Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible
government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility
to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to
befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt
politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. — Theodore Roosevelt in 1906

One did not accidentally graduate from top-tier schools. One strove to get in and to maintain grades once there, and to do that, one usually needed to be a master at conformity. To excel in all the accepted conventions. No, the truly different thinkers often went unnoticed.

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the others he wore simple work clothes — flannels and jeans with work boots. He was tall and handsome, with blue eyes and dirty-blond hair and a Donegal-style beard running along his broad jaw. He was athletically built with a charismatic, compelling look — like some rustic fashion model. And he had a vaguely familiar appearance. Grady felt certain he’d seen him somewhere before. Grady eyed the man warily. “Are you the foreman

...Christ figure is a recurring motif in many cultures; death and rebirth; symbolic turning of the seasons, all that crap. Wyle E. Coyote was a fucking Christ figure, man, and Acme Company was Rome, baby. A pause. "You can find it in Hindu legend, Sumerian mythology. Shit, you find it in modern folklore, like Rip van Winkle."

nodded. “I see that you’re a first-level Fighter. Which makes it all the more

Free people have a natural advantage on frontiers. Authoritarian subjects wait for permission, but free people take action and innovate. They can rapidly expand human presence in cislunar space — before totalitarian powers seize the L-points and hold them against us.

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I have always held a deep admiration for the founding fathers of your republic. Your Constitution and your Bill of Rights were an incredible gift to mankind. Although lately America appears to have strayed from the path set forth by its founders.

Democracy is a rare thing, Pete. You hear how democracies are all over the place, but it isn’t really true. They call it democracy. They use the vocabulary, the props, but it’s theater. What your Founding Fathers did was the real thing. But the problem with democracies is they’re hard to maintain. Especially in the face of high technology. How do you preserve your freedom when the powerful can use software bots to detect dissent and deploy drone aircraft to take out troublemakers? Human beings are increasingly unnecessary to wield power in the modern world.

They’d had so much more luck investing in eccentric B and C students. The rationale was simple: Those heavily invested in the status quo had difficulty thinking outside of it — and were often tainted by it. Especially when success and peer approval beckoned. One did not accidentally graduate from top-tier schools. One strove to get in and to maintain grades once there, and to do that, one usually needed to be a master at conformity. To excel in all the accepted conventions.

even if today we reduced carbon emissions to zero — and we’re far from that — the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere will cause the Earth to keep warming for a century or more.

Synthetic biology was the transistor of the twenty-first century. Yet political realities in America made it increasingly unfeasible for entrepreneurs there to tinker with the building blocks of life. Every cluster of human cells was viewed as a baby in America. A quarter of the population wasn’t vaccinated. A majority of Americans didn’t believe in evolution. Social-media-powered opinions carried more influence than peer-reviewed scientific research.

Instead of adapting, their leaders clung to power and strove instead to be the last ones to starve to death. The Mayan civilization in South America did the same, and I expect our own civilization will do likewise. The people behind the modern global economy will prevent any meaningful change until it’s too late.” The avatar looked to Sebeck. “But the question that needs to be answered is whether civilization’s inability to adapt is a failure of leadership — or an unwillingness in humanity itself.

Anything before you’re thirty-five is new and exciting, and anything after that is proof the world’s going to hell.