In a world where "to love a robot is death", the earth authorities tear the lovers apart, exiling one to space, the other to earth.
As part of his plot to "kill almost every last person on the earth," authorities say a U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant and self-identified white nationalist compiled a hit list of prominent politicians and cable TV journalists.
But halfway there, they start hearing the strains of Beethoven's Fifth echoing across space – part of that intergalactic "greeting" message that Earth authorities launched long ago – and Kane starts having a crisis of empathy with those he's supposed to colonise and crush.
On the same day hundreds of interfaith clergy and lay activists gathered near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation to pray for the earth, federal authorities announced they were blocking the construction of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline.
"As more authority is vested in a single individual on earth, more authority is given to a single god in heaven," Aslan notes.
To bring its fast-rising pension costs down to earth, the authority first pushed to raise the retirement age for future employees, to 62 from 55, and then demanded that future workers contribute 6percentt of their wages toward their pensions.
Therefore, the state of nature is, according to Locke's "Second Treatise," a "state of peace, good will, mutual assistance and preservation". In such a world, Locke said, you would find "[m]en living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth, with authority to judge between them". Accordingly, a limited government is all that's needed to keep the peace.
What on earth were the authorities thinking?
(Is there a Church of England position on this?) Yet the new line from the C of E – ludicrously, that gay men in civil partnerships can be bishops as long as they refrain from sex (or to put it another way, we'll have gay bishops as long as they are not really gay) raises the question: how on earth will the authorities ever find out?
But how long can we stay on the tiger's back?" Capitalism is roaring indeed in the largest nation on earth, and the authorities have no choice but to keep on pushing for greater wealth.
As they watch black men elsewhere rise, the promise held out, at last, that they may walk the earth with the authority with which white men walk, protected by the power that white men shall have no longer, is enough, and more than enough, to empty prisons and pull God down from Heaven.
