Word: mankinde
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...item neglected in the rush of the week's news: it was revealed that Russell Eugene Weston Jr., who stormed the U.S. Capitol last summer, killing two police officers, did it because he feared being contaminated by "Black Heva," a blight that he considered "the deadliest disease known to mankind." Black Heva (which exists only in Weston's mind) spreads by way of the rotting flesh of cannibals' victims; Weston shot the policemen because they were cannibals preventing him from getting to the "ruby satellite," a device that is the key to halting Heva-breeding cannibalism...
...blow their minds a lot. The film posits that life as we know it is a computer simulation: it is, Morpheus says, "the world that has been pulled over your eyes" by some creepezoid machines that look like spidery octopi. Who can free a mankind that doesn't know it's enslaved? Morpheus believes the cybermessiah is Neo (Keanu Reeves), a computer hacker. Early in the film Morpheus offers two pills to Neo. Take the blue one, you wake up and remember nothing. Take the red pill, "you stay in Wonderland. And I show you how deep the rabbit hole...
...with Orville at the controls, the Flyer lifted off shakily from Kitty Hawk and flew 120 ft.--little more than half the wingspan of a Boeing 747-400. That 12-sec. flight changed the world, lifting it to new heights of freedom and giving mankind access to places it had never before dreamed of reaching. Although the Wright brothers' feat was to transform life in the 20th century, the next day only four newspapers in the U.S. carried news of their achievement--news that was widely dismissed as exaggerated...
...finally recognized for what it was--the most efficacious life-saving drug in the world--penicillin would alter forever the treatment of bacterial infections. By the middle of the century, Fleming's discovery had spawned a huge pharmaceutical industry, churning out synthetic penicillins that would conquer some of mankind's most ancient scourges, including syphilis, gangrene and tuberculosis...
...Germans, he wrote acerbically, could not possibly pay what the victors were demanding. Calling Wilson a "blind, deaf Don Quixote" and Clemenceau a xenophobe with "one illusion--France, and one disillusion--mankind" (and only at the last moment scratching the purple prose he had reserved for Lloyd George: "this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity"), an outraged Keynes prophesied that the reparations would keep Germany impoverished and ultimately threaten all Europe...