Academics From England

"There may have been some connection between his convalescent vow of crusade and the arrest by his orders, in May 1287, of all those enemies of the Christian faith, the Jews, in England. Their subsequent release on payment of a fine of 20,000 marks is evidence that he did not allow religion to interfere with business principles."

"So far as the popes were concerned it was Edward I’s habitual practice to become enthusiastic over crusading propositions whenever he was in want of money and thereby to obtain grants of clerical subsidies, which he promptly applied to other purposes."

"Law, considered historically, may be divided into two branches, Theory or Legislation, and Practice or Administration."

"Although he must have seen that the position was serious it was impossible for him to realise the disastrous effect that the death of the Maid of Norway was to have upon the history of England. The discussion of hypothetical history is not very profitable, but it may be pointed out that if the marriage planned between Maid of Norway and Edward had been consummated the union of England and Scotland might have been anticipated by several centuries, the wearisome and disastrous wars between those two kingdoms would at least have been avoided, and also the Hundred Years’ War with France, arising out of Edward’s actual marriage with Isabel of France. Had Maid of Norway lived Bannockburn, Crécy and Agincourt would never have been fought."

"No more was heard of the proposal for this extraordinary extension of popular control, but the attacks on the Treasurer, instigated by Winchelsey, were renewed a year later when Sir John de Lovetot accused him of infringements of most of the Ten Commandments and of a few other offences, such as simony, which had been overlooked by the compilers of the Decalogue. As a result Treasurer was suspended and compelled to pay a visit to the papal court, where, after he had been well fleeced, his innocence was established in June 1303. By way of showing his own zeal for the good governance of the Church the Pope at the same time authorised the slandered Treasurer to bestow benefices upon two of his nephews who had reached the mature ages of ten and twelve years respectively."

"Eleanor of Castile is the most attractive personality in the long list of English queens, her only rival being Philippa of Hainault."

"Recently the so-called Arab spring of 2011 provided an inspiration and a catalyst for the Occupy Movements that have spread rapidly throughout the world, and perhaps significantly, awakened political forces in the United States on the left for the first time in a broad-based way since the 1960s... What is remarkable about these occupations and the challenge to the politics of neo-liberal capitalism that they represent, is that they have gained the support of the vast majority of people in every country where the occupations have occurred. It shows that today’s youth – and the population more generally – are not fooled by false promises and have developed a fairly radical political economy perspective on the world, appreciating its deep injustices and opposing the almost obscene levels of inequality that have developed."

"We can build AI to represent every corner of society… we can use it to ensure we build a less biased experience"

"We all have an innate desire to do something for humanity"

"And fourth, crucially, for true AI, you need to have an AI architect who understands how to glue these three components together: the data, the machine learning, and the optimization to build adaptive systems. And at the moment, it’s the CIO who is trying to step into that role of overseeing this. But I don’t know of many companies out there that have true AI architects. For now, companies are managing maybe part of this, but not all four categories."

"I’ve always been interested in what it means to be human, and in the nature of the universe. I did my undergraduate [degree] in AI and my master’s in AI, and my Ph.D. in AI, so I guess I’ve been doing 19 years’ worth of activity in AI."

"Digital twins are the next evolution of digital transformation. To be able to adapt more quickly to a changing world, companies need to create a digital replica of all of their physical assets, their infrastructure and people. Once you have a twin, you can start to run experiments and simulate scenarios to operate your business more effectively. Further down the line we may even have AI setting those experiments, and running experiments without the aid of the human. The role of the strategist and of leadership is to develop a strong vision and purpose, i.e., [determining] what key objective the organization needs to aspire to. I hope that organizations will realize that this objective needs to be much more sophisticated than a financial return to be able to attract, empower, and motivate talent. Exceptional talent wants to align with a strong purpose and inspirational leaders."

"Next is recruiting data scientists who have the machine learning and statistics skills to find insights from the data. Then, the third is [finding] what I call the decision scientists: people who can understand how to make decisions or solve optimization problems that leverage those insights."

"There is a bit of a bubble in AI. I don’t think that it’s going to go to waste. I think that all this investment will be additive, but there’s an over-expectation of what machine learning can bring right now, because of a lack of appreciation of the fact that machine learning is only part of the journey. And the next part of the journey for most big companies is optimization and decision making."

"There are two definitions of AI, and the more popular one is the weakest. This first definition [concerns] machines that can do tasks that were traditionally in the realm of human beings. Over the past decade, due to advances in technologies like deep learning, we have started to build machines that can do things like recognize objects in images, and understand and respond to natural language. Humans are the most intelligent things we know in the universe, so when we start to see machines do tasks once constrained to the human domain, then we assume that is intelligence.But I would argue that humans are not that intelligent. Humans are good at finding patterns in, at most, four dimensions, and we’re terrible at solving problems that involve more than seven things. Machines can find patterns in thousands of dimensions and can solve problems that involve millions of things. Even these technologies aren’t AI — they’re just algorithms. They do the same thing over and over again. In fact, my definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result."

"Hierarchies are not structured for good decision making"

"The best definition of intelligence — artificial or human — that I’ve found is goal-directed adaptive behavior. I use goal-directed in the sense of trying to achieve an objective, which in business might be to roster your staff more effectively, or to allocate marketing spend to sell as [much] ice cream as possible. It might be whatever goal you’re seeking."

"As [futurist] Roy Amara noted, the impact of technology tends to be overestimated in the short run and underestimated in the long run. For now, you can probably ignore the idea of having adaptive systems in your business. That will come later. In the short run, you can use AI to remove the friction of mundane and repetitive tasks across the organization. If used correctly, this can absolutely change your business. But there’s a lot of hype out there, and a lot of people investing in these technologies don’t know what they’re doing."

"There are four categories of AI skills. The first category is the data. Companies should ask: Are we getting our data into the shape where people can consume it? There are lots of companies out there that are throwing money at building data lakes — that’s all the raw data that a company holds from code generation to sales information — because they think at some point in the future data lakes will be useful. That’s not a bad investment, but I would also suggest that you need to be building applications straight away on top of that data lake that drive value into your business. Companies…should be thinking about building digital twins of their organizations, i.e., a perfect digital representation of their physical assets, like their infrastructure and employees."

"The world is changing so quickly, it’s very difficult to actually have all the necessary data points to be able to help you forecast accurately. At the moment, that’s still in the realm of human beings."

"AI will be disruptive, but will ultimately provide opportunities."

"Obviously, terrestrial mining does have very serious and significant impacts. But, largely speaking, they are much more controllable in a terrestrial setting. They are much more visible — so that third parties can verify them and make sure that mining companies are adhering to . Whereas, they would be far harder to see and verify and attribute to individual mines in the deep sea."

"Roberts is a and an occasional columnist for the '. His command of research is prodigious, and his generosity with example is prodigal. He is good on the big picture, but he understands even better how to burnish an argument with gleaming detail. ... Roberts has a way of bringing marine disaster closer to home. The long summer vacation of British parliamentarians is not a reward for their legislative labours but a consequence of the , in which a choked with sewage and refuse became so vile that parliament's windows were hung with sheets soaked with bleach. ... He is good on the horrors of oil spills but he points out that the Gulf of Mexico's fishing fleets kill more marine life in a day than 's notorious ' disaster did in months. Oil companies are easy to demonise but the biggest source of oil pollution is either run off from land or directly injected by the two stroke engine of the recreational boat: the floating fuel and oils concentrate on the surface, poisoning the eggs and hungry larvae of hundreds of species."

"patterns were used to map dispersal routes of from 18 sites in the . The sites varied, both as sources and recipients of larvae, by an order of magnitude. It is likely that sites supplied copiously from “upstream” reef areas will be more resilient to recruitment overfishing, less susceptible to species loss, and less reliant on local management than places with little upstream reef. The mapping of connectivity patterns will enable the identification of beneficial management partnerships among nations and the design of networks of interdependent reserves."

"More than two centuries have passed since 's discovery. passed from American to French, then to hands, but it was never colonized, perhaps because it was too remote even by Pacific standards. It was briefly a U.S. Naval air command base in World War II and the debris of conflict still liter the islands and lagoons. But underwater, it remains much as Fanning described it. Palmyra is one of the last places on this planet where shallow water marine life is still as varied, rich, and abundant as it was in the eighteenth century. A diver stepping into the seas around this today is able to take a trip back in time to an age when fishing had not yet touched life in the sea."

"I knew the moment that I put my head underwater in a coral reef in that there was no other career possibility for me."

"There are few better guides to the glories of s than Callum Roberts. Reef Life is a vibrant memoir of the joys, as well as the grind, of a research career beginning in the 1980s that has spanned a golden age of coral reef science. It is also a fine introduction to the ecology of reefs and the existential threats they now face. Roberts is well equipped for the task. He is chief scientific adviser to ', and has given us two of the best books in the last 15 years about the ecology of the sea and its fate in human hands: An Unnatural History of the Sea and Ocean of Life. Roberts revels in the details of life on a coral reef."

"... when you take into account that third dimension of depth, then 97% of the volume of living space on Earth is made up by ocean."

"I tend to read a lot of life stories of artists or creative people who I find inspiring. With this, I was reading about Alasdair Gray and Francis Bacon and . I tried to find ways to appropriate elements of their lives and create a viable character of my own. I try to build a character out of found materials and my own personal reflections, to mould them into something that’s believable and authentic — as authentic as fiction can be, anyway."

"I do a lot of thinking about the arc of the story before I begin—who the s are at the beginning, who they will become by the end—but I never have a rigid plan. Instead, I do the plot-making equivalent of looking up the journey on the map before I set off, noting where all the important junctions and turn-offs are, then putting the map in the glovebox; and if I happen to encounter a more direct or scenic route along the way, or if any landmarks I thought I would stop and see get bypassed, then I don’t worry too much about it—as long as the journey is interesting and I reach my intended destination. Then I go back and delete all the tiresome road travel metaphors I’ve put in."

"I’ve always been a relentlessly creative person. Creativity has saved me from mental trauma. I’ve always been amazed at how a piece of music, a feat of architecture or a picture could move me. I have looked into what the origins of creativity might be, whether there’s a scientific explanation for it, or whether it’s something less knowable. And since there’s no definitive answer to it, it’s grown more compelling. I also find it difficult to write about characters who don’t have an instinct to create something. I always want to write about people who are looking to add more to the world than they’re taking from it."

"Lord, it's a hard life, son, I know that it is,"

"Both the trappings and the myths of American Nazism reflect the behavior of a persecuted religious sect that prepares for militant action against a fallen world."

"What is esotericism? From the Enlightenment until the middle of the last century, magic, astrology, and occultism, to take a few of the subjects now considered under the rubric of esotericism, were generally perceived as survivals of superstition and irrationalism. The intellectual status of such topics was denigrated, and they were kept in epistemological quarantine lest they cause a relapse from progressive rationalism. Just as the established churches had once excluded heterodox doctrine as heresy, the modern post-Enlightenment world rejected magic and occultism as a violation of reason, its dominant criterion of acceptable discourse."

"Outside a purely secular frame of reference, Nazism was felt to be the embodiment of evil in a modern twentieth-century regime, a monstrous pagan relapse in the Christian community of Europe."

"RACE IS THE lodestone of the Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism, the guiding principle of their historical and political worldview. American neo-Nazism, represented by George Lincoln Rockwell and his successors, adopted the Nazi view of the Jews as the ferment of liberal society, variously promoting communism, civil rights and race mixing."

"The risks of racist religiosity are great. By projecting grievances, fears and anxieties onto the "shadow" figures of other races, religious transcendence is stunted and perverted into the dynamics of exclusion and hatred. Instead of genuine spirituality, there is partiality, separation, restriction. A rigid self-righteousness leads down into the spiritual basement of a primitive dualism, where pseudo-salvation depends on the elimination of the Other. The political projection of religious Manichaeism onto human differences inevitably leads to strife and violence. Whenever human groups are interpreted as absolute categories of good and evil, light and darkness, both the human community and humanity itself are diminished. Such degraded religion never leads to light but only into darkness."

"As long as the West upholds an image of the free human being within an integrated vision of God, heaven, and earth, esotericism will undoubtedly remain a feature of its intellectual and religious landscape."

"Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism posit powerful mythologies to negate the decline of white power in the world. The cultural pessimism of Julius Evola, Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano all express the fear of (Aryan) white submergence in a degenerate age dominated by social and racial inferiors. Their adoption of Hindu chronology is intended to plot the curve of that decline into the Kali Yuga with the millennial promise of regeneration through a new golden age in the cycle of the ages. Francis Parker Yockey likewise articulates a mythic philosophy of history, whereby the European races are (temporarily) disabled by alien Jewish influences and prevented from fulfilling their destiny in a powerful new Imperium or world empire."

"For historians trained exclusively in the evaluation of concrete events, causes, and rational purposes, this netherworld of fantasy may seem delusive. They would argue that politics and historical change are driven only by real material interests. However, fantasies can achieve a causal status once they have been institutionalized in beliefs, values, and social groups. Fantasies are also an important symptom of impending cultural changes and political action."

"We cannot know what the future holds for Western multicultural societies, but the experiment did not fare well in Austria-Hungary, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The multiracial challenges in liberal Western states are much greater, and it is evident that affirmative action and multiculturalism are even leading to a more diffuse hostility toward liberalism. From the retrospective viewpoint of a potential authoritarian future in 2020 or 2030, these Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism may be documented as early symptoms of major divisive changes in our present-day Western democracies."

"Powerful ideas of anti-Semitism as a form of world-rejecting gnosis, Aryan paganism as a global religion of white supremacism, and Hitler as a divine being within a cosmic order together compose an unholy theology of the Aryan myth. Seen in this light, neo-Nazism has all the characteristics of an international sect with a religious cult. There are devotional practices, initiates and martyrs, prophecies and millennial expectations, and even relics."

"All nature has intrinsic worth and equality, and whatever science that remains should be nondominating."

"THE RELIGIOUS AND MYTHIC elements of German National Socialism often made the Third Reich resemble a cult in power."

"The cybernetic encirclement of man and his complete divorce from nature could well foster a more fundamental alienation. In a congested and automated world, Savitri Devi's sentimental love of animals and hatred of the masses may find new followers. The pessimism of the Kali Yuga and her vision of a pristine new Aryan order possess a perennial appeal in times of uncertainty and change."

"It is a tragic paradox that the colourful variety of peoples in the Habsburg empire, a direct legacy of its dynastic supra-national past, should have nurtured the germination of genocidal racist doctrines in a new age of nationalism and social change."

"The Nazi dreams did not come true. The Great Hall of Berlin with its enormous dome was not completed in 1950; the Wewelsburg was not reconstructed as a gigantic SS vatican by the 1960s; the giant motorways and broad gauge railways as far as the Caucasus and the Urals were never laid; Western Russia was not transformed into a huge colonial territory for German soldier-peasants; nor did the SS libensborn stud-farms produce 150 million pure-blooded Germans for the New Order. The glorious One Thousand Year Reich actually ended a mere twelve years after its proclamation with the military defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. But even if these grandiose plans and megalomaniac visions had not gone beyond the stage of maps, memoranda and miniature models, the Third Reich had accomplished sufficient demolition of the old order in Europe for it to remain an outrage which still haunts literature, films, and the memory of survivors."

"Henry’s major problem was that the local communities of England rather liked the idea that the ruler needed their consent if he were to rule legitimately. It was no longer enough that Henry was God’s anointed; the reforms that had followed in the wake of the Provisions of Oxford had created a widespread expectation that consent could and should be a political force in national politics. Simon and his baronial colleagues had not acted alone in their reforms, but had tapped into the grievances of the county communities of thirteenth-century England. Indeed, it was these local grievances that gave the reformers their political weight."

"In thirteenth-century Europe, battles were rare, in part because they occurred only when both sides felt certain that they had the decisive advantage (it was relatively straightforward to avoid battle when necessary) and in part because the quickest way to win a battle was to kill or capture the opposition commander; unlike their modern counterparts, medieval war leaders led from the front and, as a result, were subject to more than their fair share of attention. A leader had to be certain of success if he were to engage the enemy in a battle."

"In the September Parliament, Henry made the announcement that the lands of Simon and his supporters were forfeit, and that the main beneficiaries were to be members of the royal family. In this act we are once again reminded that many thirteenth-century men and women had a tenuous grasp of the ethics of rulership, despite their repeated public pronouncements to the contrary: the kingdom was put there by God in order that they might predate on it."