Unprecedented Situation Quotes

The cunning villains used our innocence, naivety and honesty; they incited and steered our virtue, purity and fervent temperaments. When we realized the actual absurdity of the situation and began to demand our democratic rights, we were subjected to unprecedented persecution and suppression. Our youth, passion, learning, idealism and joy were all sacrificed to the terrible rule of this wicked tyranny. How can this not be blood?

That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation... Will replaces vision; temporality of the act outsts the eternity of the "good-in-itself"As the product of the indifferent, his being, too, must be indifferent. Then the facing of his morality would simply warrant the reaction "let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die." There is no point in caring for what has no sanction behind it in any creative intention.

Jesus’s use of the phrasing “a new commandment” is frequently scanted in light of its implicit ramifications. Because Jesus at the Last Supper has executed the “new covenant” with his disciples, the Great Commandment itself now acquires an unprecedented meaning. Its new meaning belongs to this sudden revelation not merely about who God is but also about what love is. Previously the Great Commandment bade us to love God and our neighbor. Now this love can be comprehended only in an incarnational situation. Its incarnate presence is the activation of profound rhizomic relations that explode from the center toward the ends of the earth. We are commanded to be incarnational in relation to one another just as God at the cross was incarnational in Christ. . . . We are no longer simply Christ’s “followers" - the pre-Easter form of relation to a master-and-teacher that is conventionally called “disciple” - but also perpetual Christ incarnators . . .

All terrorism is fake. It is a military deception practiced by the rich upon the poor in an ongoing class war. Their most important weapon in this class war are television presenters. The BBC has actually become The Ministry of Truth of George Orwell’s 1984….Why is this happening right now? It’s happening because we no longer have an enemy. We have an unprecedented situation in which there is only one super state: the Anglo-American alliance…..The ruling group maintain their position in society by controlling the masses through fear. In order to make us believe that we must live in fear, the rich had to provide us with a new foreign enemy, a “bogeyman” who wants to conquer the world. The moment you have a world at peace, the keystone in the arch of ruling class power is gone. Every year America’s oligarchs take three trillion dollars out of America’s economy. This is how the rich have rigged the system – so that it benefits them at the expense of everyone else all of the time. To keep this fraud going, the public must be convinced of the need for military expenditure, and this is where all of the phony terror attacks come in. Here is Orwell’s definition of totalitarianism: ‘ A society living by and for continuous warfare in which the ruling caste have ceased to have any real function but succeed in clinging to power through force and fraud.

You hear it in every political speech, “vote for me, we’ll get the dream back.” They all reiterate it in similar words—you even hear it from people who are destroying the dream, whether they know it or not. But the “dream” has to be sustained, otherwise how are you going to get people in the richest, most powerful country in world history, with extraordinary advantages, to face the reality that they see around them? Inequality is really unprecedented. If you look at total inequality today, it’s like the worst periods of American history. But if you refine it more closely, the inequality comes from the extreme wealth in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of 1 percent. There were periods like the Gilded Age in the 1890s and the Roaring Twenties and so on, when a situation developed rather similar to this, but the current period is extreme. Because if you look at the wealth distribution, the inequality mostly comes from super-wealth—literally, the top one-tenth of a percent are just super-wealthy. This is the result of over thirty years of a shift in social and economic policy. If you check you find that over the course of these years the government policy has been modified completely against the will of the population to provide enormous benefits to the very rich. And for most of the population, the majority, real incomes have almost stagnated for over thirty years. The middle class in that sense, that unique American sense, is under severe attack. A significant part of the American Dream is class mobility: You’re born poor, you work hard, you get rich. The idea that it is possible for everyone to get a decent job, buy a home, get a car, have their children go to school . . . It’s all collapsed.

We're living in a world in which we're all survived, targeted, herded, and indoctrinated to an unprecedented degree. Our fallen, debased state is ghastly. Our bodies have been transformed into profit-optimized enterprise zones, our minds have been hacked and neutered, our social milieus have been completely leached of authenticity.... [...] Bro, we're living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of petite bourgeoisie ideology whose resources and ruses are infinite and which ubiquitously permeates the world -- high culture, low culture, bienpensant media, prestige literature, pop music, commerce, sports, academia, you name it. The only reasonable response to the situation is to maintain an implacable antipathy toward everything. Denounce everyone. Make war against yourself. Guillotine all groveling intellectuals. That said, I think it's important to maintain a cheery disposition. This will hasten the restoration of Paradise. I've memorized this line from Andre Breton's magnificent homage to Antonin Artaud -- "I salute Antonin Artaud for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive." Given the state of things, that's what we need to be doing all the time -- negating everything that causes us to be dead while alive.

In previous centuries national identities were forged because humans faced problems and opportunities that were far beyond the scope of local tribes and which only countrywide cooperation could hope to handle. In the twenty-first century, nations find themselves in the same situation as the old tribes: they are no longer the right framework to manage the most important challenges of the age. We need a new global identity because national institutions are incapable of handling a set of unprecedented global predicaments. We now have a global ecology, a global economy, and a global science—but we are still stuck with only national politics. This mismatch prevents the political system from effectively countering our main problems. To have effective politics, either we must deglobalize the ecology, the economy, and the march of science or we must globalize our politics. Since it is impossible to deglobalize the ecology and the march of science, and since the cost of deglobalizing the economy would probably be prohibitive, the only real solution is to globalize politics. This does not mean establishing a “global government”—a doubtful and unrealistic vision. Rather, to globalize politics means that political dynamics within countries and even cities should give far more weight to global problems and interests.

In the West Indies and South America, slaves were worked to death and replaced with fresh imports, but in the continental North American colonies of Great Britain the situation was the opposite. By about 1710, as Morgan notes, “Virginia’s slave population began to grow from natural increase, an unprecedented event for any New World slave population.…In 1700 Virginia had 13,000 slaves; in 1730, 40,000; in 1750, 105,000, of whom nearly 80 percent were Virginia born.

He examined the situation, and found it unprecedented; so unprecedented that in the midst of his reverie he rose from his chair, moved by some inexplicable impulse of anxiety, and bolted his door. He feared lest something more should enter. He was barricading himself against possibilities. A moment later he extinguished his light; it embarrassed him. It seemed to him as though he might be seen. By whom? Alas! That on which he desired to close the door had already entered; that which he desired to blind was staring him in the face,—his conscience. His conscience; that is to say, God.

Not satisfied with controlling information pipelines, the tech oligarchs have been moving to shape content as well. Controllers like those at Facebook and Twitter seek to “curate” content on their sites, or even eliminate views they find objectionable, which tend to be conservative views, according to former employees.35 Algorithms intended to screen out “hate groups” often spread a wider net, notes one observer, since the programmers have trouble distinguishing between “hate groups” and those who might simply express views that conflict with the dominant culture of Silicon Valley.36 That managers of social media platforms aim to control content is not merely the perception of conservatives. Over 70 percent of Americans believe that social media platforms “censor political views,” according to a recent Pew study.37 With their quasi-monopoly status, Facebook and Google don’t have to worry about competing with anyone, as the tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel observes, so they can indulge their own prejudices to a greater extent than the businesses that might be concerned about alienating customers.38 With their tightening control over media content, the tech elite are now situated to exert a cultural predominance that is unprecedented in the modern era.39 It recalls the cultural influence of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, but with more advanced technology.

It was that ocean heat that caused the First Pulse to pulse, and later brought on the second one. People sometimes say no one saw it coming, but no, wrong: they did. Paleoclimatologists looked at the modern situation and saw CO2 levels screaming up from 280 to 450 parts per million in less than three hundred years, faster than had ever happened in the Earth’s entire previous five billion years (can we say “Anthropocene,” class?), and they searched the geological record for the best analogs to this unprecedented event, and they said, Whoa. They said, Holy shit. People! they said. Sea level rise! During the Eemian period, they said, which we’ve been looking at, the world saw a temperature rise only half as big as the one we’ve just created, and rapid dramatic sea level rise followed immediately. They put it in bumper sticker terms: massive sea level rise sure to follow our unprecedented release of CO2! They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of civilization went on torching the planet like a Burning Man pyromasterpiece. Really. That’s how much those knuckleheads cared about their grandchildren, and that’s how much they believed their scientists, even though every time they felt a slight cold coming on they ran to the nearest scientist (i.e. doctor) to seek aid.

We want a money-back guarantee before we take a step of obedience, but that eliminates faith from the equation. Sometimes we need to take a flying leap of faith. We need to step into the conflict without knowing if we can resolve it. We need to share our faith without knowing how our friends will react to it. We need to pray for a miracle without knowing how God will answer. We need to put ourselves in a situation that activates a spiritual gift we've never exercised before. And we need to go after a dream that is destined to fail without divine intervention. If we want to discover new lands, we've got to lose sight of the shore. We've got to leave the Land of Familiarity behind. We've got to sail past the predictable. And when we do, we develop a spiritual hunger for the unprecedented and lose our appetite for the habitual. We also get a taste of God's favor.

[E]very reader must be struck by the contrast between the outspokenness of these speeches and Thucydides’ own reticence. [...] Now this silence does not mean that he is indifferent, or that he no longer responds to men and events, as he encourages us to do, with approval and disapproval. It shows, rather, that he is a skillful political educator. For the moral seriousness that he fosters in us remains immature, it does not sufficiently help us to promote the well-being of our communities, which it necessarily wants to promote, unless it is guided by or culminates in political wisdom. And since political wisdom is primarily good judgment about unprecedented, particular situations, it is not so much a subject matter to be taught as a skill to be developed through practice. Accordingly, instead of telling us whether or not he approves of a given policy, Thucydides asks us to make our own judgments, and then to subject them to the testing that the war provides.

A special government commission consisting of Party officials and scientists were on their way to assess the situation, and would arrive over the following 24 hours. The commission’s leader was Boris Scherbina, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and a former Minister for Construction in the oil & gas industry. While not a low-level politician, Scherbina was not a member of the Politburo - the Soviet political elite - because nobody in the government realised how serious the accident was at this stage. The most prominent scientific member of the commission was 49-year-old Academician Valerii Legasov. Legasov held a Doctorate in Chemistry and was something of a prodigy, having enjoyed an unprecedented rise within Soviet scientific circles to become the First Deputy-Director of the prestigious I. V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. Even though he was not a specialist in nuclear reactors, he was a highly intelligent, experienced and influential figure, both within the Communist Party and the global scientific community.164

Imagine this situation: you have bought a new car, but before you can start using it, you must open the settings menu and check one of several boxes. In case of an accident, do you want the car to sacrifice your life or to kill the family in the other vehicle? Is this a choice you even want to make? Just think of the arguments you are going to have with your husband about which box to check. So maybe the state should intervene to regulate the market and lay down an ethical code binding all self-driving cars. Some lawmakers will doubtless be thrilled by the opportunity to finally make laws that are always followed to the letter. Others may be alarmed by such unprecedented and totalitarian responsibility. After all, throughout history the limitations of actually enforcing laws provided a welcome check on the biases, mistakes, and excesses of lawmakers. It was an extremely lucky thing that laws against homosexuality and blasphemy were only partially enforced. Do we really want a system in which the decisions of fallible politicians become as inexorable as gravity?

The ducks of Mackinac Island are apparently not easily taken down. “Found a portion of the Lungs as large as a turkey’s egg protruding through the external wound, lacerated and burnt, and below this another protrusion resembling a portion of the Stomach, what at first view I could not believe possible to be that organ in that situation with the subject surviving, but on closer examination I found it to be actually the Stomach, with a puncture in the protruding portion large enough to receive my forefinger, and through which a portion of his food that he had taken for breakfast had come out and lodged among his apparel.” Thus reads Beaumont’s somewhat windy account of the injury. Through that puncture—and in the slop of half-digested meat and bread suddenly visible in the folds of St. Martin’s wool shirt—lay Beaumont’s ticket to the spotlight of national renown. Italian digestion experimenters had pulled food in and out of live animal stomachs, soaked it up in sponges on strings, even regurgitated their own dinners, but St. Martin’s portal presented an unprecedented opportunity to document the human juices and processes in vivo.

The disaster was the first major crisis to occur under the fledgling leadership of the USSR’s most recent General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev. He chose not to address the public for three weeks after the accident, presumably to allow his experts time to gain a proper grasp of the situation. On May 14th, in addition to expressing his anger at Western Chernobyl propaganda, he announced to the world that all information relating to the incident would be made available, and that an unprecedented conference would be held with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in August at Vienna. Decades of information control proved difficult to cast off in such a short time, however, and while the report was made available in the West, it was classified in the Soviet Union. This meant those most affected by the disaster knew less than everyone else. In addition, although the Soviet delegation’s report was highly detailed and accurate in most regards, it was also misleading. It had been written in line with the official cause of the accident - that the operators were responsible - and, as such, it deliberately obfuscated vital details about the reactor.

As strangeness becomes the new normal, your past experiences, as well as the past experiences of the whole of humanity, will become less reliable guides. Humans as individuals and humankind as a whole will increasingly have to deal with things nobody ever encountered before, such as super-intelligent machines, engineered bodies, algorithms that can manipulate your emotions with uncanny precision, rapid man-made climate cataclysms and the need to change your profession every decade. What is the right thing to do when confronting a completely unprecedented situation? How should you act when you are flooded by enormous amounts of information and there is absolutely no way you can absorb and analyse it all? How to live in a world where profound uncertainty is not a bug, but a feature? To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance. You will have to repeatedly let go of some of what you know best, and feel at home with the unknown. Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown and to keep their mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or the causes of the First World War. You cannot learn resilience by reading a book or listening to a lecture. The teachers themselves usually lack the mental flexibility that the twenty-first century demands, for they themselves are the product of the old educational system. The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education. In the middle of town there is a large concrete building divided into many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs. At the sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms together with thirty other kids who were all born the same year as you. Every hour some grown-up walks in, and starts talking. They are all paid to do so by the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body. It is easy to laugh at this model, and almost everybody agrees that no matter its past achievements, it is now bankrupt. But so far we haven’t created a viable alternative. Certainly not a scaleable alternative that can be implemented in rural Mexico rather than just in upmarket California suburbs.

The birth and growth of modern antisemitism has been accompanied by and interconnected with Jewish assimilation, the secularization and withering away of the old religious and spiritual values of Judaism. What actually happened was that great parts of the Jewish people were at the same time threatened by physical extinction from without and dissolution from within. In this situation, Jews concerned with the survival of their people would, in a curious and desperate misinterpretation, hit on the consoling idea that antisemitism, after all, might be an excellent means for keeping the people together so that the assumption of external antisemitism would even imply an external guarantee of Jewish existence. This superstition, a secularized travesty of the idea of eternity inherent in a faith in chosenness and a Messianic hope, has been strengthened through the fact that for many centuries the Jews experienced the Christian brand of hostility which was indeed a powerful agent of preservation, spiritually as well as politically. The Jews mistook modern anti-Christian antisemitism for the old religious Jew-hatred—and this all the more innocently because their assimilation had by-passed Christianity in its religious and cultural aspect. Confronted with an obvious symptom of the decline of Christianity, they could therefore imagine in all ignorance that this was some revival of the so-called "Dark Ages." Ignorance or misunderstanding of their own past were partly responsible for their fatal underestimation of the actual and unprecedented dangers which lay ahead. But one should also bear in mind that lack of political ability and judgment have been caused by the very nature of Jewish history, the history of a people without a government, without a country, and without a language. Jewish history offers the extraordinary spectacle of a people, unique in this respect, which began its history with a well-defined concept of history and an almost conscious resolution to achieve a well-circumscribed plan on earth and then, without giving up this concept, avoided all political action for two thousand years. The result was that the political history of the Jewish people became even more dependent upon unforeseen, accidental factors than the history of other nations, so that the Jews stumbled from one role to the other and accepted responsibility for none.

Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] The media, of course, must walk a fine line covering this story. With more we turn to Steve Carell in the Daily Show news center. Steve? Steve Carell: [standing in front of a bank of TV monitors] Jon, this is in many ways an unprecedented situation for us. [A blue band with white letters—the “crawl,” or “chyron” in TV lingo—scrolls across the screen, at Carell’s waist level] Crawl: MAJORITY LEADER DASCHLE RECEIVES LETTER CONTAINING ANTHRAX. Steve Carell: On the one hand, we must alert the country to the latest events. Crawl: AL QAEDA VOWS NEW ATTACKS. Steve Carell: And on the other hand, we musn’t cause undue alarm. Crawl: FBI WARNS SOMETHING BAD TO HAPPEN SOMEWHERE SOMETIME. Steve Carell: Scaremongering isn’t the way to go. Crawl: WHITE POWDER FOUND ON DONUT IN ST. LOUIS. Steve Carell: So far the media has in fact shown restraint. Crawl: STORMS BATTER NEW ENGLAND—LINK TO TERRORISM STILL UNDETERMINED. Steve Carell: And I must stress this—there is absolutely no need to panic. Crawl: [picking up speed as it moves left to right] CIA: THAT GUY SITTING ACROSS FROM YOU ON THE BUS LOOKS A LITTLE SHIFTY. Steve Carell: Patience, diligence, and above all, responsibility. Crawl: A FRIEND OF THIS GUY I KNOW CONFIRMS HIS GIRLFRIEND TOLD HIM “THEY’RE PLANNING SOMETHING IN A MALL OR SOMETHING.” Steve Carell: Jon, we have a job to do here, but we also need perspective. Crawl: [accelerating] OH, F—! WHAT WAS THAT SOUND? SERIOUSLY, DID YOU HEAR A SOUND? Steve Carell: And in keeping that perspective— Crawl: “THE HORROR, THE HORROR”—KURTZ. POLL: 91% OF AMERICANS “WANT MOMMY.” Steve Carell: Okay, that was—no, no, no, that was unacceptable. Jon, would you excuse me for a minute? [walks out of frame] Crawl: CHICKEN LITTLE: “THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING!” OH GOD, OH GOD. [Carell confronts technician typing the crawl, beats him up as screen goes snowy] Jon Stewart: We’re having some technical difficulties with the crawl. Ah, Steve Carell is back! Steve Carell: Sorry about that, Jon. As I was saying, we journalists have to make sure that our worst instincts are curbed in the sake of national interest. Crawl: EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE JUST WONDERFUL WITH LOLLIPOPS AND RAINBOWS AND HAPPY FEELINGS FOR EVERYONE. Steve Carell: It’s a unique challenge, but one I think the greatest free press in the world can easily attain. Crawl: BUNNIES ARE CUTE, CUDDLY, AND COMFORTING. Steve Carell: Jon?

The more the State of Israel relied on force to manage the occupation, the more compelled it was to deploy hasbara. And the more Western media consumers encountered hasbara, the more likely they became to measure Israel’s grandiose talking points against the routine and petty violence, shocking acts of humiliation, and repression that defined its relationship with the Palestinians. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a professional explainer who spent the early years of his political career as a frequent guest on prime time American news programs perfecting the slickness of the Beltway pundit class, the Israeli government invested unprecedented resources into hasbara. Once the sole responsibility of the Israeli foreign ministry, the task of disseminating hasbara fell to a special Ministry of Public Diplomacy led by Yuli Edelstein, a rightist settler and government minister who called Arabs a “despicable nation.” Edelstein’s ministry boasted an advanced “situation room,” a paid media team, and coordination of a volunteer force that claimed to include thousands of volunteer bloggers, tweeters, and Facebook commenters fed with talking points and who flood social media with hasbara in five languages. The exploits of the propaganda soldiers conscripted into Israel’s online army have helped give rise to the phenomenon of the “hasbara troll,” an often faceless, shrill and relentless nuisance deployed on Twitter and Facebook to harass public figures who expressed skepticism of official Israeli policy or sympathy for the Palestinians.

During these uninterrupted peregrinations of mine from place to place, and almost continuous and intense reflection about this, I at last formed a preliminary plan in my mind.   Liquidating all my affairs and mobilizing all my material and other possibilities, I began to collect all kinds of written literature and oral information, still surviving among certain Asiatic peoples, about that branch of science, which was highly developed in ancient times and called " Mehkeness ", a name signifying the " taking away-of-responsibility ", and of which contemporary civilisation knows but an insignificant portion under the name of " hypnotism ", while all the literature extant upon the subject was already as familiar to me as my own five fingers.   Collecting all I could, I went to a certain Dervish monastery, situated likewise in Central Asia and where I had already stayed before, and, settling down there, I devoted myself wholly to the study of the material in my possession.   After two years of thorough theoretical study of this branch of science, when it became necessary to verify practically certain indispensable details, not as yet sufficiently elucidated by me in theory, of the mechanism of the functioning of man's subconscious sphere, I began to give myself out to be a " healer " of all kinds of vices and to apply the results of my theoretical studies to them, affording them at the same time, of course, real relief.   This continued to be my exclusive preoccupation and manifestation for four or five years in accordance with the essential oath imposed by my task, which consisted in rendering conscientious aid to sufferers, in never using my knowledge and practical power in that domain of science except for the sake of my investigations, and never for personal or egotistical ends, I not only arrived at unprecedented practical results without equal in our day, but also elucidated almost everything necessary for me.   In a short time, I discovered many details which might contribute to the solution of the same cardinal question, as well as many secondary facts, the existence of which I had scarcely suspected.   At the same time, I also became convinced that the greater number of minor details necessary for the final elucidation of this question must be sought not only in the sphere of man's subconscious mentation, but in various aspects of the manifestations in his state of waking consciousness.   After establishing this definitely, thoughts again began from time to time to " swarm " in my mind, as they had done years ago, sometimes automatically, sometimes directed by my consciousness,—thoughts as to the means of adapting myself now to the conditions of ordinary life about me with a view to elucidating finally and infallibly this question, which obviously had become a lasting and inseparable part of my Being.   This time my reflections, which recurred periodically during the two years of my wanderings on the continents of Asia, Europe and Africa, resulted in a decision to make use of my exceptional, for the modern man, knowledge of the so-called " supernatural sciences ", as well as of my skill in producing different " tricks " in the domain of these so-called " sciences ", and to give myself out to be, in these pseudo-scientific domains, a so-called " professor-instructor ".

The 9/11 Commission warned that Al Qaeda "could... scheme to wield weapons of unprecedented destructive power in the largest cities of the United States." Future attacks could impose enormous costs on the entire economy. Having used up the surplus that the country enjoyed as part of the Cold War peace dividend, the U.S. government is in a weakened financial position to respond to another major terrorist attack, and its position will be damaged further by the large budget gaps and growing dependence on foreign capital projected for the future. As the historian Paul Kennedy wrote in his book The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, too many decisions made in Washington today "bring merely short-term advantage but long-term disadvantage." The absence of a sound, long-term financial strategy could bring about a deterioration that, in his words, "leads to the downward spiral of slower growth, heavier taxes, deepening domestic splits over spending priorities and a weakening capacity to bear the burdens of defense." Decades of success in mobilizing enormous sums of money to fight large wars and meet other government needs have led Americans to believe that ample funds will be readily available in the event of a future war, terrorist attack, or other emergency. But that can no longer be assumed. Budget constraints could limit the availability or raise the cost of resources to deal with new emergencies. If government debt continues to pile up, deficits rise to stratospheric levels, and heave dependence on foreign capital grows, borrowing the money needed will be very costly. [Alexander] Hamilton understood the risks of such a precarious situation. After suffering through financial shortages, lack of adequate food and weapons, desertions, and collapsing morale during the Revolution, he considered the risk that the government would have difficulty in assembling funds to defend itself all too real. If America remains on its dangerous financial course, Hamilton's gift to the nation - the blessing of sound finances - will be squandered. The U.S. government had no higher obligation that to protect the security of its citizens. Doing so becomes increasingly difficult if its finances are unsound. While the nature of this new brand of warfare, the war on terrorism, remains uncharted, there is much to be gained if our leaders look to the experiences of the past for guidance in responding to the challenges of the future. The willingness of the American people and their leaders to ensure that the nation's finances remain sound in the face of these new challenges - sacrificing parochial interests for the common good - is the price we must pay to preserve the nation's security and thus the liberties that Hamilton and his generation bequeathed us.

But there is another case for curating as a vanguard activity for the twenty-first century. As the artist Tino Sehgal has pointed out, modern societies find themselves today in an unprecedented situation: The problem of lack, or scarcity, which has been the primary factor motivating scientific and technological innovation, is now joined and even superseded by the problem of the global effects of overproduction and resource use. Thus, moving beyond the object as the locus of meaning has a further relevance. Selection, presentation, and conversation are ways for human beings to create and exchange real value, without dependence on older, unsustainable processes. Curating can take the lead in pointing us toward this crucial importance of choosing.

Even in her unprecedented situation, Sophie felt fairly certain that 'I was on the verge of orgasming while my boss lewdly sucks eggs' wasn't an appropriate response.

Another reason that this question hasn’t demanded an answer is that most people understandably consider it to be far less relevant than “How can nuclear terrorism be prevented?” Speculating on responses to a nuclear attack is a bit like contemplating the day after any number of disasters that involve an unprecedented scale of devastation. Does the national security community focus on the US government’s potential response to an asteroid striking the planet or the aftermath of a war between China and the United States? It does not, because these types of scenarios fall into the realm of the surreal or at a minimum envision a situation in which there is such massive social disruption and such a severe

You of all boys should know that Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning and his lifeblood. Do rats tell tales? Do porpoises have narrative purposes? Do elephants ele-phantasise? You know as well as I do that they do not. Man alone burns with books.’ ‘But still, the Fire of Life … it is just a fairy tale,’ insisted Dog the bear and Bear the dog, together. Nobodaddy drew himself up indignantly. ‘Do I look,’ he demanded, ‘like a fairy to you? Do I resemble, perhaps, an elf? Do gossamer wings sprout from my shoulders? Do you see even a trace of pixie dust? I tell you now that the Fire of Life is as real as I am, and that only that Unquenchable Blaze will do what you all wish done. It will turn bear into Man and dog into Dog-Man, and it will also be the End of Me. Luka! You little murderer! Your eyes light up at the very thought! How thrilling! I am amongst assassins! What are we waiting for, then? Are we starting now? Let’s be off! Tick, tock! There is no time to lose!’ At this point Luka’s feet began to feel as if somebody was gently tickling their soles. Then the silver sun rose above the horizon, and something quite unprecedented began to happen to the neighbourhood, the neighbourhood that wasn’t Luka’s real neighbourhood, or not quite. Why was the sun silver, for one thing? And why was everything too brightly coloured, too smelly, too noisy? The sweetmeats on the street vendor’s barrow at the corner looked like they might taste odd, too. The fact that Luka was able to look at the street vendor’s barrow at all was a part of the strange situation, because the barrow was always positioned at the crossroads, just out of sight of his house, and yet here it was, right in front of him, with those oddly coloured, oddly tasting sweetmeats all over it, and those oddly coloured, oddly buzzing flies buzzing oddly all around it. How was this possible? Luka wondered. After all, he hadn’t moved a step, and there was the street vendor asleep under the barrow, so the barrow obviously hadn’t moved either; and how did the crossroads arrive as well, um, that was to say, how had he arrived at the crossroads?

Here’s a summary of our predicaments: We have more responsibility for our financial lives than ever before. We are uncomfortable talking and learning about money. We are living considerably longer, prolonging all of these problems. Our brains are hardwired to make lousy financial decisions. An unprecedented amount of information and choice makes decision-making harder. Many people are financially fragile. Our earnings and savings potential is less than it once was. Outsized investment returns are unlikely, so the market will not save us. This is not a good state of affairs. But as so many of us like to say when confronted with a tough situation: It is what it is. We carry on. Let’s now see what we can do about it. 1

Since The Great Recession, the global financial crash of 2008-09, the debt-fuelled post-recession recovery has been the weakest in the post-war era (since the end of World War Two). Whereas total outstanding credit in the US after the Wall Street Crash grew from 160% to 260% of GDP between 1929 and 1932, the figure rose from 365% in 2008 to 540% in 2010. (And this does not include derivatives, whose nominal outstanding value is at least four times GDP).[34] A long depression and rising right-wing populism have followed, including the stunning ascendency of property tycoon and TV celebrity demagogue Donald Trump as the President of the US in 2016.[35] The British public’s vote in June 2016 to leave the EU delivered another shock of global significance. A chronic drift towards trade wars and protectionism is accelerating and in January 2018, US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said that “great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of US national security”, putting Russia, China and – yes – Europe in the crosshairs of the world’s long-time dominant economic and military power. Adding to this age of anxiety is the accelerating automation revolution. What should be an emancipatory and utopian development only generates insecurity at the prospect of unprecedented mass unemployment. It can be no coincidence that all these crises are converging at exactly the same time. They cannot be explained away by cynical and shallow generalisations about ‘human nature’. In the course of this investigation we will see that in fact all of these crises have a common root cause: the decaying nature of capitalism and its tendency towards breakdown. Indeed, average Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates in the world’s richest countries have fallen in every decade since the 1960s and are clearly closing in on zero. Rates of profit, manufacturing costs and commodity prices are also trending towards zero. Drawing on Henryk Grossman’s vital clarification of Karl Marx’s methodology, we shall see that capitalism is heading inexorably towards a final, insurmountable breakdown that is destined to strike much earlier than a zero rate of profit. Indeed, we shall also see that the next, imminent economic crash will result in worldwide hyperinflation. We will also show that the economic crisis is intensifying competition between nation-states, forcing them into a situation which threatens the most destructive world war to date.

It is clear today that the ecological and political situation of this planet will force upon humanity enormous changes within this coming century. Among the future alternatives are such extremes as have been phrased, “utopia or oblivion.” Certainly the planetary situation is one of unprecedented complexity. And just as certainly, what is needed is unprecedented vision: both to avoid catastrophe and to find the path to a better future. And it is the dream that holds the key to this vision, allowing us, in Dement’s words, “to experience a future alternative as if it were real, and thereby to provide a supremely enlightened motivation to act upon this knowledge.

I became aware," Toynbee recalled, "of a difference in national traditions. Where the German a priori method drew blank, let us see what could be done by English empiricism." Focusing on the genesis and survival of societies, his original approach was eminently practical and fact-oriented. He started with an intriguing paradox. "The view that certain environments, presenting easy and comfortable conditions of life, provide the key to an explanation of the origin of civilizations is examined and rejected." Instead he "suggests the possibility that man achieves civilization, not as a result of superior biological endowment or geographical environment, but as a response to a challenge in a situation of special difficulty which rouses him to make hitherto unprecedented effort." Both sides of the paradox are supported by facts from around the earth:

In the foam worlds, however, no bubble can be expanded into an absolutely centered, all-encompassing, amphiscopic org; no central light penetrates the entire foam in its dynamic murkiness. Hence the ethics of the decentered, small and middle-sized bubbles in the world foam includes the effort to move about in an unprecedentedly spacious world with an unprecedentedly modest circumspection; in the foam, discrete and polyvalent games of reason must develop that learn to live with a shimmering diversity of perspectives , and dispense with the illusion of the one lordly point of view. Most roads do not lead to Rome-that is the situation, European: recognize it.

I know how it was two years ago, Hardcrow. And I know a little about how it is now, though the worst is kept from us peasants. But how has it become worse while getting better? What has happened in between?" "It was a series of unprecedented advances that somehow left us far in arrears, Foley; a program of wise and probably perfect moves that left us in a stupid situation; a whole array of undoubted improvements that has nearly reduced us to a shambles. Nobody knows just what has happened. And all are trying, on the advice of the best minds available, to restore some sanity to our position." "On the advice of the same best minds available which engineered the unprecedented advances, Hardcrow? The wise and probably perfect moves, and the array of undoubted improvements?

In Mary’s case the first word is the same (she was troubled), but what follows is not fear but an interior reflection on the angel’s greeting. She ponders (dialogues within herself) over what the greeting of God’s messenger could mean. So one salient feature of the image of the mother of Jesus is already present here, and we will encounter it again in two similar situations in the Gospel: her inner engagement with the word. She does not remain locked in her initial troubled state at the proximity of God in his angel, but she seeks to understand. So Mary appears as a fearless woman, one who remains composed even in the presence of something utterly unprecedented. At the same time she stands before us as a woman of great interiority, who holds heart and mind in harmony and seeks to understand the context, the overall significance of God’s message. In this way, she becomes an image of the Church as she considers the word of God, tries to understand it in its entirety and guards in her memory the things that have been given to her.

Never before has so much power been concentrated into the hands of such a few number of people, who literally can decide what countries live or die on a minute by minute basis. Never before has all the world’s wealth been subject to the decisions of such a small clique of individuals, who can, as we said earlier, completely alter the economic, sociological, and legislative landscape of entire nations as if with the wave of a magic wand. And if this situation weren’t bad enough, what makes it worse is the fact that the mental condition of this clique is such that makes the whole situation a ticking time bomb. It’s true, on it’s face, that such a threat from such a statistically small number of people makes no sense, except when considering what possibilities exist when this small number of people have the ear of the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world. And, if these people can literally make the president dance on strings like a puppet, (as has obviously been the case with every American president since Lyndon Johnson) then it becomes apparent how such machinery can be made to operate. We are talking about an unprecedented concentration of the world’s power in the hands of a few individuals who are, by any standards that can be used to measure, criminally insane. They possess 90% of the world’s wealth, control the political machinery of the world’s most powerful nations, control the informational infrastructure of these nations, and are imbued with the mindset that they have a right to possess all of this by virtue of: A: Their superiority, and by B. The inferiority of the rest of the world’s inhabitants. This situation does not paint a pretty picture, even to the most shallow-minded of thinkers. When it is reduced to its irreducible minimum, the program under which such individuals have deluded themselves is that it is impossible that evil in any form may emanate from the Jewish quarter, and, conversely, that the only evil that can exist is that which works against the Jewish agenda. Like Pavlov’s dogs, the sentiments of such individuals can be turned on like a light switch in defending the agenda of their masters, sentiments completely disconnected with any true intellectual processes and which vary between loyalty for the hand that feeds them and fear of the hand that can grab them by the throat. And thus it is in this manner therefore that we must view the intellectual parrying that takes place by today’s skeptics as but a magic act, and particularly so when the other side of the coin is discussed.

A scaled-down version of the clash between the real and the virtual and its fantastic consequences at the planetary level: the dissociation between a very high-frequency virtual space and a zero-frequency real space. The two no longer have anything in common, nor is there any communication between them: the unconditional extension of the virtual (which includes not just the new images or remote simulation, but the whole cyberspace of geo-finance, the space of multimedia and the information superhighways) brings with it an unprecedented desertification of real space and of all that surrounds us. The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyperspace is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself. The two worlds, though literally cut off from each other, are equally exponential. But the discrepancy between them does not create any new political situation or genuine crisis, for memory fades at the same time as does the real. The discrepancy is only virtually catastrophic.

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The Ticklish Subject shows how today, in spite of the decline of the paternal metaphor and the inefficacy of ethical-political principles, global capitalist relations of production actually structure an ever more prohibitive and homogenized social reality: The true horror lies not in the particular content hidden beneath the universality of global Capital but, rather, in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global machine blindly running its course; that there is in fact no particular Secret Agent animating it. The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in the very heart of each (particular living) ghost. The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism (the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds) which imposes itself today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as global world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of today’s world. (Ticklish, p. 218) Multiculturalism – as well as postmodern efforts to reduce truth to “narratives” or “solidarity of belief” – simply further the interests of global capital. Žižek notes wryly that liberal pseudo-leftists really know all of this, but the problem is that they want to maintain their relatively comfortable lifestyles (bought at the expense of suffering in the Third World), and meanwhile to maintain the pose of revolutionary “beautiful souls.” Postmodern “post-politics” replaces the recognition of global ideological divisions with an emphasis on the collaboration of enlightened experts, technocrats, and specialists who negotiate to reach compromises. Such pragmatic “administration of social matters” accepts in advance the very global capitalist framework that determines the profitability of the compromise (Ticklish, p. 199). This suspension of the space for authentic politics leads to what Žižek calls “postmodern racism,” which ignores the universal rights of the political subject, proliferates divisions along cultural lines, and prevents the working class from politicizing its predicament. Even more seriously, according to Žižek, post-politics no longer merely represses the political, but forecloses it. Thus instead of violence as the neurotic “return of the repressed,” we see signs of a new kind of irrational and excessive violence. This new manifestation of violence results from the (psychotic) foreclosure of the Name of the Father that leads to a “return in the Real.” This violence is thus akin to the psychotic passage a l’acte: “a cruelty whose manifestations range from ‘fundamentalist’ racist and/or religious slaughter to the ‘senseless’ outbursts of violence by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call Id-Evil, a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideological reason” (Ticklish, p. 198). Where then, is the power to combat such foreclosure? The Ticklish Subject shows that the subversive power of subjectivity arises only when the subject annuls himself as subject: the acknowledgment of the integral division or gap in subjectivity allows the move from subjection to subjective destitution. Insofar as the subject concedes to the inherent failure of symbolic practices, he no longer presupposes himself as a unified subject. He acknowledges the nonexistence of the symbolic big Other and the monstrosity of the Real. Such acceptance involves the full assertion – rather than the effacement – of the gap between the Real and its symbolization. In contrast to the artificial object character of the imaginary capitalist ego, The Ticklish Subject discloses the “empty place” of the subject as a purely structural function, and shows that this functioning emerges only as the withdrawal from one’s substantial identity, as the disintegration of the “self” that is situated and defined within a communal universe of meaning.

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.

Because séances were usually conducted by women, these events afforded women a unique, unprecedented opportunity to speak freely outside the home. Their communicants from beyond often preached abolitionist and feminist views to audiences. It was a win-win situation: the women were able to speak their political views while blaming it all on the inhabitant of the Great Beyond.

Longevity escape velocity(LEV) is a hypothetical situation in which one's remaining life expectancy (not LE at birth) is extended longer than the time that is passing. For example, in a given year in which LEV would be maintained, technological advances would increase people's remaining life expectancy more than the year that just went by. From Aubrey De Grey, the founder of LEV foundation himself: "My current estimate is that we will reach LEV, which is tantamount to defeating aging completely, within 12–15 years with 50% probability." "David Sinclair and I both made important contributions to the field 20-25 years ago, which gave us the option to get the media interested in us, and we chose to exercise that option because, and this may shock you, we are not scientists first and foremost, but humanitarians. We view the quest to understand aging better as a means to an end, namely to postpone the ILL-HEALTH of old age as much as possible, thereby saving lives and alleviating suffering on a totally unprecedented scale. When you ask how well respected David is as a scientist, you're actually (unintentionally, to be sure) asking a rather loaded question. Like me, he has chosen to sacrifice some of the respect he could have had, simply in order to save more lives." "I've often been asked what the life expectancy will be in the year 3000. My answer is there very (and I mean VERY) probably won’t be one. Obviously there won’t be one if the human race has ceased to exist, which quite a few people think is quite likely, but discounting that, in addressing the question we need to start by understanding what the term “life expectancy” actually means when it is applied to humans. My full answer to this here: quora .com/What-will-be-the-life-expectancy-in-the-year-3000 So the question now is “how would it work in practice?" Say you are 60 years old at the time of the first intervention and that this early and fundamentally imperfect treatment repairs 75% of the accumulated damage and winds the clock back by 25 years. Then 10 years later you would reach the chronological age of 70 but would be biologically only 45 years old and look and feel like a 45 year old. We now come to the vital key to the whole theory which is this, let's say 20 years after the first treatment, when you are chronologically 80 but biologically 55 years old, both your doctor and yourself will realize that the damage that was not repaired in the first treatment combined with the further damage accumulated over the 20 years since is again posing a health risk. At this point it is time for another intervention. It is now that the progress in medicine comes into play because, by the time 20 years has gone by, anti-aging medicine will have progressed significantly and, whilst the first treatment bought you an extra 25 or 30 years by repairing a fair amount of the damage accumulated over your first 60 years, it did not repair it all. 20 years later medical progress will mean that the latest treatment can not only repair all of the damage corrected by the first intervention but also some of the damage that was not able to be repaired 20 years earlier so in essence you are now chronologically 80 (but biologically in your 50s). This means that, whilst you will have aged 20 years chronologically you will be biologically younger after the second intervention than you were after the first. This is the essence of ADGs theory and pretty much any other theory based on rejuvenation and damage repair, essentially, it's a shortcut to radical life extension. It is not a cure but it acknowledges that it does not need to be because it simply buys time and leads to a situation where regular interventions at say 15/20 year intervals with increasing effective treatments could extend life virtually indefinitely. Will it happen? At this point, there is no doubt that it will happen eventually. It's not a question of if but when.

P1 - Longevity escape velocity(LEV) is a hypothetical situation in which one's remaining life expectancy (not LE at birth) is extended longer than the time that is passing. For example, in a given year in which LEV would be maintained, technological advances would increase people's remaining life expectancy more than the year that just went by. From Aubrey De Grey, the founder of LEV foundation himself: "My current estimate is that we will reach LEV, which is tantamount to defeating aging completely, within 12–15 years with 50% probability." "David Sinclair and I both made important contributions to the field 20-25 years ago, which gave us the option to get the media interested in us, and we chose to exercise that option because, and this may shock you, we are not scientists first and foremost, but humanitarians. We view the quest to understand aging better as a means to an end, namely to postpone the ILL-HEALTH of old age as much as possible, thereby saving lives and alleviating suffering on a totally unprecedented scale. When you ask how well respected David is as a scientist, you're actually (unintentionally, to be sure) asking a rather loaded question. Like me, he has chosen to sacrifice some of the respect he could have had, simply in order to save more lives." "I've often been asked what the life expectancy will be in the year 3000. My answer is there very (and I mean VERY) probably won’t be one. Obviously there won’t be one if the human race has ceased to exist, which quite a few people think is quite likely, but discounting that, in addressing the question we need to start by understanding what the term “life expectancy” actually means when it is applied to humans. My full answer to this here: quora .com/What-will-be-the-life-expectancy-in-the-year-3000 So the question now is “how would it work in practice?" Say you are 60 years old at the time of the first intervention and that this early and fundamentally imperfect treatment repairs 75% of the accumulated damage and winds the clock back by 25 years. Then 10 years later you would reach the chronological age of 70 but would be biologically only 45 years old and look and feel like a 45 year old. We now come to the vital key to the whole theory which is this, let's say 20 years after the first treatment, when you are chronologically 80 but biologically 55 years old, both your doctor and yourself will realize that the damage that was not repaired in the first treatment combined with the further damage accumulated over the 20 years since is again posing a health risk. At this point it is time for another intervention. It is now that the progress in medicine comes into play because, by the time 20 years has gone by, anti-aging medicine will have progressed significantly and, whilst the first treatment bought you an extra 25 or 30 years by repairing a fair amount of the damage accumulated over your first 60 years, it did not repair it all. 20 years later medical progress will mean that the latest treatment can not only repair all of the damage corrected by the first intervention but also some of the damage that was not able to be repaired 20 years earlier so in essence you are now chronologically 80 (but biologically in your 50s). This means that, whilst you will have aged 20 years chronologically you will be biologically younger after the second intervention than you were after the first. This is the essence of ADGs theory and pretty much any other theory based on rejuvenation and damage repair, essentially, it's a shortcut to radical life extension. It is not a cure but it acknowledges that it does not need to be because it simply buys time and leads to a situation where regular interventions at say 15/20 year intervals with increasing effective treatments could extend life virtually indefinitely. Will it happen? At this point, there is no doubt that it will happen eventually. It's not a question of if but when.

Longevity escape velocity(LEV) is a hypothetical situation in which one's remaining life expectancy (not LE at birth) is extended longer than the time that is passing. For example, in a given year in which LEV would be maintained, technological advances would increase people's remaining life expectancy more than the year that just went by. From Aubrey De Grey, the founder of LEV foundation himself: "My current estimate is that we will reach LEV, which is tantamount to defeating aging completely, within 12–15 years with 50% probability." "David Sinclair and I both made important contributions to the field 20-25 years ago, which gave us the option to get the media interested in us, and we chose to exercise that option because, and this may shock you, we are not scientists first and foremost, but humanitarians. We view the quest to understand aging better as a means to an end, namely to postpone the ILL-HEALTH of old age as much as possible, thereby saving lives and alleviating suffering on a totally unprecedented scale. When you ask how well respected David is as a scientist, you're actually (unintentionally, to be sure) asking a rather loaded question. Like me, he has chosen to sacrifice some of the respect he could have had, simply in order to save more lives." "I've often been asked what the life expectancy will be in the year 3000. My answer is there very (and I mean VERY) probably won’t be one. Obviously there won’t be one if the human race has ceased to exist, which quite a few people think is quite likely, but discounting that, in addressing the question we need to start by understanding what the term “life expectancy” actually means when it is applied to humans. My full answer to this here: quora .com/What-will-be-the-life-expectancy-in-the-year-3000 So the question now is “how would it work in practice?" Say you are 60 years old at the time of the first intervention and that this early and fundamentally imperfect treatment repairs 75% of the accumulated damage and winds the clock back by 25 years. Then 10 years later you would reach the chronological age of 70 but would be biologically only 45 years old and look and feel like a 45 year old. We now come to the vital key to the whole theory which is this, let's say 20 years after the first treatment, when you are chronologically 80 but biologically 55 years old, both your doctor and yourself will realize that the damage that was not repaired in the first treatment combined with the further damage accumulated over the 20 years since is again posing a health risk. At this point it is time for another intervention. It is now that the progress in medicine comes into play because, by the time 20 years has gone by, anti-aging medicine will have progressed significantly and, whilst the first treatment bought you an extra 25 or 30 years by repairing a fair amount of the damage accumulated over your first 60 years, it did not repair it all. 20 years later medical progress will mean that the latest treatment can not only repair all of the damage corrected by the first intervention but also some of the damage that was not able to be repaired 20 years earlier so in essence you are now chronologically 80 (but biologically in your 50s). This means that, whilst you will have aged 20 years chronologically you will be biologically younger after the second intervention than you were after the first. This is the essence of ADGs theory and pretty much any other theory based on rejuvenation and damage repair, essentially, it's a shortcut to radical life extension. It is not a cure but it acknowledges that it does not need to be because it simply buys time and leads to a situation where regular interventions at say 15/20 year intervals with increasing effective treatments could extend life virtually indefinitely. Will it happen? At this point, there is no doubt that it will happen eventually.

The contrast with the situation on the Atlantic seaboard was remarkable. The British had abolished the slave trade in 1807, slavery itself in 1833. The Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, charged with enforcement, seized 1,600 ships and freed 150,000 Africans between 1807 and 1860. The effect was to reduce transatlantic trafficking to a fraction of what it had been in its eighteenth-century heyday. But as the West African trade collapsed, the East African trade surged to unprecedented levels.

than one hundred black Louisianans exercising political liberty. The duty of protecting citizens’ equal rights, the Court said, “rests alone with the States.” Such judicial conservatism and embrace of states’ rights doctrine, practiced by the justices, all of whom had been appointed by Republican presidents Lincoln and Grant, left a resounding imprint on what remained of Reconstruction.55 In the disputed election of 1876, Tilden in all likelihood won the popular vote by more than two hundred thousand votes and 3 percent, but did not become president. When election returns poured in, it appeared that Hayes had failed, but the three “unredeemed” Southern states of Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina were fiercely and violently contested. With 185 electoral votes needed for victory, without the three disputed states Tilden had 184 and Hayes 166. Both sides claimed they had won and accused their opponents of fraud in the disputed states, although most of the bloodshed and intimidation committed in those states had been against black Republican voters. To resolve this unprecedented situation, Congress established a fifteen-member electoral commission, balanced between Democrats and Republicans. Because Republicans held a majority in the overall Congress, they prevailed 8–7 on repeated attempts to “count” the confused returns. As the midwinter crisis dragged on in Washington, it appeared Hayes would become president. Democrats controlled the House and launched a filibuster to block action on the count.56

Recent technology might appear to have closed the gap between leaders and subordinates. Armed with unprecedented amounts of data, CEOs, politicians, and bureaucrats can peer into what is happening almost as it occurs. As we discussed, this information can seduce leaders into thinking that they understand and can predict complex situations—that they can see what will happen. But the speed and interdependence of our current environment means that what we cannot know has grown even faster than what we can.

In truth, the U.S.-sponsored international “War on Drugs” is a war on poor people, most of them subsistence farmers caught in a dangerous no-win situation. If the goal of the War on Drugs is to discourage or prevent drug use, it has failed. Among young people in North America drug use has reached unprecedented levels and enjoys unprecedented tolerance. According to figures quoted by Norm Stamper, the number of Americans who have used illegal drugs stands at 77 million. The U.S. Department of Justice reports that the number of prisoners has tripled, from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 476 per 100,000 in 2002, the vast majority being incarcerated after drug convictions. From 1980 to 1999 the annual number of Americans arrested for drug offences nearly tripled, from 580,900 to 1,532,200. “That’s a lot of enemies,” comments the ex–police chief. If the War’s purpose is to protect people and communities or to improve their quality of life, it fails disastrously. As the personal histories of Downtown Eastside addicts illustrate and as statistics show, the human costs are devastating. “One [result] which is especially cruel and will have a terrible impact on American life for many generations is the large increase in the number of women incarcerated for drug violations,” U.S. District Court Judge John T. Curtin has pointed out. From 1980 to 1996, there has been a 400 percent increase in the number of women prisoners. Many of those jailed for drug violations were mules or assistants. I venture that none was a principal organizer. Many are the mothers of small children who will be left without maternal care, and most probably without any parental care at all…The engine of punitive punishment of mothers will haunt this nation for many years to come. If the War’s aim is to end or even curtail the international drug trade, it has failed there, too. If it is to suppress the cultivation of plants from which the major substances of abuse are derived: once again, abject failure. Truth, once again, is among the inevitable casualties of war.

It was the development of the sugar plantation colonies of the Caribbean beginning in the early seventeenth century that led to a dramatic escalation of the international slave trade and to an unprecedented increase in the importance of slavery within Africa itself. In the sixteenth century, probably about 300,000 slaves were traded in the Atlantic. They came mostly from Central Africa, with heavy involvement of Kongo and the Portuguese based farther south in Luanda, now the capital of Angola. During this time, the trans-Saharan slave trade was still larger, with probably about 550,000 Africans moving north as slaves. In the seventeenth century, the situation reversed. About 1,350,000 Africans were sold as slaves in the Atlantic trade, the majority now being shipped to the Americas. The numbers involved in the Saharan trade were relatively unchanged. The eighteenth century saw another dramatic increase, with about 6,000,000 slaves being shipped across the Atlantic and maybe 700,000 across the Sahara. Adding the figures up over periods and parts of Africa, well over 10,000,000 Africans were shipped out of the continent as slaves. Map 15 (this page) gives some sense of the scale of the slave trade. Using modern country boundaries, it depicts estimates of the cumulative extent of slavery between 1400 and 1900 as a percent of population in 1400. Darker colors show more intense slavery. For example, in Angola, Benin, Ghana, and Togo, total cumulative slave exports amounted to more than the entire population of the country in 1400. The sudden appearance of Europeans all around the coast of Western and Central Africa eager to buy slaves could not but have a transformative impact on African societies. Most slaves who were shipped to the Americas were war captives subsequently transported to the coast. The increase in warfare was fueled by huge imports of guns and ammunition, which the Europeans exchanged for slaves. By 1730 about 180,000 guns were being imported every year just along the West African coast, and between 1750 and the early nineteenth century, the British alone sold between 283,000 and 394,000 guns

All of these frameworks help us to understand why the Stonewall Riots occurred when and where they did. Some aspects of the uprising were spontaneous and unprecedented. The homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s and its radicalization in the second half of the 1960s created the preconditions for revolt. The long history of bar-based resistance practices created a repertoire of rebellious responses. Other social movements provided revolutionary inspiration and influence. And the combination of heightened expectations and dashed hopes that many felt as the country transitioned from a period of liberal reform to one of conservative backlash—and that LGBT people experienced in the context of a new wave of police raids, violent killings, and local vigilantism—created an explosive situation that erupted on 28 June.

What a wise man can do, that can’t be done by someone who’s merely clever, is make a right judgement in an unprecedented situation. ​