Bureaucracies are progressive. meaning they have a burning fear that someone. somewhere, is doing something without permission.

In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action.

Of course most people underestimate the warrior characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman peoples anyway. It takes a heap of piety to keep a Viking from wanting to go sack a city.

A Dark Age is not just a period in which people no longer know how to do things. The real key is that people no longer remember that certain things can be done at all.

Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, works only as long as it works; it does not know what to do if deterrence fails, for it envisions no defensive capabilities. A deterrent works until it is needed; then one needs defenses.

We have for years been building a society in which everybody plunders everybody, and while we are weary of being plundered, we enjoy the plunder.

If you submit a search of the following phrase on Google, you get over four hundred returns, and they are often very strange ones: "I have more information in one place than anybody in the world."