Sublime

let’s examine two of the best-known myths of history: the Code of Hammurabi of c.1776 BC, which served as a cooperation manual for hundreds of thousands of ancient Babylonians; and the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 AD, which today still serves as a cooperation manual for hundreds of millions of modern Americans.

Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions.

The replacement of colonial rubber with synthetic rubber was a sort of magic. Yet it wasn’t the only rabbit that chemists yanked from their hats. What’s extraordinary is how many raw materials the United States weaned itself off during the war. Silk, hemp, jute, camphor, cotton, wool, pyrethrum, gutta-percha, tin, copper, tung oil—for one after ano

Therefore the moral standard that must be used in evaluating the Americans is the degree to which they imposed destruction on the Indians and the degree to which disease and Indian collaboration were involved. As in the history of any continent, the history of warfare in North America is far more ancient and complex than simply one nation being at

crisis of government in

within thirty years of Columbus’s first American landfall, the conquest of the Aztec Empire by Cortés and his company of adventurers signalled that European intrusion into the Americas held a different significance from the piecemeal colonization of Europe’s oceanic periphery or Portugal’s hijacking of Asian trade.

Europeans were constantly squabbling for advantage; societies of the Northeast Woodlands, by contrast, guaranteed one another the means to an autonomous life – or at least ensured no man or woman was subordinated to any other.

THE MACHINE BEGINS TO SELF-DESTRUCT