The Meccans are falling back.

Shoot over their heads! Drive them back.

It's impossible, sir. All the men are falling back.

Everybody back behind the starting mark. Everybody out of my way!

Ray, can you make those guys get back?

And their pupils would dilate, they would recoil, then they would look down and swallow hard and start to tell me their stories.

More critically, they have increasingly reneged on commitments to assure the flow of essential humanitarian assistance.

But in China they look generation after generation because they remember the very embarrassing period, for 100 years, when they went backwards.

And then the children would get plenty of support, and nurturing, and mentoring, and the world population would decline very rapidly and everybody would be totally happy.

Senior officials in Jordan have been slowly walking back from the comprehensive political reforms that were promised in the initial euphoria of the Arab Spring.

Every South Pole expedition you may have heard about is either flown out from the Pole or has used vehicles or dogs or kites to do some kind of crossing no one has ever made a return journey.

More and more members of a governmental machine that thought it could impose a fraudulent election on Ukraine s people are shying away from imposing that choice by force.

Wouldn't that be enough? And then the children would get plenty of support, and nurturing, and mentoring, and the world population would decline very rapidly and everybody would be totally happy.

It also explains why journalists in those countries have so often bent over backwards to apologize for individual transgressions, rather than stand in defiance.

In the Commonwealth, 11 of our 53 members have already recorded significant progress on the MDGs, but 31 have made slow progress, and some are actually going backwards.

Every South Pole expedition you may have heard about is either flown out from the Pole or has used vehicles or dogs or kites to do some kind of crossing no one has ever made a return journey. So that's the plan.

And so, as Muslims were intellectually regressing, Europeans began their renaissance, developing improved ways of meeting their needs, including the manufacture of weapons that eventually allowed them to dominate the world.

Populists come to power promising to clean house, but once they move in and become identified with the house and all its flaws, they fall back on clientelism and state capture by the ruling parties (as we are now seeing in Poland) rather than becoming more radical.