R Collapse With Quotes

The guard looked down at the scarlet bloodstains blooming on his chest. He appeared to think of something that he needed to say, but as his lips began to form the words, his knees gave up the strain of supporting his ruined bulk. He collapsed to the floor, his throat issuing a final sound like a bubbling casserole.

Any belief that puts itself beyond doubt nurtures its own collapse.

His cologne was practically hijacking my ovulation cycle and I had to fight the urge to let my face collapse onto his shirt and inhale.

Before Butch knew what was doing, V grabbed his forearm, bent down, and licked the cut, sealing it up quick. Butch yanked out of his roommate's hold. "Jesus, V! What if that blood's contaminated!" "It's fine. Just f-" With a boneless lurch, Vishous gasped and collapsed against the wall, eyes rolling back in his head, body twitching. "Oh, God...!" Butch reached out in horror- Only to have V cut the seizure off and calmly take a drink from his glass. "You're fine, cop. Tastes perfectly okay. Well fine for a human guy which really ain't my 'tail of choice, you feel me?" Butch hauled back and nailed his roommate in the arm with his fist. And as the brother cursed, Butch popped him another one. V glared and rubbed himself. "Christ, cop." "Suck it up, you deserve it.

Sam, clinging to Frodo's arm, collapsed on a step in the black darkness. 'Poor old Bill!' he said in a choking voice. 'Poor old Bill! Wolves and snakes! But the snakes were too much for him. I had to choose, Mr. Frodo. I had to come with you.

Is this what we have to look forward to? The world of adults feels like a universe that has reached the end of its expansion and is inexorably collapsing back in on itself.

The collapse in evangelical doctrinal consensus is intimately related to the collapse in the understanding of, and role assigned to, Scripture as God's Word spoken within the church.

And he now knew with certainty that the world was hollowed of its wonder by knowledge and travel, that when one stripped away the mysteries, its dimensions collapsed rather than bloomed. Of course, the world was a much more sophisticated place to him now than it had been when he was a child, but it was also far simpler. Everywhere men grasped and grasped, as though the titles “king,” “shriah,” and “grandmaster” were simply masks worn by the same hungry animal. Avarice, it seemed to him, was the world's only dimension.

...the ongoing suspicion that scientific discoveries or rigorous biblical scholarship will undermine faith is a tacit admission that faith is threatened by knowledge, because it is ultimately constructed on weak or faulty assumptions and, like the proverbial house of cards, needs to be "protected" from collapsing. (p. 21)

The Men of the Ordeal do not march to save the World, Proyas--at least not first and foremost. They march to save their wives and children. Their tribes and their nations. If they learn that the world, their world, slips into ruin behind them, that their wives and daughters may perish for want of their shields, their swords, the Host of Hosts would melt about the edges, then collapse.

And then I felt him. My only anchor in this storm, my only path back. One hand grabbed my shoulder and held me firmly in place. The other banished the air driving the monster. As suddenly as the whirlwind started, it died, and I collapsed. Kovis caught me in his arms.

Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building. A vigorous totalitarian order requires that the people be invested in the leader's scheme, and while genocide may be the most perverse and ambitious means to this end, it is also the most comprehensive. In 1994, Rwanda was regarded in much of the rest of the world as the exemplary instance of chaos and anarchy associated with collapsed states. In fact, the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously administered states in history. And strange as it may sound, the ideology–or what Rwandans call "the logic"–of genocide was promoted as a way not to create suffering but alleviate it. The specter of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual–always an annoyance to totality–ceases to exist.

At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way - and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.

Tyler falls to his side. His body like rags. He begins to cry. A sound like colony collapse.

My Jimmy Choos!" Becca collapsed on the floor beside the pair of red patent leather stiletto heels. She gathered the shoes up in her arms, almost as if they were a baby, pulling them close to her ample bosom and sobbing.

Young children have no past. The old have no future. The rest are too busy with present. This time-tripod holds up the world. You ignore the importance of this interdependence of the three, the world as you know it is in danger of collapsing

The wealth of Britain depends on coercive extraction. And as Britain grows, only two options remain: either her mechanisms of coercion become vastly more brutal, or she collapses. The former’s more likely. But it might bring about the latter.

Pacing back and forth now on the spur of his conflicting needs, Covenant growled, "Baradakas said just about the same thing. By hell! You people terrify me. When I try to be responsible, you pressure me -- and when I collapse you -- You're not asking the right questions. You don't have the vaguest notion of what a leper is, and it doesn't even occur to you to inquire. _That's_ why Foul chose me for this. Because I can't-- Damnation! Why don't you ask me about where I come from? I've got to tell you. The world I come from doesn't allow anyone to live except on its own terms. Those terms-- those terms contradict yours." "What are its terms?" the High Lord asked carefully. "That your world is a dream."

How one views Scripture will determine the rest of one's theology. There is no more basic issue: Every system of thought that takes seriously the claims of the Bible to be the inspired, authoritative Word of God will share a commitment to particular central truths, and that without compromise. Those systems that do not begin with this belief in Scripture will exhibit a wide range of beliefs that will shift over time in light of the ever-changing whims and views of culture. Almost every single collapse involving denominations and churches in regard to historic Christian beliefs can be traced back to a degradation in that group's view of the Bible as the inspired and inerrant revelation of God's truth. Once this foundation is lost, the house that was built upon it cannot long stand

Should you ever intend to dull the wits of a young man and to incapacitate his brains for any kind of thought whatever, then you cannot do better than give him Hegel to read. For these monstrous accumulations of words that annul and contradict one another drive the mind into tormenting itself with vain attempts to think anything whatever in connection with them, until finally it collapses from sheer exhaustion. Thus any ability to think is so thoroughly destroyed that the young man will ultimately mistake empty and hollow verbiage for real thought. A guardian fearing that his ward might become too intelligent for his schemes might prevent this misfortune by innocently suggesting the reading of Hegel.

The world was different. The world feared touch.

They had reached the strange, disturbing little moment that comes in every holiday: the moment when suddenly the tense excitement of the journey collapses and fizzles out, and you are left, vaguely wondering what you are going to do, and how you are going to start. With a touch of panic you wonder whether the holiday, after all, is only a dull anti-climax to the journey.

Almost every single collapse involving denominations and churches in regard to historic Christian beliefs can be traced back to a degradation in that group’s view of the Bible as the inspired and inerrant revelation of God’s truth.

Idol-centered worldviews not only fail to match the external world, they also collapse internally. They are self-refuting. The technical term is that they are self-referentially absurd, which means they propose a standard for truth that they themselves fail to meet.

My legs turned to jelly as I collapsed against him, my breathing ragged as aftershocks of ecstasy spasm through me. I looked down, surprised to see the bottoms of my bathing suit were still on. I'd just assumed they'd exploded at some point within the last two minutes.

Social Security and Medicare were sold to the public as insurance programs. They are not. As such, they now rely mostly on the “contributions” of younger workers and massive federal borrowing to subsidize them. Despite repeated and dire warnings about their unsustainable fiscal condition from the trustees appointed to oversee them, younger workers are compelled to continue to pay into these programs, from which they are unlikely to benefit upon their retirement and for which future generations will bear the brunt of their eventual collapse.

Men may perish, but the world will neither celebrate nor mourn. It will go on.' His smile thinned. 'Would you like to know how?' 'No.' 'Animals will swell to fill the void left by men," he told her. 'And over-swell it, perhaps. There will be other extinctions and other recoveries. The sky will clear, but those who see it will not marvel at its many colors. Those ruins will collapse, burying treasures like this-' He waved at the walls. '-and this-' He picked up the spoon from her coffee tray and tossed it down again with a clatter. '-forever, but the world will go on. Years become centuries so easily when no one is there to count them. Centuries become millennia. The forests will reclaim the lands that Men have razed. Rivers will carve canyons across the scars left by this fallen cities. Mountains will rise up, trapping seas to dry under and uncaring sun and leaving the bones of whales to bleach in the newborn deserts for no one to find, no one to be inspired by thoughts of giants and dragons. And still the worlds will go on, and I will go on with it through ages that can only be measured by the coming and going of glaciers. The stars themselves will shift in the heavens and no one will be there to invent names for their new alignments or remember the stories of the old ones, no one but me. In time, the sun itself will begin to cool. Here on Earth, the world goes on and on as its remaining life passes through its last changes and dies away. It will be quiet. And lonely.' His mouth curved into a bitter line. 'But I'll live.' 'Stop it,' Lan whispered through numb lips. 'I read once that the sun will someday swell and engulf this world before it burns itself out. Perhaps I will finally die with it. Or perhaps I' will continue to endure... my ashes pulled eternally apart through the frozen vacuum of space, and I with no more mouth to scream... still alive.

I’ve been queen for ages and ages,” Sunny went on. She strutted across the cave floor. “No one dares challenge me for my throne! I am the strongest SandWing queen who ever lived!” “Don’t forget the treasure,” Tsunami hissed, pointing at a pile of loose rocks. “Oh, right,” Sunny said. “It’s probably because of all my treasure! I have so much treasure because I’m such an important queen!” She swept the rocks toward her and gathered them between her talons. “Did someone say treasure?” Clay bellowed, leaping out from behind a large rock formation. Sunny yelped with fright. “No!” Tsunami called. “You’re not scared! You’re Queen Oasis, the big, bad queen of the sand dragons.” “R-right,” Sunny said. “Rargh! What is this tiny scavenger doing in the Kingdom of Sand? I am not afraid of tiny scavengers! I shall go out there and eat him in one bite!” Glory started giggling so hard she had to lie down and cover her face with her wings. Even Tsunami was making faces like she was trying not to laugh. Clay swung his stalagmite in a circle. “Squeak squeak squeak!” he shouted. “And other annoying scavenger noises! I’m here to steal treasure away from a magnificent dragon!” “Not from me, you won’t,” Sunny said, bristling. She stamped forward, spread her wings, and raised her tail threateningly. Without the poisonous barb other SandWings had, Sunny’s tail was not very menacing. But nobody pointed that out. “Yaaaaaaah!” Clay shouted, lunging forward with his rock claw. Sunny darted out of the way, and they circled each other, feinting and jabbing. This was Clay’s favorite part. When Sunny forgot about trying to act queenly and focused on the battle, she was fun to fight. Her small size made it easy for her to dodge and slip under his defenses. But in the end Queen Oasis had to lose — that was how the story went. Clay drove Sunny back against the wall of the cave and thrust the fake claw between her neck and her wing, pretending it went right through her heart. “Aaaaaaaargh,” Sunny howled. “Impossible! A queen defeated by a lowly scavenger! The kingdom will fall apart! Oh, my treasure … my lovely treasure . . .” She collapsed to the ground and let her wings flop lifelessly on either side of her. “Ha ha ha!” Clay said. “And squeak squeak! The treasure is mine!” He scooped up all the rocks and paraded away, lashing his tail proudly.

An image is seen based on the light speed between the observer and the event. An image is light. Scientists theorize about sighting the edge of the universe and believe they are looking at the beginning of time. Things started moving away from each other when the Big Bang exploded 18 billion years ago. Sages theorize that this impassive distancing will end someday. Then things will reverse and start moving back towards each other. If reversal fails and contraction continues, the universe will collapse into itself, imploding into a Black Hole that can encapsulate an entire universe into a dark space the size of a fist. The size of a fist mirrors the size of a heart.

And there came a second crack, loud and sharp as thunder, and the smoke stirred and whirled around her and the pyre shifted, the logs exploding as the fire touched their secret hearts. She heard the screams of frightened horses, and the voices of the Dothraki raised in shouts of fear and terror, and Ser Jorah calling her name and cursing. No, she wanted to shout to him, no, my good knight, do not fear for me. The fire is mine. I am Daenerys Stormborn, daughter of dragons, bride of dragons, mother of dragons, don’t you see? Don’t you SEE? With a belch of flame and smoke that reached thirty feet into the sky, the pyre collapsed and came down around her. Unafraid, Dany stepped forward into the firestorm, calling to her children.

And each and every one, it seems, falls to stagnation, and in that stagnation evil men rise, through greed or lust for power. Like canker buds, they find their way in any government, slipping through seams in the well-intended laws, coaxing the codes to their advantage, finding their treasures and securing their well-being at the expense of all others, and ever blaming the helpless, who have no voice and no recourse. To the laborers they cry, “Beware the leech!” and the leech is the infirm, the elderly, the downtrodden. So do they deflect and distort reality itself to secure their wares, and yet, they are never secure, for this is the truest rhyme of history, that when the theft is complete, so will the whole collapse, and in that collapse will fall the downtrodden and the nobility alike.

When J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was published in the 1950s, a woman named Rhona Beare wrote Tolkien and asked him about the chapter in which the Ring of Power is destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom. When the ring is melted, the Dark Lord’s entire power collapses and melts away with it. She found it inexplicable that this unassailable, overwhelming power would be wiped out by the erasure of such a little object. Tolkien replied that at the heart of the plot was the Dark Lord’s effort to magnify and maximize his power by placing so much of it in the ring. He wrote: “The Ring of Sauron is only one of the various mythical treatments of the placing of one’s life, or power, in some external object, which is thus exposed to capture or destruction with disastrous results to oneself.

This was an idea of Professor Cristin’s friend, the late Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who believed that a trial of communism was necessary if only to confront the world with communism’s many unpunished crimes. Cristin has a unique way of explaining the collapse of communism. It is a collapse, he says, in which the Iron Curtain was replaced with emerging communist movements in every Western country.

Here is your modern American solution. And most people think it worked perfectly. We won the Cold War by living high off the hog. Isn’t that the real story here? We beat the Russians by talk and retreat, by growing softer and softer under a shopping ethic. We let our kids smoke pot, our schools descend into political correctness, while counter-intelligence collapsed — if it was ever there at all. But then, we didn’t really win the Cold War.

Still, it is argued that millions of people benefit from such programs. Of course, trillions of dollars in government expenditures over many years most assuredly benefit the recipients of subsidies or other related payments. But this does not change the arithmetic. The eventual collapse of a colossal government venture will indiscriminately engulf an entire society and economy, including its millions of beneficiaries and benefactors, resulting in widespread disorder and misery.

Greg watched in horror as the ball bounced off Bird and dribbled away onto the infield grass. Bird’s eyes went wide with disbelief, confusion. He stood frozen in place on the base path for a long moment. Then both of his hands shot up above his head, and he uttered a shrill cry, long and loud, like the high-pitched whinny of a horse. His eyes rolled up in his head. He sank to his knees and uttered another cry, softer this time. Then he collapsed, sprawling onto his back, his neck at an unnatural angle, his eyes closed. He didn’t move.

More recently, Lucas described a visit in Europe, after the release of Revenge of the Sith, “with a dozen reporters, and the Russian correspondents all thought the film was about Russian politics, and the Americans all thought it was about Bush. And I said, ‘Well, it’s really based on Rome. And on the French Revolution and Bonaparte.’” The prequels focus on the rise of tyranny and the collapse of democracies. They explore the kinds of machinations that allow dictators to come to power, and they show how republics fall prey to them. There’s a stylized account of the loss of freedom, which Padmé nicely captures: “So this is how liberty dies . . . with thunderous applause.

Valyria. It was written that on the day of Doom every hill for five hundred miles had split asunder to fill the air with ash and smoke and fire, blazes so hot and hungry that even the dragons in the sky were engulfed and consumed. Great rents had opened in the earth, swallowing palaces, temples, entire towns. Lakes boiled or turned to acid, mountains burst, fiery fountains spewed molten rock a thousand feet into the air, red clouds rained down dragonglass and the black blood of demons, and to the north the ground splintered and collapsed and fell in on itself and an angry sea came rushing in. The proudest city in all the world was gone in an instant, its fabled empire vanished in a day, the Lands of the Long Summer scorched and drowned and blighted.

But he wasn’t done with her. Before she could catch her breath, he pulled out, flipped her over, and yanked her onto all fours. Rearing up behind her, he bit her again, on the other side, and then he was in her once more, taking her from the rear, one hand running up between her slapping breasts and locking on the base of her throat, the other planted on the floor, holding them both up. She was facing the fire, and her vision swung wildly with each of his pounding thrusts—the flames jumping this way and that, her hair flying around until some lashed into her open mouth. At some point, her upper body just collapsed onto the blanket, her sex up in the air, his for the taking as he drilled her over and over again, coming so many times, he coated her with his marking scent. Elise forgot how many orgasms she had. All she cared about was that he never, ever stop.

Often interfaces are assumed to be synonymous with media itself. But what would it mean to say that “interface” and “media” are two names for the same thing? The answer is found in the remediation or layer model of media, broached already in the introduction, wherein media are essentially nothing but formal containers housing other pieces of media. This is a claim most clearly elaborated on the opening pages of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. McLuhan liked to articulate this claim in terms of media history: a new medium is invented, and as such its role is as a container for a previous media format. So, film is invented at the tail end of the nineteenth century as a container for photography, music, and various theatrical formats like vaudeville. What is video but a container for film. What is the Web but a container for text, image, video clips, and so on. Like the layers of an onion, one format encircles another, and it is media all the way down. This definition is well-established today, and it is a very short leap from there to the idea of interface, for the interface becomes the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system. The interface is an “agitation” or generative friction between different formats. In computer science, this happens very literally; an “interface” is the name given to the way in which one glob of code can interact with another. Since any given format finds its identity merely in the fact that it is a container for another format, the concept of interface and medium quickly collapse into one and the same thing.

These senators and representatives call themselves “leaders.” One of the primary principles of leadership is that a leader never asks or orders any follower to do what he or she would not do themselves. Such action requires the demonstration of the acknowledged traits of a leader among which are integrity, honesty, and courage, both physical and moral courage. They don’t have those traits nor are they willing to do what they ask and order. Just this proves we elect people who shouldn’t be leading the nation. When the great calamity and pain comes, it will have been earned and deserved. The piper always has to be paid at the end of the party. The party is about over. The bill is not far from coming due. Everybody always wants the guilty identified. The culprits are we the people, primarily the baby boom generation, which allowed their vote to be bought with entitlements at the expense of their children, who are now stuck with the national debt bill that grows by the second and cannot be paid off. These follow-on citizens—I call them the screwed generation—are doomed to lifelong grief and crushing debt unless they take the only other course available to them, which is to repudiate that debt by simply printing up $20 trillion, calling in all federal bills, bonds, and notes for payoff, and then changing from the green dollar to say a red dollar, making the exchange rate 100 or 1000 green dollars for 1 red dollar or even more to get to zero debt. Certainly this will create a great international crisis. But that crisis is coming anyhow. In fact it is here already. The U.S. has no choice but to eventually default on that debt. This at least will be a controlled default rather than an uncontrolled collapse. At present it is out of control. Congress hasn’t come up with a budget in 3 years. That’s because there is no way at this point to create a viable budget that will balance and not just be a written document verifying that we cannot legitimately pay our bills and that we are on an ever-descending course into greater and greater debt. A true, honest budget would but verify that we are a bankrupt nation. We are repeating history, the history we failed to learn from. The history of Rome. Our TV and video games are the equivalent distractions of the Coliseums and circus of Rome. Our printing and borrowing of money to cover our deficit spending is the same as the mixing and devaluation of the gold Roman sisteri with copper. Our dysfunctional and ineffectual Congress is as was the Roman Senate. Our Presidential executive orders the same as the dictatorial edicts of Caesar. Our open borders and multi-millions of illegal alien non-citizens the same as the influx of the Germanic and Gallic tribes. It is as if we were intentionally following the course written in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The military actions, now 11 years in length, of Iraq and Afghanistan are repeats of the Vietnam fiasco and the RussianAfghan incursion. Our creep toward socialism is no different and will bring the same implosion as socialism did in the U.S.S.R. One should recognize that the repeated application of failed solutions to the same problem is one of the clinical definitions of insanity. * * * I am old, ill, physically used up now. I can’t have much time left in this life. I accept that. All born eventually die and with the life I’ve lived, I probably should have been dead decades ago. Fate has allowed me to screw the world out of a lot of years. I do have one regret: the future holds great challenge. I would like to see that challenge met and overcome and this nation restored to what our founding fathers envisioned. I’d like to be a part of that. Yeah. “I’d like to do it again.” THE END PHOTOS Daniel Hill 1954 – 15

From a distance, even the most violent events in nature can seem innocuous and easily overlooked. Thousands of feet above the Earth, viewed from tiny cabin windows, even the mightiest river – all that tumultuous and chaotic force – becomes just another blue scratch on the land below. The collapse of a star, an explosion a billion miles wide, wreaking havoc on an entire galaxy, becomes just a pin prick of light in the night sky. Had a casual observer been scanning that same night sky on the morning it began the falling object would most likely have been overlooked. From a distance, the tiny object made its way serenely and

Exploitation: early entrants make use of the wealth of opportunity in their environment to multiply. Most fail, not least because they are poorly-connected individuals facing a dangerous world on their own, but some may eventually build a system with potential and connectedness. This is known as the r phase: r has for many years been used as a label for the rate of growth of the population of an ecology (example of phase: young trees).2 2. Conservation: the system persists in its mature form, with the benefit of a complex structure of connections, strong enough now to resist challenges for a long time, but with the weakness that the connections themselves introduce an element of rigidity, slowing down its reactions and reducing its inventiveness. This is the K phase, where the ecology reaches its carrying capacity (example: mature trees).3 In due course, however, the tight connections themselves become a decisive problem, which can only be resolved by . . . The back loop (moving from bottom-right to top-left in the diagram): 3. . . . release: at this point, the cost and complication of maintaining the large scale—providing the resources the system needs, and disposing of its waste—becomes too great. The space and flexibility for local responsiveness had become scarce, the system itself so tightly connected that it locked: a target for predators without and within, against which it found it harder and harder to defend itself. But now the stresses join up, and the system collapses (example: dying trees). This is the omega (Ω) phase, as suggested by Holling and Gunderson, and it is placed by them in its ecological context: The tightly bound accumulation of biomass and nutrients becomes increasingly fragile (overconnected, in systems terms) until it is suddenly released by agents such as forest fires, droughts, insect pests, or intense pulses of grazing.4 4. Reorganisation: the remains of a system after collapse are unpromising material on which to start afresh, and yet they are an opportunity for a different kind of system to enjoy a brief flowering—decomposing the wood of a former forest, recycling the carbon after a fire, restoring the land with forgiving grass, clearing away the assumptions and grandeur of the previous regime. Reorganisation becomes a busy system in its own right (example: rotting trees). This is the alpha (α) phase.5 In this phase, there is a persistent process of disconnecting, with the former subsidiary parts of the system being broken up. But our diagram is drawn on a graph of potential (increasing from bottom to top) and connectedness (increasing from left to right), which allows us to note a curious aspect of this back loop: the defining relationship of the fore loop—where more potential is correlated with more connectedness—is reversed. In the back loop (even) less connectedness goes with more potential. How can this be?

Here the question must be asked: What kind of brilliant scheme could entail the industrialization of China, and the arming of an implacable enemy? Setting aside Sutton’s misinterpretations of the data (where he completely fails to grasp the psychological realities of the capitalist milieu), the entire situation may be clarified by reference to a single fact: namely, the suicidal trajectory of the Western financial elite over the past half-century. As James Burnham indicated long ago, liberalism is a philosophy leading to Western suicide. By industrializing and arming China, by rebuilding Russia’s position, by opening Europe to Islamic immigration, by adopting social policies which have collapsed Europe’s birth rate, we see the rush to suicide. What geniuses indeed! What leadership! Through intellectual superficiality, political shallowness, and arrogance, they cannot possibly hope to survive their own policies. If there is a plot to establish a universal socialist dictatorship the only people who stand a chance of establishing it are in Moscow and Beijing. I fail to see how Washington and London remain standing, let alone influential.

Exploit the counter-revolution – Some strategists believe that a counter-revolutionary or right wing reaction is unavoidable. It is therefore necessary, from the standpoint of sound strategy, to send infiltrators into the right wing. Having a finger in every pie and an agent network in every organization, the Communists are not afraid of encouraging counter-revolution, secession, or civil war in the wake of financial collapse. After all, the reactionaries and right wing elements must be drawn out so that they can be purged or, if necessary, turned into puppet allies. Already Putin is posturing as a Christian who opposes feminism and homosexuality. This has fooled many “conservatives” in the West, and is an intentional ploy which further serves to disorient the West.

It has been my contention, for many years, that the KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn was generally correct in his analysis of the liberalization that led to the collapse of the USSR. Golitsyn predicted the liberalization before it occurred, and he accurately predicted where it would lead. He said that the communist party would appear to lose its monopoly of power. This would allow Russia access to capital and technology it could not have acquired during the Cold War. This capital and technology would enable Russia, further down the road, to build a military machine second to none. Golitsyn argued that Soviet liberalization was devised with this end in mind. It was also devised to eliminate anti-communism and destroy the West's vigilance so that communism could make gains across the globe without anyone noticing. If we look at what has happened, from Venezuela and Nicaragua to Brazil and Nepal, South Africa, Congo and Angola, communism did not disappear. It has been victorious in country after country.

I began collecting my notes for this book in 1987. That year I realized communism was going to "manage" its own collapse. At first I stupidly dreamed that my writing would alert people to the danger. I read hundreds of books, took thousands of notes. Week after week I put them into my computer, arranged them, rearranged them. Some of these notes are long, others are short. Here is one: In December 1984 William H. Webster, then FBI Director, said: "We have more people charged with espionage right now than ever before in our history." Rear Admiral William O. Studeman, Director of Naval Intelligence, described the nature of some of this espionage as having "powerful war-winning implications for the Soviet side." At the end of the 1980s I could write such a note imagining that it proved something, that it demonstrated an important aspect of America's socio-strategic problem. I did not foresee that nearly everyone would dismiss this fact as virtually meaningless. I did not foresee that such insights would one day suggest clinical paranoia. "Origins of the Fourth World War

Deng’s judgment about the importance of strong economic growth was later validated by a series of studies of the collapse of the USSR conducted by party scholars in the 1990s. These scholars concluded that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) fell for four main reasons: •  The economy did not grow fast enough, leading to frustration and resentment, and this failure resulted from insufficient use of market mechanisms. •  The CPSU’s propaganda and information systems were too closed and ideologically rigid, preventing officials from getting accurate and timely knowledge about conditions both inside and outside the Soviet Union. •  Decision-making was far too centralized, and hence far too slow. •  Once reforms started under Gorbachev, they undermined the core principle of the party’s absolute monopoly on political power.14

Eventually I was ready to learn how to perform routine life tasks again. 'Enabling occupation'—that’s what the learning process was called when it was presented to me. Enabling occupation involved the mastery of skills that I didn’t even know could properly be called 'skills.' How to pick up and carry and manipulate a set of common objects: a handbag, a stoneware saucer, a mobile phone, a paperback book. I was told that my new limbs were capable of hefting an automobile, of bending an iron bar, but I couldn’t make them do any of these magical things—not anything remotely close. Instead, I spent my days trying to pick up a thumbtack from a hard surface using my feeble pincer grasp, to activate a light switch with a single articulated finger, and to fasten a long line of shirt buttons, each of which was around the size of a half-dollar coin. During this period, I worked to improve my gross motor skills in parallel. I relearned how to reach for distant objects without collapsing under my own weight, how to twist a standard brass doorknob, and how to pour liquid from a plastic pitcher into a paper cup without spilling everything everywhere or crushing the handle itself in my grip. Eventually I used these newfound skills to practice clothing myself in simple blouses with velcro fasteners and pants with elastic waistbands, struggling to take it all off again when it was time. At some point during this phase, a team of nameless staff members helped me stand upright in front of a full-length mirror so I could stare at my newly-made body, fully exposed, and with my sharpened vision I was able to see the true extent of my transformation, the exquisite atrocity I’d chosen to perpetrate.

Morally and politically, in practice every liberal capitalist country has a solid record for being humane, for by and large respecting rights and freedoms, and for making it possible for people to put together fruitful and meaningful lives. Socialist practice has time and time again proved itself more brutal than the worst dictatorships in history prior to the twentieth century. Each socialist regime has collapsed into dictatorship and begun killing people on a huge scale. Each has produced dissident writers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Nien Cheng who have documented what those regimes are capable of.

Are you so eager for war?” the drow asked, his face barely an inch from the elf’s. “Do you long to hear the screams of the dying, lying helplessly in fields amidst rows and rows of corpses? Have you ever borne witness to that?” “Orcs!” the elf protested. Drizzt grabbed him in both hands, pulled him forward, and slammed him back against the wall. Hralien called to Drizzt, but the dark elf hardly heard it. “I have ventured outside of the Silver Marches,” Drizzt said, “have you? I have witnessed the death of once-proud Luskan, and with it, the death of a dear, dear friend, whose dreams lay shattered and broken beside the bodies of five thousand victims. I have watched the greatest cathedral in the world burn and collapse. I witnessed the hope of the goodly drow, the rise of the followers of Eilistraee. But where are they now?” “You speak in ridd—” the elf started, but Drizzt slammed him again. “Gone!” Drizzt shouted. “Gone, and gone with them the hopes of a tamed and gentle world. I have watched once safe trails revert to wilderness, and have walked a dozen-dozen communities that you will never know. They are gone now, lost to the Spellplague or worse! Where are the benevolent gods? Where is the refuge from the tumult of a world gone mad? Where are the candles to chase away the darkness?” Hralien had quietly moved around the wall and walked up beside Drizzt. He put a hand on the drow’s shoulder, but that brought no more than a brief pause in the tirade. Drizzt glanced at him before turning back to the captured elf. “They are here, those lights of hope,” Drizzt said, to both elves. “In the Silver Marches. Or they are nowhere. Do we choose peace or do we choose war? If it is battle you seek, fool elf, then get you gone from this land. You will find death aplenty, I assure you. You will find ruins where once proud cities stood. You will find fields of wind-washed bones, or perhaps the remains of a single hearth, where once an entire village thrived. “And in that hundred years of chaos, amidst the coming of darkness, few have escaped the swirl of destruction, but we have flourished. Can you say the same for Thay? Mulhorand? Sembia? You say I betray those who befriended me, yet it was the vision of one exceptional dwarf and one exceptional orc that built this island against the roiling sea.” The elf, his expression more cowed, nonetheless began to speak out again, but Drizzt pulled him forward from the wall and slammed him back even harder. “You fall to your hatred and you seek excitement and glory,” the drow said. “Because you do not know. Or is it because you do not care that your pursuits will bring utter misery to thousands in your wake?

When does a wave behave like a particle? When one or more dimensions collapse to zero or nearly zero. Action in a field creates the spacetime it inhabits and dimensions, like particles, may be virtual. Gravity is a variation of scale and ratio is the only thing that is discrete.

Therefore, the way for the Christian to avoid spiritual collapse is to consider Christ and the opposition He faced from the likes of sinners like Caiaphas, Herod, and Pilate. Consider how He faced them with confidence, meekness, and strength.

No, no, no, stop, please . . . My butt can’t take any more.” Maria collapsed onto the ground, her back against the mirror-lined wall. She stared up at Nick in obvious desperation. “What do you mean? That’s too much? You can handle a lot more,

This was an environment of struggle and dominance for life. Everything competing for the resources available and the losers eventually collapsing back into the earth, the decomposers returning their life back into the soil to start all over. This place was full cycle, life and death, ugly and beautiful, a place to frolic and play, and a place to…

During her final hour, it is said, Lady Laena rose from her bed, pushed away the septas praying over her, and made her way from her room, intent on reaching Vhagar that she might fly one last time before she died. Her strength failed her on the tower steps, however, and it was there she collapsed and died.

S e r p e n t Oh slithery serpent tongue, Work wonders with italics! ...Punctuate…punctuate… Parenthetic lips, appealing & concealing the precipice, The cratered, crescent moon Dipping, whipping, winding Lambent, luscious, luminous Waning, waxing, waning And swallowing the taper Burning, burning, brighter Brighter,whiter,whiter coming, coming, coming AHHHAHHHHAHHHHH Gently, gently expiring Like collapsing stars Blackholeofmass From which nothing, Nothing escapes, nothing

Consistent with those patterns, there has been essentially no correlation between what states have spent on education and their measured academic outcomes. In other words, America’s educational productivity appears to have collapsed, at least as measured by the NAEP and the SAT.”15

Defeated, Jesse sat down beside Esther, collapsing onto the cold bench. She was running something back and forth under her nose, sniffing it. It was a cinnamon stick. Forgetting all about John for a moment, he stared at her with a fresh curiosity. “What are you doing?” “My mother loved the smell of cinnamon so much she’d rub it on her clothes.” She inhaled deeply. “Sometimes on her neck too. It’s my favorite memory. I always keep a stick of cinnamon in my purse so I can remember her anytime I want.” Jesse responded sincerely. “That’s nice.” He wished he could carry every scent with him that he would need to remember everyone and everything he ever loved. Licorice. The beach. Bubble gum. Dandelion weeds. Cigarettes. Ratty old comic books. Opening her purse, Esther carefully placed the stick of cinnamon back inside and sealed it tight again. She inhaled deeply through her nose, bringing herself back to reality. She asked softly, “You’re the young man who was sleeping with Missus Galloway, aren’t you?” Jesse glanced quickly over to John, hoping he didn’t hear her words. It was obvious he hadn’t. “How did you know that?” Jesse asked her quietly. “Your smell was all over that house,” Esther said, tapping her nose.

As he closed in on the mess tent, he could hear the first voices of the morning and gave a sigh of relief. The mess tent flap was closed, and he fancied he could hear the sounds of cooking, the clinking and clanking of metal, hisses of steam, from inside. His belly rolled again at the thought of food but he steeled himself, reached out a hand, lifted the flap, and stepped inside. The inside was empty of life but it was full of death. Bodies of Wubei men lay where they had collapsed dotted all around the interior. The smell of loosened bowels and vomit violated the sanctity of Zhou’s nose causing him to heave and retch. When he had regained control he forced himself to examine the scene, to make sense of it. There was food still on the table and open barrels of wine around the place but no sign of blood or struggle.

She wobbled, steadying herself against the pale blue walls. “You’ve been going out alone?” “Yes.” He reached out for her arm, but she tore it away from him. “Beth—” She yanked open the door. “Don’t touch me.” The thing clapped shut behind her. Rage at himself had Wrath spinning toward his desk, and the instant he saw all the papers, all the requests, all the complaints, all the problems, it was like someone hooked jumper cables up to his shoulder blades and hit him with a charge. He shot forward, swept his arms across the top, and sent the shit flying everywhere. As papers fluttered down like snow, he took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes, a headache spearing into his frontal lobe. Robbed of breath, he stumbled around, finding his chair by feel and collapsing into the damn thing. With a ragged grunt, he let his head fall back. These stress headaches were becoming a daily occurrence lately, wiping him out and lingering like a flu that refused to be cured. Beth. His Beth… When he heard a knock, he gave the f-word a workout. The knock came again. “What,” he barked. Rhage put his head around the jamb, then froze. “Ah…” “What.” “Yeah, well…Ah, going by the door slamming—and, wow, the stiff wind that clearly just blew by your desk—do you still want to meet with us?” -Beth, Wrath, & Rhage

The storefront was a nail salon called Nail-R-Us in a not-yet-redeveloped section of Queens. The building had that decrepit thing going on, as if leaning against it would cause a wall to collapse. The rust on the fire escape was so thick that tetanus seemed a far greater threat than smoke inhalation. Every window was blocked by either a heavy shade or a plank of wood. The structure was four levels and ran almost the entire length of the block. Myron said to Win, “The R on the sign is crossed out.” “That’s intentional.” “Why?” Win looked at him, waited. Myron did it in his head. Nail-R-Us had become Nail Us. “Oh,” Myron said. “Cute.

The storefront was a nail salon called Nail-R-Us in a not-yet-redeveloped section of Queens. The building had that decrepit thing going on, as if leaning against it would cause a wall to collapse. The rust on the fire escape was so thick that tetanus seemed a far greater threat than smoke inhalation. Every window was blocked by either a heavy shade or a plank of wood. The structure was four levels and ran almost the entire length of the block. Myron

A Lady wrote on a Forum "after my body gets old or not and collapses my thoughts which r electrical impulses will cease my body blood etc will melt back into the soil....my last breath which sustains life will go back into the atmosphere so we will be around until our galaxy implodes..." I concur. Who says we die...? I found the epiphany a long time ago that nature is our supreme being and we are going to be here Forever. You die and the grass feeds off your flesh, the cow eats the grass, your children eat the cow and then your children dies and the cycle goes on again. Just as how the carbon dioxide you breathe out is what plants take in and we survive on the oxygen they give out. We are not separate and distinct from nature. We are one. God is a metaphor for the Universe. We are the universe and the universe is in us. It is evident in how the dead meat of an animal or the offspring of a plant gives us life in the form of food then we die and our body deteriorates to fertilize the soil so the plants can survive. The universe is everything. The air that we inhale, the various plants that cures ailments and alleviates various symptoms of diseases. It Should not be cryptic or alien to us to understand how a plant cell completely independent of us can affect our health in such a positive way. That is because the universe is in every one of us.

The liberals, cowering under the banner of “humane interventionism,” are no less imperialistic than before. As they sit in America and Britain repeating their democracy mantra, how hard they must have to work to blind themselves to the bankruptcy of their own political systems, to the extraordinary social decay and poverty in their own midst, to their economies on the precipice of collapse, to their bought-and-paid-for politicians, and to their increasingly timid and shallow corporate media. How self-deluded they must be to sing the praises of political systems, and even suggest them as models for others, when they have brought to power, through democratic elections, such scoundrels as George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi, Vladimir Putin, and Nicolas Sarkozy.

Where Adam collapsed, Jesus conquered. Where Adam compromised, Jesus refused to negotiate. Where Adam's trust in God faltered, Jesus' never wavered. The second Adam triumphed for Himself and for us.

At the heart of The Lord of the Rings are the assertions which Gandalf makes in Book 1/2, his long conversation with Frodo. If they are not accepted, then the whole point of the story collapses. And these assertions are in essence three. First, Gandalf says that the Ring is immensely powerful, in the right or the wrong hands. If Sauron regains it, then he will be invincible at least for the foreseeable future: ‘If he recovers it, then he will command [all the other Rings of Power] again, even the Three [held by the elves], and all that has been wrought with them will be laid bare, and he will be stronger than ever.’ Second, though, Gandalf insists that the Ring is deadly dangerous to all its possessors: it will take them over, ‘devour’ them, ‘possess’ them. The process may be long or short, depending on how ‘strong or well-meaning’ the possessor may be, but ‘neither strength nor good purpose will last – sooner or later the dark power will devour him’. Furthermore this will not be just a physical take-over. The Ring turns everything to evil, including its wearers. There is no one who can be trusted to use it, even in the right hands, for good purposes: there are no right hands, and all good purposes will turn bad if reached through the Ring. Elrond repeats this assertion later on, ‘I will not take the Ring’, as does Galadriel, ‘I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel’. But finally, and this third point is one which Gandalf has to re-emphasize strongly and against opposition in ‘The Council of Elrond’, the Ring cannot simply be left unused, put aside, thrown away: it has to be destroyed, and the only place where it can be destroyed is the place of its fabrication, Orodruin, the Cracks of Doom. These assertions determine the story. It becomes, as has often been noted, not a quest but an anti-quest, whose goal is not to find or regain something but to reject and destroy something.

Yet the life expectancy for white people without a high school diploma has dropped catastrophically since the 1990s—down by five years for women, three years for men—suggesting a cultural crisis among poor whites akin to that in Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed. Yet the morally preening powerful, confident in their supposedly progressive views, largely ignore this collapse and the people suffering from it.

Will there be a run on the banks in the U.S. similar to what we saw in Cyprus several years ago? Will the government demand for all citizens to turn over our gold and silver, like they did when F. D. R. was president in WWII? Is this what the largest military exercise on American soil since the Civil War, Jade Helm, is really about? The government knows the collapse is coming, and when it does will they be prepared?

Belong" Her world collapsed early Sunday morning She got up from the kitchen table Folded the newspaper and silenced the radio Those creatures jumped the barricades And have headed for the sea, sea Those creatures jumped the barricades And have headed for the sea She began to breathe To breathe at the thought of such freedom Stood and whispered to her child, belong She held the child and whispered With calm, calm; belong Stood and whispered to her child, belong She held the child and whispered With calm, calm; belong These barricades can only hold for so long Her world collapsed early Sunday morning She took the child held tight Opened the window A breath, this song, how long And knew, knew; belong R.E.M., Out Of Time (1991)

In the longer term, business itself will be harmed by shifting from R&D to financial manipulations. In earlier days, that might have been a concern. But managerial ethic has shifted from the time when viability of the firm was a serious concern to today’s focus on gain tomorrow. The long-term prospects for the firm become lesser considerations—or for human society generally. Nothing could reveal this shift with more brilliant clarity than a matter already discussed: the virtually reflexive decisions to race toward destruction, with eyes open, if it yields short-term gain. Right now profits are spectacular and CEO salaries have skyrocketed to the stratosphere, dragging other managerial rewards with them, while for the general population, real wages stagnate, social spending is meager, unions and other interferences with “sound economics” are dismantled. The best of all possible worlds. So why care if my firm will go under after I’ve moved to greener pastures, or for that matter, why care if I leave to my grandchildren a world in which they have some chance for decent survival? Capitalist mentality gone insane. There is, of course, the usual problem. The rascal multitude. They’re not too happy about the undermining of functioning democracy and basic rights. I should add the same is true in Europe. In fact, even more so. The attack on democracy in Europe is even sharper than here. Significant decisions about society and politics are out of the hands of the population. They’re made by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels: the IMF, the Central Bank, the European Commission. All of this, all over the world, is leading to anger, resentment, and bitterness. You see it right now in the Yellow Vest movement in France, but it’s everywhere. In election after election, the centrist parties are collapsing. It’s happening here, too. Parties happen to be keeping their names in our rigid two-party system, but the centrist elements are losing their grip.

The Iraqi army collapsed in less than seventy-two hours.

The Germans in this multicultural border region were mainly members of the upper class: teachers, lawyers, factory owners, and clergy. My father's family (architect and brickyard owner) was well-to-do until the political upheavals resulting from World War I occurred (collapse of the old Austrian Habsburg

starvation, violence, or disease, it assured people that the future was in the hands of an infallible god and that if they followed his rules, things would work out. This gave people the courage to cope with threatening and unpredictable situations rather than give way to despair, increasing their chances of survival. Having a clear belief system is conducive to physical and mental health, and religious people tend to be happier than nonreligious people (R. F. Inglehart, 2018, Chapter 8). The belief system need not be religious; Marxism once provided a clear belief system and hope for the future for many people—but when it collapsed, subjective well-being collapsed along with it.

Nevertheless, these authors anchor their stories in the ancient idea of the Fall of Man: just as a force of evil entered our world in a distant past, so it inhabits and threatens the worlds of their imaginations. It is the deepest source of alienation and conflict in their stories. Even so, it cannot erase the longing for goodness and joy, so palpably alive in the best and noblest of their characters. They are haunted by the memory of Eden: take away this fundamental idea, and their moral vision collapses.

THROUGHOUT 1941, THE officers and crew of the Arizona were caught up in an ever-escalating whirlwind. The air was filled with war tension that everyone from admirals to raw recruits could feel. Most traced the origins to the day Adolf Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, but Japan had been at war in the Pacific since its efforts to subjugate China in 1937. At the heart of the matter were natural resources. What Japan’s home islands lacked, Japan needed to find elsewhere. After France surrendered to Germany and Great Britain stood alone against the Axis threat, Japan took advantage of the collapse of French authority in Indochina to move south, seize more territory, and threaten the natural resources of the Netherlands East Indies.

Adaskar fell to his knees, He couldn't speak. Half-crawling, he managed to reach Azarin's snout and pulled himself up enough so his dragon could see him. 'You can fight it.' 'We cannot defeat...death.' Adaskar tried to speak, but all that came out was a blubbering sob. He fell forward, pressing himself against Azarin and rubbing his scales. All their warmth was fleeing him. 'You must be strong.' That broke him. 'Dooset doram, Azarin. Dooset doram.' 'I love you too.' Azarin's last breath stretched out into a soft sigh, almost peaceful. The remnants of their golden bridge collapsed.

I have written many essays detailing the facts about this so-called “collapse of communism.” In all that time nobody wrote a detailed argument showing I was wrong. They just repeated slogans the communists had given them. In fact, those who warned about the coming fake collapse of communism – James Angleton and Anatoliy Golitsyn – were not dealt with by rational argument. They were libeled in books whose authors did the talk show circuit. They were dragged through the mud and called madmen by leading conservatives like William F. Buckley, Jr. But there was no rational argument against their true predictions of the future. Angleton and Golitsyn had been right. And now the end of the long range strategy is upon us. J.R.Nyquist

Time passed. Warehouses shed exoskeletons and became artist lofts. Collapsing Victorians and colonials slouched into their roles as homeless shelters. The suburbs hunched into Squatter City. Malleus Industries International relocated its North American East offices to Oceanrest. Highrises sprouted overnight, a newborn downtown squealing in glass and neon. Oceanrest shivered out from its old skin. Everything became something else, eventually.

he now knew with certainty that the world was hollowed of its wonder by knowledge and travel, that when one stripped away the mysteries, its dimensions collapsed rather than bloomed.

[…] Although it’s hard to imagine it now, there was a time when horror was nearly unrivaled in popularity with the general reader. In the 1970s and ’80s, local bookstores had whole shelves devoted to it. You couldn’t miss them: they were the ones stocked between Mystery and Fantasy/Sci-Fi, with all the black and red covers, the raised titles dripping blood, and the leering skeletons. Lots and lots of skeletons. These books had notoriously short shelf lives, but because there was such a demand for them—owing largely to the success of books like The Exorcist and writers like Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Peter Straub—it was possible to hack a living if you could turn them out fast enough. A lot of folks tried their hand, and a lot of bad books were published. So many that the market eventually collapsed under its own weight. Among those bad books, though, were some truly great ones written by great writers—writers like Ramsey Campbell, Robert R. McCammon, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, to name just three—who delivered lasting contributions to the genre. While it would be nice to think that all the deserving books were saved from being swept away in the vast tide, that just wasn’t the case. [...] Excerpt from ”Introduction” to Michael McDowell’s ”Blackwater: The Complete Saga” (2017, Kindle edition)

If Russo was managing the local Pizza Hut,” writer R.D. Reynolds memorably observed, “you’d order a pizza and they’d deliver a newspaper. Sure, it was a surprise, but it didn’t make much sense, nor did you want to order from them again. But it sure fooled you, didn’t it?

The logic of going downhill, the logic of decline, entails an absolute failure to bite through. It signifies a softening. It is known, as well, that soft people no longer have the stomach for what is necessary. They are focused on shopping. What occurs is a form of denial, in which the realities of politics and war are cast aside in favor of fantasy substitutes, heavily laced with ideological logos of the kind that paralyze all thought. This intellectual failure, born out of spiritual collapse, heralds the end of rational calculation and grand strategy. One does not need strategy to win. Merely, the right kind of publicity is all-in-all sufficient. When something tangible occurs, which may be strategically fatal, the answer is to revile the opposition. There is no analysis, no judgment, no genuine fright at the prospect of death and destruction. Few are those who believe that real destruction is possible. Few suspect that weapons of mass destruction can and will be used against people who are too silly to know, and too careless to consider, who is preparing these weapons against them. Soft people imagine that such weapons cannot be used because the world would end. And nobody wants that. Here is a failure of imagination alongside a dismissal of the concept "enemy," done without any hesitation, with the survival instinct overridden by the daily corruption that attends absolute comfort. Those who are soft cannot see into an enemy that emerges from totally different conditions of life.

There is a law of unintended consequences at work in history which makes war inevitable. According to sound strategic principles, statesmen should only wage war when they are sure to win, and victory is relatively bloodless. Yet history shows us wars in which tens of millions have died amid universal ruin and economic collapse. Only if we admit that men miscalculate, and situations easily get out of control, can we explain the facts of history.

into the night I collapse into the night under the pressure of my own unhappiness overthinking pushing myself further into the darkest corners of my own existence I've been smiling in an attempt to avoid their concern while trying to learn to navigate through the chaos that plagues my life though genuine laughter is what I've been after I've been unable to find it and so I resort to a cheerfulness that isn't real the type of joy I only wish to feel there is sadness all around us it follows and it swallows all of us up us being the people like me dreading tomorrow and the sorrows that live within the minutes of every passing moment this has become my life this life of someone who in a room filled with others still feels lonely

When faced with a challenge (be it a hurricane or a struggling business or a reluctance to start writing), we must decide to act and then we must act. We should perceive our worries as an indication that we should meet our challenges head on, cut right to the heart of them, and take action. Otherwise, we’ll be in the aftermath of the storm, sitting and staring at that old tree that’s collapsed onto our patio, and asking, “Well, what now?

The most important training involved the latest American breakthrough in communications technology: a handheld, portable, two-way radio transceiver that made ground-to-air communications possible for the first time. A predecessor of the mobile telephone, the equipment had been designed at the RCA electronics laboratories in New York before being refined and developed for the OSS by De Witt R. Goddard and Lieutenant Commander Stephen H. Simpson. The device would eventually become known as a “walkie-talkie,” but at the time of its invention this pioneering gizmo went by a more cumbersome and quaint title: the “Joan-Eleanor system.” “Joan” was the name for the handheld transmitter carried by the agent in the field, six inches long and weighing three pounds, with a collapsible antenna; “Eleanor” referred to the larger airborne transceiver carried on an aircraft flying overhead at a prearranged time. Goddard’s wife was named Eleanor, and Joan, a major in the Women’s Army Corps, was Simpson’s girlfriend. The Joan-Eleanor (J-E) system operated at frequencies above 250 MHz, far higher than the Germans could monitor. This prototype VHF (very high frequency) radio enabled the users to communicate for up to twenty minutes in plain speech, cutting out the need for Morse code, encryption, and the sort of complex radio training Ursula had undergone. The words of the spy on the ground were picked up and taped on a wire recorder by an operator housed in a special oxygen-fed compartment in the fuselage of an adapted high-speed de Havilland Mosquito bomber flying at over twenty-five thousand feet, outside the range of German anti-aircraft artillery. An intelligence officer aboard the circling aircraft could communicate directly with the agent below. As a system of communication from behind enemy lines, the J-E was unprecedented, undetectable by the enemy, easy to use, and so secret that it would not be declassified until 1976.

In a 2005 Russian “state of the nation” speech, Vladimir Putin had said: “Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our cocitizens and copatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.” He blamed the United States for that disaster and wanted nothing more than for Russia to regain glory at our expense. By May 2017, when Jim Comey was fired and I began appearing on the talk shows, we’d learned that the Russian operation had been even more expansive than the IC had assessed in January. We knew now that the Russians had thousands of Twitter accounts and tens of thousands of bots that posted more than a million tweets. They posted more than a thousand videos on YouTube with days of streaming content. Facebook has said Russian content reached 126 million of its American users—an astonishing number, considering that only 139 million Americans voted.

The intermediate objectives for achieving U.S. defeat may be enumerated as follows: Make the Americans stupid – Disorient the people of the United States and other Western countries. Establish a set of myths useful from the standpoint of the long-range strategy. Examples of such myths: Josef Stalin is our “Uncle Joe,” a man we can trust; the Cold War was triggered by paranoid anti-Communists; Senator McCarthy blacklisted innocent people; President Kennedy was killed by Big Business and the CIA; the Vietnam War was fought on account of corporate greed; Russia and China are irreconcilable enemies who will not be able to combine their forces against the United States; the Soviet Union collapsed for economic reasons; Russia is America’s ally in the War on Terror. Infiltrate the U.S. financial system – Financial control through organized crime and drug trafficking. To this end the Eastern Bloc began infiltrating organized crime in the 1950s and, in 1960, began a narcotics offensive against the West which would generate billions of dollars in illicit money which banks could not resist laundering. In this way, a portal was opened into the heart of the capitalist financial structures in order to facilitate future economic and financial sabotage. Promote bankruptcy and economic breakdown – The promotion of a cradle-to-grave welfare state as a means to bankrupt the United States Treasury (i.e., the Cloward-Piven Strategy). Welfare simultaneously demoralizes the workforce as it bankrupts the government. Elect a stealth Communist president – As an organizer for the Communist Party explained during a meeting I attended more than thirty years ago, the stealth Communist president will one day exploit a future financial collapse to effect a transition from “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” to the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Exploit the counter-revolution – Some strategists believe that a counter-revolutionary or right wing reaction is unavoidable. It is therefore necessary, from the standpoint of sound strategy, to send infiltrators into the right wing. Having a finger in every pie and an agent network in every organization, the Communists are not afraid of encouraging counter-revolution, secession, or civil war in the wake of financial collapse. After all, the reactionaries and right wing elements must be drawn out so that they can be purged or, if necessary, turned into puppet allies. Already Putin is posturing as a Christian who opposes feminism and homosexuality. This has fooled many “conservatives” in the West, and is an intentional ploy which further serves to disorient the West. Take away the nuclear button – The strategists in Moscow do not forget that the neutralization of the U.S. nuclear deterrent is the most important of all intermediate objectives. This can be achieved in one of four ways: (1) cutting off nuclear forces funding by Congress; (2) administratively unplugging the weapons through executive orders issued by Obama, (3) it may be accomplished through a general financial collapse, or (4) a first strike.

JUDITH (in bell-like tones): So many illusions shattered – so many dreams trodden in the dust— DAVID (collapsing on to the form in hysterics): Love’s Whirlwind! Dear old Love’s Whirlwind! SOREL (runs over to R., pushes MYRA up stage and poses): I don’t understand. You and Victor – My God! JUDITH (moves away L., listening): Hush! Isn’t that little Pam crying—? SIMON (savagely): She’ll cry more, poor mite, when she realises her mother is a – a— JUDITH (shrieking and turning to SIMON): Don’t say it! Don’t say it! SOREL: Spare her that.

When J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was published in the 1950s, a woman named Rhona Beare wrote Tolkien and asked him about the chapter in which the Ring of Power is destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom. When the ring is melted, the Dark Lord’s entire power collapses and melts away with it. She found it inexplicable that this unassailable, overwhelming power would be wiped out by the erasure of such a little object. Tolkien replied that at the heart of the plot was the Dark Lord’s effort to magnify and maximize his power by placing so much of it in the ring. He wrote: “The Ring of Sauron is only one of the various mythical treatments of the placing of one’s life, or power, in some external object, which is thus exposed to capture or destruction with disastrous results to oneself.”272

To set up the “final phase” of their long-range policy, the communists developed strategies for marginalizing and (in future, criminalizing) conservatives. As Kremlin strategist Georgi Arbatov explained in December 1988, “Our major weapon is to deprive you of an enemy.” The so-called “collapse of communism” ideologically disarmed the West. Once that was done, the left’s advocacy for gay marriage, critical race theory, open borders, and abortion, turned the tables on conservatives.

The whole world stands to be engulfed. The destruction, when it is unleashed, will be unprecedented. The totalitarians in Russia, China, Iran and the Arab world are preparing for war. Now that Bush's position is collapsing and the Party of Outright Appeasement has begun its reign, the enemies of freedom see their chance. Cowardice and stupidity have conspired, and the result is "opportunity." Western progress has finally given the totalitarian regimes a generation of "last men," about whom Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: "The earth hath become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small." The "last man" comes at the end, when civilization begins to die. And indeed, the Western democracies are dying. I am reminded of Titus Livius's description of Rome's descent into despotism as "the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them." We congratulate ourselves on the interest-group demagogy that produces policy in the West, throwing up words like "democracy" and "freedom" when the reality of the situation is better described by words like "anarchy" and "licentiousness.

If Russo was managing the local Pizza Hut,” writer R.D. Reynolds memorably observed, “you’d order a pizza and they’d deliver a newspaper.

Postmodernism is grounded in the assumption that the ideological system sustaining the cultural and material practices of Western European civilization is bankrupt and on the point of collapse. It claims that the intellectual schemata of the Enlightenment have been abraded by history to the point that nothing but a skeleton remains, held together by unreflective habit, incapable of accommodating the creative impulses of the future.

Until his hand brushes against something hard. There, beneath one of his t-shirts, is a small wooden box. For a minute James just stares at it. It’s been a long time since he’s looked at it—shoved all the way at the back of his dresser. He’s not sure why he kept it, except that the idea of throwing it away makes him want to be sick. Eventually he gives in, reaching for it as he collapses down onto the floor. He runs his fingers over it, brushing off the dust, before he flicks open the lid, revealing the little miniature ball inside, initials catching the light. J&R Sometimes, he can’t even believe any of it really happened. It doesn’t sound real. Doesn’t sound like him—getting with his best mates brother. A Slytherin. A Death Eater. He stares the Quaffle down like it’ll give him the answers. Like it’ll tell him what happened and why all this time later it still feels…like this. He’d told his mother he didn’t want Regulus to become a bruise and he’d gotten his wish. Regulus isn’t a bruise. He’s a tsunami. And every time James lets himself think of him, lets himself remember, he's overwhelmed. He loses sight of the shore. Forgets it even exists at all. He isn't even here, hasn't been, in a very long time, and yet somehow, Regulus still has the ability to wrap himself around James. To be all he can hear and feel and think. All he can breathe and smell and taste. Which is exactly why he needs to stay at the back of James's dresser. He snaps the box shut, eyes falling on what had been lying next to it. Black velvet, a jewelry case his mother had very politely not asked him about when she saw him buying it. This he really doesn't know why he kept. He sets the Quaffle down next to it, a matching set. He'd agonized about what to get Regulus, what could possibly match his gift. It couldn't just be something he bought, it had to be something he made. The problem was, James's magic has always been big and loud and strong, well suited to duelling not meticulous charm worm. Still he'd been determined. He can't help wondering what Regulus would've thought, if he'd had the time to give it to him. If everything hadn't gone to hell after Christmas. If things had been different. It shouldn't matter now. He wishes it didn't. "James?" The front door closes and James jolts, like he's been caught. He throws the two boxes back in his dresser, slamming the drawer shut and trying to ignore the sinking feeling of guilt currently eating its way through his stomach. "Up here!" James calls down to Lily as he heads for the bedroom door. Looking over his shoulder like he's expecting to see Regulus standing there. Like Lily could walk in on them. Catch him with the memory of the boy he used to love. Still loves. When he lets himself. When he forgets about the shore.

Did you know there are planets that orbit dead stars?” I ask. “Are there really?” “Yes. There is at least one in the Milky Way. A star’s death is spectacularly violent. They expand, become giants, and explode. The explosion is called a supernova, and the light one makes is comparable to an entire galaxy.” “Wow, that’s amazing.” “Yeah. When a planet orbits a dead star, that means that it survived the burst. When stars die, they consume the planets near them. They are incinerated and pulled apart. A planet that survives intact would move closer. It would huddle in toward the burned-out star core. When stars die, they become white dwarfs, which is synonymous with a star’s collapsed core. A white dwarf is a remnant of what it once was. It is like the corpse of a star.

Heinlein, in Starship Troopers, by a description of a mirror reflection and the mention of an ancestor’s nationality, in the midst of a strophe on male makeup, generates the data that the first-person narrator, with whom we have been traveling now through two hundred and fifty-odd pages (of a three-hundred-and-fifty-page book), is black. Others have argued the surface inanities of this novel, decried its endless preachments on the glories of war, and its pitiful founderings on sublimated homosexual themes. But who, a year after reading the book, can remember the arguments for war—short of someone conscientiously collecting examples of human illogic? The arguments are inane; they do not relate to anything we know of war as a real interface of humanity with humanity: they do not stick in the mind. What remains with me, nearly ten years after my first reading of the book, is the knowledge that I have experienced a world in which the placement of the information about the narrator’s face is proof that in such a world the “race problem,” at least, has dissolved. The book as text—as object in the hand and under the eye—became, for a moment, the symbol of that world. In that moment, sign, symbol, image, and discourse collapse into one, nonverbal experience, catapulted from somewhere beyond the textus (via the text) at the peculiarly powerful trajectory only s-f can provide.

I owe Kent Joosten of the Johnson Space Center, NASA, even more gratitude than usual for his contribution to the cephalopod sections. Thanks also to Eric Brown and Simon Bradshaw for reading manuscript drafts. • The idea that squid and other cephalopods may be intelligent is real. A recent reference is New Scientist of 7 June 1997; Cephalopod Behaviour by R. T. Hanlon and J. B. Messenger (Cambridge University Press, 1996) was a valuable source. • The riches available to us from the asteroids and other extraterrestrial resources, and plans to exploit those riches, are real. A good recent survey is Mining the Sky by John S. Lewis (Addison Wesley, 1996). • The probabilistic doomsday prediction called here the “Carter catastrophe” is real. It has been well expressed by John Leslie in The End of the World (Routledge, 1996). • The “Feynman radio” idea of using advanced electromagnetic waves to pick up messages from the future is real. This has actually been attempted, for example by I. Schmidt and R. Newman (Bulletin of the American Physical Society, vol. 25, p. 581, 1979). And the extension of the idea to quantum mechanics (the “transactional interpretation”) is real. See John Cramer, Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 58, p. 647, 1986. • Cruithne, Earth’s “second Moon,” is real. Its peculiar properties were reported in Nature, vol. 387, p. 685, 1997. • The “quark-nugget” idea of collapsed matter, with its potentially disastrous implications, is real. It was proposed by E. Witten in “Cosmic Separation of Phases,” Physical Review D, vol. 30, p. 272, 1984. • The physics of the possible far future drawn here is real. A classic reference is “Time without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe,” F. Dyson, Review of Modern Physics, vol. 51, p. 447, 1979. • The idea that our universe is one of an evolutionary family is real. A recent variant of the theory has been developed by L. Smolin in his book The Life of the Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 1997). • The notion of vacuum decay is real. It was explored by P. Hut and M. Rees in “How Stable Is Our Vacuum?” Nature, vol. 302, p. 508, 1983. The rest is fiction.

remarkable the way she collapses yet catches herself