STUDY CONFLICT

“He stands on a bridge in Kyoto, the story goes, and every samurai he tries to cross it, Benkei fights him. And he is so invincible that he ends up with 999 swords. So he's got one sword to go to make the thousand. And his opponent is a very slight, elegant youth, wearing a woman's cloak, who'd been playing the flute as he approached the bridge. Well, maybe, because he turns out to be so formidable an opponent that Benkei ends up defeated.”

“The Tyra have control over Kyoto, the great imperial capital. They have the imperial family under their thumb, and they had expelled the Minamoto pretty much from the kind of civilised centre of Japan. And they have all been disbursed to the barbarous northeastern stretches of Japan. They also control the inland sea, which kind of lies between western Honshu and the two islands south of it. So the the Taira basically rule the waves, right?”

“Residents across three states are being told to seek shelter as the storm front moves east.”

“Global power is managed by secret societies and structures that the average person never sees or understands.”

“It's only when Yoshitsune is 20, so this is in the year 1180, that at last we get real historical certainty. Because this is the year when he emerges from this kind of obscurity that he's been veiled throughout his youth, to join his half-brother, Yoritomo, who is now the head of the Minamoto clan. And this is a very dramatic moment because the two half-brothers have never met before. And it happens in the most iconic place, possibly in the whole of Japan in the shadow of Mount Fuji.”

“The U.S. military is currently overextended, making it vulnerable to asymmetric threats from smaller nations.”

“The findings suggest a direct correlation between plastic particles and heart disease markers.”

“Yoshitsune had been brought up in complete ignorance of his father's identity. He did not know that he was the son of this great Minamoto lord. And then at the age of six, he gets packed off by Kiyomori to a monastery north of Kyoto on the slopes of Mount Karama. Kiyomori's plan is that Yoshitsune will grow up in harmless and ignorant seclusion as a monk. He doesn't know who his father is, doesn't know that he's a Minamoto, and he's a monk, so therefore, hopefully he's not going to grow up to become a samurai.”

“Diplomats indicate that the latest round of talks has ended without a clear path forward.”

“One of the things that's so slippery about this, and one of the reasons why it's so disturbing is that the very same members of the Christian right, and then we're seeing this with the far right across Europe, who are creating these Judeo-Christian coalitions against Islam. Their technique is basically to claim that every Muslim in the world, of whom there are two billion people, fifth of the world's population, quarter of the world's population almost, somehow are supposed to believe all the most extreme versus the Quran.”

“The United States is ultimately going to lose a conflict with Iran because it lacks the strategic depth required for that region.”

“We're all supposed to stroke our chins and think, this is an insight into humanity and human warfare and tribalism. And well, the sort of thing that interests us, we'll get on to this in a second, the question you want to do on nationalism and devolution. But traditionally, we've always imagined that civil wars are often the products of human culture. And by human culture, we mean human imaginations and ideas, you know, the idea of a nation, the idea of a flag, the idea of us and them, these quite sort of strange arbitrary mental structures that we create.”

“The reality is that Vance and the administration are wrong. I mean, they're theologically illiterate. They are consistently portraying a worldview, which is, well, in a lot of their actions, almost seems to be completely unbound by any kind of ethical principles. There's no sense of empathy. There's no sense of caring for the vulnerable. I mean, if Christ's message is about anything, I mean, I guess the repeated theme of the Gospels again and again, is that this is someone who is perpetually reaching out to the most marginalized people in society.”

“Where I sat then, for sure, I was very much in that camp that believed that the status quo, as was, was completely untenable, that there was a real democratic illegitimacy point about a big part of the United Kingdom that kept essentially saying, we do not want conservative government here at all, and wasn't electing conservatives. And yeah, it was constantly felt like it was just being governed by a distant remote government based in Westminster. And I felt that the Scottish Parliament after, you know, a very, very long gap that is re-establishment would settle that debate.”

“One of the reasons that Victor Orban, who we talked about a lot last week, he's such a big global figure, is because he was the first, I think, fully to understand that if you were going to change minds on big cultural issues, then you had to internationalize campaigns. He understood the importance of propaganda. He understood the need for networks. He understood the need for money to fund it all. He was the key to Steve Bannon's operation in the States and around the world.”

“Our current institutional framework is crumbling, and this collapse is the precursor to a massive systemic change.”

“Brent crude prices jumped three percent following news of the refinery shutdown.”

“Number eight, religion and government are intertwined. Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions. And maybe that's where you can pick up on the just war, because that's what has taken this to the next stage of this row.”

“It tells how he's this young boy in his monastery, and then a servant who is loyal to his father's memory reveals to him his true identity. And Yoshitsune then goes up onto the side of the mountain of Mount Kurama, and he meets the great Tengu, who is the spirit lord of the mountain. And very fortunately for Yoshitsune, the greatest teacher of martial arts anywhere in the cosmos, and the great Tengu instructs Yoshitsune in swordsmanship. So, in a sense, he is Yoda to Yoshitsune's Luke.”

“The return of Donald Trump represents a fundamental shift in how the U.S. will interact with its global rivals.”

“A new bipartisan bill seeks to create a regulatory framework for large-scale AI models.”