Accountability Without Authority Quotes

Washington, who, after uselessly admonishing the European      general of the danger into which he was heedlessly running,      saved the remnants of the British army, on this occasion, by      his decision and courage. The reputation earned by      Washington in this battle was the principal cause of his      being selected to command the American armies at a later      day. It is a circumstance worthy of observation, that while      all America rang with his well-merited reputation, his name      does not occur in any European account of the battle; at      least the author has searched for it without success. In      this manner does the mother country absorb even the fame,      under that system of rule.

To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found to be swarming with numberless allusions to the popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough stuff.' I have never happeend to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to insist on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male was so very rude, the female should have been so very refined. The cave-man may have been a brute, but there is no reason why he should have been more brutal than the brutes. And the loves of the giraffes and the river romances of the hippopotami are affected without any of this preliminary fracas or shindy.

It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state. On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence. The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and illusions become. I even discern some relation between misfortune and megalomania. The man who has lost everything preserves as a last resort the hope of glory, or of literary scandal. He consents to abandon everything, except his name. [ . . . ] Let us say a man writes a novel which makes him, overnight, a celebrity. In it he recounts his sufferings. His compatriots in exile envy him: they too have suffered, perhaps more. And the man without a country becomes—or aspires to become—a novelist. The consequence: an accumulation of confusions, an inflation of horrors, of frissons that date. One cannot keep renewing Hell, whose very characteristic is monotony, or the face of exile either. Nothing in literature exasperates a reader so much as The Terrible; in life, it too is tainted with the obvious to rouse our interest. But our author persists; for the time being he buries his novel in a drawer and awaits his hour. The illusion of surprise, of a renown which eludes his grasp but on which he reckons, sustains him; he lives on unreality. Such, however, is the power of this illusion that if, for instance, he works in some factory, it is with the notion of being freed from it one day or another by a fame as sudden as it is inconceivable. * Equally tragic is the case of the poet. Walled up in his own language, he writes for his friends—for ten, for twenty persons at the most. His longing to be read is no less imperious than that of the impoverished novelist. At least he has the advantage over the latter of being able to get his verses published in the little émigré reviews which appear at the cost of almost indecent sacrifices and renunciations. Let us say such a man becomes—transforms himself—into an editor of such a review; to keep his publication alive he risks hunger, abstains from women, buries himself in a windowless room, imposes privations which confound and appall. Tuberculosis and masturbation, that is his fate. No matter how scanty the number of émigrés, they form groups, not to protect their interests but to get up subscriptions, to bleed each other white in order to publish their regrets, their cries, their echoless appeals. One cannot conceive of a more heart rending form of the gratuitous. That they are as good poets as they are bad prose writers is to be accounted for readily enough. Consider the literary production of any "minor" nation which has not been so childish as to make up a past for itself: the abundance of poetry is its most striking characteristic. Prose requires, for its development, a certain rigor, a differentiated social status, and a tradition: it is deliberate, constructed; poetry wells up: it is direct or else totally fabricated; the prerogative of cave men or aesthetes, it flourishes only on the near or far side of civilization, never at the center. Whereas prose demands a premeditated genius and a crystallized language, poetry is perfectly compatible with a barbarous genius and a formless language. To create a literature is to create a prose.

It wouldn’t be right to have a responsibility and be held accountable for a job without having the authority to do it. Imagine

My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us. No philosopher can contemplate this interesting situation without beginning to reflect on what it can mean. The gap between political realities and their public face is so great that the term “paradox” tends to crop up from sentence to sentence. Our rulers are theoretically “our” representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves. Debt, intemperance, and incompetence in rearing our children are no doubt regrettable, but they are vices, and left alone, they will soon lead to the pain that corrects. Life is a better teacher of virtue than politicians, and most sensible governments in the past left moral faults to the churches. But democratic citizenship in the twenty-first century means receiving a stream of improving “messages” from politicians. Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority—they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step towards totalitarianism. We might perhaps be more tolerant of rulers turning preachers if they were moral giants. But what citizen looks at the government today thinking how wise and virtuous it is? Public respect for politicians has long been declining, even as the population at large has been seduced into demanding political solutions to social problems. To demand help from officials we rather despise argues for a notable lack of logic in the demos. The statesmen of eras past have been replaced by a set of barely competent social workers eager to take over the risks of our everyday life. The electorates of earlier times would have responded to politicians seeking to bribe us with such promises with derision. Today, the demos votes for them.

If you have no arms To hold your crying child but your own arms And no legs but your own to run the stairs one more time To fetch what was forgotten I bow to you If you have no vehicle To tote your wee one but the wheels that you drive And no one else to worry, “Is my baby okay?” When you have to say goodbye on the doorsteps of daycare or on that cursed first day of school I bow to you If you have no skill but your own skill To replenish an ever-emptying bank account And no answers but your own to Satisfy the endless whys, hows, and whens your child asks and asks again I bow to you If you have no tongue to tell the truth To keep your beloved on the path without a precipice And no wisdom to impart Except the wisdom that you’ve acquired I bow to you If the second chair is empty Across the desk from a scornful, judging authority waiting For your child’s father to appear And you straighten your spine where you sit And manage to smile and say, “No one else is coming—I’m it.” Oh, I bow to you If your head aches when the spotlight finally shines on your child because your hands are the only hands there to applaud I bow to you If your heart aches because you’ve given until everything in you is gone And your kid declares, “It’s not enough.” And you feel the crack of your own soul as you whisper, “I know, baby. But it’s all mama’s got.” Oh, how I bow to you If they are your life while you are their nurse, tutor, maid Bread winner and bread baker, Coach, cheerleader and teammate… If you bleed when your child falls down I bow, I bow, I bow If you’re both punisher and hugger And your own tears are drowned out by the running of the bathroom faucet because children can’t know that mamas hurt too Oh, mother of mothers, I bow to you. —Toni Sorenson

Most incarcerated women—nearly two-thirds—are in prison for nonviolent, low-level drug crimes or property crimes. Drug laws in particular have had a huge impact on the number of women sent to prison. “Three strikes” laws have also played a considerable role. I started challenging conditions of confinement at Tutwiler in the mid-1980s as a young attorney with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee. At the time, I was shocked to find women in prison for such minor offenses. One of the first incarcerated women I ever met was a young mother who was serving a long prison sentence for writing checks to buy her three young children Christmas gifts without sufficient funds in her account. Like a character in a Victor Hugo novel, she tearfully explained her heartbreaking tale to me. I couldn’t accept the truth of what she was saying until I checked her file and discovered that she had, in fact, been convicted and sentenced to over ten years in prison for writing five checks, including three to Toys “R” Us. None of the checks was for more than $150. She was not unique. Thousands of women have been sentenced to lengthy terms in prison for writing bad checks or for minor property crimes that trigger mandatory minimum sentences. The collateral consequences of incarcerating women are significant. Approximately 75 to 80 percent of incarcerated women are mothers with minor children. Nearly 65 percent had minor children living with them at the time of their arrest—children who have become more vulnerable and at-risk as a result of their mother’s incarceration and will remain so for the rest of their lives, even after their mothers come home. In 1996, Congress passed welfare reform legislation that gratuitously included a provision that authorized states to ban people with drug convictions from public benefits and welfare. The population most affected by this misguided law is formerly incarcerated women with children, most of whom were imprisoned for drug crimes. These women and their children can no longer live in public housing, receive food stamps, or access basic services. In the last twenty years, we’ve created a new class of “untouchables” in American society, made up of our most vulnerable mothers and their children.

The novel, then, provides a reduction of the world different from that of the treatise. It has to lie. Words, thoughts, patterns of word and thought, are enemies of truth, if you identify that with what may be had by phenomenological reductions. Sartre was always, as he explains in his autobiography, aware of their being at variance with reality. One remembers the comic account of this antipathy in Iris Murdoch Under the Net, one of the few truly philosophical novels in English; truth would be found only in a silent poem or a silent novel. As soon as it speaks, begins to be a novel, it imposes causality and concordance, development, character, a past which matters and a future within certain broad limits determined by the project of the author rather than that of the characters. They have their choices, but the novel has its end. * ____________________ * There is a remarkable passage in Ortega y Gasset London essay ' History as a System' (in Philosophy and History, ed. Klibansky and Paton, 1936) which very clearly states the issues more notoriously formulated by Sartre. Ortega is discussing man's duty to make himself. 'I invent projects of being and doing in the light of circumstance. This alone I come upon, this alone is given me: circumstance. It is too often forgotten that man is impossible without imagination, without the capacity to invent for himself a conception of life, to "ideate" the character he is going to be. Whether he be original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself... Among... possibilities I must choose. Hence, I am free. But, be it well understood, I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not... To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity, not to have subscribed to a determined being, to be able to be other than what one was...' This 'constitutive instability' is the human property lacking in the novels condemned by Sartre and Murdoch. Ortega differs from Sartre on the use of the past; but when he says that his free man is, willy-nilly, 'a second-hand God,' creating his own entity, he is very close to Sartre, who says that to be is to be like the hero in a novel. In one instance the eidetic image is of God, in the other of the Hero.

I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.

When I stopped viewing girls as potential girlfriends and started treating them as sisters in Christ, I discovered the richness of true friendship. When I stopped worrying about who I was going to marry and began to trust God’s timing, I uncovered the incredible potential of serving God as a single. . . . I believe the time has come for Christians, male and female, to own up to the mess we’ve left behind in our selfish pursuit of short-term romance. Dating may seem an innocent game, but as I see it, we are sinning against each other. What excuse will we have when God asks us to account for our actions and attitudes in relationships? If God sees a sparrow fall (Matthew 10:29), do you think He could possibly overlook the broken hearts and scarred emotions we cause in relationships based on selfishness? Everyone around us may be playing the dating game. But at the end of our lives, we won’t answer to everyone. We’ll answer to God. . . . Long before Seventeen magazine ever gave teenagers tips on dating, people did things very differently. At the turn of the twentieth century, a guy and girl became romantically involved only if they planned to marry. If a young man spent time at a girl’s home, family and friends assumed that he intended to propose to her. But shifting attitudes in culture and the arrival of the automobile brought radical changes. The new “rules” allowed people to indulge in all the thrills of romantic love without having any intention of marriage. Author Beth Bailey documents these changes in a book whose title, From Front Porch to Backseat, says everything about the difference in society’s attitude when dating became the norm. Love and romance became things people could enjoy solely for their recreational value. Though much has changed since the 1920s, the tendency of dating relationships to move toward intimacy without commitment remains very much the same. . . . Many of the attitudes and practices of today’s dating relationships conflict with the lifestyle of smart love God wants us to live.

It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the thing. I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all, having written a full account for the information or the contemptuous amusement of my fellow-men. Often I ask myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm—a mere freak of fever as I lay sun-stricken and raving in the open boat after my escape from the German man-of-war. This I ask myself, but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.

A platoon of thirty soldiers or even a company of a hundred soldiers can function well on the basis of intimate relations, with a minimum of formal discipline. A well-respected sergeant can become ‘king of the company’ and exercise authority even over commissioned officers. A small family business can survive and flourish without a board of directors, a CEO or an accounting department.

The ultimate gift we can give the world is to grow our tiny humans into adult humans who are independent thinkers, compassionate doers, conscious questioners, radical innovators, and passionate peacemakers. Our world doesn't need more adults who blindly serve the powerful because they've been trained to obey authority without question. Our world needs more adults who question and challenge and hold the powerful accountable.

What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour. It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate. We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen; who sometimes too, without any provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of their labour. Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of provisions; sometimes the great profit which their masters make by their work. But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. The masters upon these occasions are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen, accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which, partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate, partly from the necessity superior steadiness of the masters, partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of submitting for the sake of present subsistence, generally end in nothing, but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders. But though in disputes with their workmen, masters must generally have the advantage, there is, however, a certain rate be.

And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.

PREFACE TO THE 1832 EDITION At the head of the earlier editions of this work, published at first without the name of the author, there was nothing but the following lines. “There are two ways of accounting for the existence of this work. Either there really has been found a bundle of yellow, ragged, papers, on which were inscribed, exactly as they came, the last thoughts of a wretched being; or else there has been a man, a dreamer, occupied in observing nature for the advantage of art, a philosopher, a poet, who, having been seized with these forcible ideas, could not rest until he had given them the tangible form of a volume. Of these two explanations, the reader will choose that which he prefers.

Richard and I seemed really to be at the end of our rope, for he had done what he could for me, and it had not worked out, and now he was going away. It seemed to me that he was sailing into the most splendid of futures, for he was going, of all places! to France, and he had been invited there by the French government. But Richard did not seem, though he was jaunty, to be overjoyed. There was a striking sobriety in his face that day. He talked a great deal about a friend of his, who was in trouble with the U.S. Immigration authorities, and was about to be, or already had been, deported. Richard was not being deported, of course, he was traveling to a foreign country as an honored guest; and he was vain enough and young enough and vivid enough to find this very pleasing and exciting. Yet he knew a great deal about exile, all artists do, especially American artists, especially American Negro artists. He had endured already, liberals and literary critics to the contrary, a long exile in his own country. He must have wondered what the real thing would be like. And he must have wondered, too, what would be the unimaginable effect on his daughter, who could now be raised in a country which would not penalize her on account of her color. And that day was very nearly the last time Richard and I spoke to each other without the later, terrible warfare. Two years later, I, too, quit America, never intending to return.

with a minimum of formal discipline. A well-respected sergeant can become ‘king of the company’ and exercise authority even over commissioned officers. A small family business can survive and flourish without a board of directors, a CEO or an accounting department. But once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can no longer work that way. You cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon. Successful family businesses usually face a crisis when they grow larger and hire more personnel. If they cannot reinvent themselves, they go bust. How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants

First among the authors that Rousseau had in mind was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who had presented a very different picture: Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. . . . In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Heisenberg repeated his story about the German bomb program to anyone who would listen for the rest of his life. Goudsmit, who had access to the Farm Hall reports and had seen the pathetic remnants of the Nazi nuclear program firsthand, knew Heisenberg’s story was a fabrication. But, with the existence of the Farm Hall transcripts itself classified, Goudsmit could state only that Heisenberg was lying, without explaining how he knew. The first popular account of the Manhattan Project, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, written by the Swiss journalist Robert Jungk in 1958, repeated Heisenberg’s story almost verbatim. So did The Virus House, the first book dedicated solely to the history of the German bomb program, which relied heavily on interviews from Heisenberg and his fellow former Farm Hall detainees. (The author, David Irving, was later revealed to be a Holocaust denier.)

McDougall was a certified revolutionary hero, while the Scottish-born cashier, the punctilious and corpulent William Seton, was a Loyalist who had spent the war in the city. In a striking show of bipartisan unity, the most vociferous Sons of Liberty—Marinus Willett, Isaac Sears, and John Lamb—appended their names to the bank’s petition for a state charter. As a triple power at the new bank—a director, the author of its constitution, and its attorney—Hamilton straddled a critical nexus of economic power. One of Hamilton’s motivations in backing the bank was to introduce order into the manic universe of American currency. By the end of the Revolution, it took $167 in continental dollars to buy one dollar’s worth of gold and silver. This worthless currency had been superseded by new paper currency, but the states also issued bills, and large batches of New Jersey and Pennsylvania paper swamped Manhattan. Shopkeepers had to be veritable mathematical wizards to figure out the fluctuating values of the varied bills and coins in circulation. Congress adopted the dollar as the official monetary unit in 1785, but for many years New York shopkeepers still quoted prices in pounds, shillings, and pence. The city was awash with strange foreign coins bearing exotic names: Spanish doubloons, British and French guineas, Prussian carolines, Portuguese moidores. To make matters worse, exchange rates differed from state to state. Hamilton hoped that the Bank of New York would counter all this chaos by issuing its own notes and also listing the current exchange rates for the miscellaneous currencies. Many Americans still regarded banking as a black, unfathomable art, and it was anathema to upstate populists. The Bank of New York was denounced by some as the cat’s-paw of British capitalists. Hamilton’s petition to the state legislature for a bank charter was denied for seven years, as Governor George Clinton succumbed to the prejudices of his agricultural constituents who thought the bank would give preferential treatment to merchants and shut out farmers. Clinton distrusted corporations as shady plots against the populace, foreshadowing the Jeffersonian revulsion against Hamilton’s economic programs. The upshot was that in June 1784 the Bank of New York opened as a private bank without a charter. It occupied the Walton mansion on St. George’s Square (now Pearl Street), a three-story building of yellow brick and brown trim, and three years later it relocated to Hanover Square. It was to house the personal bank accounts of both Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and prove one of Hamilton’s most durable monuments, becoming the oldest stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action. Early in Roosevelt’s tenure, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, joined a small group of friends in the president’s library to offer advice and criticism on a draft of his upcoming message to Congress. “He had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character,” Abbott recalled, “when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said, ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’ ” From this bully pulpit, Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press. He called them by their first names, invited them to meals, took questions during his midday shave, welcomed their company at day’s end while he signed correspondence, and designated, for the first time, a special room for them in the West Wing. He brought them aboard his private railroad car during his regular swings around the country. At every village station, he reached the hearts of the gathered crowds with homespun language, aphorisms, and direct moral appeals. Accompanying reporters then extended the reach of Roosevelt’s words in national publications. Such extraordinary rapport with the press did not stem from calculation alone. Long before and after he was president, Roosevelt was an author and historian. From an early age, he read as he breathed. He knew and revered writers, and his relationship with journalists was authentically collegial. In a sense, he was one of them. While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication. The restless enthusiasm and manic energy of their publisher and editor, S. S. McClure, infused the magazine with “a spark of genius,” even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. “The story is the thing,” Sam McClure responded when asked to account for the methodology behind his publication. He wanted his writers to begin their research without preconceived notions, to carry their readers through their own process of discovery. As they educated themselves about the social and economic inequities rampant in the wake of teeming industrialization, so they educated the entire country. Together, these investigative journalists, who would later appropriate Roosevelt’s derogatory term “muckraker” as “a badge of honor,” produced a series of exposés that uncovered the invisible web of corruption linking politics to business. McClure’s formula—giving his writers the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles—was soon adopted by rival magazines, creating what many considered a golden age of journalism. Collectively, this generation of gifted writers ushered in a new mode of investigative reporting that provided the necessary conditions to make a genuine bully pulpit of the American presidency. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.

In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. But even gossip has its limits. Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings. Even today, a critical threshold in human organisations falls somewhere around this magic number. Below this threshold, communities, businesses, social networks and military units can maintain themselves based mainly on intimate acquaintance and rumour-mongering. There is no need for formal ranks, titles and law books to keep order. 3A platoon of thirty soldiers or even a company of a hundred soldiers can function well on the basis of intimate relations, with a minimum of formal discipline. A well-respected sergeant can become ‘king of the company’ and exercise authority even over commissioned officers. A small family business can survive and flourish without a board of directors, a CEO or an accounting department. But once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can no longer work that way. You cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon. Successful family businesses usually face a crisis when they grow larger and hire more personnel. If they cannot reinvent themselves, they go bust. How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.

IT is worth remembering that the rise of what we call literary fiction happened at a time when the revealed, authenticated account of the beginning was losing its authority. Now that changes in things as they are change beginnings to make them fit, beginnings have lost their mythical rigidity. There are, it is true, modern attempts to restore this rigidity. But on the whole there is a correlation between subtlety and variety in our fictions and remoteness and doubtfulness about ends and origins. There is a necessary relation between the fictions by which we order our world and the increasing complexity of what we take to be the 'real' history of that world. I propose in this talk to ask some questions about an early and very interesting example of this relation. There was a long-established opinion that the beginning was as described in Genesis, and that the end is to be as obscurely predicted in Revelation. But what if this came to seem doubtful? Supposing reason proved capable of a quite different account of the matter, an account contradicting that of faith? On the argument of these talks so far as they have gone, you would expect two developments: there should be generated fictions of concord between the old and the new explanations; and there should be consequential changes in fictive accounts of the world. And of course I should not be troubling you with all this if I did not think that such developments occurred. The changes to which I refer came with a new wave of Greek influence on Christian philosophy. The provision of accommodations between Greek and Hebrew thought is an old story, and a story of concord-fictions--necessary, as Berdyaev says, because to the Greeks the world was a cosmos, but to the Hebrews a history. But this is too enormous a tract in the history of ideas for me to wander in. I shall make do with my single illustration, and speak of what happened in the thirteenth century when Christian philosophers grappled with the view of the Aristotelians that nothing can come of nothing--ex nihilo nihil fit--so that the world must be thought to be eternal. In the Bible the world is made out of nothing. For the Aristotelians, however, it is eternal, without beginning or end. To examine the Aristotelian arguments impartially one would need to behave as if the Bible might be wrong. And this was done. The thirteenth-century rediscovery of Aristotle led to the invention of double-truth. It takes a good deal of sophistication to do what certain philosophers then did, namely, to pursue with vigour rational enquiries the validity of which one is obliged to deny. And the eternity of the world was, of course, more than a question in a scholarly game. It called into question all that might seem ragged and implausible in the usual accounts of the temporal structure of the world, the relation of time to eternity (certainly untidy and discordant compared with the Neo-Platonic version) and of heaven to hell.

suppose, that all the historians who treat of England, should agree, that, on the first of January 1600, Queen Elizabeth died; that both before and after her death she was seen by her physicians and the whole court, as is usual with persons of her rank; that her successor was acknowledged and proclaimed by the parliament; and that, after being interred a month, she again appeared, resumed the throne, and governed England for three years: I must confess that I should be surprised at the concurrence of so many odd circumstances, but should not have the least inclination to believe so miraculous an event. I should not doubt of her pretended death, and of those other public circumstances that followed it: I should only assert it to have been pretended, and that it neither was, nor possibly could be real. You would in vain object to me the difficulty, and almost impossibility of deceiving the world in an affair of such consequence; the wisdom and solid judgment of that renowned queen; with the little or no advantage which she could reap from so poor an artifice: All this might astonish me; but I would still reply, that the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena, that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence, than admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature. 38 But should this miracle be ascribed to any new system of religion; men, in all ages, have been so much imposed on by ridiculous stories of that kind, that this very circumstance would be a full proof of a cheat, and sufficient, with all men of sense, not only to make them reject the fact, but even reject it without farther examination. Though the Being to whom the miracle is ascribed, be, in this case, Almighty, it does not, upon that account, become a whit more probable; since it is impossible for us to know the attributes or actions of such a Being, otherwise than from the experience which we have of his productions, in the usual course of nature. This still reduces us to past observation, and obliges us to compare the instances of the violation of truth in the testimony of men, with those of the violation of the laws of nature by miracles, in order to judge which of them is most likely and probable. As the violations of truth are more common in the testimony concerning religious miracles, than in that concerning any other matter of fact; this must diminish very much the authority of the former testimony, and make us form a general resolution, never to lend any attention to it, with whatever specious pretence it may be covered. 39 Lord Bacon seems to have embraced the same principles of reasoning. “We ought,” says he, “to make a collection or particular history of all monsters and prodigious births or productions, and in a word of every thing new, rare, and extraordinary in nature. But this must be done with the most severe scrutiny, lest we depart from truth. Above all, every relation must be considered as suspicious, which depends in any degree upon religion, as the prodigies of Livy: And no less so, everything that is to be found in the writers of natural magic or alchemy, or such authors, who seem, all of them, to have an unconquerable appetite for falsehood and fable.

The free man is immoral, because it is his will to depend upon himself and not upon tradition: in all the primitive states of humanity “evil” is equivalent to “individual,” “free,” “arbitrary,” “unaccustomed,” “unforeseen,” “incalculable.” In such primitive conditions, always measured by this standard, any action performed — not because tradition commands it, but for other reasons (e.g. on account of its individual utility), even for the same reasons as had been formerly established by custom — is termed immoral, and is felt to be so even by the very man who performs it, for it has not been done out of obedience to the tradition. What is tradition? A higher authority, which is obeyed, not because it commands what is useful to us, but merely because it commands. And in what way can this feeling for tradition be distinguished from a general feeling of fear? It is the fear of a higher intelligence which commands, the fear of an incomprehensible power, of something that is more than personal — there is superstition in this fear. In primitive times the domain of morality included education and hygienics, marriage, medicine, agriculture, war, speech and silence, the relationship between man and man, and between man and the gods — morality required that a man should observe her prescriptions without thinking of himself as individual. Everything, therefore, was originally custom, and whoever wished to raise himself above it, had first of all to make himself a kind of lawgiver and medicine-man, a sort of demi-god — in other words, he had to create customs, a dangerous and fearful thing to do! — Who is the most moral man? On the one hand, he who most frequently obeys the law: e.g. he who, like the Brahmins, carries a consciousness of the law about with him wherever he may go, and introduces it into the smallest divisions of time, continually exercising his mind in finding opportunities for obeying the law. On the other hand, he who obeys the law in the most difficult cases.

The old theological problem of "Faith" and "Knowledge," or more plainly, of instinct and reason―the question whether, in respect to the valuation of things, instinct deserves more authority than rationality, which wants to appreciate and act according to motives, according to a "Why," that is to say, in conformity to purpose and utility―it is always the old moral problem that first appeared in the person of Socrates, and had divided men's minds long before Christianity. Socrates himself, following, of course, the taste of his talent―that of a surpassing dialectician―took first the side of reason; and, in fact, what did he do all his life but laugh at the awkward incapacity of the noble Athenians, who were men of instinct, like all noble men, and could never give satisfactory answers concerning the motives of their actions? In the end, however, though silently and secretly, he laughed also at himself: with his finer conscience and introspection, he found in himself the same difficulty and incapacity. "But why"―he said to himself― "should one on that account separate oneself from the instincts! One must set them right, and the reason ALSO―one must follow the instincts, but at the same time persuade the reason to support them with good arguments." This was the real FALSENESS of that great and mysterious ironist; he brought his conscience up to the point that he was satisfied with a kind of self-outwitting: in fact, he perceived the irrationality in the moral judgment.―Plato, more innocent in such matters, and without the craftiness of the plebeian, wished to prove to himself, at the expenditure of all his strength―the greatest strength a philosopher had ever expended―that reason and instinct lead spontaneously to one goal, to the good, to "God"; and since Plato, all theologians and philosophers have followed the same path―which means that in matters of morality, instinct (or as Christians call it, "Faith," or as I call it, "the herd") has hitherto triumphed. Unless one should make an exception in the case of Descartes, the father of rationalism (and consequently the grandfather of the Revolution), who recognized only the authority of reason: but reason is only a tool, and Descartes was superficial.

Immediately my mind had conceived this new idea of "the purest and most exalted manifestation of dramatic art," it, the idea, sped to join the imperfect pleasure which I had felt in the theatre, added to it a little of what was lacking, and their combination formed something so exalting that I cried out within myself: ‘What a great artist!’ It may doubtless be argued that I was not absolutely sincere. But let us bear in mind, rather, the numberless writers who, dissatisfied with the page which they have just written, if they read some eulogy of the genius of Chateaubriand, or evoke the spirit of some great artist whose equal they aspire to be, by humming to themselves, for instance, a phrase of Beethoven, the melancholy of which they compare with what they have been trying to express in prose, are so filled with that idea of genius that they add it to their own productions, when they think of them once again, see them no longer in the light in which at first they appeared, and, hazarding an act of faith in the value of their work, say to themselves: "After all!" without taking into account that, into the total which determines their ultimate satisfaction, they have introduced the memory of marvellous pages of Chateaubriand which they assimilate to their own, but of which, in cold fact, they are not the authors; let us bear in mind the numberless men who believe in the love of a mistress on the evidence only of her betrayals; all those, too, who are sustained by the alternative hopes, either of an incomprehensible survival of death, when they think, inconsolable husbands, of the wives whom they have lost but have not ceased to love, or, artists, of the posthumous glory which they may thus enjoy; or else the hope of complete extinction which comforts them when their thoughts turn to the misdeeds that otherwise they must expiate after death; let us bear in mind also the travellers who come home enraptured by the general beauty of a tour of which, from day to day, they have felt nothing but the tedious incidents; and let us then declare whether, in the communal life that is led by our ideas in the enclosure of our minds, there is a single one of those that make us most happy which has not first sought, a very parasite, and won from an alien but neighbouring idea the greater part of the strength that it originally lacked

However, it is important not to lose sight of exactly how the neoliberal system works. As David Harvey has demonstrated, by drawing on Karl Polanyi’s masterful work, the free market has never been incompatible with state intervention, and the management of crises is part of the neoliberal project. We therefore need to inquire into how this crisis was presented by recalling, if we take the American example, that President George W. Bush kept forcefully repeating that the foundations of the economy were solid. Then suddenly, in the fateful month of September, as if faced with the sudden surge of a more or less unexpected “economic hurricane,” he asked for $700 billion to avoid a severe economic meltdown. It was necessary to save the banks and businesses that were too big to fail. This complex crisis called for a reaction that was as fast as it was extreme, starting with $350 billion distributed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs. We should note in passing that this sort of crisis discourse recalls all of the exceptional measures put in place or intensified after September 11, 2001: the usa patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, illegal wiretappings, extraordinary rendition, the network of secret prisons, the redefinition of torture by the Office of Legal Council, and so on. It is not by chance that this crisis was presented as a complex and uncontrollable natural phenomenon, whose severity was largely unforeseen, for it is similar to the historical logic outlined above. By naturalizing the economy and transforming it into an autonomous authority independent of the decisions made by specific agents, this historical order promotes passivity (we can only bow before forces stronger than us), the removal of responsibility (no one can be held accountable for natural phenomena), and historical nearsightedness (the situation is so critical that we must respond quickly, without wasting time by debating over distant causes: time is short!). If we were to step back and assess the overall situation, we would see numerous specters rising up in the cemetery that is neoliberalism, and we would need to begin questioning—following Polanyi—whether the very project of laissez-faire economics has ever been anything other than socialism for the rich or, more precisely, topdown class warfare enforced by state intervention

1. Divine Writing: The Bible, down to the details of its words, consists of and is identical with God’s very own words written inerrantly in human language. 2. Total Representation: The Bible represents the totality of God’s communication to and will for humanity, both in containing all that God has to say to humans and in being the exclusive mode of God’s true communication.[11] 3. Complete Coverage: The divine will about all of the issues relevant to Christian belief and life are contained in the Bible.[12] 4. Democratic Perspicuity: Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text.[13] 5. Commonsense Hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts. 6. Solo Scriptura:[14] The significance of any given biblical text can be understood without reliance on creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks, such that theological formulations can be built up directly out of the Bible from scratch. 7. Internal Harmony: All related passages of the Bible on any given subject fit together almost like puzzle pieces into single, unified, internally consistent bodies of instruction about right and wrong beliefs and behaviors. 8. Universal Applicability: What the biblical authors taught God’s people at any point in history remains universally valid for all Christians at every other time, unless explicitly revoked by subsequent scriptural teaching. 9. Inductive Method: All matters of Christian belief and practice can be learned by sitting down with the Bible and piecing together through careful study the clear “biblical” truths that it teaches. The prior nine assumptions and beliefs generate a tenth viewpoint that—although often not stated in explications of biblicist principles and beliefs by its advocates—also commonly characterizes the general biblicist outlook, particularly as it is received and practiced in popular circles: 10. Handbook Model: The Bible teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, so that together those affirmations comprise something like a handbook or textbook for Christian belief and living, a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects—including science, economics, health, politics, and romance.[15]

Under these circumstances the most anodyne book was a source of danger from the simple fact that love was alluded to, and woman depicted as an attractive creature; and this was enough to account for all—for the inherent ignorance of Catholics, since it was proclaimed as the preventive cure for temptations—for the instinctive horror of art, since to these craven souls every written and studied work was in its nature a vehicle of sin and an incitement to fall. Would it not really be far more sensible and judicious to open the windows, to air the rooms, to treat these souls as manly beings, to teach them not to be so much afraid of their own flesh, to inculcate the firmness and courage needed for resistance? For really it is rather like a dog which barks at your heels and snaps at your legs if you are afraid of him, but who beats a retreat if you turn on him boldly and drive him off. The fact remains that these schemes of education have resulted, on the one hand, in the triumph of the flesh in the greater number of men who have been thus brought up and then thrown into a worldly life, and on the other, in a wide diffusion of folly and fear, an abandonment of the possessions of the intellect and the capitulation of the Catholic army surrendering without a blow to the inroads of profane literature, which takes possession of territory that it has not even had the trouble of conquering. This really was madness! The Church had created art, had cherished it for centuries; and now by the effeteness of her sons she was cast into a corner. All the great movements of our day, one after the other—romanticism, naturalism—had been effected independently of her, or even against her will. If a book were not restricted to the simplest tales, or pleasing fiction ending in virtue rewarded and vice punished, that was enough; the propriety of beadledom was at once ready to bray. As soon as the most modern form of art, the most malleable and the broadest—the Novel—touched on scenes of real life, depicted passion, became a psychological study, an effort of analysis, the army of bigots fell back all along the line. The Catholic force, which might have been thought better prepared than any others to contest the ground which theology had long since explored, retired in good order, satisfied to cover its retreat by firing from a safe distance, with its old-fashioned match-lock blunderbusses, on works it had neither inspired nor written. The Church party, centuries behind the time, and having made no attempt to follow the evolution of style in the course of ages, now turned to the rustic who can scarcely read; it did not understand more than half of the words used by modern writers, and had become, it must be said, a camp of the illiterate. Incapable of distinguishing the good from the bad, it included in one condemnation the filth of pornography and real works of art; in short, it ended by emitting such folly and talking such preposterous nonsense, that it fell into utter discredit and ceased to count at all. And it would have been so easy for it to work on a little way, to try to keep up with the times, and to understand, to convince itself whether in any given work the author was writing up the Flesh, glorifying it, praising it, and nothing more, or whether, on the contrary, he depicted it merely to buffet it—hating it. And, again, it would have done well to convince itself that there is a chaste as well as a prurient nude, and that it should not cry shame on every picture in which the nude is shown. Above all, it ought to have recognized that vices may well be depicted and studied with a view to exciting disgust of them and showing their horrors.

On the other hand, while we insist that what is other than theology cannot determine the content of theology, or its nature as a science, do we imply that all the various academic disciplines may and must freely go their own way, independently and competitively, without any obligation to coordinate and adjust their claims about the real world or in the name of truth? Should not theology in the name of revelation and reason, and in view of the logical norms of noncontradiction and coherence, call the secular sciences to account? Ought it not, for example, challenge both the arbitrary positivist limitation of truth to the sensory world and technocratic scientific reduction of the real world to impersonal processes and relationships? To go yet a step farther, should not theology in the name of the truth of revelation elaborate a comprehensive framework wherein theology and all other sciences are together and equally answerable to criteria that apply to each and every claimant to knowledge of external reality?

In Strassburg in 1212 the Dominicans had already arrested 500 persons who belonged to churches of the Waldenses. They were of all classes, nobles, priests, rich and poor, men and women. The prisoners said that there were many like them in Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Bohemia, etc. Eighty of them, including 12 priests and 23 women were given over to the flames. Their leader and elder, named John, declared as he was about to die, “We are all sinners, but it is not our faith that makes us so, nor are we guilty of the blasphemy of which we are accused without reason; but we expect the forgiveness of our sins, and that without the help of men, and not through the merit of our own works.” The goods of those executed were divided between the Church and the civil authority, which placed its power at the disposition of the Church.

After the capture of another place, La Minerve, about 140 believers were found, women in one house, men in another, engaged in prayer as they awaited their doom. De Montfort had a great pile of wood prepared, and told them to be converted to the Catholic faith or mount that pile. They answered that they owned no papal or priestly authority, only that of Christ and His Word. The fire was lighted and the confessors, without hesitation, entered the flames. It was near this spot, in the neighbourhood of Narbonne, that the Inquisition was established (1210), under the superintendence of Dominic, the founder of the Dominican order. When, at the Council of Toulouse (1229) it was made a permanent institution, the Bible, excepting only the Latin Psalter, was forbidden to the laity, and it was decreed that they might have no part of it translated into their own languages. The Inquisition finished what the crusade had left undone.

If the gospel lacks correspondence to reality, why is it that the majority of believers never comes to terms with this? As I expressed in my opening chapter, I am convinced it is not due to a lack of intelligence. Nor is it due to a lack of goodness or noble intentions on the part of most believers. Rather, from the perspective of one who has escaped the finely tuned clutches of the Christian machinery designed to keep me in the fold, I see it primarily as a lack of courage, at least for those who have encountered good reasons for doubting. I, like most believers, experienced serious doubts as a young Christian, but I lacked the courage to pit my reservations against the authority of the church and against its fallible, humanly authored scriptures, finding it safer to submit to the supremely well-crafted, guilt-inducing tactics of apologists who assured me that all the fault lay with me and not with the divinely inspired Bible. I capitulated and managed to hold my doubts at bay for over a decade longer while serving God on the mission field. Many if not most of you have faced similar questions and misgivings about the Bible and the Christian faith, even if not to the same extent. You might be like me during my initial short-lived crises of faith: I could not bring myself to face with courage the possibility that life might not have any cosmic Meaning; that there might be no higher power to guide, protect, and provide for me; that justice might not prevail in the long run; that I might no longer be able to hold sinners accountable with the words, "Thus says the Lord"; that life ends at the grave; or that I might have followed and lead others to follow a grand mistake. I lacked the courage to face my church, family, and friends whom I feared would look upon me as a reprobate. I lacked the courage to think for myself—to accept that the virtues of humility and meekness must not be used as an excuse for failing to challenge entrenched ideas that lack sufficient evidence. In short, I preferred to squelch the seed of doubt and label it as sin rather than as healthy, critical thinking, lest it flower and make life unbearable. That I viewed my incipient doubt and disbelief as sin was no accident: the church has a powerful vested interest in keeping believers in the fold, and it will not let them go without a fight. My courage-squelching guilt or angst was the result of a concerted effort developed over the centuries to make me feel like a depraved worm, a proud and willful rebel, a traitor, a God-hater, and an enemy of all that is good. I was programmed to consider that I would be better off if I were to commit adultery or murder than if I were to abandon the one who created me and redeemed me. Without Christ I would be worse than a good-for-nothing, and, like the traitor Judas, it would have been better for me had I never been born. No wonder most believers never muster the courage to break free from this cage!

Loans NRIs can give loans to resident Indians on a repatriable or non-repatriable basis. NRIs can also receive loans from residents. Loan from NRIs in foreign currency or on a repatriable basis A resident Indian can borrow up to US dollars 250,000 from NRI close relatives on a repatriation basis i.e. on repayment, the NRI can credit the funds in an NRE account and take this money back without any restrictions. The NRI should be a close relative of the borrower. Please check ‘Who is your relative’ for details. The amount of loan should be received by an inward remittance or by debit to the NRE/FCNR account. The loan should be a minimum of 1 year and without any interest. The funds cannot be used for agricultural/plantation/real estate business or for relending. Income: As the loan should be interest-free, no income can be generated. Taxability: As there is no income, there is no tax. Loan from NRIs in Indian rupees or on a non-repatriable basis A resident, not being a company incorporated in India, may borrow in rupees from an NRI on a non- repatriation basis. The period of loan should be 3 years or less and the rate of interest should not exceed 2% over the prevailing bank rate at the time of the loan. The loan has to be utilized for meeting the borrower’s personal requirement or for his business purposes. The funds cannot be used for agricultural/plantation/real estate business or for relending or for investment in shares, securities or immovable property. For example, Ms. Isumati has given an unsecured loan to her father’s firm earning 15% interest. If she goes to the UK for further studies and becomes an NRI, while she may continue with the loan, RBI rules would apply. The funds cannot be used for real estate business and if the bank rate is 10%, she cannot be paid more than 12% interest on her loan. Her father would also need to deduct TDS @ 30.9% on the interest. Income: Income from loans given to residents is interest. Taxability: The interest income on loans given is taxable for NRIs. Loans to NRIs NRIs are allowed to borrow from a bank/authorized

Norman Cousins, author of Anatomy of an Illness and The Healing Heart, divides the human race into “positive” and “negative” people: The positive people work miracles, accounting for the evolution of human performance. I add another division, productive and nonproductive people: those who can do things and those who only talk about things (especially talk about why they can’t do things). As far back as I can remember, I was determined to contribute something, to be productive, and I’ve always questioned those who—though they may know much—go through life without making a mental contribution to the species: “If I live, I ought to speak my mind.” Productive people have a love affair with time, with all of love’s ups and downs. They get more from time than others, seem to know how to use time much better than nonproductive people—so much so that they can waste immense quantities of time and still be enormously creative and productive. One of my favorite examples is John Peabody Harrington, the great anthropologist of the American Southwest. At the time of his death, Harrington’s field notes filled a basement of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and several rented warehouses in the Washington suburbs were needed for the overflow. Yet Carobeth Laird, his wife and Harrington’s biographer, called him one of the greatest wasters of time she’d ever known—and said he felt the same way about himself.

There is nothing," (the author of) Madhyamika-castra[FN#369] says, "that ever came into existence without direct and indirect causes. Therefore there is anything that is not unreal in the world." He says again: "Things produced through direct and indirect causes I declare to be the very things which are unreal." (The author of) Craddhotdada-castra[FN#370] says: "All things in the universe present themselves in different forms only on account of false ideas. If separated from the (false) ideas and thoughts, no forms of those external objects exist." "All the physical forms (ascribed to Buddha)," says (the author of) a sutra,[FN#371] "are false and unreal. The beings that transcend all forms are called Buddhas."[FN#372] Consequently you must acknowledge that mind as well as external objects are unreal. This is the eternal truth of the Mahayana doctrine. We are driven to the conclusion that unreality is the origin of life, if we trace it back according to this doctrine. [FN#369]

You can research and easily find about 200 Flood legends without extensive research. Dr. John Morris of the Institute for Creation Research has done this.7 So has Japanese researcher Nozomi Osanai for her Master’s thesis at Wesley Biblical Seminary.8 In fact, I’ve done this too! Though there were more, I read over 200 flood accounts when researching a family book that I co-authored with Laura Welch on flood legends (The Flood of Noah, Legends and Lore of Survival, Master Books, 2014).

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No one can post a false transaction without ownership of the corresponding account due to the asymmetric key cryptography protecting the accounts. You have one “public” key representing an address to receive tokens and a “private” key used to unlock and spend tokens over which you have custody. This same type of cryptography is used to protect your credit card information and data when using the Internet. A single account cannot “double spend” its tokens because the ledger keeps an audit of the balance at any given time and the faulty transaction would not clear. The ability to prevent a double spend without a central authority illustrates the primary advantage of using a blockchain to maintain the underlying ledger.

Several years ago, the House Oversight Committee chairman wrote, referring to the cash sent to Iraq after the invasion: “The numbers are so large that it doesn’t seem possible that they are true. Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone?” Who indeed… In the first year after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction determined that $8.8 billion in $100 bills was disbursed as cash to Iraqi ministries, “without assurance the monies were probably used are accounted for.” Worse still, he later decided that that lack of accountability “extended to the entire $20 billion expended” by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Much of this money was stolen by Americans. Millions of dollars was billed by contractors for contracts that simply did not exist. Where the contracts were real, accounts were not kept. Sometimes, perhaps even often, this can be attributed to the chaos present during wartime. But you would have to be naïve to think that hundreds of millions of dollars – probably billions – was not stolen. Hangman was the result of me asking – who stole it?

Man has not the clearness of perception, the retentiveness of memory, or the power of presentation, to enable him (without supernatural aid) to give a trustworthy account of a discourse once heard, a few years or even months after its delivery. And that this should be done over and over from month to month for thousands of years, is an impossibility. If to this be added the difficulty in the way of this oral transmission, arising from the blindness of men to the things of the Spirit, which prevents their understanding what they hear, and from the disposition to pervert and misrepresent the truth to suit their own prejudices and purposes, it must be acknowledged that tradition cannot be a reliable source of knowledge of religious truth. This is universally acknowledged and acted upon, except by Romanists. No one pretends to determine what Luther and Calvin, Latimer and Cranmer, taught, except from contemporaneous written records. Much less will any sane man pretend to know what Moses and the prophets taught except from their own writings. Romanists admit the force of this objection. They admit that tradition would not be a trustworthy informant of what Christ and the Apostles taught, without the supernatural intervention of God. Tradition is to be trusted not because it comes down through the hands of fallible men, but because it comes through an infallibly guided Church. This, however, is giving up the question. It is merging the authority of tradition into the authority of the Church. There is no need of the former, if the latter be admitted.

In 2005, a computer expert named Ian Grigg, working at a company called Systemics, introduced a trial system he called “triple-entry bookkeeping.” Grigg worked in the field of cryptography, a science that dates way back to ancient times, when coded language to share “ciphers,” or secrets, first arose. Ever since Alan Turing’s calculating machine cracked the German military’s Enigma code, cryptography has underpinned much of what we’ve done in the computing age. Without it we wouldn’t be able to share private information across the Internet—such as our transactions within a bank’s Web site—without revealing it to unwanted prying eyes. As our computing capacity has exponentially grown, so too has the capacity of cryptography to impact our lives. For his part, Grigg believed it would lead to a programmable record-keeping system that would make fraud virtually impossible. In a nutshell, the concept took the existing, double-entry bookkeeping system and added a third book: the independent, open ledger that’s secured by cryptographic methods so that no one can change it. Grigg saw it as a way to combat fraud. The way Grigg described it, users would maintain their own, double-entry accounts, but added to these digitized books would be another function, essentially a time stamp, a cryptographically secured, signed receipt of every transaction. (The concept of a “signature” in cryptography means something far more scientific than a handwritten scrawl; it entails combining two associated numbers, or “keys”—one publicly known, the other private—to mathematically prove that the entity making the signature is uniquely authorized to do so.)

So what would the censors have to love — other than change itself — to be interested in change? What might make the censors give ground? How does our taste change, and why would we want it to? What Freud is saying — what Freud adds to this fundamental cultural conversation — is that we are obedient, unconsciously, to internal authorities. But we don't call it that, we call it our preferences, our prejudices, our beliefs and convictions, what we take for granted, what goes without saying. We are unconscious, Freud suggests, of what we have consented to, and that we are consenting (I might say this is just who I am rather than giving an account of what my masters want from me and for me). In the Freudian story, censorship is where we start from. We begin with, and in relation to, our censors (so development could be described as the history of our relationship to censorship, censorship by others and self-censorship).

Ehsan Sehgal Quotes about Media — — — * Words matter and mirror if your head is a dictionary of insight and your feelings are alive. * Sure, fake news catches and succeeds attention, but for a while; however, it embraces disregard and unreliability forever. * Media rule the incompetent minds and pointless believers. * A real journalist only states, neither collaborates nor participates. * The majority of journalists and anchors have the information only but not the sense of knowledge. * When the media encourages and highlights the wrong ones, anti-democratic figures, criminals in uniform, and dictators in a supreme authority and brilliant context, sure, such a state never survives the breakdown of prosperity and civil rights, as well as human rights. Thus, the media is accountable and responsible for this as one of the democratic pillars. *Media cannot be a football ground or a tool for anyone. It penetrates the elementary pillar of a state, it forms and represents the language of entire humanity within its perception of love, peace, respect, justice, harmony, and human rights, far from enmity and distinctions. Accordingly, it demonstrates its credibility and neutrality. * When the non-Western wrongly criticizes and abuses its culture, religion, and values, the Western media highlights that often, appreciating in all dimensions. However, if the same one even points out only such subjects, as a question about Western distinctive attitude and role, the West flies and falls at its lowest level, contradicting its principles of neutrality and freedom of press and speech, which pictures, not only double standards but also double dishonesty with itself and readers. Despite that, Western media bother not to realize and feel ignominy and moral and professional stigma. * Social Media has become the global dustbin of idiocy and acuity. It stinks now. Anyone is there to separate and recycle that. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean to constitute insulting, abusing, and harming deliberately in a distinctive and discriminative feature and context, whereas supporting such notions and attempts is a universal crime. * Social media is a place where you share your favourite poetry, quotes, songs, news, social activities, and reports. You can like something, you can comment, and you can use humour in a civilised way. It is social media, but it is not a place to love or be loved. Any lover does not exist here, and no one is serious in this regard. Just enjoy yourself and do not try to fool anyone. If you do that, it means you are making yourself a fool; it is a waste of time, and it is your defeat too. * I use social media only to devote and denote my thoughts voluntarily for the motivation of knowledge, not to earn money as greedy-minded. * One should not take seriously the Social-Media fools and idiots. * Today, on social media, how many are on duty? * Journalists voluntarily fight for human rights and freedom of speech, whereas they stay silent for their rights and journalistic freedom on the will and restrictions of the boss of the media. Indeed, it verifies that The nearer the church, the farther from god. * The abuse, insult, humiliation, and discrimination against whatever subject is not freedom of expression and writing; it is a violation and denial of global harmony and peace. * Press freedom is one significant pillar of true democracy pillars, but such democracy stays deaf, dumb, and blind, which restricts or represses the media. * Press and speech that deliberately trigger hatred and violation fall not under the freedom of press and speech since restrictions for morale and peace apply to everyone without exemption. * Real press freedom is just a dream, which nowhere in the world becomes a reality; however, journalists stay dreaming that.

What people love is the idea of freedom. They love to think that they are not slaves. They go to great lengths to convince themselves they are independent, and that no one can boss them around. But reality tells a different story. Most people badly want some parent figure—whether that's a teacher, president, gang leader, pope, guru, God, or Santa Claus—to whom they can delegate their power of choice, for they would much rather trust anyone other than themselves. Having to figure things out on their own and take responsibility for their lives is too scary of a prospect. Following a path is much easier than creating one. This accounts for the popularity of dogma; and this is why, despite all the rhetoric suggesting otherwise, real freedom terrifies people. What they crave is not freedom but authority figures to give them orders. If I can go on record with another runner-up for the most undemocratic sentence of all times . . . most people seem to be born to obey commands. They probably resent the commands, often complain about them, and occasionally secretly break them only to feel guilty later, but the truth is they would be totally lost without them. If you try to take away their chains, they'll scream and shout because their security, their very identity, is in their chains. Give them real freedom and they'll run back to their dogmas crying “please mama hold me tight.” Dogma is what reassures them and lulls them to sleep at night. “No, dear child—dogma whispers softly in their ears—you don't need to venture alone in that big, scary world. Stay by my side instead, and I will always take care of you. I promise you will never have to make difficult choices all by yourself. I will map out the path for you, and all you'll have to do is follow. You will never be lost again.” Forget freedom as a family value. Real freedom is scary. Real freedom is for people with broad shoulders and big hearts.

In scores of cities all over the United States, when the Communists were simultaneously meeting at their various headquarters on New Year’s Day of 1920, Mr. Palmer’s agents and police and voluntary aides fell upon them—fell upon everybody, in fact, who was in the hall, regardless of whether he was a Communist or not (how could one tell?)—and bundled them off to jail, with or without warrant. Every conceivable bit of evidence—literature, membership lists, books, papers, pictures on the wall, everything—was seized, with or without a search warrant. On this and succeeding nights other Communists and suspected Communists were seized in their homes. Over six thousand men were arrested in all, and thrust summarily behind the bars for days or weeks—often without any chance to learn what was the explicit charge against them. At least one American citizen, not a Communist, was jailed for days through some mistake—probably a confusion of names—and barely escaped deportation. In Detroit, over a hundred men were herded into a bull-pen measuring twenty-four by thirty feet and kept there for a week under conditions which the mayor of the city called intolerable. In Hartford, while the suspects were in jail the authorities took the further precaution of arresting and incarcerating all visitors who came to see them, a friendly call being regarded as prima facie evidence of affiliation with the Communist party. Ultimately a considerable proportion of the prisoners were released for want of sufficient evidence that they were Communists. Ultimately, too, it was divulged that in the whole country-wide raid upon these dangerous men—supposedly armed to the teeth—exactly three pistols were found, and no explosives at all. But at the time the newspapers were full of reports from Mr. Palmer’s office that new evidence of a gigantic plot against the safety of the country had been unearthed; and although the steel strike was failing, the coal strike was failing, and any danger of a socialist régime, to say nothing of a revolution, was daily fading, nevertheless to the great mass of the American people the Bolshevist bogey became more terrifying than ever. Mr. Palmer was in full cry. In public statements he was reminding the twenty million owners of Liberty bonds and the nine million farm-owners and the eleven million owners of savings accounts, that the Reds proposed to take away all they had. He was distributing boilerplate propaganda to the press, containing pictures of horrid-looking Bolsheviks with bristling beards, and asking if such as these should rule over America. Politicians were quoting the suggestion of Guy Empey that the proper implements for dealing with the Reds could be “found in any hardware store,” or proclaiming, “My motto for the Reds is S. O. S.—ship or shoot. I believe we should place them all on a ship of stone, with sails of lead, and that their first stopping-place should be hell.” College graduates were calling for the dismissal of professors suspected of radicalism; school-teachers were being made to sign oaths of allegiance; business men with unorthodox political or economic ideas were learning to hold their tongues if they wanted to hold their jobs. Hysteria had reached its height.

Interestingly, Dominus Iesus, following the Letter Communionis Notio of 1992, did, in fact, attribute the title “particular churches” to the Local Orthodox Churches. Ocáriz’s explanation of what this attribution means shows even more clearly the divergence that exists between the two views of the Church. He claims that this attribution is based not upon the real, Eucharistic presence of Christ but upon “the real presence of the Petrine Primacy (and of the Episcopal College) in of the ‘one and undivided’ episcopate—a unity that cannot exist without the Bishop of Rome.” Further, he writes: "Where, on account of apostolic succession, a valid episcopate exists, the Episcopal College with its Head is objectively present as supreme authority ( even if, in fact, that authority is not recognized ). Furthermore, in every valid celebration of the Eucharist, there is an objective reference to the universal communion with the Successor of Peter and with the entire Church, independent of subjective convictions." As the supreme and final criterion of full ecclesiality the Pope is seen not only to supplant the Eucharistic Presence of the Lord Himself, but to be present as “supreme authority” in the Eucharistic Synaxis of those not in communion with him, even if this is against their will. Whereas, for the Orthodox, the ever-present and existential reality manifested by the Holy Spirit at every Eucharistic gathering is dogmatic truth and a unity in truth freely espoused, for the Latins it is the “objective reference to the universal communion” with the Pope “independent of subjective convictions.

What distinguishes us above all from Muslim-born or converted individuals—“psychologically”, one could say—is that our mind is a priori centered on universal metaphysics (Advaita Vedānta, Shahādah, Risālat al-Ahadiyah) and the universal path of the divine Name (japa-yoga, nembutsu, dhikr, prayer of the heart); it is because of these two factors that we are in a traditional form, which in fact—though not in principle—is Islam. The universal orthodoxy emanating from these two sources of authority determines our interpretation of the sharī'ah and Islam in general, somewhat as the moon influences the oceans without being located on the terrestrial globe; in the absence of the moon, the motions of the sea would be inconceivable and “illegitimate”, so to speak. What universal metaphysics says has decisive authority for us, as does the “onomatological” science connected to it, a fact that once earned us the reproach of “de-Islamicizing Islam”; it is not so much a matter of the conscious application of principles formulated outside of Islamism by metaphysical traditions from Asia as of inspirations in conformity with these principles; in a situation such as ours, the spiritual authority—or the soul that is its vehicle—becomes like a point of intersection for all the rays of truth, whatever their origin. One must always take account of the following: in principle the universal authority of the metaphysical and initiatic traditions of Asia, whose point of view reflects the nature of things more or less directly, takes precedence—when such an alternative exists—over the generally more “theological” authority of the monotheistic religions; I say “when such an alternative exists”, for obviously it sometimes happens, in esoterism as in essential symbolism, that there is no such alternative; no one can deny, however, that in Semitic doctrines the formulations and rules are usually determined by considerations of dogmatic, moral, and social opportuneness. But this cannot apply to pure Islam, that is, to the authority of its essential doctrine and fundamental symbolism; the Shahādah cannot but mean that “the world is false and Brahma is true” and that “you are That” (tat tvam asi), or that “I am Brahma” (aham Brahmāsmi); it is a pure expression of both the unreality of the world and the supreme identity; in the same way, the other “pillars of Islam” (arqān al-Dīn), as well as such fundamental rules as dietary and artistic prohibitions, obviously constitute supports of intellection and realization, which universal metaphysics—or the “Unanimous Tradition”—can illuminate but not abolish, as far as we are concerned. When universal wisdom states that the invocation contains and replaces all other rites, this is of decisive authority against those who would make the sharī'ah or sunnah into a kind of exclusive karma-yoga, and it even allows us to draw conclusions by analogy (qiyās, ijtihād) that most Shariites would find illicit; or again, should a given Muslim master require us to introduce every dhikr with an ablution and two raka'āt, the universal—and “antiformalist”—authority of japa-yoga would take precedence over the authority of this master, at least in our case. On the other hand, should a Hindu or Buddhist master give the order to practice japa before an image, it goes without saying that it is the authority of Islamic symbolism that would take precedence for us quite apart from any question of universality, because forms are forms, and some of them are essential and thereby rejoin the universality of the spirit. (28 January 1956)

Accountability without Authority fails miserably; Authority without Accountability screws up.

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Impersonal: Hot stove treats all alike. It does not show any favouritism or spare anybody.Similarly, the disciplinary authority should treat all employees alike without any discrimination.[You may feel that past good conduct of the delinquent employee is taken into account while deciding the quantum of penalty. This is not in contravention of the rule of impersonal approach. Even past conduct has to be taken into account in respect of all the employees, without discrimination. ] � Immediate action: Just as the hot stove burns the fingers of those who touch it without any time lag, the disciplinary authority is also expected to impose penalty without delay. This will make the delinquent employee link the misconduct to the penalty; besides it also sends a message that misconduct will be appropriately dealt with.[The rule is attributed to Douglas McGregor who is better known for his ‘X’ and ‘Y’ theories of Management] 7. How to find out who is the Disciplinary Authority? Firstly, it must be remembered that the Disciplinary authority is determined with reference to the employee proceeded against. Schedule to the Rules 1965 lay down the details of the disciplinary authorities in respect of various grade of employees in different services in the Government. The President, the Appointing Authority, the Authority specified in the Schedule ot the Rules (to the extent specified therein) or by any other authority empowered in this behalf by any general or special order of the President may impose any fo the Penalties specified in Rule 11. Appointing Authority as mentioned in the Schedule must be understood with reference to rule2 (a) of the Rules. The question as to who is the appropriate disciplinary authority must be raised and answered not only while issuing charge sheet but also at the time of imposing penalty because there might have been some change in the situation due to delegation of powers, etc. in the organization.8. What are the functions of the Disciplinary Authority? Disciplinary authority is required to discharge the following functions: (a) Examination of the complaints received against the employees (b) Deciding as to who is to be appointed as the investigating authority 5

How could it be that Theophilus, one of the earliest Christian apologists, wrote nearly 30,000 words about Christianity without once mentioning Jesus Christ? How come the name "Jesus Christ," in fact, doesn't appear in any Greek or Latin author until after the Council of Nicaea? Why was it that the only near-contemporary account that mentioned Christ, a suspiciously precise paragraph known as the Testimonium Flavianum, in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, had been proved to be a patent insertion into that historical narrative? How could Jesus have been born in 1 A.D. when the Gospels say he was born before Herod the Great died — and King Herod's death could be pinpointed to 4 B.C.? Even Philip Cardinal Vasta, now known to the world as Pope Pius XIII, had lamented that the greatest obstacle for spreading the Catholic faith today was that the historical existence of Jesus could no longer be made credible.

And if we must take historical blunders in our stride, how will we cope with flat-out contradictions? Did Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb of Jesus see an angel of the Lord [Matthew 28:2] or merely a young man in white [Mark 16:5]? Or was it two men in shining garments [Luke 24:4]? Or two angels [John 20:12]? And how do we deal with the omission of pivotal events? Did Mary see Jesus himself near the tomb, at first mistaking him for a gardener [John 20:14-15]? Surely a sighting of Jesus is critically important evidence of the resurrection, the central mystery of the Christian faith. Yet the encounter at the tomb is mentioned only in the Gospel of John. How could Matthew, Mark and Luke have missed such a crucial point? Historical scholars, and most theologians, recognize that the authors who penned the ancient documents were doing the best they could with the sources available to them, writing in the traditions and expectations of their time, more concerned with presenting a coherent message than with precise historical accuracy. Some biblical scholars, however, even to this day maintain the inerrancy of scripture. They see the Bible as the Word of God, divinely inspired and supernaturally protected from error down the centuries. Unless one reads without comprehension (a distressingly common affliction), a belief in biblical inerrancy demands considerable mental gymnastics. Adherents typically construct a unified account of the gospel stories, not by resolving conflicts, but by adding together all the elements from the different narratives. Thus, Mary Magdalene visited the tomb several times, seeing the different combinations of divine presences on different occasions. For some inscrutable reason, God chose to drop the accounts of those visits into different gospels instead of presenting them logically in a single document.

I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.

The various products and processes of church tradition are certainly fallible, and their existence and exercise are certainly accountable to their prophetic and apostolic foundation. Their weak and subordinate nature notwithstanding, these instruments do not stand as obstacles to a knowledge of God that can be gained more immediately through the reading of Scripture without them. They stand as divinely authorized instruments and divinely appointed aids to reading Scripture, part of the fullness of Christ’s gift that he has bestowed in and through his anointing upon the church. Having received this anointing, and the fruits of this anointing, the church and the church’s theology can do no better than to abide in the one who has given by abiding in the gifts he has given (1 John 2:27).

Note: I am sure that now they will approach Medium to stop me from writing. Let’s see what happens. “A genuine person or celebrity doesn’t need a certificate or blue tick. Such ways are blackmailing your passion, emotion, or willingness. Criminals and money-mongers misuse and try to earn in an ugly and easy way. This trend also discriminates against others who cannot afford such an awkward notion.” Istay determined every day. I cannot tolerate liars and those who misuse their authority and attempt to victimize the righteous for their will and purpose in an illegitimate way to please their godfathers of the mafia and international criminal intelligence agencies. I am pretty sure, after reviewing again the replies from the Twitter team that mirror and endorse the Twitter team, that someone works for intelligence agencies or criminal and mafia groups. Since the beginning months of this year, I have been continuously victimized without specifying why I was posting the wrong things. I am going to publish a few emails that will exhibit the picture of how I was being victimized, harassed, and even threatened about things that I was neither aware of nor that the team explained. I was already under the attacks of criminals and even the gang of filthy-minded gays who were suffering from mental issues and sexual frustration; knowing it, I am not gay. In the Twitter team, the presence of such ones is not excluded since I felt a similar style of victimization. How do they dare to adopt such mean tactics to gain their will and desire? This reply email shows that a screenshot article has been displayed since 2020. After four years, it became an issue for someone in the Twitter team who continued to lock my account and tag the restriction flag. Text of my emails; “I am still uncertain about what to post and what not to post. You didn’t specify why my account was locked, whether it was because of the content I removed or something else. Is it permissible for me to share media and social media links in which my quotes are mentioned? My writings do not contain any personal attacks; nonetheless, thank you.” “You locked my Twitter, @EhsanSehgal, again; you know why you are doing it. Now, I can say only goodbye to my locked account and enjoy your terror. It is not a protection of my account; it is victimization. No more requests to unlock my account. Someone of angelic character will do it without my request. Shame on you all, involved ones.” Team replied; Hello, “We had a look at your account, and it appears that everything is now resolved! If that’s not the case, please reply to this message, and we’ll continue to help. Thanks,” X Support This was a screenshot article from Wikipedia about me on my profile that was illegitimately removed by such people as the Twitter team forced me to remove. Despite that, they continued locking my account to identify and provide an ID or passport. I did that twice and identified several times, but the team seemed not satisfied since their goal was something else; they would not approach nor be able to do it. To stop such criminal torture, I deactivated my account and decided never to come back there again.

Fully Vaccinated (The Sonnet) I am alive, well and fully vaccinated, Despite pledging allegiance to no authority. Listening to experts is not complacency, It's just an act of common sense humanity. You trust bus-drivers to get you to work, You trust pilots to fly you to places. Then why are you afraid to trust scientists, Without science we'd still be living like savages. State doesn't need to put microchip in your body, Future tech isn't needed to rule prehistoric veggies. Your dependency on social media is sufficient, To observe, manipulate and exploit your life stories. Be cautious of your online footprint, not inoculation. Be accountable and get your shot trampling all hesitation.

The Sayanim: Mossad’s International Volunteers by Michael Ellmer April 16, 2021 In the Hebrew language, Sayanim translates to mean “helpers” or “assistants”. In the Mossad, the Sayanim are a volunteer network of Jews across the world who are loyal to the nation of Israel and willing to help the agency in their global mission. According to a comparative study of HUMINT in counterterrorism between Israel and France, Amy Kirchheimer writes that Israel has “the challenge of collecting intelligence on a vast array of targets with a comparatively small number of intelligence officers, and the Sayanim network helped the Mossad Katsas (case officers) somewhat lessen this problem.” According to Gordon Thomas in his book Gideon’s Spies: Mossad’s Secret Warriors, the Sayanim were a creation of Mier Amit, the Chief Director of the Mossad from 1963-1968. Thomas writes, “Each Sayan was an example of historical cohesiveness of the world Jewish community. Regardless of allegiance to his or her country, in the final analysis, a Sayan would recognize a greater loyalty: the mystical one to Israel, and a need to help protect it from its enemies”. The loyalty of the Sayanim is what fuels their mission and none reside on a Mossad payroll. The flexibility and diversity in their roles give the Mossad a unique operational capability with increased protection from detection and a way to avoid budget restraints or accountability. Most Sayanim fulfil various roles that can themselves be used to support Mossad operations. For example, Thomas writes, “A car Sayan, running a rental agency, provided a Katsa with a vehicle without the usual documentation. A letting agency Sayan offered accommodation. A bank Sayan might unlock funds outside normal hours. A Sayan physician would give medical assistance – treating a bullet wound for example – without informing the authorities”.

Process accountability might sound like the opposite of psychological safety, but they’re actually independent. Amy Edmondson finds that when psychological safety exists without accountability, people tend to stay within their comfort zone, and when there’s accountability but not safety, people tend to stay silent in an anxiety zone. When we combine the two, we create a learning zone. People feel free to experiment—and to poke holes in one another’s experiments in service of making them better. They become a challenge network. One of the most effective steps toward process accountability that I’ve seen is at Amazon, where important decisions aren’t made based on simple PowerPoint presentations. They’re informed by a six-page memo that lays out a problem, the different approaches that have been considered in the past, and how the proposed solutions serve the customer. At the start of the meeting, to avoid groupthink, everyone reads the memo silently. This isn’t practical in every situation, but it’s paramount when choices are both consequential and irreversible. Long before the results of the decision are known, the quality of the process can be evaluated based on the rigor and creativity of the author’s thinking in the memo and in the thoroughness of the discussion that ensues in the meeting.

When the new charter arrived, May 14, 1692, the country was so involved in confusion about witchcraft, that twenty persons were executed on that account, in about four months. And when their general court met, on October 12, they made laws to compel every town to have and support an orthodox minister, and to empower their county courts to punish every town who neglected it. The whole power of choosing, and of supporting religious ministers was put into the hands of the voters in each town, who acted therein without any religious qualification in themselves. Formerly the church had governed the world, but now the world was to govern the church, about religious ministers. Our Lord says, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” John 3:3. And His kingdom evidently here means His church; yet no regard is paid to His authority, as far as the world governs in religious affairs.

Political authority, the authority of the State, may arise in a number of possible ways: in Locke's phrase, for instance, a father may become the "politic monarch" of an extended family; or a judge may acquire kingly authority in addition, as in Herodotus' tale. Whatever its first origin, political authority tends to include all four pure types of authority. Medieval scholastic teachings of the divine right of kings display this full extent of political authority. Even in this context, however, calls for independence of the judicial power arose, as exemplified by the Magna Carta; in this way the fact was manifested that the judge's authority, rooted in Eternity, stands apart from the three temporal authorities, which more easily go together, of father, master, and leader. The medieval teaching of the full extent of political authority is complicated and undermined by the existence of an unresolved conflict, namely that arising between ecclesiastical and state power, between Pope and Emperor, on account of the failure to work out an adequate distinction between the political and the ecclesiastical realms. The teachings of absolutism by thinkers such as Bodin and Hobbes resolved this conflict through a unified teaching of sovereignty that removed independent theological authority from the political realm. In reaction to actual and potential abuses of absolutism, constitutional teachings arose (often resting on the working hypothesis of a "social contract") and developed—most famously in Montesquieu—a doctrine of "separation of powers." This new tradition focused its attention on dividing and balancing political power, with a view to restricting it from despotic or tyrannical excess. Kojève makes the astute and fascinating observation that in this development from absolutism to constitutionalism, the authority of the father silently drops out of the picture, without any detailed analysis or discussion; political authority comes to be discussed as a combination of the authority of judge, leader, and master, viewed as judicial power, legislative power, and executive power. In this connection, Kojève makes the conservative or traditionalist Hegelian suggestion that, with the authority of the father dropped from the political realm, the political authority, disconnected from its past, will have a tendency towards constant change.

For some [Papists] (gymnē tē kephalē, without wish of concealment) altogether deny the authenticity (authentian) of Scripture in itself without the testimony of the church and think it worthy of no more belief (I shudder to relate) than the Koran, Titus Livy or the fables of Aesop. In a former age those who undertook to dispute with our men concerning the authority of Scripture belched forth these blasphemies. Such are the impious words of Hosius against Brentius ('Confutatio Prolegomenon Brentii,' in Opera [1583], 1:530). He asserts that it can be said in a pious sense that 'the Scriptures have only as much force as the fables of Aesop, if destitute of the authority of the church.' Eck says that 'the Scriptures are not authentic, except by authority of the church' (Enchirdion of Commonplaces 1 [trans. F.L. Battles, 1979], p. 13, 'On the Church and her Authority'). Baile says that 'without the authority of the church we should no more believe Matthew than Titus Livy' (cf. Andre Rivet, Sommaire de toutes les controverses touchant la religion [1615], p. 217). Andradius says, 'There is nothing of divinity in the books in which the sacred mysteries are written and that there cannot be found in them anything to bind us to religion and to believe what they contain; but that the power and dignity of the church are so great as that no one without the greatest impiety can resist it' (Defensio tridentinae fidei catholicae 3+ [1580]). Stapleton says, 'The church must be considered in such a light, as that we ought not to believe the testimony in any other way than the apostles believed the testimony of Christ, and that God is not to be believed except on account of the church' (adversus Whittak., lib. i, c. 7+ [1620]).

Without a constitution to maintain some semblance of order, religious law becomes the highest authority. And when everyone is free to interpret and enforce the law as he sees fit, chaos ensues.

This introduces us to several things about Mark's Gospel. First, he writes at an absolutely breakneck pace, often focusing on deeds without many words. For example, his account of Jesus' temptation by Satan does not include the mini-debate familiar from Matthew and Luke. Mark portrays Jesus as relentlessly active, driven by a sense that time is short and he has much to do. Things inevitably slow down after this remarkable opening chapter, but Mark will still move his narrative along. Second, we see the importance the evangelist puts upon Jesus' authority. He differs from everyone else. He is unique. The world has never seen his like and never will again. Human history has changed because of him, although few knew it at the time. Third, one reason few people knew him was that Jesus kept cautioning those he healed as well as the evil spirits to tell no one about the work he did. On the surface this makes little sense. How can he cure someone in a synagogue or when the whole town is present and expect word of that not to get around? The answer is that this is a Markan literary device.

© Copyright 2021 by Janani Sathish - All rights reserved. This document is geared towards providing exact and reliable information in regards to the topic and issue covered. The publication is sold with the idea that the publisher is not required to render accounting, officially permitted, or otherwise, qualified services. If advice is necessary, legal or professional, a practiced individual in the profession should be ordered.- From a Declaration of Principles which was accepted and approved equally by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations. In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.The information provided herein is stated to be truthful and consistent, in that any liability, in terms of inattention or otherwise, by any usage or abuse of any policies, processes, or directions contained within is the solitary and utter responsibility of the recipient reader. Under no circumstances will any legal responsibility or blame be held against the publisher for any reparation, damages, or monetary loss due to the information herein, either directly or indirectly. Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher. The information herein is offered for informational purposes solely, and is universal as so. The presentation of the information is without contract or any type of guarantee assurance. The trademarks that are used are without any consent, and the publication of the trademark is without permission or backing by the trademark owner.Spells are each reason devices of a wizard or witch; short eruptions of sorcery used to achieve single specific

Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.

Dear Elephant, Sir: … There are those, of course, who say you are useless, that you destroy crops in a land where starvation is rampant, that mankind has enough problems taking care of itself, without being expected to burden itself with elephants, They are saying, in fact, that you are a luxury, that we can no longer afford you. This is exactly the kind of argument every totalitarian regime from Stalin and Hitler to Mao uses to prove that a truly “progressive” society cannot be expected to afford the luxury of individual freedom. Human rights are elephants, too. The right of dissent, of independent thinking, the right to oppose and to challenge authority can very easily be throttled and repressed in the name of “necessity.” … In a German prison camp, during the last world war … locked behind the barbed wires we would think of the elephant herds thundering across the endless plains of Africa, and the image of such an irresistible liberty helped us to survive. If the world can no longer afford the luxury of natural beauty, then it will soon be overcome and destroyed by its own ugliness. I myself feel deeply that the fate of Man, and his dignity, are at stake.… There is no doubt that in the name of total rationalism you should be destroyed, leaving all the room to us on this overpopulated planet. Neither can there be any doubt that your disappearance will mean the beginning of an entirely man-made world. But let me tell you this, old friend: in an entirely man-made world, there can be no room for man either.… We are not and could never be our own creation. We are forever condemned to be part of a mystery that neither logic nor imagination can fathom, and your presence among us carries a resonance that cannot be accounted for in terms of science or reason, but only in terms of awe, wonder and reverence. You are our last innocence.… I know only too well that by taking your side—or is it merely my own?—I shall no doubt be labeled a conservative, or even a reactionary, a “monster” belonging to another and, it seems, prehistorical era: that of liberalism. I willingly accept the label. And so, dear Elephant, sir, we are finding ourselves, you and I, in the same boat.… In a truly materialistic and realistic society, poets, writers, artists, dreamers and elephants are a mere nuisance.… You are, dear Elephant sir, the last individual. Your very devoted friend, Romain Gary

If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus [AD 180]. The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were restrained by the firm and gentle hand of four successive emperors, whose characters and authority commanded involuntary respect. The forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased with considering themselves as the accountable ministers of the laws.

Hegel’s claim that genuine agency is the collective historical product of earlier, only partially realized attempts at the actualization of such agency (attempts at an unavoidable normative self-regulation) goes well beyond Kant’s self-legislation model but is not fully intelligible without remembering that origin, and without working through what he (and Fichte) adopted from Kant and transformed. Kant’s view that being an agent involves not acting “according to laws” but “according to conceptions of law” still holds great, decisive force in his successors, as does his claim that a law’s authority and so its genuineness as law, can be explained only by some non arbitrary act of self-legislation or self authorization. This will turn out to be a thoroughly “socially mediated” account of human autonomy (as collective autonomy), but the reliance on the German idealist theme of Reason’s self-authorization will be quite prominent.

Jessie, a fifty-year-old woman with no skills, job opportunities were limited. She may have had a historic family background, but pedigree was of little use when it came to job skills. A few years later, Daisy ghost-wrote an article, “On the Fourteenth Floor,” a first-person account of a woman—a mother of two daughters—who has run out of money and moves to New York City in search of a job. Retail work is available, but she wisely decides that she would not be a good candidate to be a saleswoman. One day, she lunches with a friend at a large hotel in the city and notices that the hotel is bursting with business. Foot traffic in the lobby is thick and without letup. The woman realizes that this is a thriving operation and most likely has job positions available. On a whim, the woman applies for a job, not really knowing what position they would place her in. The manager says she can begin the next day as a chambermaid for thirty-six dollars a month, along with room and board. “On the Fourteenth Floor,” rich in detail as to the woman’s responsibilities and day-to-day activities, is sprinkled with descriptions of her interactions with the clientele. The author also writes of a friendly co-worker named Zayda with whom she becomes close friends. Daisy would give homage to Zayda later in her early career at Street & Smith. Forty years later, Esther would tell stories of the time when the three women lived at a hotel in Manhattan. They lived at the Hotel Astor, Esther said, and socialized with Arturo Toscanini’s wife Carla. Esther remembered Mrs. Toscanini cooking traditional Italian dinners for her and her sister in her suite, much to the consternation of the hotel management. Although there is no documentation proving this, and neither Jessie nor Daisy mention living at the Astor in their journals, Esther’s reminisces about socializing with the wife of the legendary conductor line up chronologically with the time that she lived at the hotel.

Privilege increases the odds of having things your own way, of being able to set the agenda in a social situation and determine the rules and standards and how they're applied. Privilege grants the cultural authority to make judgments about others and to have those judgments stick. It allows people to define reality and to have prevailing definitions of reality fit their experience. Privilege means being able to decide who gets taken seriously, who receives attention, who is accountable to whom and for what. And it grants a presumption of superiority and social permission to act on that presumption without having to worry about being challenged.

One sees now how prettily the eels and snakes copulate together in a heap. The priests and all the evil clergy are the snakes, as John the Baptist calls them, Matthew 3[:7], and the temporal lords and rulers are the eels, as is symbolized by the fish in Leviticus 11[:10-12]. For the devil's empire has painted its face with clay. Oh, you beloved lords, how well the Lord will smash down the old pots of clay [ecclesiastical authorities] with his rod of iron, Psalm 2[:9]. Therefore, you most true and beloved regents, learn your knowledge directly from the mouth of God and do not let yourselves be seduced by your flattering priests and restrained by false patience and indulgence. For the stone [Christ's spirit] torn from the mountain without human touch has become great. The poor laity and the peasants see it much more clearly than you do. Yes, God be praised, the stone has become so great that, already, if other lords or neighbours wanted to persecute you on account of the gospel, they would be overthrown by their own subjects. This I know to be true. Indeed the stone is great! The foolish world has long feared it. The stone fell upon the world when it was still small. What then should we do now, after it has grown so great and powerful? And after it has struck the great statue so powerfully and irresistibly that it has smashed down the old pots of clay?

Unlike most of the bureaucracy, he does not believe in segregation of responsibilities. The government, in his view, must function in a holistic manner. This is only possible with cooperation and exchange between departments. So, if there is shady dealing in one department, he has a moral responsibility to point it out. After all, his ultimate accountability is not to the state CM, but to his appointing authority: the President of India. The political class and its bureaucrats, on the other hand, love compartmentalization. As long as one department does not know what the other is doing, it is always possible to pull off a scam. In the DLF–Vadra case, for example, the Town & Country Planning department was merrily issuing licences without checking with the revenue departments responsible for enforcing land laws.

Pragmatically, there is an evident need for the continuation of many of the functions of the original apostles. This would include church planting, laying good foundations in churches, continuing to oversee those churches, appointing the leaders, giving ongoing fatherly care to leaders, and handling difficult questions that may arise from those churches. There are really only three ways for churches to carry out these functions: 1. Each church is free to act totally independently and to seek God’s mind for its own government and pastoral wisdom, without any help from outside, unless the church may choose to seek it at any particular time. When we started the church which I am still a part of, for example, we were so concerned to be ‘independent’ that we would not even join the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, although we adopted their trust deed and constitution because that would prevent us being purely independent. We were at that time very proud of our ‘independence’! 2. Churches operate under some sort of structured and formal oversight, as in many denominations today, where local church leaders are appointed by and accountable to regional leadership, whether ‘bishops’, ‘superintendents’ or ‘overseers’. It is hard to justify this model from the pages of the New Testament, though we recognize that it developed very early in church history. Even the word episkopos, translated ‘bishop’ or ‘overseer’, which came to be used of those having wider authority and oversight over other leaders and churches, was used in the New Testament as a synonym for the local leaders or elders of a particular church. The three main forms of church government current in the institutional church are Episcopalianism (government by bishops), Presbyterianism (government by local elders) and Congregationalism (government by the church meeting). Each of these is only a partial reflection of the New Testament. Commenting on these forms of government without apostolic ministry, Phil Greenslade says, ‘We assert as our starting point what the other three viewpoints deny: that the apostolic role is as valid and vital today as ever before. This is to agree with the German charismatic theologian, Arnold Bittlinger, when he says “the New Testament nowhere suggests that the apostolic ministry was intended only for first-century Christians”.’39 3. We aim to imitate the New Testament practice of travelling ministries of apostles and prophets, with apostles having their own spheres of responsibility as a result of having planted and laid the foundations in the churches they oversee. Such ministries continue the connection with local churches as a result of fatherly relationships and not denominational election or appointment, recognizing that there will need to be new charismatically gifted and friendship-based relationships continuing into later generations. This is the model that the ‘New Apostolic Reformation’ (to use Peter Wagner’s phrase) is attempting to follow. Though mistakes have been made, including some quite serious ones involving controlling authority, and though those of us involved are still seeking to find our way with the Holy Spirit’s help, it seems to reflect more accurately the New Testament pattern and a present-day outworking of scriptures such as 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4. ‘Is the building finished? Is the Bride ready? Is the Body full-grown, are the saints completely equipped? Has the church attained its ordained unity and maturity? Only if the answer to these questions is “yes” can we dispense with apostolic ministry. But as long as the church is still growing up into Christ, who is its head, this ministry is needed. If the church of Jesus Christ is to grow faster than the twentieth century population explosion, which I assume to be God’s intention, then we will need to produce, recognize and use Pauline apostles.’40

Motivational speaker and author Shiv Khera says, ‘Accepting responsibilities involves taking risks and being accountable, which is sometimes uncomfortable. Most people would rather stay in their comfort zones and live passive lives without accepting responsibilities.

In our image of the physical world, we are obliged to introduce partial totalities without which there would be no laws and which partial totalities are precisely what we understood above by form. The combined interplay of laws could withdraw existence from structures which had become stable and bring about the appearance of other structures, the properties of which are not predictable. Thus there is a flow of things which supports the laws and which cannot be definitively resolved into them. To treat the physical world as if it were an intersecting of linear causal series in which each keeps its individuality, as if it were a world in which there is no duration, is an illegitimate extrapolation; science must be linked to a history of the universe in which the development is discontinuous. We cannot even pretend to possess genuine "causal series," models of linear causality, in our established science. The notion of causal series can be considered a constitutive principle of the physical universe only if the law is separated from the process of verification which gives it objective value. The physical experiment is never the revelation of an isolated causal series: one verifies that the observed effect indeed obeys the presumed law by taking into account a series of conditions, such as temperature, atmospheric pressure, altitude, in brief, that is, a certain number of laws which are independent of those which constitute the proper object of the experiment. Properly speaking, therefore, what one verifies is never a law but a system of complementary laws. There could be no question of supposing a point-for-point correspondence between the experiment and the physical laws; the truth of physics is not found in the laws taken one by one, but in their combinations. Since the law cannot be detached from concrete events where it intersects with other laws and receives a truth value along with them, one cannot speak of a linear causal action which would distinguish an effect from its cause; for in nature it is impossible to circumscribe the author, the one responsible as it were, of a given effect. Since we nevertheless succeed in formulating laws, clearly all the parts of nature must not contribute equally in producing the observed effect. The only valid formulation of the principle of causality will be that which affirms, along with the solidarity of phenomena in the universe, a sort of lessening—proportional to the distance—of the influences exercised on a given phenomenon by prior and simultaneous phenomena. Thus laws and the linear relation of consequence to conditions refer us back to events in interaction, to "forms" from which they should not be abstracted.

In one of his essays William Placher comments on a time when the theological use of the Bible presupposed a deep knowledge of what the Bible says.1 The example he serves up is from the final pages of Calvin’s Institutes, where the Reformer thinks through the issue of what Christians should do if they find themselves under a wicked ruler. Placher notes that Calvin reflects on Daniel and Ezekiel regarding the need to obey even bad rulers; he weighs the command to serve the king of Babylon in Jeremiah 27. He quotes from the Psalms, and he cites Isaiah to the effect that the faithful are urged to trust in God to overcome the unrighteous. On the other hand, he evenhandedly notes episodes in Exodus and Judges “where people serve God by overthrowing the evil rulers,” and texts in 1 Kings and Hosea where God’s people are criticized for being obedient to wicked kings. He cites Peter’s conclusion before Gamaliel, according to Acts: “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). From these and other biblical passages, he proceeds to weave nuanced conclusions. We should disobey what governement mandates if it violates our religious obligations. By contrast, Christians should not normally go around starting revolutions. But those who are in positions of authority should deploy that authority to deal with those who exploit others. Even violent revolutionaries may in mysterious ways perform the will of God, though of course they may be called to judgment on account of their evil. Placher then comments: My point is not to defend all of Calvin’s conclusions, or even all of his method, but simply to illustrate how immersion in biblical texts can produce a very complex way of reflecting within a framework of biblical authority, compared to which most contemporary examples look pretty simple-minded. We can’t “appeal to the Bible” in a way that’s either helpful or faithful without beginning to do theology. Theology begins to put together a way of looking as a Christian at the world in all its variety, a language that we share as Christians and that provides a context rich enough for discussing the complexities of our lives. Absent such a shared framework, we can quote passages at each other, but the only contexts in which we can operate come from the discourses of politics and popular culture.2

The bond to corporeality in these traditions is renewed as well by the deification of notable priestesses, priests and rulers, who become aspects of the Gods with whom they have a bond in life. On the other hand, there is a kind of absolute divine ancestrality without reference to historical identity as such, as in Vodou in the pantheon of the Gede (Guede), among whom we find, for example, the first mortal to die, the first to commit murder, and the first to die by violence. Ancestrality thus does not function in these traditions as a form of limitation, as we see instead for example in euhemerizing accounts of polytheist traditions by Christian authors, which reduce Gods to historical figures in order to diminish Them relative to the Christian God.

Ask for Permission If the gap you’re about to address is traditionally off limits, particularly sensitive, or something a person in your position doesn’t normally discuss, ask for permission to discuss it. Be gracious. Don’t plunge into a delicate topic without first seeking permission. Asking permission is a powerful sign of respect and is particularly helpful if you’re speaking from a position of authority. It also helps allay people’s suspicion that your intentions toward them are malicious.