The Inevitable Law

"The Law Inevitable" by Louis Couperus chronicles the story of a 23-year-old Dutch divorcee, Cornélie de Retz van Loo, from an upper-class The Hague background who seeks to start a new emancipated and culturally fulfilling life in Italy. Romance, and a newfound freedom cause van Loo to get a taste of the excitement life has to offer that she almost lost out on has she stayed in her dull and dead-end marriage.

“A remarkably nuanced, empathetic, and well-crafted work of journalism, [The Inevitable] explores what might be called the right-to-die underground, a world of people who wonder why a medical system that can do so much to try to extend their lives can do so little to help them end those lives in a peaceful and painless way.”—Brooke Jarvis, The New Yorker More states and countries are passing right-to-die laws that allow the sick and suffering to end their lives at pre-planned moments, with the help of physicians. But even where these laws exist, they leave many people behind. The Inevitable moves beyond margins of the law to the people who are meticulously planning their final hours—far from medical offices, legislative chambers, hospital ethics committees, and polite conversation. It also shines a light on the people who help them: loved ones and, sometimes, clandestine groups on the Internet that together form the “euthanasia underground.” Katie Engelhart, a veteran journalist, focuses on six people representing different aspects of the right to die debate. Two are doctors: a California physician who runs a boutique assisted death clinic and has written more lethal prescriptions than anyone else in the U.S.; an Australian named Philip Nitschke who lost his medical license for teaching people how to end their lives painlessly and peacefully at “DIY Death” workshops. The other four chapters belong to people who said they wanted to die because they were suffering unbearably—of old age, chronic illness, dementia, and mental anguish—and saw suicide as their only option. Spanning North America, Europe, and Australia, The Inevitable offers a deeply reported and fearless look at a morally tangled subject. It introduces readers to ordinary people who are fighting to find dignity and authenticity in the final hours of their lives.

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestseller is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control – from the author of The Laws of Human Nature. In the book that People magazine proclaimed “beguiling” and “fascinating,” Robert Greene and Joost Elffers have distilled three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by drawing from the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz and also from the lives of figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to P.T. Barnum. Some laws teach the need for prudence (“Law 1: Never Outshine the Master”), others teach the value of confidence (“Law 28: Enter Action with Boldness”), and many recommend absolute self-preservation (“Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally”). Every law, though, has one thing in common: an interest in total domination. In a bold and arresting two-color package, The 48 Laws of Power is ideal whether your aim is conquest, self-defense, or simply to understand the rules of the game.

Janus: The double-faced Roman God of gates and doors, beginnings and endings, is an appropriate representation for a book about Empire. The Inevitable Decline and Fall of Empire is an analysis of 'the system,' its origins in biology, its evolution to Empire and its inevitable destination in a civilization of humanity. Over the past 8000 years Empire has nurtured and evolved hierarchical legal, business and religious systems that originate in our sentient selfish instincts and are maintained through privilege, power and authority usurped by a few, and it is sustained through two myths: group sovereignty and spiritual dependency. Humanity is at the threshold of a transition to a more inclusive era of civilization based more on our instincts for cooperation and coexistence. The transition will be contentious and destructive to cultures and the corporate government, business, legal and religious systems they have established and perpetuated. The irony is that 'the system' will go through the transition anyway, even over the vehement resistance and objections of those that presently benefit and profit from the perquisites of Empire. And, to speed up the process, the author has proposed a remedy — a new Magna Carta — and issues the following disclaimer: WARNING - Contents of this book may be hazardous to your sentient preconceived notions. www.secondmagnacarta.com

While in the West 'the Caliphate" evokes overwhelmingly negative images, throughout Islamic history it has been regarded as the ideal Islamic polity. In the wake of the "Arab Spring" and the removal of long-standing dictators in the Middle East, in which the dominant discourse appears to be one of the compatibility of Islam and democracy, reviving the Caliphate has continued to exercise the minds of its opponents and advocates. Reza Pankhurst's book contributes to our understanding of Islam in politics, the path of Islamic revival across the last century and how the popularity of the Caliphate in Muslim discourse waned and later re-emerged. Beginning with the abolition of the Caliphate, the ideas and discourse of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir, al-Qaeda and other smaller groups are then examined. A comparative analysis highlights the core commonalities as well as differences between the various movements and individuals, and suggests that as movements struggle to re-establish a polity which expresses the unity of the ummah (or global Islamic community), the Caliphate has alternatively been ignored, had its significance minimised or denied, reclaimed and promoted as a theory and symbol in different ways, yet still serves as a political ideal for many.

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