“Men and women of the United States armed forces in armored vehicles patrol the streets of Baghdad. They pass in the way of so many who have come before them: the Egyptian charioteers of Ramses II, the Macedonian phalanx of Alexander the Great, the Roman legionnaires of Caesar and Trajan, the Crusaders of Richard the Lion-Hearted, the legionnaires of Napoleon, the Camel Corps of Lawrence of Arabia. All of these have come through the Middle East. Many of them have come with the best of intentions, by their lights, to bring stability, even freedom to the Middle East. All have passed away. The Middle East has been the graveyard of empires.” - - J. ...

There is a life cycle to empire - a historical evolution in the birth, maintenance, and loss of world preeminence. Conceived brutally through conquest, or peacefully as in the transfer of power from Great Britain to America after the first and second world wars, the birth of a new empire is always led by the relocation of major centers of knowledge in science, technology and engineering. This is so because the long term outcome of leadership in these fields is a genuine increase in human wealth — in the ability to sustain ever more humans with an ever rising standard of living. To be certain the wealth has often been inequitably distributed, but ...

The investment - - and the enablement - - began 3.6 million years ago in Tanzania when two early humans stood upright and left the “Laetoli Footprints” in the wet volcanic ash. We do not know what these humans knew, but they had mastered enough of their environment to survive, because we are here today. We owe them a great debt. A million years passed. Hammerstones and sharp stone cutting flakes were in use. Another million years passed and handaxes arrived. Hearths appeared 790,000 years ago. Humans had learned to control fire. Two hundred thousand years ago innovation in stone technology accelerated. Points were hafted to shafts to make ...

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to ...

  “Meet the Campaign to Fix the Debt, the billionaire-funded project that uses Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles as figureheads for a fear mongering campaign to convince Americans that the deficits the United States has run throughout its history have suddenly metastasized into “a cancer that will destroy this country from within.” It is the latest incarnation of Wall Street mogul Pete Peterson’s long campaign to get Congress and the White House to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while providing tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.”                                          ...

“Commercial banks create money, in the form of bank deposits, by making new loans. When a bank makes a loan, for example to someone taking out a mortgage to buy a house, it does not typically do so by giving them thousands of pounds worth of banknotes. Instead, it credits their bank account with a bank deposit of the size of the mortgage. At that moment, new money is created. For this reason, some economists have referred to bank deposits as ‘fountain pen money’, created at the stroke of bankers’ pens when they approve loans.” - - Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1 “Thus it can now be said with confidence for the first time ...