Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

A mass rally in Pyongyang this week to swear allegiance to Mr Kim jun­ior on behalf of the 1.2m members of the army, made the pledge to "wipe out the enemies to the last one if they intrude into the inviolable sky, land and seas of the country even 0.001mm."

When the tribes of ancient Israel defeated the Midianites, the vic­tors got the losers' 675,000 sheep, 72,000 oxen, 61,000 asses and 32,000 female virgins (males and non-virgin women were slaugh­tered), as well as the gold and jewels. The biblical account sug­gests that, in that era at least, this was a standard post-conflict resolution of property questions.

Diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments (Frederick the Great).

What matters is the ability to knit everything together on the bat­tlefield through what the Chinese called "informatisation" and what is known in the West as "unified C4ISR". (The four Cs are command, control, communications, and computers; ISR stands for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; the Pentagon loves its abbreviations.)

I refer you to some apt lines uttered by Orson Welles in "The Third Man": "In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

The memos gave the CIA licence to use "enhanced" techniques derived from American training advice to pilots and other per­sonnel on how to withstand torture if they should fall into enemy hands. They are shocking for their bureaucratic punctiliousness. They parse the degrees of pain that would constitute forbidden torture ("an intensity akin to the pain accompanying serious physical injury"). They set out in incongruous detail the limits of abuse. A prisoner could be deprived of sleep, but for no more than 180 hours before being allowed to rest for eight. He could be stripped naked but only if the room was warmer than 68°F (20 °C). He could be doused in water but it had to be potable. He could be waterboarded with cold (saline) water poured onto his face but each application should not last more than 40 seconds, there should be no more than six applications per session, no session could last more than two hours and there could be only two ses­sions in 24 hours. One prisoner, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the operational head of the September 11th 2001 attacks on America, was waterboarded 183 times.

The world is more stable when one nation dominates, especially when it is a nation like America. If American leadership does collapse, what then.

You cannot make war on war and on your neighbor at the same time.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi had to pack his bags to leave Hiroshima after a three-month assignment as an engineer in the Mitsubishi shipyard; there were goodbyes to say at the office, then a 200-mile train journey back to Nagasaki to his wife Hisako and Katsutoshi, his baby son. It was a beautiful August day and he noticed an aircraft circling, and two parachutes dropping down. His status was recognised by the Japanese government: he became officially (though there had been more than 100 others) the only nijyuu hibakusha, or twice-victim of the atom bomb.

America is estimated to have over 33,000 gangs, with approxi­mately 1.4m members; the great bulk of these are in cities.

Teddy Roosevelt's advice to speak softly and carry a big stick.

American Congressman says he is a friend on Monday and sends money to extremists on Tuesday.

He made wild bets, too, on anything, as long as he was likely to win. He bet on which of five sugar cubes a fly would land on; whether a stray cat could carry a Coke bottle across a room; whether he could beat Bobby Riggs at table tennis played with iron skillets, and Minnesota Fats at pool with a broom; whether he dared ride a camel through the fanciest casino in Marakesh, and whether he could hang on to a horse's tail for a quarter of a mile. He won them all until, as the song said, even the Devil wouldn't bet with him.

That Chongqing's dirty linen was aired in front of American dip­lomats on his watch may matter more than the dirt itself.

The telegraph operator — incoming telegrams to large Berlin banks — orders of securities to be purchased — speculator informed first.

Even given more money, soldiers and equipment, the formula for success in foreign wars remains mysterious. Iraq, Afghanistan and even Libya have hardly been unqualified successes for West­ern intervention.