The "moral reason" for the war was that Saddam's regime was an engine of mass destruction and genocide that had killed thousands of his own people, and neighbors, and needed to be stopped.
Dr. Kaplan, a former chief speechwriter for Vice President Walter F. Mondale and a former studio executive and screenwriter at Disney, describes the program as an effort to bring the intellectual rigor long applied to topics like politics, education and high culture to a study of the driving engine of mass culture.
He blamed high rates of youth unemployment on efforts to stabilise the single currency, calling the euro "an engine of mass job-destruction".
In this safe and harmonious world, building terrible engines of mass destruction — Crowley is not an unironic writer — for as long as the war lasts, they will be valued, valuable, free.
In most accounts of the period, including Mark Greif's recent book "The Age of the Crisis of Man" (2015), the dominant refugee is Hannah Arendt, whose "Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951) depicted the rise of Hitlerism and Stalinism as twin modernities, engines of mass terror built to effect "the transformation of human nature itself".
It is important because they bear silent witness to what an engine of human mass destruction Saddam Hussein's regime was.
"Why don't you see what's keeping her?" The scene was still eerie: the gloom, the heat, the whispering, the low, insistent whine of the jet engine, the mass of dim faces crowded so close together.
Most of the engine's mass sits ahead of the front wheels, and with 266 pound-feet of torque at only 2,750 rpm, this car has a lot of from-the-stoplight muscle.
Worthiness and philanthropy were the twin engines of the ethos of Mass Observation, which was very much an organisation of its time: left-leaning and optimistic, but with a tendency to view the working class as a kind of exotic species to be studied under an anthropological microscope.
But in this car, the engine seemed overburdened by the two tons of mass it must push along.
We have faced economic and social revolutions before, with the invention of the steam engine and mass production, and, just like the Luddites were sabotaging machinery in the Industrial Revolution, technology has always been considered a threat to social stability.
