United Kingdom Quotes

The Emperor decided to make a proclamation to his troops about the importance of compassion in the face of the rising tide of heinous fuckery and political weaselocity in the nearby kingdom of the United States.

I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The airplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say, do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it is written that the kingdom of God is within man, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill that promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfill that promise. Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness. Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

I will have you without armor. Those were the words she'd said to Kaz aboard the Ferolind, desperate for some sign that he might open himself to her, that they could be more than two wary creatures united by their distrust of the world.

The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity.

Since every country stands in numerous and various relations with the other countries of the world, and many, our own among the number, exercise actual authority over some of these, a knowledge of the established rules of international morality is essential to the duty of every nation, and therefore of every person in it who helps to make up the nation, and whose voice and feeling form a part of what is called public opinion. Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject. It depends on the habit of attending to and looking into public transactions, and on the degree of information and solid judgment respecting them that exists in the community, whether the conduct of the nation as a nation, both within itself and towards others, shall be selfish, corrupt, and tyrannical, or rational and enlightened, just and noble.

Her Majesty Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, had a lamp shade on her head. Again.

Free citizens of the United Kingdom can apparently vote for clowns, but not vote (dressed) as them.

Everything in London is great and adorable, apart from the weather which is so unpredictable.

The empire long united must divide, long divided must unite; this is how it has always been.

In 2012, in the United Kingdom, the number of people (regardless of race) shot and killed by police officers: 1 In 2013, in the United Kingdom, the number of times police officers fired guns in the line of duty/the number of people fatally shot: 3/0 In the United States, in the seven year period ending in 2012, a white police officer killed a black person nearly two times a week. “I’m not much of a talker,” she finished up. “You know that. But I know numbers. The numbers don’t lie, kids. The numbers always tell a story.

Break my heart for what breaks yours Everything I am for Your Kingdom's cause As I walk from earth into eternity

The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.

You could just marry each other,” Yrene said, and Dorian whipped his head to her, incredulous. “It’d make it easier for you both, so you don’t need to pretend.” Chaol gaped at his wife. Yrene shrugged. “And be a strong alliance for our two kingdoms.” Dorian knew his face was red when he turned to Manon, apologies and denials on his lips. But Manon smirked at Yrene, her silver-white hair lifting in the breeze, as if reaching for the united people who would soon soar westward. That smirk softened as she mounted Abraxos and gathered up the reins. “We’ll see,” was all Manon Blackbeak, High Queen of the Crochans and Ironteeth, said before she and her wyvern leaped into the skies. Chaol and Yrene began bickering, laughing as they did, but Dorian strode to the edge of the aerie. Watched that white-haired rider and the wyvern with silver wings become distant as they sailed toward the horizon. Dorian smiled. And found himself, for the first time in a while, looking forward to tomorrow.

You don't know me! I'm the United bloody Kingdom and I can held my locker better then you any day!" -England

Some other facts I picked up: Welsh is an actual, currently used language and our next-door neighbours Angela and Gaenor spoke it. It sounds like Wizard. Baked beans are very popular in England. For breakfast. On toast. On baked potatoes. They can't get enough. "American History" is not a subject everywhere. England and Britain and the United Kingdom are not the same thing. England is the country. Britain is the island containing England, Scotland, and Wales. The United Kingdom is the formal designation of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as a political entity. If you mess this up, you will be corrected. Repeatedly.

Seorang pengarang hebat tidak akan pernah kekurangan khalayak.

A librarian for president is exactly what this country needs.

The response to war is to live like brothers and sisters. The response to injustice is to share. The response to despair is a limitless trust and hope. The response to prejudice and hatred is forgiveness. To work for community is to work for humanity. To work for peace is to work for a true political solution; it is to work for the Kingdom of God. It is to work to enable every one to live and taste the secret joys of the human person united to the eternal.

One thing united them all, without Babel they had nowhere in this country to go. They had been chosen for privileges they couldn't have ever imagined, funded by powerful and wealthy men whose motives they didn't understand and they were acutely aware these could be lost at any moment. That precariousness made them simultaneously bold and terrified. They had the keys to the kingdom. They did not want to give them back.

It is a general truism of this world that anything long divided will surely unite, and anything long united will surely divide.

Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening. And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots' anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV.

Look at the most religious areas of the world at present - the Middle East and the United States. These are sick societies, and they're going to get sicker. People are never more dangerous than when they have nothing left to believe in except God.

Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again.

The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.

It’s a little-known fact that most terrorist groups fail, and that all of them die. Lest this seem hard to believe, just reflect on the world around you. Israel continues to exist, Northern Ireland is still a part of the United Kingdom, and Kashmir is a part of India. There are no sovereign states in Kurdistan, Palestine, Quebec, Puerto Rico, Chechnya, Corsica, Tamil Eelam, or Basque Country. The Philippines, Algeria, Egypt, and Uzbekistan are not Islamist theocracies; nor have Japan, the United States, Europe, and Latin America become religious, Marxist, anarchist, or new-age utopias. The numbers confirm the impressions.

which will lead to even more of them despairing at the future and what with the planet about to go to shit with the United Kingdom soon to be disunited from Europe which itself is hurtling down the reactionary road and making fascism fashionable again and it’s so crazy that the disgusting perma-tanned billionaire has set a new intellectual and moral low by being president of America and basically it all means that the older generation has RUINED EVERYTHING and her generation is doooooomed

Many confuse the United States with the Church or the Constitution with the Bible. They feel that the good of the United States is the same as the good of the Kingdom of God. Some feel that the Constitution of the United States is as infallible as the Bible. However, one with wisdom notice that some things are Kingdom principles and some are not.

Believe it or not, many people are so fearful of Jewish people – whether they be Jews in Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia or wherever – they are convinced this tiny minority of 13 million people is secretly ruling the world’s 7.5 billion people AND can effortlessly revise any episode of history AND can fake such well-documented and scientifically-proven historical events as the Holocaust.

The British attendees reported a similar difficulty identifying introverts in America because “U.S. Introverts exhibited behavior that in the United Kingdom was associated with Extroversion: sociability, comfort with small talk, disclosure of personal information, energetic and fast-paced conversation, and so forth.” Most Americans, whether introverted or extroverted, have learned to look like extroverts.

Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on [E]arth. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. Insofar as there is a crime problem in Western Europe, it is largely the product of immigration. Seventy percent of the inmates of France's jails, for instance, are Muslim. The Muslims of Western Europe are generally not atheists. Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' [H]uman [D]evelopment [I]ndex are unwaveringly religious. Other analyses paint the same picture: the United States is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious adherence; it is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and infant mortality. The same comparison holds true within the United States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism, are especially plagued by the above indicators of societal dysfunction, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms.

I plea with the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Mr. Boris Johnson. He ought to look at the following law - The Age of Marriage Act 1929 which has caused many unwanted or forced marriages by their wicked parents. It is horrific to see an outdated law in this era.

America’s total healthcare bill for 2014 is $3 trillion. That’s more than the next ten biggest spenders combined: Japan, Germany, France, China, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain, and Australia. All that extra money produces no better, and in many cases worse, results.

The theory and the atheistic bias that came with it spread quickly to Germany, Italy, Spain, and to self-professed intellectual elites in the United States, even

Madeleine was enraptured by Garrison's tan complexion, which greatly differed from the pale boys of London. It wasn't actually the boys' fault, as the whole of the United Kingdom was under a cloud for much of the year. But at that moment, Madeleine decided that boys, like bread, were better toasted.

IN THE TORRID London summer of 1886, William Gladstone was up against Benjamin Disraeli for the post of prime minister of the United Kingdom. This was the Victorian era, so whoever won was going to rule half the world. In the very last week before the election, both men happened to take the same young woman out to dinner. Naturally, the press asked her what impressions the rivals had made. She said, “After dining with Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest person in England. But after dining with Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest person in England.” Guess who won the election? It was the man who made others feel intelligent, impressive, and fascinating: Benjamin Disraeli.

American involvement in the Persian Gulf has not been in order to secure energy supplies for the United States, but instead to supply energy for its energy-starved Bretton Woods partners in Europe and Asia. Put more directly, the Americans do not protect the Persian Gulf kingdoms and emirates so that the Americans can use Middle Eastern oil, but so that their Bretton Woods partners in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, India, and Pakistan can.

My immediate neighbourhood will not be palmy Norway – my first choice on account of its gigantic sovereign fund and generous social provision; nor my second, Italy, on grounds of regional cuisine and sun-blessed decay; and not even my third, France, for its Pinot Noir and jaunty self-regard. Instead I’ll inherit a less than united kingdom ruled by an esteemed elderly queen, where a businessman-prince, famed for his good works, his elixirs (cauliflower essence to purify the blood) and unconstitutional meddling, waits restively for his crown. This will be my home, and it will do. I

Lisbon, to me, is the Lisbon of Pessoa. Just like London is Woolf’s, or rather, Mrs. Dalloway’s. Barcelona is Gaudí's and Rome is da Vinci’s. You see them in every crevice and hear their echoes in every cathedral. I’d like to be the child, or rather, the mother of a city but I neither have a home nor a resting place. My race is humankind. My religion is kindness. My work is love and, well, my city is the walls of your heart.

What if, I never tire of asking, we said 'Secret Council' instead of the archaic and therefore cuddly 'Privy Council'?

The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide.

Today, as a result of the policy of Macmillan's Government, Great Britain presents in the United Nations the face of Pecksniff and in Katanga the face of Gradgrind.

The English are very proud of their Parliament, and week in, week out, century after century, they have pretty good cause to be.

All the six hundred and fifty-eight members in the Commons House of Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; who are strong lovers no doubt, but of their country only, which makes all the difference; for in a passion of that kind (which is not always returned), it is the custom to use as many words as possible, and express nothing whatever.

London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.

For millennia in the United Kingdom, a woman and everything she possessed became the legal property of the man who married her. Only recently did a woman gain the right to keep her own property when she married (1882), to keep her name (1924), and to not be raped by her husband (1991).

Now we are able to rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that he will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes – and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away and he that sits upon the throne will say, ‘Behold, I make all things new.

Now, I have always wanted to agree with Lady Bracknell that there is no earthly use for the upper and lower classes unless they set each other a good example. But I shouldn't pretend that the consensus itself was any of my concern. It was absurd and slightly despicable, in the first decade of Thatcher and Reagan, to hear former and actual radicals intone piously against 'the politics of confrontation.' I suppose that, if this collection has a point, it is the desire of one individual to see the idea of confrontation kept alive.

To me, a king is a lighthouse. A guide who can cast his glow across his kingdom and bring every last one of us out of the shadows. A beacon who we can look up to when the world seems lost. A bridge who can unite us when our differences seem to stark to reconcile. Tonight, we need a king who is all of those things. A king who can look each of you in the eye and make you feel that you won't just fight for him or his kingdom, but you'll fight for our way of life.

Among the most important such innovations is the human love of using symbolic markers to show our group memberships. From the tattoos and face piercings used among Amazonian tribes through the male circumcision required of Jews to the tattoos and facial piercings used by punks in the United Kingdom, human beings take extraordinary, costly, and sometimes painful steps to make their bodies advertise their group memberships

I believe, there is scarcely a young lady in the united kingdoms, who would not rather put up with the misfortune of being sought by a clever, agreeable man, than have him driven away by the vulgarity of her nearest relations.

In fact, the belief that climate could be plausibly governed, or managed, by any institution or human instrument presently at hand is another wide-eyed climate delusion. The planet survived many millennia without anything approaching a world government, in fact endured nearly the entire span of human civilization that way, organized into competitive tribes and fiefdoms and kingdoms and nation-states, and only began to build something resembling a cooperative blueprint, very piecemeal, after brutal world wars—in the form of the League of Nations and United Nations and European Union and even the market fabric of globalization, whatever its flaws still a vision of cross-national participation, imbued with the neoliberal ethos that life on Earth was a positive-sum game. If you had to invent a threat grand enough, and global enough, to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation, climate change would be it—the threat everywhere, and overwhelming, and total. And yet now, just as the need for that kind of cooperation is paramount, indeed necessary for anything like the world we know to survive, we are only unbuilding those alliances—recoiling into nationalistic corners and retreating from collective responsibility and from each other. That collapse of trust is a cascade, too.

A marriage which does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-sufficiency, which does not ‘die to itself’ that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage. The real sin of marriage today is not adultery or lack of ‘adjustment’ or ‘mental cruelty.’ It is the idolization of the family itself, the refusal to understand marriage as directed toward the Kingdom of God. This is expressed in the sentiment that one would ‘do anything’ for his family, even steal. The family has here ceased to be for the glory of God; it has ceased to be a sacramental entrance into his presence. It is not the lack of respect for the family, it is the idolization of the family that breaks the modern family so easily, making divorce its almost natural shadow. It is the identification of marriage with happiness and the refusal to accept the cross in it. In a Christian marriage, in fact, three are married; and the united loyalty of the two toward the third, who is God, keeps the two in an active unity with each other as well as with God. Yet it is the presence of God which is the death of the marriage as something only ‘natural.’ It is the cross of Christ that brings the self-sufficiency of nature to its end. But ‘by the cross, joy entered the whole world.’ Its presence is thus the real joy of marriage. It is the joyful certitude that the marriage vow, in the perspective of the eternal Kingdom, is not taken ‘until death parts,’ but until death unites us completely.

The US head of state grew up on food stamps. The British head of state grew up on the postage stamps.

One has to put aside the popular notion that language and culture are endlessly passed on from generation to generation, rather as if ‘Scottishness’ or ‘Englishness’ were essential constituents of some national genetic code. If this were so, it would never be possible to forge new nations – like the United States of America or Australia – from diverse ethnic elements.

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research in the United States estimates that in 2015 women working full time earned only seventy-nine cents for every dollar that a man earned. In the United Kingdom, the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970. But today, according to the Office for National Statistics, a gender pay gap of more than 18 percent still exists, although it’s falling.

A state is a sovereign political entity like the United Kingdom, Kenya, Panama, or New Zealand, eligible for membership in the United Nations and inclusion on the maps produced by Rand McNally or the National Geographic Society. A nation is a group of people who share—or believe they share—a common culture, ethnic origin, language, historical experience, artifacts, and symbols.

However, the most challenging comparison is that we—the United States of America, the leaders of the modern-day heretical kingdom of Christendom, one exceptional nation that for centuries has been thriving, growing, and expanding (supposedly) under God—are not that dissimilar from Nazi Germany.

Are you a preacher or a capitalist? You must make up your mind!" But how could I choose? I was consumed by the ingenuous desire of uniting these two things, of finding a synthesis in which the irreducible opposites would fraternise, and of winning both the earthly life and the kingdom of the skies.

Throughout the 1950s, the government was reluctant to recognise that the country had a problem with racism. But there was some movement. In 1960, backbench Labour MP Archibald Fenner Brockway repeatedly tried to bring forward a Race Discrimination Bill with the aim of outlawing ‘discrimination to the detriment of any person on the grounds of colour, race and religion in the United Kingdom’.28 Every single one of the nine times he tabled the Bill, it was defeated.

Once upon a time, during a time after all the happily-ever-afters, and perhaps even after the ever-afters after that, all the evil villains of the world were banished from the United Kingdom of Auradon and imprisoned on the Isle of the Lost. There, underneath a protective dome that kept all manner of enchantment out of their clutches, the terrible, the treacherous, the truly awful, and the severely sinister were cursed to live without the power of magic. King Beast declared the villains exiled forever.

Many also forget that the international campaign in solidarity with the Union under the Lincoln presidency rallied at a time when it was entirely possible that the United Kingdom might have thrown its whole weight behind the Confederacy and even moved troops from Canada to hasten the partition of a country half slave and half free. This is often forgotten, I suggest, because the movement of solidarity was partly led by Karl Marx and his European allies (as was gratefully acknowledged by Henry Adams in his Education)

After the crushing of the Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen Rising of 1798, the British were determined not to have to contend with any further liberation-minded Dublin Parliaments. To this end, William Pitt, the British Prime Minister, engineered an Act of Union for the sole purpose of total political suppression of the Irish. Cornwallis, the Viceroy of Ireland, embarked on a campaign of rank chicanery designed to coerce the Dublin Parliament into dissolving itself after five hundred years. When it was done, the Cross of St. Patrick was added to the British Cross of St. George and the Scottish Cross of St. Andrew, all fixed on a single banner known as the Union Jack to fly over a so-called United Kingdom. For

It's the minute fanaticism and superiority of the Almanach that offends: the chilling and narrowing of the kinship tie into something denatured and artificial.

As long as you know 'to let' means to rent and not a place to pee, you’re all set to travel in the UK. The lifts and the boots and everything else don’t really matter.

We take each other’s breath and give it back until we’re one unit, one heart, one body. It’s erotic and intoxicating—a high that I never want to come down from.

You're going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit. But I hope you feel a bit exhilarated too. Live boldly. Push yourself. Don't settle.

America certainly did its part. But doing the sums, it is now clear that through the eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, 1981-89, Saudi Arabia actually provided more material assistance to the world’s varied assortment of anti Communist “freedom fighters” than did the United States, thus hastening the end of the Cold War and helping accomplish the downfall of the “Evil Empire.

Through Jimi Hendrix's music you can almost see the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Junior, the beginnings of the Berlin Wall, Yuri Gagarin in space, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the debut of Spiderman, Martin Luther King Junior’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Ford Mustang cars, anti-Vietnam protests, Mary Quant designing the mini-skirt, Indira Gandhi becoming the Prime Minister of India, four black students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro North Carolina, President Johnson pushing the Civil Rights Act, flower children growing their hair long and practicing free love, USA-funded IRA blowing up innocent civilians on the streets and in the pubs of Great Britain, Napalm bombs being dropped on the lush and carpeted fields of Vietnam, a youth-driven cultural revolution in Swinging London, police using tear gas and billy-clubs to break up protests in Chicago, Mods and Rockers battling on Brighton Beach, Native Americans given the right to vote in their own country, the United Kingdom abolishing the death penalty, and the charismatic Argentinean Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. It’s all in Jimi’s absurd and delirious guitar riffs.

In the workplace, Japanese women have low participation and low pay. Participation declines steeply with increasing level of responsibility. Whereas women account for 49% of Japanese university students and 45% of entry-level job holders, they account for only 14% of university faculty positions (versus 33%–44% in the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany, and France), 11% of middle-level to senior management positions, 2% of positions on boards of directors, 1% of business executive committee members, and less than 1% of CEOs. At those higher levels Japan lags behind all major industrial countries except (again) South Korea.

What was new to our ears these days, and thrilling to hear, was the steadiness and justice of those who spoke, the abscence of panic and exaggeration the quiet insistence on legal processes as opposed to trial by suspicion. McCarthyism so repelled the English that they take special care not to be infected by it.

The Emperor decided to make a proclamation to the troops about the importance of compassion in the face of the rising tide of heinous fuckery and political weaselocity in the nearby kingdom of the United States.

The myth of the dragon is a very peculiar one, precisely because it is a truly global myth. Giant serpents appear in mythologies from all over the world: China, Scandinavia, Greece, Persia, Germany, Central America, the United Kingdom, even Africa. There is no discernible reason for this. How could the myth of a large serpentine creature be so consistent across the ancient world? From: Dragons in History by Eleanor Lock (Border Press, London, 1999)

In contrast, once food can be stockpiled, a political elite can gain control of food produced by others, assert the right of taxation, escape the need to feed itself, and engage full-time in political activities. Hence moderate-sized agricultural societies are often organized in chiefdoms, and kingdoms are confined to large agricultural societies. Those complex political units are much better able to mount a sustained war of conquest than is an egalitarian band of hunters.

In July, 1950, one news commentator rather plaintively remarked that warfare had not changed so much, after all. For some reason, ground troops still seemed to be necessary, in spite of the atom bomb. And oddly and unfortunately, to this gentleman, man still seemed to be an important ingredient in battle. Troops were still getting killed, in pain and fury and dust and filth. What happened to the widely-heralded pushbutton warfare where skilled, immaculate technicians who never suffered the misery and ignominy of basic training blew each other to kingdom come like gentlemen? In this unconsciously plaintive cry lies the buried a great deal of the truth why the United States was almost defeated. Nothing had happened to pushbutton warfare; its emergence was at hand. Horrible weapons that could destroy every city on Earth were at hand—at too many hands. But, pushbutton warfare meant Armageddon, and Armageddon, hopefully, will never be an end of national policy. Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men in the mud.

Revolution was the great nightmare of eighteenth-century British society, and when first the American Revolution of 1776, then the French Revolution of 1789 overturned the accepted order, the United Kingdom exercised all its power so that revolution would not damage its own hardwon security and growing prosperity. Eighteenth-century writing is full of pride in England as the land of liberty (far ahead of France, the great rival, in political maturity), and saw a corresponding growth in national self-confidence accompanying the expansion of empire.

You aime lots of stupid crap." While Hassan worked to make God hates baguettes Colin's mind raced like this: (1) baguettes (2) Katherine XIX (3) the ruby necklace he'd bought her five months and seventeen days before (4) most rubies come from India, which (5) used to be under control of the United Kingdom, of which (6) Winston Churchill was the prime minister, and (7) isn't it interesting how a lot of good politicians, like Churchill and also Gandhi, were bald while (8) a lot of evil dictators, like Hitler and Stalin and Saddam Hussein, were mustachoied? But (9) Mussolini only wore a mustache sometimes, and (10) lost of good scientists had mustaches, like the Italian Ruggero Oddi, who (11) discovered (and named for himself) the intestinal tract's spinchter of Oddi, which is just one of several lesser-known sphicnters like (12) the pupillary spinchter.

I was never attracted to big things―convertible Porsche's, mansions, fame, and money. I always found those things to be repulsive and energy-draining. Give me the gutters, the junkyards, the bars, the liquor stores, the grimy graffiti-ridden back alleys, the insane asylums, the pimps, the hookers, the preachers, the old, the drunkards, the junkies, the homeless, the madmen, and the madwomen. Wherever the ghetto is, that's where life is. It doesn't matter where you live, United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, you won't find a liveliness like in the ghetto anywhere else. They're the things that refill my energy tank and keep me going. Anything out of that realm is just plain, dull, and boring. Give me the cheap and effortless lifestyle. The factory job, the small one-bedroom apartments, the whores, the Budweiser six-packs, the hand-rolled cigarettes, the Tom Waits vinyls, and the old vintage typewriters. I'll be alright.

In the world everyone wants to be a 'wolf,' and no one is called to play the part of 'sheep.' Yet the world cannot live without this living witness of sacrifice. That is why it is essential that Christians should be very careful not to be 'wolves' in the spiritual sense - that is, people who try to dominate others. Christians must accept the domination of other people, and offer the daily sacrifice of their lives, which is united with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

when they leave uni it’s gonna be with a huge debt and crazy competition for jobs and the outrageous rental prices out there mean her generation will have to move back home forever, which will lead to even more of them despairing at the future and what with the planet about to go to shit with the United Kingdom soon to be disunited from Europe which itself is hurtling down the reactionary road and making fascism fashionable again and it’s so crazy that the disgusting perma-tanned billionaire has set a new intellectual and moral low by being president of America and basically it all means that the older generation has RUINED

I will have you without armor. Those were the words she’d said to Kaz aboard the Ferolind , desperate for some sign that he might open himself to her, that they could be more than two wary creatures united by their distrust of the world. But what might have happened if he’d spoken that night? If he had willingly offered her some part of his heart? What if he had come to her, laid his gloves aside, drawn her to him, kissed her mouth? Would she have pulled him closer? Kissed him back? Could she have been herself in such a moment, or would she have broken apart and vanished, a doll in his arms, a girl who could never quite be whole

I HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It’s where I’m from, after all. There’s baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don’t obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective. Consider two small experiences I had upon arriving at a hotel in downtown Austin, Texas. When I checked in, the clerk needed to record my details, naturally enough, and asked for my home address. Our house doesn’t have a street number, just a name, and I have found in the past that that is more deviance than an American computer can sometimes cope with, so I gave our London address. The girl typed in the building number and street name, then said: “City?” I replied: “London.” “Can you spell that please?” I looked at her and saw that she wasn’t joking. “L-O-N-D-O-N,” I said. “Country?” “England.” “Can you spell that?” I spelled England. She typed for a moment and said: “The computer won’t accept England. Is that a real country?” I assured her it was. “Try Britain,” I suggested. I spelled that, too—twice (we got the wrong number of T’s the first time)—and the computer wouldn’t take that either. So I suggested Great Britain, United Kingdom, UK, and GB, but those were all rejected, too. I couldn’t think of anything else to suggest. “It’ll take France,” the girl said after a minute. “I beg your pardon?” “You can have ‘London, France.’ ” “Seriously?” She nodded. “Well, why not?” So she typed “London, France,” and the system was happy. I finished the check-in process and went with my bag and plastic room key to a bank of elevators a few paces away. When the elevator arrived, a young woman was in it already, which I thought a little strange because the elevator had come from one of the upper floors and now we were going back up there again. About five seconds into the ascent, she said to me in a suddenly alert tone: “Excuse me, was that the lobby back there?” “That big room with a check-in desk and revolving doors to the street? Why, yes, it was.” “Shoot,” she said and looked chagrined. Now I am not for a moment suggesting that these incidents typify Austin, Texas, or America generally or anything like that. But it did get me to thinking that our problems are more serious than I had supposed. When functioning adults can’t identify London, England, or a hotel lobby, I think it is time to be concerned. This is clearly a global problem and it’s spreading. I am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas.

The graph, unsurprisingly, reveals that differences across the world’s culture zones are substantial. The Protestant countries of Western Europe, such as the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom, are the world’s most liberal, followed by the United States and other wealthy English-speaking countries, then Catholic and Southern Europe, then the former Communist countries of central Europe. Latin America, the industrialized countries of East Asia, and the former republics of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are more socially conservative, followed by South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The world’s most illiberal region is the Islamic Middle East.

They taught that the church of which Jesus is the Head, was a spiritual organization, composed not of those who came into it by hereditary descent, but of those who were born of the Spirit. But, there has been a departure from these principles; and organizations now exist, under the designation of Christian churches, which aim to unite the church and the world, and introduce the impious, and ungodly, and profane, into Christ's kingdom – thus reversing his declaration, that his "kingdom is not of this world." Against this innovation Baptists strenuous!y protest. We announce, then, as the Second Feature of the reform in which Baptists are engaged, THE RESTORATION OF THE SPIRITUALITY OF CHRIST'S KINGDOM.

Although it is a bit of a caricature, I think that there is some truth in the generalizations I’m about to make. The tendency in Roman Catholic theology is to view the kingdom of Christ as a cosmic ladder or tower, leading from the lowest strata to the hierarchy led by the pope. Anabaptists have tended to see the kingdom more as a monastery, a community of true saints called out of the world and a worldly church. Lutheran and Reformed churches tend sometimes to see the kingdom as a school, while evangelicals (at least in the United States) lean more toward seeing it as a market.

This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term.

That the United Kingdom will collapse is a foregone conclusion. Sooner or later, all states do collapse, and ramshackle, asymmetric dynastic amalgamations are more vulnerable than cohesive nation-states. Only the ‘how’ and the ‘when’ are mysteries of the future. An exhaustive study of the many pillars on which British power and prestige were built – ranging from the monarchy, the Royal Navy and the Empire to the Protestant Ascendancy, the Industrial Revolution, Parliament and Sterling – indicated that all without exception were in decline; some were already defunct, others seriously diminished or debilitated; it suggests that the last act may come sooner rather than later.110 Nothing implies that the end will necessarily be violent; some political organisms dissolve quietly. All it means is that present structures will one day disappear, and be replaced by something else.

The “German problem” after 1970 became how to keep up with the Germans in terms of efficiency and productivity. One way, as above, was to serially devalue, but that was beginning to hurt. The other way was to tie your currency to the deutsche mark and thereby make your price and inflation rate the same as the Germans, which it turned out would also hurt, but in a different way. The problem with keeping up with the Germans is that German industrial exports have the lowest price elasticities in the world. In plain English, Germany makes really great stuff that everyone wants and will pay more for in comparison to all the alternatives. So when you tie your currency to the deutsche mark, you are making a one-way bet that your industry can be as competitive as the Germans in terms of quality and price. That would be difficult enough if the deutsche mark hadn’t been undervalued for most of the postwar period and both German labor costs and inflation rates were lower than average, but unfortunately for everyone else, they were. That gave the German economy the advantage in producing less-than-great stuff too, thereby undercutting competitors in products lower down, as well as higher up the value-added chain. Add to this contemporary German wages, which have seen real declines over the 2000s, and you have an economy that is extremely hard to keep up with. On the other side of this one-way bet were the financial markets. They looked at less dynamic economies, such as the United Kingdom and Italy, that were tying themselves to the deutsche mark and saw a way to make money. The only way to maintain a currency peg is to either defend it with foreign exchange reserves or deflate your wages and prices to accommodate it. To defend a peg you need lots of foreign currency so that when your currency loses value (as it will if you are trying to keep up with the Germans), you can sell your foreign currency reserves and buy back your own currency to maintain the desired rate. But if the markets can figure out how much foreign currency you have in reserve, they can bet against you, force a devaluation of your currency, and pocket the difference between the peg and the new market value in a short sale. George Soros (and a lot of other hedge funds) famously did this to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, blowing the United Kingdom and Italy out of the system. Soros could do this because he knew that there was no way the United Kingdom or Italy could be as competitive as Germany without serious price deflation to increase cost competitiveness, and that there would be only so much deflation and unemployment these countries could take before they either ran out of foreign exchange reserves or lost the next election. Indeed, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was sometimes referred to as the European “Eternal Recession Mechanism,” such was its deflationary impact. In short, attempts to maintain an anti-inflationary currency peg fail because they are not credible on the following point: you cannot run a gold standard (where the only way to adjust is through internal deflation) in a democracy.

You think you know what a man is? You have no idea what a man is. You think you know what a daughter is? You have no idea what a daughter is. You think you know what this country is? You have no idea what this country is. You have a false image of everything. All you know is what a fucking glove is. This country is frightening. Of course she was raped. What kind of company do you think she was keeping? Of course out there she was going to get raped. This isn't Old Rimrock, old buddy - she's out there, old buddy, in the USA. She enters that world, that loopy world out there, with whats going on out there - what do you expect? A kid from Rimrock, NJ, of course she didn't know how to behave out there, of course the shit hits the fan. What could she know? She's like a wild child out there in the world. She can't get enough of it - she's still acting up. A room off McCarter Highway. And why not? Who wouldn't? You prepare her for life milking the cows? For what kind of life? Unnatural, all artificial, all of it. Those assumptions you live with. You're still in your olf man's dream-world, Seymour, still up there with Lou Levov in glove heaven. A household tyrannized by gloves, bludgeoned by gloves, the only thing in life - ladies' gloves! Does he still tell the one about the woman who sells the gloves washing her hands in a sink between each color? Oh where oh where is that outmoded America, that decorous America where a woman had twenty-five pairs of gloves? Your kid blows your norms to kingdom come, Seymour, and you still think you know what life is?" Life is just a short period of time in which we are alive. Meredith Levov, 1964. "You wanted Ms. America? Well, you've got her, with a vengeance - she's your daughter! You wanted to be a real American jock, a real American marine, a real American hotshot with a beautiful Gentile babe on your arm? You longed to belong like everybody else to the United States of America? Well, you do now, big boy, thanks to your daughter. The reality of this place is right up in your kisser now. With the help of your daughter you're as deep in the sit as a man can get, the real American crazy shit. America amok! America amuck! Goddamn it, Seymour, goddamn you, if you were a father who loved his daughter," thunders Jerry into the phone - and the hell with the convalescent patients waiting in the corridor for him to check out their new valves and new arteries, to tell how grateful they are to him for their new lease on life, Jerry shouts away, shouts all he wants if it's shouting he wants to do, and the hell with the rules of hte hospital. He is one of the surgeons who shouts; if you disagree with him he shouts, if you cross him he shouts, if you just stand there and do nothing he shouts. He does not do what hospitals tell him to do or fathers expect him to do or wives want him to do, he does what he wants to do, does as he pleases, tells people just who and what he is every minute of the day so that nothing about him is a secret, not his opinions, his frustrations, his urges, neither his appetite nor his hatred. In the sphere of the will, he is unequivocating, uncompromising; he is king. He does not spend time regretting what he has or has not done or justifying to others how loathsome he can be. The message is simple: You will take me as I come - there is no choice. He cannot endure swallowing anything. He just lets loose. And these are two brothers, the same parents' sons, one for whom the aggression's been bred out, the other for whom the aggression's been bred in. "If you were a father who loved your daughter," Jerry shouts at the Swede, "you would never have left her in that room! You would have never let her out of your sight!

SELF-HELP FOR FELLOW REFUGEES If your name suggests a country where bells might have been used for entertainment, or to announce the entrances and exits of the seasons and the birthdays of gods and demons, it's probably best to dress in plain clothes when you arrive in the United States. And try not to talk too loud. If you happen to have watched armed men beat and drag your father out the front door of your house and into the back of an idling truck, before your mother jerked you from the threshold and buried your face in her skirt folds, try not to judge your mother too harshly. Don't ask her what she thought she was doing, turning a child's eyes away from history and toward that place all human aching starts. And if you meet someone in your adopted country and think you see in the other's face an open sky, some promise of a new beginning, it probably means you're standing too far. Or if you think you read in the other, as in a book whose first and last pages are missing, the story of your own birthplace, a country twice erased, once by fire, once by forgetfulness, it probably means you're standing too close. In any case, try not to let another carry the burden of your own nostalgia or hope. And if you're one of those whose left side of the face doesn't match the right, it might be a clue looking the other way was a habit your predecessors found useful for survival. Don't lament not being beautiful. Get used to seeing while not seeing. Get busy remembering while forgetting. Dying to live while not wanting to go on. Very likely, your ancestors decorated their bells of every shape and size with elaborate calendars and diagrams of distant star systems, but with no maps for scattered descendants. And I bet you can't say what language your father spoke when he shouted to your mother from the back of the truck, "Let the boy see!" Maybe it wasn't the language you used at home. Maybe it was a forbidden language. Or maybe there was too much screaming and weeping and the noise of guns in the streets. It doesn't matter. What matters is this: The kingdom of heaven is good. But heaven on earth is better. Thinking is good. But living is better. Alone in your favorite chair with a book you enjoy is fine. But spooning is even better.

In all provinces of life, it is unhappily the case, that whatever is to be accomplished by a number of co-operating men and circumstances cannot long continue perfect. Of an acting company as well as of a kingdom, of a circle of friends as well as of an army, you may commonly select the moment when it may be said that all was standing on the highest pinnacle of harmony, perfection, contentment, and activity. But alterations will ere long occur; the individuals that compose the body often change; new members are added; the persons are no longer suited to the circumstances, or the circumstances to the persons; what was formerly united quickly falls asunder.

Obama was the most powerful man in the world, but that didn’t mean he could control the forces at play in the Middle East. There was no Nelson Mandela who could lead a country to absolution for its sins and ours. Extremist forces were exploiting the Arab Spring. Reactionary forces—with deep reservoirs of political support in the United States—were intent on clinging to power. Bashar al-Assad was going to fight to the death, backed by his Russian and Iranian sponsors. Factions were going to fight it out in the streets of Libya. The Saudis and Emiratis were going to stamp out political dissent in Egypt before it could come to their kingdoms. A Likud prime minister was going to mouth words about peace while building settlements that made peace impossible. Meanwhile, innocent people were going to suffer, some of them were going to be killed, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. Obama had reached that conclusion before I had. History had opened up a doorway in 2011 that, by the middle of 2013, had been slammed shut. There would be more war, more conflict, and more suffering, until—someday—old men would make peace.

Even mighty states and kingdoms are not exempted. If we look into history, we shall find some nations rising from contemptible beginnings and spreading their influence, until the whole globe is subjected to their ways. When they have reached the summit of grandeur, some minute and unsuspected cause commonly affects their ruin, and the empire of the world is transferred to some other place. Immortal Rome was at first but an insignificant village, inhabited only by a few abandoned ruffians, but by degrees it rose to a stupendous height, and excelled in arts and arms all the nations that preceded it. But the demolition of Carthage (what one should think should have established is in supreme dominion) by removing all danger, suffered it to sink into debauchery, and made it at length an easy prey to Barbarians. England immediately upon this began to increase (the particular and minute cause of which I am not historian enough to trace) in power and magnificence, and is now the greatest nation upon the globe. Soon after the reformation a few people came over into the new world for conscience sake. Perhaps this (apparently) trivial incident may transfer the great seat of empire into America. It looks likely to me. For if we can remove the turbulent Gallics, our people according to exactest computations, will in another century, become more numerous than England itself. Should this be the case, since we have (I may say) all the naval stores of the nation in our hands, it will be easy to obtain the mastery of the seas, and then the united force of all Europe will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us. Divide et impera. Keep us in distinct colonies, and then, some great men from each colony, desiring the monarchy of the whole, they will destroy each others' influence and keep the country in equilibrio. Be not surprised that I am turned into politician. The whole town is immersed in politics.

Future Europe’s problems are many, but four stand out. The first is energy: The Europeans are more dependent upon energy imports than the Asians, and no two major European countries think that problem can be solved the same way. The Germans fear that not having a deal with the Russians means war. The Poles want a deal with anyone but Russia. The Spanish know the only solution is in the Western Hemisphere. The Italians fear they must occupy Libya. The French want to force a deal on Algeria. The Brits are eyeing West Africa. Everyone is right. Everyone is wrong. The second is demographic: The European countries long ago aged past the point of even theoretical repopulation, meaning that the European Union is now functionally an export union. Without the American-led Order, the Europeans lose any possibility of exporting goods, which eliminates the possibility of maintaining European society in its current form. The third is economic preference: Perhaps it is mostly subconscious these days, but the Europeans are aware of their bloody history. A large number of conscious decisions were made by European leaders to remodel their systems with a socialist bent so their populations would be vested within their collective systems. This worked. This worked well. But only in the context of the Order with the Americans paying for the bulk of defense costs and enabling growth that the Europeans could have never fostered themselves. Deglobalize and Europe’s demographics and lack of global reach suggest that permanent recession is among the better interpretations of the geopolitical tea leaves. I do not see a path forward in which the core of the European socialist-democratic model can survive. The fourth and final problem: Not all European states are created equal. For every British heavyweight, there is a Greek basket case. For every insulated France, there is a vulnerable Latvia. Some countries are secure or rich or have a tradition of power projection. Others are vulnerable or poor or are little more than historical doormats. Perhaps worst of all, the biggest economic player (Germany) is the one with no options but to be the center weight of everything, while the two countries with the greatest capacity to go solo (France and the United Kingdom) hedged their bets and never really integrated with the rest of Europe. There’s little reason to expect the French to use their reach to benefit Europe, and there’s no reason to expect assistance from the British, who formally seceded from the European Union in 2020. History,

Dating yes. But she thinks we're, uh, more than dating." "Oh," he says, thoughtful. Then he grins. "Oh." The reason her lips are turning his favorite color is because Emma's mom thinks they've been dating and mating. The blush extends down her neck and disappears into her T-shirt. He should probably say something to make her feel more comfortable. But teasing her seems so much more fun. "Well then, the least she could do is give us some privacy-" "Ohmysweetgoodness!" She snatches her backpack from the seat and marches around her car to the driver's side. Before she can get the door unlocked, he plucks the key from her fingers and tucks it into his jeans' pocket. She moves to retrieve it, but stops when she realizes where she's about to go fishing. He's never seen her this red. He laughs. "Calm down, Emma. I'm just kidding. Don't leave." "Yeah, well, it's not funny. You should have seen her this morning. She almost cried. my mom doesn't cry." She crosses her arms again but relaxes against her door. "She cried? That's pretty insulting." She cracks a tiny grin. "Yeah, it's an insult to me. She thinks I would...would..." "More than date me?" She nods. He steps toward her and puts his hand beside her on the car, leaning in. A live current seems to shimmy up his spine. What are you doing? "But she should know that you don't even think of me like that. That it would never even cross your mind," he murmurs. She looks away, satisfying his unspoken question-it has crossed her mind. The same way it crosses his. How often? Does she feel the voltage between them, too? Who cares, idiot? She belongs to Grom. Or are you going to let a few sparks keep you from uniting the kingdoms? He pulls back, clenching his teeth. His pockets are the only safe place for his hands at the moment. "Why don't I meet her then? You think that would make her feel better?" "Um." She swipes her hair to the other side of her face. Her expression falls somewhere between shock and expectation. And she had every right to expect it-he's been entertaining the idea of kissing her for over two weeks now. She fidgets the door handle. "Yeah, it might. She won't let me go anywhere-especially with you-if she doesn't meet you first." "Should I be afraid?" She sighs. "Normally I would say no. But after this morning..." She shrugs. "How about I follow you to your house so you can drop off your car? Then she can interrogate me. When she sees how charming I am, she'll let you ride to the beach with me." She rolls her eyes. "Just don't be too charming. If you're too smooth, she'll never believe-just don't overdue it, okay?" "This is getting complicated," he says, unlocking her car. "Just remember, this is your idea and your fault. Now would be the time to back out." He chuckles and opens the door for her. "Don't lose me on the road.

The Restoration did not so much restore as replace. In restoring the monarchy with King Charles II, it replaced Cromwell's Commonwealth and its Puritan ethos with an almost powerless monarch whose tastes had been formed in France. It replaced the power of the monarchy with the power of a parliamentary system - which was to develop into the two parties, Whigs and Tories - with most of the executive power in the hands of the Prime Minister. Both parties benefited from a system which encouraged social stability rather than opposition. Above all, in systems of thought, the Restoration replaced the probing, exploring, risk-taking intellectual values of the Renaissance. It relied on reason and on facts rather than on speculation. So, in the decades between 1660 and 1700, the basis was set for the growth of a new kind of society. This society was Protestant (apart from the brief reign of the Catholic King James II, 1685-88), middle class, and unthreatened by any repetition of the huge and traumatic upheavals of the first part of the seventeenth century. It is symptomatic that the overthrow of James II in 1688 was called The 'Glorious' or 'Bloodless' Revolution. The 'fever in the blood' which the Renaissance had allowed was now to be contained, subject to reason, and kept under control. With only the brief outburst of Jacobin revolutionary sentiment at the time of the Romantic poets, this was to be the political context in the United Kingdom for two centuries or more. In this context, the concentration of society was on commerce, on respectability, and on institutions. The 'genius of the nation' led to the founding of the Royal Society in 1662 - 'for the improving of Natural Knowledge'. The Royal Society represents the trend towards the institutionalisation of scientific investigation and research in this period. The other highly significant institution, one which was to have considerably more importance in the future, was the Bank of England, founded in 1694.

Jackson himself described how the treaties were obtained: “. . . we addressed ourselves feelingly to the predominant and governing passion of all Indian tribes, i.e., their avarice or fear.” He encouraged white squatters to move into Indian lands, then told the Indians the government could not remove the whites and so they had better cede the lands or be wiped out. He also, Rogin says, “practiced extensive bribery.” These treaties, these land grabs, laid the basis for the cotton kingdom, the slave plantations. Every time a treaty was signed, pushing the Creeks from one area to the next, promising them security there, whites would move into the new area and the Creeks would feel compelled to sign another treaty, giving up more land in return for security elsewhere. Jackson’s work had brought the white settlements to the border of Florida, owned by Spain. Here were the villages of the Seminole Indians, joined by some Red Stick refugees, and encouraged by British agents in their resistance to the Americans. Settlers moved into Indian lands. Indians attacked. Atrocities took place on both sides. When certain villages refused to surrender people accused of murdering whites, Jackson ordered the villages destroyed.

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone - if possible - Jew, Gentile - black man - white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness - not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men - cries out for universal brotherhood - for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world - millions of despairing men, women, and little children - victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. ….. Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” - not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power - the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then - in the name of democracy - let us use that power - let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world - a decent world that will give men a chance to work - that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world - to do away with national barriers - to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

Geopolitics is ultimately the study of the balance between options and lim­itations. A country's geography determines in large part what vulnerabilities it faces and what tools it holds. "Countries with flat tracks of land -- think Poland or Russia -- find building infrastructure easier and so become rich faster, but also find them­selves on the receiving end of invasions. This necessitates substantial stand­ing armies, but the very act of attempting to gain a bit of security automat­ically triggers angst and paranoia in the neighbors. "Countries with navigable rivers -- France and Argentina being premier examples -- start the game with some 'infrastructure' already baked in. Such ease of internal transport not only makes these countries socially uni­fied, wealthy, and cosmopolitan, but also more than a touch self-important. They show a distressing habit of becoming overimpressed with themselves -- and so tend to overreach. "Island nations enjoy security -- think the United Kingdom and Japan -- in part because of the physical separation from rivals, but also because they have no choice but to develop navies that help them keep others away from their shores. Armed with such tools, they find themselves actively meddling in the affairs of countries not just within arm's reach, but half a world away. "In contrast, mountain countries -- Kyrgyzstan and Bolivia, to pick a pair -- are so capital-poor they find even securing the basics difficult, mak­ing them largely subject to the whims of their less-mountainous neighbors. "It's the balance of these restrictions and empowerments that determine both possibilities and constraints, which from my point of view makes it straightforward to predict what most countries will do: · The Philippines' archipelagic nature gives it the physical stand-off of is­lands without the navy, so in the face of a threat from a superior country it will prostrate itself before any naval power that might come to its aid. · Chile's population center is in a single valley surrounded by mountains. Breaching those mountains is so difficult that the Chileans often find it easier to turn their back on the South American continent and interact economically with nations much further afield. · The Netherlands benefits from a huge portion of European trade because it controls the mouth of the Rhine, so it will seek to unite the Continent economically to maximize its economic gain while bringing in an exter­nal security guarantor to minimize threats to its independence. · Uzbekistan sits in the middle of a flat, arid pancake and so will try to expand like syrup until it reaches a barrier it cannot pass. The lack of local competition combined with regional water shortages adds a sharp, brutal aspect to its foreign policy. · New Zealand is a temperate zone country with a huge maritime frontage beyond the edge of the world, making it both wealthy and secure -- how could the Kiwis not be in a good mood every day? "But then there is the United States. It has the fiat lands of Australia with the climate and land quality of France, the riverine characteristics of Germany with the strategic exposure of New Zealand, and the island fea­tures of Japan but with oceanic moats -- and all on a scale that is quite lit­erally continental. Such landscapes not only make it rich and secure beyond peer, but also enable its navy to be so powerful that America dominates the global oceans.

Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.' Creationists gleefully quote this sentence again and again. Needless to say, they never quote what follows. Darwin's fulsomely free confession turned out to be a rhetorical device. He was drawing his opponents towards him so that his punch, when it came, struck the harder. The punch, of course, was Darwin's effortless explanation of exactly how the eye evolved by gradual degrees. Darwin may not have used the phrase 'irreducible complexity', or 'the smooth gradient up Mount Improbable', but he clearly understood the principle of both. 'What is the use of half an eye?' and 'What is the use of half a wing?' are both instances of the argument from 'irreducible complexity'. A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning. This has been assumed to be self-evident for both eyes and wings. But as soon as we give these assumptions a moment's thought, we immediately see the fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed can't see clear images without glasses, but can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff. Half a wing is indeed not as good as a whole wing, but it is certainly better than no wing at all. Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could save you if you fall from a slightly taller tree. Whatever fraction of a wing you have, there is a fall from which it will save your life where a slightly smaller winglet would not. The thought experiment of trees of different height, from which one might fall, is just one way to see, in theory, that there must be a smooth gradient of advantage all the way from 1 per cent of a wing to 100 per cent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up that particular slope of Mount Improbable. By analogy with the trees of different height, it is easy to imagine situations in which half an eye would save the life of an animal where 49 per cent of an eye would not. Smooth gradients are provided by variations in lighting conditions, variations in the distance at which you catch sight of your prey—or your predators. And, as with wings and flight surfaces, plausible intermediates are not only easy to imagine: they are abundant all around the animal kingdom. A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than half a human eye. Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human. Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see no image, the Nautilus 'pinhole camera' eye makes a real image; but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours. It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are all better than no eye at all, and all lie on a continuous and shallow slope up Mount Improbable, with our eyes near a peak—not the highest peak but a high one.

Yet the homogeneity of contemporary humanity is most apparent when it comes to our view of the natural world and of the human body. If you fell sick a thousand years ago, it mattered a great deal where you lived. In Europe, the resident priest would probably tell you that you had made God angry and that in order to regain your health you should donate something to the church, make a pilgrimage to a sacred site, and pray fervently for God’s forgiveness. Alternatively, the village witch might explain that a demon had possessed you and that she could cast it out using song, dance, and the blood of a black cockerel. In the Middle East, doctors brought up on classical traditions might explain that your four bodily humors were out of balance and that you should harmonize them with a proper diet and foul-smelling potions. In India, Ayurvedic experts would offer their own theories concerning the balance between the three bodily elements known as doshas and recommend a treatment of herbs, massages, and yoga postures. Chinese physicians, Siberian shamans, African witch doctors, Amerindian medicine men—every empire, kingdom, and tribe had its own traditions and experts, each espousing different views about the human body and the nature of sickness, and each offering their own cornucopia of rituals, concoctions, and cures. Some of them worked surprisingly well, whereas others were little short of a death sentence. The only thing that united European, Chinese, African, and American medical practices was that everywhere at least a third of all children died before reaching adulthood, and average life expectancy was far below fifty.14 Today, if you happen to be sick, it makes much less difference where you live. In Toronto, Tokyo, Tehran, or Tel Aviv, you will be taken to similar-looking hospitals, where you will meet doctors in white coats who learned the same scientific theories in the same medical colleges. They will follow identical protocols and use identical tests to reach very similar diagnoses. They will then dispense the same medicines produced by the same international drug companies. There are still some minor cultural differences, but Canadian, Japanese, Iranian, and Israeli physicians hold much the same views about the human body and human diseases. After the Islamic State captured Raqqa and Mosul, it did not tear down the local hospitals. Rather, it launched an appeal to Muslim doctors and nurses throughout the world to volunteer their services there.15 Presumably even Islamist doctors and nurses believe that the body is made of cells, that diseases are caused by pathogens, and that antibiotics kill bacteria.