too. If a teacher becomes angry or frustrated, the children in her classroom may begin to misbehave, reflecting the powerful emotion expressed by the teacher. To calm a frightened child, you must first calm yourself.

Mountain Lion moves fluidly, claims adequate rest, nurtures and teaches the young, is fiercely protective, territorial, graceful, walks softly on the Earth, and is highly perceptive to sound and smell. Its golden coat is like the rays of our creative and generative sun. As a transformational symbol, this feline embodies the power of creating what we want. This is balanced with harmonized communication and adaptability. Though an apex predator, the medicine of this animal encourages receptivity and self-reflection. I feared this creature at a deep, primal level, perhaps to be expected when we interface with how powerful we are and take responsibility for what we’ve been given.

A skunk may spray a predator when it feels threatened, but everyone else within two miles has to smell the spray, and these others may assume that the skunk actually had it in for them. It’s not productive to work with a skunk, and it’s not enjoyable to be served by one either. In a business that depends on the harmony of an ensemble, a skunk’s scent is toxic.

Although power predates the sovereignty of language, the will of the world is defined by speech, its rubric preserved by voicing the visual and the abstract. We were nothing more than label-makers. Etymological parasites. Concepts reduced to single terminology might as well count for a groan, the same brass snore from another room. Comprehension is a code, a cipher swapped out against forms remote or in motion, the remainder relegated fantastically to the opaque and fallacious.

To take one example of our shortsightedness, a powerful fear for many parents is that their child will fall into the hands of a sexual predator. But sex criminals nowadays spend most of their time in the virtual world because the internet makes it so much easier to communicate with children and to find and circulate sexual and violent videos involving children.

In order to prosper then, in whatever way we choose, we need to regain all of the energy that we were born with, and have created throughout the course of our life; energy which we have lost due to energy predation in one form or another. We need to do this in order to first of all escape the mass of the world and all its memetic traps, and in that way find true freedom, and the power needed to accomplish our life purpose.

Six. Sex. Star. David. Saturn. Planet. Rings. Eye. Hexagon. Triangles. Eye. On The Sky. Evil. Pushing Buttons. Sins. Influence. People. Lunatics. Psychopaths. Bad vibes. Frequencies. Praying. For. Easy. Prey. Summoning: Spirits. Tempting. Your female. “Like The Snake.” Sadly, they do “like” the snake and the buttons, too. “Like buttons.” “Life.” “Like.” The psychopath (Adam, Sabrina, Martina…) is obsessed with power, controlling other people in order to achieve their goals. They thrive on control, making others jump and "winning," whether it's world domination or obtaining a ride to the coffeeshop, or just a free lunch. Psychopaths see their condition as a blessing, considering it an advantage in this “eye for an eye” and “kill or be killed” and “dog eat dog” world. In their, sadly: Natural Eyes. They lack remorse or empathy and are incapable of feeling guilt. We are the ones more civilized. They remained more natural. Closer to nature. Only we call them: Evil Eye Cult. They must be calling themselves: The Saturn, The Satan, The Nature Cult or Satan’s Eye (Saturn) Cult. Some of us are in between. Two worlds. Kind of sensing them. Sometimes. Surviving. Too. They aren’t true hunters or predators. They are worse. “They are sucking. Blood.” Bloodthirsty people.

Burning books. Like the Christians. Like the Nazis. Like the Communists. Burning knowledge. Eliminating. History. Rewriting. No life under such circumstances. “F…g (bad) people.(sex)” “Making friends” out of our enemies. Danger. Chaos. Life. Death. Life in Spain. Pain or Death. “Suffering or Boredom.” “Love or Power.” Dead born ideas. Stillborn. Unborn. Unholy. Unjust. Unpredictable. Juicy. Unforgiving. Crimes. Like Space. Like Nature. Somehow, they are right, in their own means. But. Barbarians. Their crimes are unforgivable. Therefor, their ideology cannot be considered: Excuse. It is Black Magic. It is considerably, overwhelmingly: Nazi. Instead. Evil. Being a Nazi (predator, psychopath, criminal, murderer, thief…) cannot be your defense speech. Sorry. “Sorry we are “Natural beings” being nazis. We were only “testing” Tomas. Hunting.” Criminals respect no laws, no person, no holy, no god, no life. They respect only the Evil Eye. “Performing.” Acts. Inhumane methods. Inhumane. Reptilian people. Sacrifice. Blood. Vultures. Nazis. And I have to respect their “Human” “Rights.” Imagine. Not telling you their exact names or how they tattoos exactly look like. I cannot defend you from precisely these specific people, vultures, hyenas. But they are part of a bigger thing, so keep your eyes open. The World: Upside. Down.

Did you allow Herman Blanchard to teach children for decades even though you knew he was a predator? Did you sacrifice kids for the sake of your own power, yes or no?

I take a minute to admire him as he turns to do another lap, his back coiling while the water cascades down his athletic frame. Powerful, formidable, intimidating. He’s a heartless, soulless predator. And now he’s invading, intertwining our lives just to prove his point, that temporarily, he owns me.

I froze. The grizzly paused, catching my movement, then lowered his head and with a sort of stiff-legged gait, ambled toward me swinging his head from side to side. I knew from having watched this bear interact with other animals that the worst thing I could do was run. The big bear stopped thirty feet in front of me. I slowly worked my hand into my bag and gradually pulled out the Magnum. I peered down the gun barrel into the dull red eyes of the huge grizzly. He gnashed his jaws and lowered his ears. The hair on his hump stood up. We stared at each other for what might have been seconds but felt like hours. I knew once again that I was not going to pull the trigger. My shooting days were over. I lowered the pistol. The giant bear flicked his ears and looked off to the side. I took a step backward and turned my head towards the trees. I felt something pass between us. The grizzly slowly turned away from me with grace and dignity and swung into the timber at the end of the meadow. I caught myself breathing heavily again, the flush of blood hot on my face. I felt life had been touched by enormous power and mystery.

The objective is never equality; it’s power. The unhumans know how to seize it. They find the have-nots with grievances, legitimate or imagined, and emotionally abuse them. They rile them up. And then, they unhuman them. The radicals turn men into beasts, people into predators, with no will but to kill. Is it death! Kill, kill. Then when it’s done, those who did not die in the uprising suffer a regret that is a living prison their conscience can never escape.

When Hurricane Andrew hit the south-eastern US in 1992, it was the worst hurricane in US history. It caused incalculable damage both to property and to the environment; however, its biggest environmental effect, perhaps, was not the loss of a species, but the opposite. In South Florida, the hurricane burst a large coastal aquarium tank, releasing an unwelcome species of fish into the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. The lionfish comes from the tropical waters around Indonesia. Though beautiful to look at, it is a voracious predator of other fish, and is able to eat as many as 30 in half an hour. Furthermore, one female lionfish can produce over two million eggs per year, which was a particular problem in the Caribbean, where it has no natural predators.

People and animals come together in herd-communities with their own kind exclusively to a single end. Each individual strives to preserve their own genes but achieving that alone can become extremely difficult or even impossible. It is easier to find a partner for the realisation of the basic instinct as a member of a herd and so ultimately, the prime principle in play is still the Law of Gene Preservation. It is easier to defend oneself from a more powerful enemy as a member of a herd. A pack of hyenas, for example, can face down a powerful predator like a lion, whereas an individual hyena would have no chance. In a herd it is easier to hunt and gather large sources of food, which it would be impossible for a lone animal to find. This is the case for lions, wolves and all other herd predators, including mankind. The unification of human beings into ever larger communities, beginning with tribes and clans in prehistoric times, then nations and states in the Middle Ages, continues today in the process called world globalisation. The reason for globalisation is the same as it was a thousand years ago. It provides the best conditions for preserving one’s own gene.

In the new network-centric world, currencies occupy evolutionary niches. They evolve, like species, based on the stimulus they have from their environment. Bitcoin is a dynamic system with software developers that can change it. The question is, in which direction will bitcoin evolve? Which environmental niche will it attempt to fit in? And how will that be affected by the actions of the powerful? If they attack bitcoin, it evolves to defend itself against predators, just like any species. If they attack bitcoin anonymity, it evolves to become more anonymous. If they attack its resilience, it evolves to become more decentralized. In the end, despite all of the messages of fear, bitcoin is the cuddly little bear of currencies and you do not want to kick it. Because, as in evolution, if you stomp on the little gecko, it will evolve until it’s a Komodo dragon and then you can’t stomp on it. Sometimes

Our earliest ancestors were descended from primates who thrived for millions of years in a treetop environment, and who in the process had evolved one of the most remarkable visual systems in nature. To move quickly and efficiently in such a world, they developed extremely sophisticated eye and muscle coordination. Their eyes slowly evolved into a full-frontal position on the face, giving them binocular, stereoscopic vision. This system provides the brain a highly accurate three-dimensional and detailed perspective, but is rather narrow. Animals that possess such vision—as opposed to eyes on the side or half side—are generally efficient predators like owls or cats. They use this powerful sight to home in on prey in the distance. Tree-living primates evolved this vision for a different purpose—to navigate branches, and to spot fruits, berries, and insects with greater effectiveness. They also evolved elaborate color vision.

When our earliest human ancestors left the trees and moved to the open grasslands of the savanna, they adopted an upright stance. Possessing already this powerful visual system, they could see far into the distance (giraffes and elephants might stand taller, but their eyes are on the sides, giving them instead panoramic vision). This allowed them to spot dangerous predators far away on the horizon and detect their movements even in twilight. Given a few seconds or minutes, they could plot a safe retreat. At the same time, if they focused on what was nearest at hand, they could identify all kinds of important details in their environment—footprints and signs of passing predators, or the colors and shapes of rocks that they could pick up and perhaps use as tools.

Chaol had told himself that he was only following Celaena to make sure she didn’t hurt herself or anyone else, but as she’d neared the royal mausoleum, he followed for other reasons. The night provided good cover, but the moon was bright enough to keep him back, far enough away so she wouldn’t see or hear his approach. But then he saw where she had stopped, and realized he had no right to be here for this. He’d been about to turn away when she lifted her face to the moon and sang. It was not in any language that he knew. Not in the common tongue, or in Eyllwe, or in the languages of Fenharrow or Melisande or anywhere else on the continent. This language was ancient, each word full of power and rage and agony. She did not have a beautiful voice. And many of the words sounded like half sobs, the vowels stretched by the pangs of sorrow, the consonants hardened by anger. She beat her breast in time, so full of savage grace, so at odds with the black gown and veil she wore. The hair on the back of his neck stood as the lament poured from her mouth, unearthly and foreign, a song of grief so old that it predated the stone castle itself.

Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire,43 and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change. A

As Lara stared in the square Queen Anne mirror poised on the chest of drawers in her room, it seemed that the atmosphere changed, the air suddenly heavy and pressing. It was so quiet in the cottage that she could hear her own mad heartbeat. She caught sight of something in the mirror, a deliberate movement that paralyzed her. Someone had entered the cottage. Skin prickling, Lara stood in frozen silence and stared into the mirror as another reflection joined her own. A man's bronzed face... short, sun-streaked brown hair... dark brown eyes... the hard, wide mouth she remembered so well. Tall... massive chest and shoulders... a physical power and assurance that made the room seem to shrink around him. Lara's breath stopped. She wanted to run, to cry out, faint, but it seemed that she had been turned to stone. He stood just behind her, his head and shoulders looming far above hers. His gaze held hers in the mirror... The eyes were the same color, yet... he had never looked at her like this, with an intensity that made every inch of her skin burn. His was the hard gaze of a predator. She shook in fright as his hands moved gently to her hair. One by one he slipped the confining pins from the shining sable mass, and set them on the dresser before her. Lara watched him, quivering with each light tug on her hair. "It's not true," she whispered. He spoke in Hunter's voice, deep and slightly raspy. "I'm not a ghost, Lara." She tore her gaze from the mirror and stumbled around to face him. He was so much thinner, his body lean, almost rawboned, his heavy muscles thrown into stark prominence. His skin was tanned to a copper blaze that was far too exotic for an Englishman. And his hair had lightened to the mixed gold and brown of a griffin's feathers.

Thus humans who lived a million years ago, despite their big brains and sharp stone tools, dwelt in constant fear of predators, rarely hunted large game, and subsisted mainly by gathering plants, scooping up insects, stalking small animals, and eating the carrion left behind by other more powerful carnivores.

When we set our hearts on power, we become hardened predators. We become like what we worship.94

Over the past quarter century, the leaders of both the Democratic and the Republican political parties have perfected a remarkable system for remaining in power while serving the new economic oligarchy. Both parties take in huge amounts of money, in many forms — campaign contributions, lobbying, revolving-door hiring, favours, and special access of various kinds. Politicians in both parties enrich themselves and betray the interests of the nation, including most of the people who vote for them. Yet both parties are still able to mobilize support because they skilfully exploit America’s cultural polarization. Republicans warn social conservatives about the dangers of secularism, taxes, abortion, welfare, gay marriage, gun control, and liberals. Democrats warn social liberals about the dangers of guns, pollution, global warming, making abortion illegal, and conservatives. Both parties make a public show of how bitter their conflicts are, and how dangerous it would be for the other party to achieve power, while both prostitute themselves to the financial sector, powerful industries, and the wealthy. Thus, the very intensity of the two parties’ differences on “values” issues enables them to collaborate when it comes to money.

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

Nature Favors Risk Takers Starting something new means taking a risk. But in our society, the word "risk" has assumed mostly negative connotations. When someone tells us "that's risky," most of us have a visceral, fearful reaction. But Mother Nature seems to have built a loophole into our sense of well-being, because embedded somewhere within the human genetic makeup is an inclination to take risks. Of course, in order for evolution and natural selection to favor risk-taking as a behavior there has to be a benefit, and that benefit has to outweigh the outcome of doing nothing. Many examples from the animal kingdom support this hypothesis. According to research by Dr. Lee Alan Dugatkin, who was trying to understand a continuum of risk-taking, fish willing to take risks were likely to mate better.11 Guppies, for example, engage in what is known as predator inspection behavior. Predator inspection is akin to guard duty. A few fish break away from the group and slowly approach the predator to obtain information. In taking risks in the presence of a predator, a guppy is more likely to get eaten, but a male guppy that takes this risk is more attractive as a mate to females.12 The bolder guppies are also better at learning.

Some black people will always be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.

the hunter’s tools are deadly weapons, capable not only of feeding him and his family, but of defending his life, liberty, and property against predators and thieves—including tax collectors. Requiring more subtlety and dexterity than raw power, they can be wielded to good effect by women, or even children.

Psychopaths are social predators who are born without a conscience and without the ability to feel love, compassion, fear or remorse. Psychopaths experience the lack of these abilities and emotions as indication that they are superior, and they consider us nothing more than prey to be hunted to fulfill their own needs. The psychopath considers life a game to be played and "won" at the expense of others. Inflicting harm, whether it be psychological, spiritual, physical or financial, is entertainment to them. Self-gratification is the only thing that motivates them and all that they live for. Psychopaths play their game primarily to fulfill their insatiable desires for power and control.

Tiberius Bogg's borderline malnourishment had grown to a powerful hunger that drove him back toward -- he hated to even think the word -- civilization. The wilderness was different things to different people. To many, it was some sort of bloodthirsty predator that would eat your guts out if it could get close enough.

Most human predators, however, seek power, not food. To destroy or damage something is to take its power.

Evolved to Run Walking long distances is fundamental to being a hunter-gatherer, but people sometimes have to run. One powerful motivation is to sprint to a tree or some other refuge when being chased by a predator. Although you only have to run faster than the next fellow when a lion chases you, bipedal humans are comparatively slow. The world’s fastest humans can run at 37 kilometers (23 miles) per hour for about ten to twenty seconds, whereas an average lion can run at least twice as fast for approximately four minutes. Like us, early Homo must have been pathetic sprinters whose terrified dashes were too often ineffective. However, there is plentiful evidence that by the time of H. erectus our ancestors had evolved exceptional abilities to run long distances at moderate speeds in hot conditions. The adaptations underlying these abilities helped transform the human body in crucial ways and explain why humans, even amateur athletes, are among the best long-distance runners in the mammalian world. Today, humans run long distances to stay fit, commute, or just have fun, but the struggle to get meat underlies the origins of endurance running. To appreciate this inference, try to imagine what it was like for the first humans to hunt or scavenge 2 million years ago. Most carnivores kill using a combination of speed and strength. Large predators, such as lions and leopards, either chase or pounce on their prey and then dispatch it with lethal force. These dangerous carnivores can run as fast as 70 kilometers (43 miles) per hour, and they have terrifying natural weapons: daggerlike fangs, razor-sharp claws, and heavy paws to help them maim and kill. Hunters

If you find a FEAR predator on your tail, STOP running, turn and face it, with BOLDNESS and declare,"God has not given me the spirit of FEAR! but of power, and of love and of a sound mind. [2 Timothy 1:7] Take your best shot Devil! then, march on with boldness, confidence, power and strength, as a soldier in the King's army!

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

Guylaine Lanctot offers us wise words to contemplate. In The Medical Mafia she reveals how victory over a powerful adversary is achieved. Using the metaphor of the combat between David and Goliath, Lanctot states that the young hero had to do four things before securing his victory. He had to identify his enemy, overcome his fear, find a weak spot, and use a simple weapon. So must each person do in the fight against the monstrous predators who stalk our world.

Of valid economics pre-dating the Power Age (steam and electricity), there remains not a vestige. Of valid economics pre-dating the intensive and extensive use of electricity there will soon exist only rags and tatters. We still have to thank Adam Smith for insisting 'Consumption is the sole end and purpose of production;' but the old form of the law of demand and supply is outmoded, since supply has become practically inexhaustible.

I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we- so incontrovertibly- are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can work at making sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. I am as passionately interested in where I am as is a lone sailor sans sextant in a ketch on an open ocean. I have at the moment a situation which allows me to devote considerable hunks of time to seeing what I can see, and trying to piece it together. I’ve learned the name of some color-patches, but not the meanings. I’ve read books; I’ve gathered statistics feverishly: the average temperature of our planet is 57 degrees F…The average size of all living animals, including man, is almost that of a housefly. The earth is mostly granite, which is mostly oxygen…In these Appalachians we have found a coal bed with 120 seams, meaning 120 forests that just happened to fall into water…I would like to see it all, to understand it, but I must start somewhere, so I try to deal with the giant water bug in Tinker Creek and the flight of three hundred redwings from an Osage orange and let those who dare worry about the birthrate and population explosion among solar systems. So I think about the valley. And it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. The giant water bug’s predations, the frog’s croak, the tree with the lights in it are not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or its creator. Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity for which I would die, and I shall. The point about that being, as I know it here and see it, is that as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about creation. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, then look at the trees; when you’ve looked at enough trees, you’ve seen a forest, you’ve got it. If the world is gratuitous, then the fringe of a goldfish’s fin is a million times more so. The first question- the one crucial one- of the creation of the universe and the existence of something as a sign and an affront to nothing is a blank one… The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter; they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy then is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.

Idling the dinghy, bringing it quietly in closer and closer to the croc, Steve would finally make his move. He’d creep to the front of the boat and hold the spotlight until the last moment. Then he would leap into the water. Grabbing the crocodile around the scruff of the neck, he would secure its tail between his legs and wrap his body around the thrashing creature. Crocodiles are amazingly strong in the water. Even a six-foot-long subadult would easily take Steve to the bottom of the river, rolling and fighting, trying to dislodge him by scraping against the rocks and snags at the bottom of the river. But Steve would hang on. He knew he could push off the bottom, reach the surface for air, flip the crocodile into his dinghy, and pin the snapping animal down. “Piece of cake,” he said. That was the most incredible story I had ever heard. And Steve was the most incredible man I had ever seen--catching crocodiles by hand to save their lives? This was just unreal. I had an overwhelming sensation. I wanted to build a big campfire, sit down with Steve next to it, and hear his stories all night long. I didn’t want them to ever end. But eventually the tour was over, and I felt I just had to talk to this man. Steve had a broad, easy smile and the biggest hands I had ever seen. I could tell by his stature and stride that he was accustomed to hard work. I saw a series of small scars on the sides of his face and down his arms. He came up and, with a broad Australian accent, said, “G’day, mate.” Uh-oh, I thought. I’m in trouble. I’d never, ever believed in love at first sight. But I had the strangest, most overwhelming feeling that it was destiny that took me into that little wildlife park that day. Steve started talking to me as if we’d known each other all our lives. I interrupted only to have my friend Lori take a picture of us, and the moment I first met Steve was forever captured. I told him about my wildlife rescue work with cougars in Oregon. He told me about his work with crocodiles. The tour was long over, and the zoo was about to close, but we kept talking. Finally I could hear Lori honking her horn in the car park. “I have to go,” I said to Steve, managing a grim smile. I felt a connection as I never had before, and I was about to leave, never to see him again. “Why do you love cougars so much?” he asked, walking me toward the park’s front gate. I had to think for a beat. There were many reasons. “I think it’s how they can actually kill with their mouths,” I finally said. “They can conquer an animal several times their size, grab it in their jaws, and kill it instantly by snapping its neck.” Steve grinned. I hadn’t realized how similar we really were. “That’s what I love about crocodiles,” he said. “They are the most powerful apex predators.” Apex predators. Meaning both cougars and crocs were at the top of the food chain. On opposite sides of the world, this man and I had somehow formed the same interest, the same passion. At the zoo entrance I could see Lori and her friends in the car, anxious to get going back to Brisbane. “Call the zoo if you’re ever here again,” Steve said. “I’d really like to see you again.” Could it be that he felt the same way I did? As we drove back to Brisbane, I was quiet, contemplative. I had no idea how I would accomplish it, but I was determined to figure out a way to see him. The next weekend, Lori was going diving with a friend, and I took a chance and called Steve. “What do you reckon, could I come back for the weekend?” I asked. “Absolutely. I’ll take care of everything,” came Steve’s reply.

You need to be careful to stay out of Charlie’s line of sight,” Steve said to me. “I want Charlie focusing only on me. If he changes focus and starts attacking you, it’s going to be too difficult for me to control the situation.” Right. Steve got no argument from me. Getting anywhere near those bone-crushing jaws was the furthest thing from my mind. I wasn’t keen on being down on the water with a huge saltwater crocodile trying to get me. I would have to totally rely on Steve to keep me safe. We stepped into the dinghy, which was moored in Charlie’s enclosure, secured front and back with ropes. Charlie came over immediately to investigate. It didn’t take much to encourage him to have a go at Steve. Steve grabbed a top-jaw rope. He worked on roping Charlie while the cameras rolled. Time and time again, Charlie hurled himself straight at Steve, a half ton of reptile flesh exploding up out of the water a few feet away from me. I tried to hang on precariously and keep the boat counterbalanced. I didn’t want Steve to lose his footing and topple in. Charlie was one angry crocodile. He would have loved nothing more than to get his teeth into Steve. As Charlie used his powerful tail to propel himself out of the water, he arched his neck and opened his jaws wide, whipping his head back and forth, snapping and gnashing. Steve carefully threw the top-jaw rope, but he didn’t actually want to snag Charlie. Then he would have had to get the rope off without stressing the croc, and that would have been tricky. The cameras rolled. Charlie lunged. I cowered. Steve continued to deftly toss the rope. Then, all of a sudden, Charlie swung at the rope instead of Steve, and the rope went right over Charlie’s top jaw. A perfect toss, provided that had been what Steve was trying to do. But it wasn’t. We had a roped croc on our hands that we really didn’t want. Steve immediately let the rope go slack. Charlie had it snagged in his teeth. Because of Steve’s quick thinking and prompt maneuvering, the rope came clear. We breathed a collective sigh of relief. Steve looked up at the cameras. “I think you’ve got it.” John agreed. “I think we do, mate.” The crew cheered. The shoot lasted several minutes, but in the boat, I wasn’t sure if it had been seconds or hours. Watching Steve work Charlie up close had been amazing--a huge, unpredictable animal with a complicated thought process, able to outwit its prey, an animal that had been on the planet for millions of years, yet Steve knew how to manipulate him and got some fantastic footage. To the applause of the crew, Steve got us both out of the boat. He gave me a big hug. He was happy. This was what he loved best, being able to interact and work with wildlife. Never before had anything like it been filmed in any format, much less on thirty-five-millimeter film for a movie theater. We accomplished the shot with the insurance underwriters none the wiser. Steve wanted to portray crocs as the powerful apex predators that they were, keeping everyone safe while he did it. Never once did he want it to appear as though he were dominating the crocodile, or showing off by being in close proximity to it. He wished for the crocodile to be the star of the show, not himself. I was proud of him that day. The shoot represented Steve Irwin at his best, his true colors, and his desire to make people understand how amazing these animals are, to be witnessed by audiences in movie theaters all over the world. We filmed many more sequences with crocs, and each time Steve performed professionally and perfected the shots. He was definitely in his element. With the live-croc footage behind us, the insurance people came on board, and we were finally able to sign a contract with MGM. We were to start filming in earnest. First stop: the Simpson Desert, with perentie lizards and fierce snakes.

Steve looked up at the cameras. “I think you’ve got it.” John agreed. “I think we do, mate.” The crew cheered. The shoot lasted several minutes, but in the boat, I wasn’t sure if it had been seconds or hours. Watching Steve work Charlie up close had been amazing--a huge, unpredictable animal with a complicated thought process, able to outwit its prey, an animal that had been on the planet for millions of years, yet Steve knew how to manipulate him and got some fantastic footage. To the applause of the crew, Steve got us both out of the boat. He gave me a big hug. He was happy. This was what he loved best, being able to interact and work with wildlife. Never before had anything like it been filmed in any format, much less on thirty-five-millimeter film for a movie theater. We accomplished the shot with the insurance underwriters none the wiser. Steve wanted to portray crocs as the powerful apex predators that they were, keeping everyone safe while he did it. Never once did he want it to appear as though he were dominating the crocodile, or showing off by being in close proximity to it. He wished for the crocodile to be the star of the show, not himself. I was proud of him that day. The shoot represented Steve Irwin at his best, his true colors, and his desire to make people understand how amazing these animals are, to be witnessed by audiences in movie theaters all over the world. We filmed many more sequences with crocs, and each time Steve performed professionally and perfected the shots. He was definitely in his element.

To succeed as a predator, simple math explains that it is vital that the consumers do not outnumber the consumees. The older and larger the consumer, the greater the investment of energy, pound for pound. It takes a lot of seeds and grass to make enough mice and rabbits to make a wolf; a lot of little plants to make sufficient numbers of small fish to make a shark. As it turns out, it takes a lot of everything to power human societies.

Widening economic inequality, intensifying public anger, and threats to democratic governance have all resulted from the depredation of Davos Man—an unusual predator whose power comes in part from his keen ability to adopt the guise of an ally.

GOLF (Men’s Journal, 1992) The smooth, long, liquid sweep of a three wood smacking into the equator of a dimpled Titleist … It makes a potent but slightly foolish noise like the fart of a small, powerful nature god. The ball sails away in a beautiful hip or breast of a curve. And I am filled with joy. At least that’s what I’m filled with when I manage to connect. Most of my strokes whiz by the tee the way a drunk passes a truck on a curve or dig into the turf in a manner that is more gardening than golf. But now and then I nail one, and each time I do it’s an epiphany. This is how the Australopithecus felt, one or two million years ago, when he first hit something with a stick. Puny hominoid muscles were amplified by the principles of mechanics so that a little monkey swat suddenly became a great manly engine of destruction able to bring enormous force to bear upon enemy predators, hunting prey, and the long fairway shots necessary to get on the green over the early Pleistocene’s tar pit hazards. Hitting things with a stick is the cornerstone of civilization. Consider all the things that can be improved by hitting them with a stick: veal, the TV, Woody Allen. Having a dozen good sticks at hand, all of them well balanced and expertly made, is one reason I took up golf. I also wanted to show my support for the vice president. I now know for certain that Quayle is smarter than his critics. He’s smart enough to prefer golf to spelling. How many times has a friend called you on a Sunday morning and said, “It’s a beautiful day. Let’s go spell potato”? I waited until I was almost forty-five to hit my first golf ball. When I was younger I thought golf was a pointless sport. Of course all sports are pointless unless you’re a professional athlete or a professional athlete’s agent, but complex rules and noisy competition mask the essential inanity of most athletics. Golf is so casual. You just go to the course, miss things, tramp around in the briars, use pungent language, and throw two thousand dollars’ worth of equipment in a pond. Unlike skydiving or rugby, golf gives you leisure to realize it’s pointless. There comes a time in life, however, when all the things that do have a point—career, marriage, exercising to stay fit—start turning, frankly, golflike. And that’s when you’re ready for

Deirdre’s consciousness flooded with unbidden images. Her foot on a man’s throat; her gun against a man’s head; her hand wrapped around power; her seat atop a throne of yellowed bone, a kingdom spread out below her in bloodstained wasteland. In return: offerings, worship. Worship: apes eating their own young, faces smeared in meatjelly. Worship: jackbooted soldiers marching over corpse-strewn battlefields. Worship: a father staring at the severed hands and feet of his own child. Inside her gut, an instinctive gospel heaved itself into her diaphragm. The scripture said there were two kinds of people in the world: predators and prey. All other truths were secondary. Deirdre could be a predator in exchange for worship. If not…

In the beginning, there was nature, powerful and cruel—that original destroyer of worlds—drought and predation, wind and disease. And so we built tools to subdue her: from jamming sticks into anthills to charting out agronomist tables and plows. And we built these tools so well and for so long that now nature, real nature, is mostly a dream, an uneasy longing, repressed and turned kindly by submission, the way terrible fathers crumble into grandfathers.

The first lesson the predator learns is to take down the weakest prey first. Then, fed on that victim, one has strength to pursue more powerful quarry.

This uncertainty has made us particularly vulnerable to the powerful effects of trauma. Animals like the agile, darting impala know they are prey and are intimate with their survival resources. They sense what they need to do and they do it. Likewise, the sleek cheetah’s seventy-miles-an-hour sprint and treacherous fangs and claws make it a self-assured predator. The line is not so clearly delineated for the human animal

I heard Lucien first. 'Back off.' A low female laugh. Everything in me went still and cold at that sound. I'd heard it once before- in Rhysand's memory. Keep going. They were distracted, horrible as it was. Keep going, keep going, keep going. 'I thought you'd seek me out after the Rite,' Ianthe purred. They couldn't be more than thirty feet through the trees. Far enough away not to hear my presence, if I was quiet enough. 'I was obligated to perform the Rite,' Lucien snapped. 'That night wasn't the product of desire, believe me.' 'We had fun, you and I.' 'I'm a mated male now.' Every second was the ringing of my death knell. I'd primed everything to fall; I'd long since stopped feeling any guilt or doubt about my plan. Not with Alis now safely away. And yet- and yet- 'You don't act that way with Feyre.' A silk-wrapped threat. 'You're mistaken.' 'Am I?' Twigs and leaves crunched, as if she was circling him. 'You put your hands all over her.' I had done my job too well, provoked her jealousy too much with every instance I'd found ways to get Lucien to touch me in her presence, in Tamlin's presence. 'Do not touch me,' he growled. And then I was moving. I masked the sound of my footfalls, silent as a panther as I stalked to the little clearing where they stood. Where Lucien stood, back against a tree- twin bands of blue stone shackled around his wrists. I'd seen them before. On Rhys, to immobilise his power. Stone hewn from Hybern's rotted land, capable of nullifying magic. And in this case... holding Lucien against that tree as Ianthe surveyed him like a snake before a meal. She slid a hand over the broad panes of his chest, his stomach. And Lucien's eyes shot to me as I stepped between the trees, fear and humiliation reddening his golden skin. 'That's enough,' I said. Ianthe whipped her head to me. Her smile was innocent, simpering. But I saw her note the pack, Tamlin's bandolier. Dismiss them. 'We were in the middle of a game. Weren't we, Lucien?' He didn't answer. And the sight of those shackles on him, however she'd trapped him, the sight of her hand still on his stomach- 'We'll return to the camp when we're done,' she said, turning to him again. Her hand slid lower, not for his own pleasure, but simply to throw it in my face that she could-

I saw a pretty shop across the Sidra the other day. It sold what looked to be lots of lacy little things. Am I allowed to buy that on your credit, too, or does that come out of my personal funds?' Those violet eyes again drifted to me. 'I'm not in the mood.' There was no humour, no mischief. I could go warm myself by a fire inside, but... He had stayed. And fought for me. Week after week, he'd fought for me, even when I had no reaction, even when I had been been able to speak or bring myself to care if I lived or died or ate or starved. I couldn't leave him to his own dark thoughts, his own guilt. He'd shouldered them alone long enough. So I held his gaze. 'I never knew Illyrians were such morose drunks.' 'I'm not drunk- I'm drinking,' he said, his teeth flashing a bit. 'Again semantics,' I leaned back in my seat, wishing I'd brought my coat. 'Maybe you should have slept with Cresseida after all- so you could both be sad and lonely together.' 'So you're entitled to have as many bad days as you want, but I can't get a few hours?' 'Oh, take however long you want to mope. I was going to invite you to come shopping with me for said lacy little unmentionables, but... sit up here forever, if you have to.' He didn't respond. I went on, 'Maybe I'll send a few to Tarquin- with an offer to wear them for him if he forgives us. Maybe he'll take those blood rubies right back.' His mouth barely, barely tugged up at the corners. 'He'd see that as a taunt.' 'I gave him a few smiles and he handed over a family heirloom. I bet he'd give me the keys to his territory if I showed up wearing those undergarments.' 'Someone thinks mighty highly of herself.' 'Why shouldn't I? You seem to have difficulty not staring at me day and night.' There it was - a kernel of truth and a question. 'Am I supposed to deny,' he drawled, but something sparked in those eyes, 'That I find you attractive?' 'You've never said it.' 'I've told you many times, and quite frequently, how attractive I find you.' I shrugged, even as I thought of all those times- when I'd dismissed them as teasing compliments, nothing more. 'Well, maybe you should do a better job of it.' The gleam in his eyes turned into something predatory. A thrill went through me as he braced his powerful arms on the table and purred, 'Is that a challenge, Feyre?' I held that predator's gaze- the gaze of the most powerful male in Prythian. 'Is it?' His pupils flared. Gone was the quiet sadness, the isolated guilt. Only that lethal force- on me. On my mouth. On the bob of my throat as I tried to keep my breathing even. He said, slow and soft, 'Why don't we go down to that store right now, Feyre, so you can try on those lacy little things- so I can help you pick which ones to send to Tarquin.' My toes curled inside my fleece-lined slippers. Such a dangerous line we walked together.

A small part of Morana could not help but admire that lethal, powerful grace.

I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

Surely you know bureaucracies always become voracious aristocracies after they attain commanding power... Ministers of this, Great Honored Matres of that, a powerful few at the top and many functionaries below. They already are full of adolescent hungers. Like voracious predators, they never consider how they exterminate their prey. A tight relationship: Reduce the numbers of those upon whom you feed and you bring your own structure crashing down.

A time had come, or was coming. He could feel drawing closer, feel its predator breath on his back. So he must face, and perhaps take strength from the power that had awakened here. e must access it fully. Perhaps then, the gate of his dreams and nightmares would open and the void be sensed within himself could be filled.

If one person embodies this approach to work and life—the apex predator of the anticipated regret food chain—that person is Jeff Bezos. He’s one of the richest people in the world, thanks to founding Amazon, one of the largest companies on the planet. He owns The Washington Post. He visits outer space. Yet in the domain of our most misunderstood emotion, he is best known for a concept that he calls the “Regret Minimization Framework.

Predation isn't merely a pricing and wage practice; it is also a political practice: one of its most powerful tools is local or state subsidies. In 2018, when Amazon was offered $3 billion in state subsidies to locate a new facility in New York City, the owner of the Strand, the legendary Union Square bookstore, wasn't having it. She told the New York Times, 'The richest man in America, who is a direct competitor, has just been handed $3 billion in subsidies.' The basic insight in her complaint is essential: any subsidy that goes to a particular firm necessarily hurts its competitors.

But, if gods are all-knowing, why do they rely on imperfect messengers to unpack and “screw up” interpretations of their doctrines across the centuries? If they are all powerful why do they allow predators and thieves to infest the leadership of every major religious denomination on the planet?

From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship—homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.” Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.

On Fox News a few days earlier, Tucker Carlson had sat in front of a picture of Oppenheim and called for his resignation. “Let’s be clear. NBC is lying,” Carlson said. “Many powerful people knew what Harvey Weinstein was doing and not only ignored his crimes but actively took his side against his many victims. It’s a long list but at the very top of that list is NBC News.” He appeared to relish the chance to attack a mainstream outlet, Hollywood liberals, and a sexual predator all at once. “News executives are not allowed to tell lies,” he said, as if he’d never met one.

Rohan was battling invisible foes, wielding the large, lancelike weapon she had seen in his hand that first night in the great hall. His long hair flowed around his shoulders, wetted with the sweat that streamed from him and made his body gleam with rippling, raw power. He was bare-chested, wearing only loose black trousers that draped his compact buttocks and muscled thighs gracefully. His bare feet were silent on the flagstones as he lunged, leaped, and spun about, the torchlight flashing crimson on his long, wicked blade. Kate watched, riveted by the play of shadows and gold torchlight that slid over his sweat-slicked body, gliding across the sleekly muscled contours of his back and massive shoulders, his powerful chest and chiseled abdomen as he thrust, swung, jabbed, then spiraled up to parry an imaginary blow, only to gouge again with precision perfectly balanced with killing force. His blade sliced through the air with naught but a deadly whisper, each slashing arc of his weapon, like his honed body, under his exquisite control. In constant motion, he wove through the changing patterns of his regime with a beautiful---an almost otherworldly---prowess, a creature of elegant savagery. He attacked again with a low war cry, but then suddenly went motionless, standing in a sure-footed stance below her, his chest heaving. Slowly, he looked up, as though he had felt her there. Kate found herself looking into the eyes of a predator; she held absolutely still.

How strong must love be to persist in the face of a powerful evil that has named it hate? How resolute must love be when its enemy uses the mass media to convince the world that it is hate? How courageous must love be to raise its banner and sound its trumpets in an age that would purge it—as hate. Of this we can be sure: at some point in the distant past, Whites were a single tribe, a single people. They were alone against a hostile world, a frosty star in the depths of an ancient darkness, ringed by the ferocity of the natural world, besieged by alien tribes and animal predators. But they were a people, together, united, and possessed by an indomitable spirit. Before us, the world’s darkness receded. Its nightmares withered in the light of our coming. Its monsters fled for the darkling holes that brooded in the shadows. We built civilization and in our victory over that which sought victory over us, we fell from grace. In our triumph, we turned to folly. We renounced our brotherhood and rejected our unity. As ungrateful children of our ancient sires, we turned to separate paths, following petty rulers who put their insignificant lives before the fundamental importance of our people, and in so doing we spilled our brothers’ blood. The darkness that we conquered is once again crawling from its thorny lairs, creeping across the world under many fair-seeming guises, now as cancers upon our civilization, now forming gangs and armies, now devouring us in our disunion. It was a song that called us from the darkness long ago, and once again that mysterious music is beckoning. We will reunite as a single people, a great ring that will circle the globe for our wellbeing, or we will perish, and the Western Light of the world will go with us. These people are my people, my nation, and even as I type, even as I ponder how today decides tomorrow a new spirit rises within us, a spirit that refuses to yield to those who seek our undoing. I have always loved our people, their heroism, their genius, their spirit, and though my heart is filled with concern for them, it sings now, it sings with the coming of the dawn. These are my people, and I love them. I was born for this; it is my destiny.

From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship-homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross' back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for "the thrill of the chase and the kill." Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.

It sounds on paper the slightest of shelters for the most powerful of predators. A hole in a snowdrift, sealed by more snow, scarcely seems sufficiently substantial to provide privacy and protection for one of the largest truly carnivorous mammals on Earth. And yet, the hostile environment is an impediment to all but the most curious and determined, and the monochrome surroundings render the dens invisible to all but the keenest, most experienced eyes.

First, people like to command attention, and one way to do that is to place yourself at the center of dramatic events. There is no reason to think that this incentive to claim special witness to high drama was any less powerful among hunter-gatherers circa 30,000 BCE than among midwestern Americans circa 1900 CE. Imagine that you are one of those hunter-gatherers and you walk past a place where someone died mysteriously, and you hear leaves rustle eerily. That’s a story that will get people’s attention, and you can heighten the attention by stressing how exquisitely timed the rustling was. And, by the way, didn’t you catch sight of a shadowy—almost ethereal—creature out of the corner of your eye? The anthropologist Stewart Guthrie has suggested that hunter-gatherers would be encouraged to make just such false sightings by standard human mental equipment—something called a “hyperactive agent-detection device.” Because the costs of failing to detect a predator lurking in the woods are much higher than the costs of detecting one that isn’t there, natural selection, he plausibly argues, may have biased our brains toward “false positives”: you hear a rustling, your mind flashes the vivid hypothesis of some generic animal that’s doing the rustling, and you turn toward it expectantly. Did you actually see something? Kind of.

He was charming, wealthy, and powerful. A combination that, when interspersed with danger, swayed people in his direction. This man was the leader of one of the biggest mob organizations in the world. This man reeked with the security of his authority. This man was the Bloodhound whose reputation preceded him. And then the most fascinating thing happened. The Predator walked in the door. For once, Morana forced herself not to become entranced by the man but instead notice everyone else’s reaction to him. The energy in the room crackled. It buzzed over the people, who turned to watch him. Men straightened, women inhaled. And Lorenzo ‘Bloodhound’ Maroni lost the security of his authority. The man kissing his fingers had stopped in the middle to watch The Predator stride instead. And Maroni stiffened, an emperor feeling the challenge to his throne pulsing through the room. It was fascinating.