The ancient Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Roman, Byzantine, Arabian, Chinese empires, and in modern times the sudden collapse of the French, Russian, German and Austrian empires warn us, by example, of what happens to nations, in spite of all their external splendor and apparent manifestations of greatness, when the private individual becomes restricted in thought and act by narrow, mean specialization, mean formalism, monotony of lines of action due to a legalized mesh of fibrinous tissue in a hypertrophied, cartilagenous, ossified structure of organized, and classified, governmental officialdom.

Electron overheating has been shown to give a consistent description of this behavior, but there are other, more exotic, explanations including a novel, superinsulating state and a many-body localized state.

Hey, this is none of your business; don’t butt in!

[…] the police called me a niggerfucker, they'd come in my motel room when I was out, they knew everything I did.