Administration Best Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Administration Best. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Another fresh new year is here . . . Another year to live! To banish worry, doubt, and fear, To love and laugh and give! This bright new year is given me To live each day with zest . . . To daily grow and try to be My highest and my best! I have the opportunity Once more to right some wrongs, To pray for peace, to plant a tree, And sing more joyful songs!
William Arthur Ward
A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
I have nothing but contempt for the kind of governor who is afraid, for whatever reason, to follow the course that he knows is best for the State.
Sophocles (Antigone (The Theban Plays, #3))
When picking a leader, choose a peacemaker. One who unites, not divides. A cultured leader who supports the arts and true freedom of speech, not censorship.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with the arms of intelligence and with moral qualities which he may use for the worst ends. Wherefore, if he have not virtue, he is the most unholy and the most savage of animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony. But justice is the bond of men in states, and the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society.
Aristotle (Politics)
Pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Because I'm the best fuck in the solar system." (Toreth)
Manna Francis (First Against the Wall (The Administration, #6))
...The Presidential election has given me less anxiety than I myself could have imagined. The next administration will be a troublesome one, to whomsoever it falls, and our John has been too much worn to contend much longer with conflicting factions. I call him our John, because, when you were at the Cul de sac at Paris, he appeared to me to be almost as much your boy as mine. ...As to the decision of your author, though I wish to see the book {Flourens’s Experiments on the functions of the nervous system in vertebrated animals}, I look upon it as a mere game at push-pin. Incision-knives will never discover the distinction between matter and spirit, or whether there is any or not. That there is an active principle of power in the universe, is apparent; but in what substance that active principle resides, is past our investigation. The faculties of our understanding are not adequate to penetrate the universe. Let us do our duty, which is to do as we would be done by; and that, one would think, could not be difficult, if we honestly aim at it. Your university is a noble employment in your old age, and your ardor for its success does you honor; but I do not approve of your sending to Europe for tutors and professors. I do believe there are sufficient scholars in America, to fill your professorships and tutorships with more active ingenuity and independent minds than you can bring from Europe. The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with episcopal and presbyterian creeds, and confessions of faith. They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton’s universe and Herschel’s universe, came down to this little ball, to be spit upon by Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world. I salute your fireside with best wishes and best affections for their health, wealth and prosperity. {Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 22 January, 1825}
John Adams (The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams)
the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam.
David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library))
If you are disabled, it is probably not your fault, but it is no good blaming the world or expecting it to take pity on you. One has to have a positive attitude and must make the best of the situation that one finds oneself in; if one is physically disabled, one cannot afford to be psychologically disabled as well. In my opinion, one should concentrate on activities in which one's physical disability will not present a serious handicap. I am afraid that Olympic Games for the disabled do not appeal to me, but it is easy for me to say that because I never liked athletics anyway. On the other hand, science is a very good area for disabled people because it goes on mainly in the mind. Of course, most kinds of experimental work are probably ruled out for most such people, but theoretical work is almost ideal. My disabilities have not been a significant handicap in my field, which is theoretical physics. Indeed, they have helped me in a way by shielding me from lecturing and administrative work that I would otherwise have been involved in. I have managed, however, only because of the large amount of help I have received from my wife, children, colleagues and students. I find that people in general are very ready to help, but you should encourage them to feel that their efforts to aid you are worthwhile by doing as well as you possibly can.
Stephen Hawking
American culture is a sheep culture—long on talk about individualism, but even longer on absolute conformity. Most still believe that individuality is based on which model car you like best—commodity identity, a selection of personalities on a shelf full of products approved by the Federal Identity Administration. I’m a Taurus aspiring to be a Lexus.
Stan Goff (Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century)
This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: To set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent on him; and, after doing so, to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgement, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community--the man of wealth thus becoming the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.
Andrew Carnegie
by 1950, caught up increasingly in our own global vision of anti-Communism, we chose not to see this war as primarily a colonial/anticolonial war, and we had begun to underwrite most of the French costs. Where our money went our rhetoric soon followed. We adjusted our public statements, and much of our journalism, to make it seem as if this was a war of Communists against anti-Communists, instead, as the people of Vietnam might have seen it, a war of a colonial power against an indigenous nationalist force.
David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library))
Up to then there had been something of a gentleman’s agreement among those who might be called The Good Journalists of Washington that the Kennedy Administration was one of excellence, that it was for good things and against bad things, and that when it did lesser things it was only in self-defense, and in order that it might do other good things.
David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest)
When things are orderly, it reduces the possibility of waste. When things are orderly, it maximizes efficiency. Eliminating waste and maximizing efficiency both lend themselves to profit.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Business for Beginners: Getting Started)
[The wives of powerful noblemen] must be highly knowledgeable about government, and wise – in fact, far wiser than most other such women in power. The knowledge of a baroness must be so comprehensive that she can understand everything. Of her a philosopher might have said: "No one is wise who does not know some part of everything." Moreover, she must have the courage of a man. This means that she should not be brought up overmuch among women nor should she be indulged in extensive and feminine pampering. Why do I say that? If barons wish to be honoured as they deserve, they spend very little time in their manors and on their own lands. Going to war, attending their prince's court, and traveling are the three primary duties of such a lord. So the lady, his companion, must represent him at home during his absences. Although her husband is served by bailiffs, provosts, rent collectors, and land governors, she must govern them all. To do this according to her right she must conduct herself with such wisdom that she will be both feared and loved. As we have said before, the best possible fear comes from love. When wronged, her men must be able to turn to her for refuge. She must be so skilled and flexible that in each case she can respond suitably. Therefore, she must be knowledgeable in the mores of her locality and instructed in its usages, rights, and customs. She must be a good speaker, proud when pride is needed; circumspect with the scornful, surly, or rebellious; and charitably gentle and humble toward her good, obedient subjects. With the counsellors of her lord and with the advice of elder wise men, she ought to work directly with her people. No one should ever be able to say of her that she acts merely to have her own way. Again, she should have a man's heart. She must know the laws of arms and all things pertaining to warfare, ever prepared to command her men if there is need of it. She has to know both assault and defence tactics to insure that her fortresses are well defended, if she has any expectation of attack or believes she must initiate military action. Testing her men, she will discover their qualities of courage and determination before overly trusting them. She must know the number and strength of her men to gauge accurately her resources, so that she never will have to trust vain or feeble promises. Calculating what force she is capable of providing before her lord arrives with reinforcements, she also must know the financial resources she could call upon to sustain military action. She should avoid oppressing her men, since this is the surest way to incur their hatred. She can best cultivate their loyalty by speaking boldly and consistently to them, according to her council, not giving one reason today and another tomorrow. Speaking words of good courage to her men-at-arms as well as to her other retainers, she will urge them to loyalty and their best efforts.
Christine de Pizan (The Treasure of the City of Ladies)
What the hell kind of message were you supposed to send under these circumstances? Tell him I committed suicide because I couldn't bear the idea of Carnac shoving his cock down my throat and expecting me to be grateful for it? Tell him I'm going to miss him, for however long it takes them to kill me? Tell him I'm sorry that the last thing we did together was argue and not fuck? Tell him that he was the best fuck in the world? "Tell him I..." And his eyes started to sting from looking at her, seeing her crying for him. No one else ever had. "You're the admin—just tell him something. Whatever you think he'd like to hear. Make it sound good.
Manna Francis (First Against the Wall (The Administration, #6))
It is easy for faction and calumny to shed their poison on the administration of the best of princes, and to accuse even their virtues, by artfully confounding them with those vices to which they bear the nearest affinity.
Edward Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)
Among those dazzled by the Administration team was Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. After attending his first Cabinet meeting he went back to his mentor Sam Rayburn and told him with great enthusiasm how extraordinary they were, each brighter than the next, and that the smartest of them all was that fellow with the Stacomb on his hair from the Ford Motor Company, McNamara. “Well, Lyndon,” Mister Sam answered, “you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.” It is my favorite story in the book, for it underlines the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal fluency which the team exuded, and the true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam.
David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest)
I would do a book about how and why we had gone to war in Vietnam, and about the men who were the architects of the war. The basic question behind the book was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War.
David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library))
I added another chapter, the story of John Paton Davies, one of the most distinguished of the China hands who had had his career savaged during the McCarthy years. The section reflected my belief that in a better and healthier society he or someone like him might have been sitting in as Assistant Secretary of State during the Vietnam decisions.
David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library))
The small batches principle is part of the DevOps methodology. It comes from the Lean Manufacturing movement, which is often called just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing. It
Thomas A. Limoncelli (Practice of System and Network Administration, The: DevOps and other Best Practices for Enterprise IT, Volume 1)
As a system administrator, it's in your best interest to befriend data center technicians and bribe them with coffee, caffeinated soft drinks, and alcoholic beverages
Evi Nemeth (UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook)
That I wasn’t summoned to report for administrative endoscopy was possibly the best indicator possible of how bad things were.
Elizabeth Bear (Machine (White Space, #2))
Day after day we read about them, each new man more brilliant than the last. They were not just an all-star first team, but an all-star second team as well. There were counts kept on how many Rhodes scholars there were in the Administration, how many books by members of the new Administration (even the Postmaster, J. Edward Day, had written a novel, albeit a bad one).
David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest)
convincing those who are intrusted with the public administration that every valuable end of government is best answered by the enlightened confidence of the people, and by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority;
George Washington (State of the Union Address)
Under fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don’t want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or to present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is. The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you’d first used writing to avoid or disguise is another paradox, but this one isn’t any kind of bind at all. What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to it the reward of strangers’ affection is as dust, lint.
David Foster Wallace (Both Flesh and Not: Essays)
Administrators often hide their mimicry under the rubric of adherence to “best practices.” They can seldom offer any real evidence that the practice in question is even good, much less best.
Benjamin Ginsberg (The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters)
The East Coast was running smoothly, but it now involved too much administration for him. The whole thing needed reorganizing, streamlining, and that wasn’t the best use of Johnson’s time or creativity
Phil Knight (Shoe Dog)
New Rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word "liberal," they also have to take back the word "elite." By now you've heard the constant right-wing attacks on the "elite media," and the "liberal elite." Who may or may not be part of the "Washington elite." A subset of the "East Coast elite." Which is overly influenced by the "Hollywood elite." So basically, unless you're a shit-kicker from Kansas, you're with the terrorists. If you played a drinking game where you did a shot every time Rush Limbaugh attacked someone for being "elite," you'd be almost as wasted as Rush Limbaugh. I don't get it: In other fields--outside of government--elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I'd like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad--the elite aren't down-to-earth and accessible like you and me and President Shit-for-Brains. Which is fine, except that whenever there's a Bush administration scandal, it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment, and you think to yourself, "Where are they getting these screwups from?" Well, now we know: from Pat Robertson. I'm not kidding. Take Monica Goodling, who before she resigned last week because she's smack in the middle of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She's thirty-three, and though she never even worked as a prosecutor, was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all ninety-three U.S. attorneys. How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College--you know, home of the "Fighting Christies"--and then went on to attend Pat Robertson's law school. Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause "earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor," has a law school. And what kid wouldn't want to attend? It's three years, and you have to read only one book. U.S. News & World Report, which does the definitive ranking of colleges, lists Regent as a tier-four school, which is the lowest score it gives. It's not a hard school to get into. You have to renounce Satan and draw a pirate on a matchbook. This is for the people who couldn't get into the University of Phoenix. Now, would you care to guess how many graduates of this televangelist diploma mill work in the Bush administration? On hundred fifty. And you wonder why things are so messed up? We're talking about a top Justice Department official who went to a college founded by a TV host. Would you send your daughter to Maury Povich U? And if you did, would you expect her to get a job at the White House? In two hundred years, we've gone from "we the people" to "up with people." From the best and brightest to dumb and dumber. And where better to find people dumb enough to believe in George Bush than Pat Robertson's law school? The problem here in America isn't that the country is being run by elites. It's that it's being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And by the way, the lawyer Monica Goodling hired to keep her ass out of jail went to a real law school.
Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
In nations where it exists, every individual takes an equal share in sovereign power and participates equally in the government of the state. Thus he is considered as enlightened, virtuous, strong as any of his fellow men. Why then does he obey society and what are the normal limits of his obedience? He obeys not because he holds an inferior position to those who run the administration or is less capable than his neighbor of self-government but because he recognizes the usefulness of his association with his fellow men and because he knows that this association cannot exist without a regulating power. While he has become a subject in all the mutual duties of citizens, he remains master in his own affairs where he is free and answerable only to God and his action. Out of that grows the general truth that the individual is the sole and best placed judge of his own private concerns and society has the right to control his actions only when it feels such actions cause it damage or needs to seek the cooperation of the individual.
Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America)
It hung heavily albeit secretly over the internal calculation of Democratic leaders of the period. But of course it was never discussed in the major newspapers and magazine articles that analyzed policy making in Vietnam. It was a secret subject, reflecting secret fears.
David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library))
Experiment is valued by Schlesinger more than experience, and compassion, not results, is described as “the best answer.” Leuchtenburg follows a similar line and notes, “many workingmen, poor farmers, and others who felt themselves to have been neglected in the past regarded Roosevelt as their friend. They sensed that his was a humane administration, that the President cared what happened to them.” Historians seem to focus on “caring” and “compassion” more than on the unprecedented lack of recovery for the eleven years from 1929 to 1940.
Burton W. Folsom Jr. (New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America)
Physicians, nurses, and other caregivers often do not know the costs associated with their treatment protocols. And administrators rarely collaborate with them to develop outcome and cost measurements that would facilitate benchmarking and best-practice-sharing opportunities.
Anonymous
The more White investigated the flow of oil money from Osage headrights, the more he found layer upon layer of corruption. Although some white guardians and administrators tried to act in the best interests of the tribe, countless others used the system to swindle the very people they were ostensibly protecting.
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
COMMUNITY WAS HELD IN A LONG ROOM with tall barred windows that overlooked a redbrick wall. The smell of coffee was in the air, mingled with traces of Yuri’s aftershave. About thirty people were sitting in a circle. Most were clutching paper cups of tea or coffee, yawning and doing their best to wake up. Some, having drunk their coffees, were fidgeting with the empty cups, crumpling, flattening them, or tearing them to shreds. Community met once or twice daily; it was something between an administrative meeting and a group therapy session. Items relating to the running of the unit or the patients’ care were put on the agenda to be discussed
Alex Michaelides (The Silent Patient)
He asked me, "what were the usual causes or motives that made one country go to war with another?" I answered "they were innumerable; but I should only mention a few of the chief. Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land or people enough to govern; sometimes the corruption of ministers, who engage their master in a war, in order to stifle or divert the clamour of the subjects against their evil administration. Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire: what is the best colour for a coat, whether black, white, red, or gray: and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean; with many more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long a continuance, especially if it be in things indifferent.
Jonathan Swift
Bergoglio was revolutionary when it came to administrative matters too. He put an end to the traditional system of young priests starting in poor parishes and then being promoted with the years to larger and wealthier ones. ‘Nor did he like the idea that the best priests would go off to jobs in Rome’, said Marcó. ‘He saw that as careerism.
Paul Vallely (Pope Francis: Untying the Knots)
John Archer in a definitive 2006 review, “There is a weak and inconsistent association between testosterone levels and aggression in [human] adults, and … administration of testosterone to volunteers typically does not increase their aggression.” The brain doesn’t pay attention to fluctuations of testosterone levels within the normal range.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
In his book Politics, which is the foundation of the study of political systems, and very interesting, Aristotle talked mainly about Athens. But he studied various political systems - oligarchy, monarchy - and didn't like any of the particularly. He said democracy is probably the best system, but it has problems, and he was concerned with the problems. One problem that he was concerned with is quite striking because it runs right up to the present. He pointed out that in a democracy, if the people - people didn't mean people, it meant freemen, not slaves, not women - had the right to vote, the poor would be the majority, and they would use their voting power to take away property from the rich, which wouldn't be fair, so we have to prevent this. James Madison made the same pint, but his model was England. He said if freemen had democracy, then the poor farmers would insist on taking property from the rich. They would carry out what we these days call land reform. and that's unacceptable. Aristotle and Madison faced the same problem but made the opposite decisions. Aristotle concluded that we should reduce ineqality so the poor wouldn't take property from the rich. And he actually propsed a visin for a city that would put in pace what we today call welfare-state programs, common meals, other support systems. That would reduce inequality, and with it the problem of the poor taking property from the rich. Madison's decision was the opposite. We should reduce democracy so the poor won't be able to get together to do this. If you look at the design of the U.S. constitutional system, it followed Madison's approach. The Madisonian system placed power in the hands of the Senate. The executive in those days was more or less an administrator, not like today. The Senate consisted of "the wealth of the nation," those who had sympathy for property owners and their rights. That's where power should be. The Senate, remember, wasn't elected. It was picked by legislatures, who were themselves very much subject to control by the rich and the powerful. The House, which was closer to the population, had much less power. And there were all sorts of devices to keep people from participation too much - voting restrictions and property restrictions. The idea was to prevent the threat of democracy. This goal continues right to the present. It has taken different forms, but the aim remains the same.
Noam Chomsky (Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire (American Empire Project))
It’s Groundhog Day,” said Max. “The new people come in and think that the previous administration and the civil service are lazy or stupid. Then they actually get to know the place they are managing. And when they leave they say, ‘This was a really hard job, and those are the best people I’ve ever worked with.’ This happens over and over and over.
Michael Lewis (The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy)
Whoever visits some estates there, and witnesses the good-humored indulgence of some masters and mistresses, and the affectionate loyalty of some slaves, might be tempted to dream the oft-fabled poetic legend of a patriarchal institution, and all that; but over and above the scene there broods a portentous shadow—the shadow of law. So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to a master,—so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil,—so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best regulated administration of slavery.
Solomon Northup (Twelve Years a Slave: Plus Five American Slave Narratives, Including Life of Frederick Douglass, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Life of Josiah Henson, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Up From Slavery)
It is an office for which Mr. Taft has conspicuous qualifications. But best of all, his nomination means the end of Roosevelt and Rooseveltism. It means the end of personal government, of autocratic régime, of militarism, of jingoism, of roughriderism, of administration by shouting and clamor, tumult and denunciation. It means the end of the Roosevelt reign of terror and the restoration of the Presidency to its historical dignity under the Constitution. Even Andrew Johnson, in his periods of sobriety, had more innate respect for the office itself, for its traditions and for appearances than Mr. Roosevelt has shown. Never before was there such a lawless President. Never before was the Presidency so deliberately lowered to gratify a love for studied and sensational theatricalism.
Mark Twain (Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3: The Complete and Authoritative Edition (Mark Twain Papers Book 12))
Of the things I had not known when I started out, I think the most important was the degree to which the legacy of the McCarthy period still lived. It had been almost seven years since Joe McCarthy had been censured when John Kennedy took office, and most people believed that his hold on Washington was over. ... among the top Democrats, against whom the issue of being soft on Communism might be used, and among the Republicans, who might well use the charge, it was still live ammunition. ... McCarthyism still lingered ... The real McCarthyism went deeper in the American grain than most people wanted to admit ... The Republicans’ long, arid period out of office [twenty years, ended by the Eisenhower administration], accentuated by Truman’s 1948 defeat of Dewey, had permitted the out-party in its desperation, to accuse the leaders of the governing party of treason. The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China. Long after McCarthy himself was gone, the fear of being accused of being soft on Communism lingered among the Democratic leaders. The Republicans had, of course, offered no alternative policy on China (the last thing they had wanted to do was suggest sending American boys to fight for China) and indeed there was no policy to offer, for China was never ours, events there were well outside our control, and our feudal proxies had been swept away by the forces of history. But in the political darkness of the time it had been easy to blame the Democrats for the ebb and flow of history. The fear generated in those days lasted a long time, and Vietnam was to be something of an instant replay after China. The memory of the fall of China and what it did to the Democrats, was, I think, more bitter for Lyndon Johnson than it was for John Kennedy. Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.
David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest)
Mr. President I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them: For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error. Steele a Protestant in a Dedication tells the Pope, that the only difference between our Churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrines is, the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong. But though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect. In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other. I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the Builders of Babel; and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another's throats. Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best. The opinions I have had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good. I have never whispered a syllable of them abroad. Within these walls they were born, and here they shall die. If every one of us in returning to our Constituents were to report the objections he has had to it, and endeavor to gain partizans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received, and thereby lose all the salutary effects & great advantages resulting naturally in our favor among foreign Nations as well as among ourselves, from our real or apparent unanimity. Much of the strength & efficiency of any Government in procuring and securing happiness to the people, depends, on opinion, on the general opinion of the goodness of the Government, as well as of the wisdom and integrity of its Governors. I hope therefore that for our own sakes as a part of the people, and for the sake of posterity, we shall act heartily and unanimously in recommending this Constitution (if approved by Congress & confirmed by the Conventions) wherever our influence may extend, and turn our future thoughts & endeavors to the means of having it well administred. On the whole, Sir, I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.
Benjamin Franklin
It had personally pained Trump not to be able to give it to him. But if the Republican establishment had not wanted Trump, they had not wanted Christie almost as much. So Christie got the job of leading the transition and the implicit promise of a central job—attorney general or chief of staff. But when he was the federal prosecutor in New Jersey, Christie had sent Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, to jail in 2005. Charlie Kushner, pursued by the feds for an income tax cheat, set up a scheme with a prostitute to blackmail his brother-in-law, who was planning to testify against him. Various accounts, mostly offered by Christie himself, make Jared the vengeful hatchet man in Christie’s aborted Trump administration career. It was a kind of perfect sweet-revenge story: the son of the wronged man (or, in this case—there’s little dispute—the guilty-as-charged man) uses his power over the man who wronged his family. But other accounts offer a subtler and in a way darker picture. Jared Kushner, like sons-in-law everywhere, tiptoes around his father-in-law, carefully displacing as little air as possible: the massive and domineering older man, the reedy and pliant younger one. In the revised death-of-Chris-Christie story, it is not the deferential Jared who strikes back, but—in some sense even more satisfying for the revenge fantasy—Charlie Kushner himself who harshly demands his due. It was his daughter-in-law who held the real influence in the Trump circle, who delivered the blow. Ivanka told her father that Christie’s appointment as chief of staff or to any other high position would be extremely difficult for her and her family, and it would be best that Christie be removed from the Trump orbit altogether.
Michael Wolff (Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House)
It is difficult beyond description to pursue a complex policy in a contentious part of the world when the policy is subject to instant modification based on the boss’s perception of how inaccurate and often-already-outdated information is reported by writers who don’t have the Administration’s best interests at heart in the first place. It was like making and executing policy inside a pinball machine, not the West Wing of the White House.
John R. Bolton (The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir)
to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so there’s not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus—a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept. (which the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the pre-molded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and numinous aura)—which balcony means that
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.
David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library))
wheelchair-accessible front ramp, take a bit of getting used to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so there’s not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus—a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept. (which the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the pre-molded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
There is no small irony here: An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War. Part of the reason for this were the upheavals of the McCarthy period, but in part it was also the arrogance of men of the Atlantic; it was as if these men did not need to know about such a distant and somewhat less worthy part of the world. Lesser parts of the world attracted lesser men; years later I came upon a story which illustrated this theory perfectly. Jack Langguth, a writer and college classmate of mine, mentioned to a member of that Administration that he was thinking of going on to study Latin American history. The man had turned to him, his contempt barely concealed, and said, “Second-rate parts of the world for second-rate minds.
David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest)
More fundamentally, meritocracy is impossible to achieve, because, as Young says, a meritocracy is always based on an imperfect definition of merit and often narrowly defined to favor training, connections, and education primarily available to the wealthy. Take Stanford. Because Stanford is filled with students with top high-school GPAs and SAT scores, administrators can pat themselves on the back and say, “We only admit the best students. We’re a meritocracy.” The students are encouraged to think similarly. But is it just a coincidence that the median annual family income of a Stanford student is $167,500 while the national median is roughly one-third that? Did those high-achieving students naturally get high SAT scores, or did they benefit from their parents’ paying for tutors and sending them to private schools? Privilege accumulates as you advance in life. If the college you attend is the basis of your future employment networks, then it is impossible to say that your employment success is solely based on merit.
Emily Chang (Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley)
[Professor Greene's] reaction to GAMAY, as published in the Yale Daily News, fairly took one's breath away. He fondled the word "fascist" as though he had come up with a Dead Sea Scroll vouchsafing the key word to the understanding of God and Man at Yale. In a few sentences he used the term thrice. "Mr. Buckley has done Yale a great service" (how I would tire of this pedestrian rhetorical device), "and he may well do the cause of liberal education in America an even greater service, by stating the fascist alternative to liberalism. This fascist thesis . . . This . . . pure fascism . . . What more could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for . . . ?" (They asked for, and got, a great deal more.) What survives, from such stuff as this, is ne-plus-ultra relativism, idiot nihlism. "What is required," Professor Greene spoke, "is more, not less tolerance--not the tolerance of indifference, but the tolerance of honest respect for divergent convictions and the determination of all that such divergent opinions be heard without administrative censorship. I try my best in the classroom to expound and defend my faith, when it is relevant, as honestly and persuasively as I can. But I can do so only because many of my colleagues are expounding and defending their contrasting faiths, or skepticisms, as openly and honestly as I am mine." A professor of philosophy! Question: What is the 1) ethical, 2) philosophical, or 3) epistemological argument for requiring continued tolerance of ideas whose discrediting it is the purpose of education to effect? What ethical code (in the Bible? in Plato? Kant? Hume?) requires "honest respect" for any divergent conviction?
William F. Buckley Jr. (God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom')
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free--honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just--a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.
Abraham Lincoln
Who understands an emperor? An emperor, Paulinus, is a man accustomed to absolute and godlike power. A man who plans for the good of thousands too often to consider the good of one. Even the best of emperors is like that; even Emperor Augustus the god, our ancestor. Domitian is no Augustus; he’s tricky and odd-tempered like all the Flavians. And he’s no god. But I’ve seen eight men wear the purple, and Domitian wears it better than many. I wasn’t much impressed with him as a boy, but he‘s turned into one of the best administrators I’ve seen, and a fair general as well.
Kate Quinn (Mistress of Rome (The Empress of Rome, #1))
I strongly believe that the best economic policy for any administration is the one that seeks to produce more entrepreneurs, not just more minimally educated college graduates with nowhere to go. Nothing against recent college graduates, but many of today’s best universities are no longer providing the basics of a classical liberal education. That is why the single most important economic issue of our time—and one that impacts the poor and middle class alike—will be how we treat the entrepreneurs and wealth creators among us, from both the government and the private-sector viewpoints.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
The executive’s time tends to belong to everybody else. If one attempted to define an “executive” operationally (that is, through his activities) one would have to define him as a captive of the organization. Everybody can move in on his time, and everybody does. There seems to be very little any one executive can do about it. He cannot, as a rule, like the physician, stick his head out the door and say to the nurse, “I won’t see anybody for the next half hour.” Just at this moment, the executive’s telephone rings, and he has to speak to the company’s best customer or to a high official in the city administration or to his boss—and the next half hour is already gone.*
Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials))
Currently the best educated and the brightest minds of any nation are not among its elected, but among its public, and in much greater numbers. But even having a great number of the best and the brightest amongst us does not make us capable of installing a working version of direct democracy right away. People who claim that it does, may be there to voluntarily or involuntarily damage the credibility of direct democracy. Direct democracy needs a yet inexistent infrastructure to support the new mechanism that will render the public capable of constituting the experience necessary to domesticate direct democracy, without destabilizing our societies with needless haste, emotions and fractures. One way of doing it may be the constitution of a nation-wide, internet reliant hence fluid, non-political organism parallel but totally hermetic to our representative democracies, with a unique objective: creating the means, platforms and protocols necessary for the public and all the specialists it contains, to communicate horizontally. The public may decide to keep for the moment our representative democracies, but in parallel create an experimental version of direct democracy until we all acquire the necessary perspective and invent new working mechanisms of self-governance. Later the public may decide to have both representative and direct democracies sharing governance for a time, and experience first-hand the advantages and disadvantages of both systems before deciding where to go from there.
Haroutioun Bochnakian
You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.” Truman understood something his legendary immediate predecessor had also grasped: that, as Franklin D. Roosevelt observed during the 1932 campaign, “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership. All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
MY FIRST ASSIGNMENT AFTER BEING ORDAINED as a pastor almost finished me. I was called to be the assistant pastor in a large and affluent suburban church. I was glad to be part of such an obviously winning organization. After I had been there a short time, a few people came to me and asked that I lead them in a Bible study. “Of course,” I said, “there is nothing I would rather do.” We met on Monday evenings. There weren’t many—eight or nine men and women—but even so that was triple the two or three that Jesus defined as a quorum. They were eager and attentive; I was full of enthusiasm. After a few weeks the senior pastor, my boss, asked me what I was doing on Monday evenings. I told him. He asked me how many people were there. I told him. He told me that I would have to stop. “Why?” I asked. “It is not cost-effective. That is too few people to spend your time on.” I was told then how I should spend my time. I was introduced to the principles of successful church administration: crowds are important, individuals are expendable; the positive must always be accented, the negative must be suppressed. Don’t expect too much of people—your job is to make them feel good about themselves and about the church. Don’t talk too much about abstractions like God and sin—deal with practical issues. We had an elaborate music program, expensively and brilliantly executed. The sermons were seven minutes long and of the sort that Father Taylor (the sailor-preacher in Boston who was the model for Father Mapple in Melville’s Moby Dick) complained of in the transcendentalists of the last century: that a person could no more be converted listening to sermons like that than get intoxicated drinking skim milk.[2] It was soon apparent that I didn’t fit. I had supposed that I was there to be a pastor: to proclaim and interpret Scripture, to guide people into a life of prayer, to encourage faith, to represent the mercy and forgiveness of Christ at special times of need, to train people to live as disciples in their families, in their communities and in their work. In fact I had been hired to help run a church and do it as efficiently as possible: to be a cheerleader to this dynamic organization, to recruit members, to lend the dignity of my office to certain ceremonial occasions, to promote the image of a prestigious religious institution. I got out of there as quickly as I could decently manage it. At the time I thought I had just been unlucky. Later I came to realize that what I experienced was not at all uncommon.
Eugene H. Peterson (Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best)
Wilson insisted that the centralized administrative state must, by logic and necessity, replace or thoroughly alter the constitutional structure—particularly the Framers’ incorporation of Charles de Montesquieu’s separation-of-powers doctrine, essential to curtailing the likelihood of concentrated tyranny, which must be abandoned in principle. Otherwise there can be no real historical progress. “The study of administration, philosophically viewed, is closely connected with the study of the proper distribution of constitutional authority. . . . If administrative study can discover the best principles upon which to base such distribution, it will have done constitutional study an invaluable service. Montesquieu did not, I am convinced, say the last word on this head.”44 Hence the administrative state is to effectively replace the constitutional state, the latter being old and immovable.
Mark R. Levin (Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism)
Although formulas have greatly improved over the years, no formula can fully replicate the immunological benefits of mother’s milk. In the summer of 2018, the administration of President Donald Trump provoked dismay among many health authorities by opposing an international resolution to encourage breast-feeding and reportedly threatened Ecuador, the sponsor of the initiative, with trade sanctions if it didn’t change its position. Cynics pointed out that the infant formula industry, which is worth $70 billion a year, might have had a hand in determining the U.S. position. A Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson denied that that was the case and said that America was merely “fighting to protect women’s abilities to make the best choices for the nutrition of their babies” and to make sure that they were not denied access to formula—something the resolution wouldn’t have done anyway.
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
(Corinthians:) In the face of such an enemy, Lacedaemonians, you persist in doing nothing. You do not see that peace is best secured by those who use their strength justly, but whose attitude shows that they have no intention of submitting to wrong. Justice with you seems to consist in giving no annoyance to others and in defending yourselves only against positive injury. But this policy would hardly be successful, even if your neighbours were like yourselves; and in the present case, as we pointed out just now, your ways compared with theirs are old-fashioned. And, as in the arts, so also in politics, the new must always prevail over the old.In settled times the traditions of government should be observed: but when circumstances are changing and men are compelled to meet them, much originality is required. The Athenians have had a wider experience, and therefore the administration of their state unlike yours has been greatly reformed. (Book 1 Chapter 71.1-3)
Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War: Bk. 1-2)
Only under a polity in which all citizens enjoy equal rights—corresponding to the liberal ideal, which has nowhere ever been fully achieved—can there be political parties consisting of associations of persons who want to see their ideas on legislation and administration put into effect. For there can very well be differences of opinion concerning the best way to achieve the liberal aim of assuring peaceful social cooperation, and these differences of opinion must join issue as conflicts of ideas. Thus, in a liberal society there could be socialist parties too. Even parties that seek to have a special legal position conceded to particular groups would not be impossible under a liberal system. But all these parties must acknowledge liberalism (at least temporarily, until they emerge victorious) so far as to make use in their political struggles solely of the weapons of the intellect, which liberalism views as the only ones permissible in such contests, even though, in the last analysis, as socialists or as champions of special privileges, the members of the antiliberal parties reject the liberal philosophy.
Ludwig von Mises (Liberalism: The Classical Tradition)
New Rule: Democrats must get in touch with their inner asshole. I refer to the case of Van Jones, the man the Obama administration hired to find jobs for Americans in the new green industries. Seems like a smart thing to do in a recession, but Van Jones got fired because he got caught on tape saying Republicans are assholes. And they call it news! Now, I know I'm supposed to be all reinjected with yes-we-can-fever after the big health-care speech, and it was a great speech--when Black Elvis gets jiggy with his teleprompter, there is none better. But here's the thing: Muhammad Ali also had a way with words, but it helped enormously that he could also punch guys in the face. It bothers me that Obama didn't say a word in defense of Jones and basically fired him when Glenn Beck told him to. Just like dropped "end-of-life counseling" from health-care reform because Sarah Palin said it meant "death panels" on her Facebook page. Crazy morons make up things for Obama to do, and he does it. Same thing with the speech to schools this week, where the president attempted merely to tell children to work hard and wash their hands, and Cracker Nation reacted as if he was trying to hire the Black Panthers to hand out grenades in homeroom. Of course, the White House immediately capitulated. "No students will be forced to view the speech" a White House spokesperson assured a panicked nation. Isn't that like admitting that the president might be doing something unseemly? What a bunch of cowards. If the White House had any balls, they'd say, "He's giving a speech on the importance of staying in school, and if you jackasses don't show it to every damn kid, we're cutting off your federal education funding tomorrow." The Democrats just never learn: Americans don't really care which side of an issue you're on as long as you don't act like pussies When Van Jones called the Republicans assholes, he was paying them a compliment. He was talking about how they can get things done even when they're in the minority, as opposed to the Democrats , who can't seem to get anything done even when they control both houses of Congress, the presidency, and Bruce Springsteen. I love Obama's civility, his desire to work with his enemies; it's positively Christlike. In college, he was probably the guy at the dorm parties who made sure the stoners shared their pot with the jocks. But we don't need that guy now. We need an asshole. Mr. President, there are some people who are never going to like you. That's why they voted for the old guy and Carrie's mom. You're not going to win them over. Stand up for the seventy percent of Americans who aren't crazy. And speaking of that seventy percent, when are we going to actually show up in all this? Tomorrow Glenn Beck's army of zombie retirees descending on Washington. It's the Million Moron March, although they won't get a million, of course, because many will be confused and drive to Washington state--but they will make news. Because people who take to the streets always do. They're at the town hall screaming at the congressman; we're on the couch screaming at the TV. Especially in this age of Twitters and blogs and Snuggies, it's a statement to just leave the house. But leave the house we must, because this is our last best shot for a long time to get the sort of serious health-care reform that would make the United States the envy of several African nations.
Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
Michelle Alexander, an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, has written an entire book, The New Jim Crow, that blames high black incarceration rates on racial discrimination. She posits that prisons are teeming with young black men due primarily to a war on drugs that was launched by the Reagan administration in the 1980s for the express purpose of resegregating society. “This book argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system,” wrote Alexander.4 “What this book is intended to do—the only thing it is intended to do—is to stimulate a much-needed conversation about the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetrating racial hierarchy in the United States.”5 Liberals love to have “conversations” about these matters, and Alexander got her wish. The book was a best seller. NPR interviewed her multiple times at length. The New York Times said that Alexander “deserved to be compared to Du Bois.” The San Francisco Chronicle described the book as “The Bible of a social movement.
Jason L. Riley (Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed)
The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue. And this will be thought no inconsiderable recommendation of the Constitution, by those who are able to estimate the share which the executive in every government must necessarily have in its good or ill administration. Though we cannot acquiesce in the political heresy of the poet who says: "For forms of government let fools contest—That which is best administered is best,"—yet we may safely pronounce, that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.
Alexander Hamilton (The Federalist Papers (Illustrated))
Donald Trump repeatedly promised he would hire "the best people." He did not. That is not my opinion; it is President Trump's, which he expresses frequently. Trump has said that his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, was "dumb as a rock" and "lazy as hell." His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was "scared stiff and Missing in Action," "didn't have a clue," and "should be ashamed of himself." Trump described one of his assistants, Omarosa Manigault Newman, as "wacky," "deranged," "vicious, but not smart," a "crazed, crying lowlife," and finally a "dog." After lasting only eleven days as communications director, Anthony Scaramucci "was quickly terminated 'from' a position that he was totally incapable of handling" and was called "very much out of control." An anonymous adviser to the president was called "a drunk/drugged-up loser." Chief strategist Steve Bannon was "sloppy," a "leaker," and "dumped like a dog by almost everyone." His longtime lawyer Michael Cohen was "TERRIBLE," "hostile," "a convicted liar & fraudster," and a "failed lawyer." The president was "Never a big fan!" of his White House counsel Don McGahn and "not even a little bit happy" with Jerome Powell, his selection to head the Federal Reserve, whom he called an "enemy." His third national security advisor, John Bolton, was mocked as a "tough guy [who] got us into Iraq." When the president was irritated with his former chief of staff, John Kelly, the president's press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, declared that Kelly "was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great president.
John Dickerson (The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency)
In the absence of expert [senior military] advice, we have seen each successive administration fail in the business of strategy - yielding a United States twice as rich as the Soviet Union but much less strong. Only the manner of the failure has changed. In the 1960s, under Robert S. McNamara, we witnessed the wholesale substitution of civilian mathematical analysis for military expertise. The new breed of the "systems analysts" introduced new standards of intellectual discipline and greatly improved bookkeeping methods, but also a trained incapacity to understand the most important aspects of military power, which happens to be nonmeasurable. Because morale is nonmeasurable it was ignored, in large and small ways, with disastrous effects. We have seen how the pursuit of business-type efficiency in the placement of each soldier destroys the cohesion that makes fighting units effective; we may recall how the Pueblo was left virtually disarmed when it encountered the North Koreans (strong armament was judged as not "cost effective" for ships of that kind). Because tactics, the operational art of war, and strategy itself are not reducible to precise numbers, money was allocated to forces and single weapons according to "firepower" scores, computer simulations, and mathematical studies - all of which maximize efficiency - but often at the expense of combat effectiveness. An even greater defect of the McNamara approach to military decisions was its businesslike "linear" logic, which is right for commerce or engineering but almost always fails in the realm of strategy. Because its essence is the clash of antagonistic and outmaneuvering wills, strategy usually proceeds by paradox rather than conventional "linear" logic. That much is clear even from the most shopworn of Latin tags: si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war), whose business equivalent would be orders of "if you want sales, add to your purchasing staff," or some other, equally absurd advice. Where paradox rules, straightforward linear logic is self-defeating, sometimes quite literally. Let a general choose the best path for his advance, the shortest and best-roaded, and it then becomes the worst path of all paths, because the enemy will await him there in greatest strength... Linear logic is all very well in commerce and engineering, where there is lively opposition, to be sure, but no open-ended scope for maneuver; a competitor beaten in the marketplace will not bomb our factory instead, and the river duly bridged will not deliberately carve out a new course. But such reactions are merely normal in strategy. Military men are not trained in paradoxical thinking, but they do no have to be. Unlike the business-school expert, who searches for optimal solutions in the abstract and then presents them will all the authority of charts and computer printouts, even the most ordinary military mind can recall the existence of a maneuvering antagonists now and then, and will therefore seek robust solutions rather than "best" solutions - those, in other words, which are not optimal but can remain adequate even when the enemy reacts to outmaneuver the first approach.
Edward N. Luttwak
On the evening of Wednesday, June 22, 1955, there was an official re-election ceremony being held on the open porch behind the Executive Mansion. As usual it was hot and steamy in Monrovia and without air-conditioning the country’s President and several members of his administration were taking in the cooler, but still damp, night air. Without warning, several shots were fired in the direction of the President. In the dark all that could be seen were the bright flashes from a pistol. Two men, William Hutchins, a guard, and Daniel Derrick, a member of the national legislature, fell wounded, but fortunately President Tubman had escaped harm and was hurried back into the building. In the dark no one was certain, but Paul Dunbar was apparently seen by someone in the garden behind the mansion. James Bestman, a presidential security agent, subdued and apprehended the alleged shooter in the Executive Pavilion, best known for its concrete painted animals. It was said that Bestman had used his .38 caliber “Smith and Wesson,” revolver. Members of the opposition party were accused of participating in the assassination plot and a dragnet was immediately cast to round up the alleged perpetrators. It didn’t take long before the son of former President William Coleman, Samuel David Coleman, was indicted, as was his son John. The following day, warrants for the arrest of Former President Barclay, and others in opposition to Tubman, were also issued for allegedly being accomplices. Coleman and his son fled to Clay-Ashland, a township 15 miles north of Monrovia in the St. Paul River District of Montserrado County. Photo Caption: The (former) Liberian Executive Mansion.
Hank Bracker
Progressivism was imported from Europe and would result in a radical break from America’s heritage. In fact, it is best described as an elitist-driven counterrevolution to the American Revolution, in which the sovereignty of the individual, natural law, natural rights, and the civil society—built on a foundation of thousands of years of enlightened thinking and human experience—would be drastically altered and even abandoned for an ideological agenda broadly characterized as “historical progress.” Progressivism is the idea of the inevitability of historical progress and the perfectibility of man—and his self-realization—through the national community or collective. While its intellectual and political advocates clothe its core in populist terminology, and despite the existence of democratic institutions and cyclical voting, progressivism’s emphasis on material egalitarianism and societal engineering, and its insistence on concentrated, centralized administrative rule, lead inescapably to varying degrees of autocratic governance. Moreover, for progressives there are no absolute or permanent truths, only passing and distant historical events. Thus even values are said to be relative to time and circumstances; there is no eternal moral order—that is, what was true and good in 1776 and before is not necessarily true and good today. Consequently, the very purpose of America’s founding is debased. To better understand this ideology, its refutation of the American heritage, and its enormous effect on modern American life, it is necessary to become acquainted with some of the most influential progressive intellectuals who, together with others, set the nation on this lamentable course. Given their prolific writings, it is neither possible nor necessary to delve into every manner of their thoughts or the differences among them in their brand of progressivism. For our purposes, it is enough to expose essential aspects of their arguments.
Mark R. Levin (Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism)
Just as, in the eyes of the liberal, the state is not the highest ideal, so it is also not the best apparatus of compulsion. The metaphysical theory of the state declares— approaching, in this respect, the vanity and presumption of the absolute monarchs— that each individual state is sovereign, i.e., that it represents the last and highest court of appeals. But, for the liberal, the world does not end at the borders of the state. In his eyes, whatever significance national boundaries have is only incidental and subordinate. His political thinking encompasses the whole of mankind. The starting-point of his entire political philosophy is the conviction that the division of labor is international and not merely national. He realizes from the very first that it is not sufficient to establish peace within each country, that it is much more important that all nations live at peace with one another. The liberal therefore demands that the political organization of society be extended until it reaches its culmination in a world state that unites all nations on an equal basis. For this reason he sees the law of each nation as subordinate to international law, and that is why he demands supranational tribunals and administrative authorities to assure peace among nations in the same way that the judicial and executive organs of each country are charged with the maintenance of peace within its own territory. For a long time the demand for the establishment of such a supranational world organization was confined to a few thinkers who were considered utopians and went unheeded. To be sure, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the world repeatedly witnessed the spectacle of the statesmen of the leading powers gathered around the conference table to arrive at a common accord, and after the middle of the nineteenth century, an increasing number of supranational institutions were established, the most widely noted of which are the Red Cross and the International Postal Union. Yet all of this was still a very far cry from the creation of a genuine supranational organization.
Ludwig von Mises (Liberalism: The Classical Tradition)
In 1786, Jefferson, then the American ambassador to France, and Adams, then the American ambassador to Britain, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the ambassador to Britain. The Americans wanted to negotiate a peace treaty based on Congress’ vote to appease. During the meeting Jefferson and Adams asked the ambassador why Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts. In a later meeting with the American Congress, the two future presidents reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja had answered that Islam “was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Qur’an that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.” For the following 15 years, the American government paid the Muslims millions of dollars for the safe passage of American ships or the return of American hostages. Most Americans do not know that the payments in ransom and Jizyah tribute amounted to 20 percent of United States government annual revenues in 1800. Not long after Jefferson’s inauguration as president in 1801, he dispatched a group of frigates to defend American interests in the Mediterranean, and informed Congress. Declaring that America was going to spend “millions for defense but not one cent for tribute,” Jefferson pressed the issue by deploying American Marines and many of America’s best warships to the Muslim Barbary Coast. The USS Constitution, USS Constellation, USS Philadelphia, USS Chesapeake, USS Argus, USS Syren and USS Intrepid all fought. In 1805, American Marines marched across the dessert from Egypt into Tripolitania, forcing the surrender of Tripoli and the freeing of all American slaves. During the Jefferson administration, the Muslim Barbary States, crumbled as a result of intense American naval bombardment and on shore raids by Marines. They finally agreed officially to abandon slavery and piracy. Jefferson’s victory over the Muslims lives on today in the Marine Hymn with the line “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we will fight our country’s battles on the land as on the sea.” It wasn’t until 1815 that the problem was fully settled by the total defeat of all the Muslim slave trading pirates.
Walid Shoebat (God's War on Terror: Islam, Prophecy and the Bible)
supposed weakness on national security. Ours was a brief exchange, filled with unspoken irony—the elderly Southerner on his way out, the young black Northerner on his way in, the contrast that the press had noted in our respective convention speeches. Senator Miller was very gracious and wished me luck with my new job. Later, I would happen upon an excerpt from his book, A Deficit of Decency, in which he called my speech at the convention one of the best he’d ever heard, before noting—with what I imagined to be a sly smile—that it may not have been the most effective speech in terms of helping to win an election. In other words: My guy had lost. Zell Miller’s guy had won. That was the hard, cold political reality. Everything else was just sentiment. MY WIFE WILL tell you that by nature I’m not somebody who gets real worked up about things. When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously; I assume that they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sourpusses. When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we all take a deep breath. When people at dinner parties ask me how I can possibly operate in the current political environment, with all the negative campaigning and personal attacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or some guy in a Chinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth, being called names is not such a bad deal. Still, I am not immune to distress. And like most Americans, I find it hard to shake the feeling these days that our democracy has gone seriously awry. It’s not simply that a gap exists between our professed ideals as a nation and the reality we witness every day. In one form or another, that gap has existed since America’s birth. Wars have been fought, laws passed, systems reformed, unions organized, and protests staged to bring promise and practice into closer alignment. No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics—the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem. We know that global competition—not to mention any genuine commitment to the values
Barack Obama (The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream)
Correlation and causality. Why is it that throughout the animal kingdom and in every human culture, males account for most aggression and violence? Well, what about testosterone and some related hormones, collectively called androgens, a term that unless otherwise noted, I will use simplistically as synonymous with testosterone. In nearly all species, males have more circulating testosterone than do females, who secrete small amounts of androgens from the adrenal glands. Moreover, male aggression is most prevalent when testosterone levels are highest; adolescence and during mating season in seasonal breeders. Thus, testosterone and aggression are linked. Furthermore, there are particularly high levels of testosterone receptors in the amygdala, in the way station by which it projects to the rest of the brain, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, and in its major targets, the hypothalamus, the central gray of the mid-brain, and the frontal cortex. But these are merely correlative data. Showing that testosterone causes aggression requires a subtraction plus a replacement experiment. Subtraction, castrate a male: do levels of aggression decrease? Yes, including in humans. This shows that something coming from the testes causes aggression. Is it testosterone? Replacement: give that castrated individual replacement testosterone. Do pre-castration levels of aggression return? Yes, including in humans, thus testosterone causes aggression. Time to see how wrong that is. The first hint of a complication comes after castration. When average levels of aggression plummet in every species, but crucially, not to zero, well, maybe the castration wasn't perfect, you missed some bits of testes, or maybe enough of the minor adrenal androgens are secreted to maintain the aggression. But no, even when testosterone and androgens are completely eliminated, some aggression remains, thus some male aggression is testosterone independent. This point is driven home by castration of some sexual offenders, a legal procedure in a few states. This is accomplished with chemical castration, administration of drugs that either inhibit testosterone production or block testosterone receptors. Castration decreases sexual urges in the subset of sex offenders with intense, obsessive, and pathological urges. But otherwise, castration doesn't decrease recidivism rates as stated in one meta-analysis. Hostile rapists and those who commit sex crimes motivated by power or anger are not amenable to treatment with the anti-androgenic drugs. This leads to a hugely informative point. The more experience the male had being aggressive prior to castration, the more aggression continues afterward. In otherwise, the less his being aggressive in the future requires testosterone and the more it's a function of social learning.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
A word of explanation about how the information in this book was obtained, evaluated and used. This book is designed to present, as best my reporting could determine, what really happened. The core of this book comes from the written record—National Security Council meeting notes, personal notes, memos, chronologies, letters, PowerPoint slides, e-mails, reports, government cables, calendars, transcripts, diaries and maps. Information in the book was supplied by more than 100 people involved in the Afghanistan War and national security during the first 18 months of President Barack Obama’s administration. Interviews were conducted on “background,” meaning the information could be used but the sources would not be identified by name. Many sources were interviewed five or more times. Most allowed me to record the interviews, which were then transcribed. For several sources, the combined interview transcripts run more than 300 pages. I have attempted to preserve the language of the main characters and sources as much as possible, using their words even when they are not directly quoted, reflecting the flavor of their speech and attitudes. Many key White House aides were interviewed in-depth. They shared meeting notes, important documents, recollections of what happened before, during and after meetings, and assisted extensively with their interpretations. Senior and well-placed military, intelligence and diplomatic officials also provided detailed recollections, read from notes or assisted with documents. Since the reporting was done over 18 months, many interviews were conducted within days or even hours after critical discussions. This often provided a fresher and less-calculated account. Dialogue comes mostly from the written record, but also from participants, usually more than one. Any attribution of thoughts, conclusions or feelings to a person was obtained directly from that person, from notes or from a colleague whom the person told. Occasionally, a source said mid-conversation that something was “off-the-record,” meaning it could not be used unless the information was obtained elsewhere. In many cases, I was able to get the information elsewhere so that it could be included in this book. Some people think they can lock up and prevent publication of information by declaring it “off-the-record” or that they don’t want to see it in the book. But inside any White House, nearly everyone’s business and attitudes become known to others. And in the course of multiple, extensive interviews with firsthand sources about key decision points in the war, the role of the players became clear. Given the diversity of sources, stakes and the lives involved, there is no way I could write a sterilized or laundered version of this story. I interviewed President Obama on-the-record in the Oval Office for one hour and 15 minutes on Saturday, July 10, 2
Bob Woodward (Obama's Wars)
Time management also involves energy management. Sometimes the rationalization for procrastination is wrapped up in the form of the statement “I’m not up to this,” which reflects the fact you feel tired, stressed, or some other uncomfortable state. Consequently, you conclude that you do not have the requisite energy for a task, which is likely combined with a distorted justification for putting it off (e.g., “I have to be at my best or else I will be unable to do it.”). Similar to reframing time, it is helpful to respond to the “I’m not up to this” reaction by reframing energy. Thinking through the actual behavioral and energy requirements of a job challenges the initial and often distorted reasoning with a more realistic view. Remember, you only need “enough” energy to start the task. Consequently, being “too tired” to unload the dishwasher or put in a load of laundry can be reframed to see these tasks as requiring only a low level of energy and focus. This sort of reframing can be used to address automatic thoughts about energy on tasks that require a little more get-up-and-go. For example, it is common for people to be on the fence about exercising because of the thought “I’m too tired to exercise.” That assumption can be redirected to consider the energy required for the smaller steps involved in the “exercise script” that serve as the “launch sequence” for getting to the gym (e.g., “Are you too tired to stand up and get your workout clothes? Carry them to the car?” etc.). You can also ask yourself if you have ever seen people at the gym who are slumped over the exercise machines because they ran out of energy from trying to exert themselves when “too tired.” Instead, you can draw on past experience that you will end up feeling better and more energized after exercise; in fact, you will sleep better, be more rested, and have the positive outcome of keeping up with your exercise plan. If nothing else, going through this process rather than giving into the impulse to avoid makes it more likely that you will make a reasoned decision rather than an impulsive one about the task. A separate energy management issue relevant to keeping plans going is your ability to maintain energy (and thereby your effort) over longer courses of time. Managing ADHD is an endurance sport. It is said that good soccer players find their rest on the field in order to be able to play the full 90 minutes of a game. Similarly, you will have to manage your pace and exertion throughout the day. That is, the choreography of different tasks and obligations in your Daily Planner affects your energy. It is important to engage in self-care throughout your day, including adequate sleep, time for meals, and downtime and recreational activities in order to recharge your battery. Even when sequencing tasks at work, you can follow up a difficult task, such as working on a report, with more administrative tasks, such as responding to e-mails or phone calls that do not require as much mental energy or at least represent a shift to a different mode. Similarly, at home you may take care of various chores earlier in the evening and spend the remaining time relaxing. A useful reminder is that there are ways to make some chores more tolerable, if not enjoyable, by linking them with preferred activities for which you have more motivation. Folding laundry while watching television, or doing yard work or household chores while listening to music on an iPod are examples of coupling obligations with pleasurable activities. Moreover, these pleasant experiences combined with task completion will likely be rewarding and energizing.
J. Russell Ramsay (The Adult ADHD Tool Kit)
The Seventh Central Pay Commission was appointed in February 2014 by the Government of India (Ministry of Finance) under the Chairmanship of Justice Ashok Kumar Mathur. The Commission has been given 18 months to make its recommendations. The terms of reference of the Commission are as follows:  1. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure including pay, allowances and other facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, having regard to rationalisation and simplification therein as well as the specialised needs of various departments, agencies and services, in respect of the following categories of employees:-  (i) Central Government employees—industrial and non-industrial; (ii) Personnel belonging to the All India Services; (iii) Personnel of the Union Territories; (iv) Officers and employees of the Indian Audit and Accounts Department; (v) Members of the regulatory bodies (excluding the RBI) set up under the Acts of Parliament; and (vi) Officers and employees of the Supreme Court.   2. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure, concessions and facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, as well as the retirement benefits of the personnel belonging to the Defence Forces, having regard to the historical and traditional parties, with due emphasis on the aspects unique to these personnel.   3. To work out the framework for an emoluments structure linked with the need to attract the most suitable talent to government service, promote efficiency, accountability and responsibility in the work culture, and foster excellence in the public governance system to respond to the complex challenges of modern administration and the rapid political, social, economic and technological changes, with due regard to expectations of stakeholders, and to recommend appropriate training and capacity building through a competency based framework.   4. To examine the existing schemes of payment of bonus, keeping in view, inter-alia, its bearing upon performance and productivity and make recommendations on the general principles, financial parameters and conditions for an appropriate incentive scheme to reward excellence in productivity, performance and integrity.   5. To review the variety of existing allowances presently available to employees in addition to pay and suggest their rationalisation and simplification with a view to ensuring that the pay structure is so designed as to take these into account.   6. To examine the principles which should govern the structure of pension and other retirement benefits, including revision of pension in the case of employees who have retired prior to the date of effect of these recommendations, keeping in view that retirement benefits of all Central Government employees appointed on and after 01.01.2004 are covered by the New Pension Scheme (NPS).   7. To make recommendations on the above, keeping in view:  (i) the economic conditions in the country and the need for fiscal prudence; (ii) the need to ensure that adequate resources are available for developmental expenditures and welfare measures; (iii) the likely impact of the recommendations on the finances of the state governments, which usually adopt the recommendations with some modifications; (iv) the prevailing emolument structure and retirement benefits available to employees of Central Public Sector Undertakings; and (v) the best global practices and their adaptability and relevance in Indian conditions.   8. To recommend the date of effect of its recommendations on all the above.
M. Laxmikanth (Governance in India)
“I’m talking about greatness, about taking a lever to the world and moving it,” Larry Ellison said, walking the grounds of his new Woodside property in spring 2000 with his best friend, Steve Jobs. “I’m not talking about moral perfection. I’m talking about people who changed the world the most during their lifetime.” Jobs, who had returned to Apple three years earlier, enjoyed the conversational volleying with Larry about who was history’s greatest person. The Apple co-founder placed Leonardo da Vinci and Gandhi as his top choices, with Gandhi in the lead. Leonardo, a great artist and inventor, lived in violent times and was a designer of tanks, battlements, ramparts, and an assortment of other military tools and castle fortifications. Larry joked that had Leonardo not been gay, he would have been “a perfect fit for the Bush administration.” Jobs, who had studied in India, cited Gandhi’s doctrine of nonviolent revolution as an example of how it was possible to remain morally pure while aggressively pursuing change. Larry’s choice could not have been more different from Gandhi: the Corsican-born military leader Napoleon Bonaparte. “Napoleon overthrew kings and tyrants throughout Europe, created a system of free public schools, and wrote one set of laws that applied to everybody. Napoleon achieved liberal ends through conservative means,” Larry argued. " - The Billionaire and the Mechanic
Julian Guthrie (The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, The America's Cup)
I'd like you to see that we are interfering too drastically. WE can't just assume so completely that Azerbaijan is in the hands of dangerous men and vicious Bolsheviks. I suppose it's all in the way you see Iran. I'd like you to see that Iranians are just as serious about their politics as we are: perhaps more so. The Iranian is a vigorous individual with definite ideas about the right and wrong done to him. It's easy for these journalists to laugh at the idea of political spontaneity among the Iranians because they look on these people as dirty, stupid, childlike natives who stare open-mouthed while the wonders of the west are offered to them. …... They are not like that at all. They want proper government, the same as anybody else. They have certainly tried hard enough to get it, but they haven't had a chance. We have done a great deal to prevent them getting real government. It may shock you, but we have always wanted corrupt administrations. Since the Reuter concessions sixty years ago we have begaved like American gangsters using threats, money, and even war to extort privileges and concessions which amounted to owning the country. At one time we had complete control over the administration, over the entire wealth of the land, the banks, and the army. It's rather silly to say the Iranians are un-political when you realize how quickly we had to hand back those concessions. This country rose to a man against us. We gave in hastily, but we managed to cling desperately to our oil concessions. [MacGregor] I think you are worrying yourself unduly [Essex]. We can't be too bad an influence. We may not be reformers ourselves... but we do not fight people who are really trying to improve the country. You must admit that we did not resist the last Shah, and he certainly reformed the place as best as it could be reformed. [MacGregor] It has become a habit to pass all compliments to Reza Shah,...even though we dethroned him. All reforms and modernizations are supposed to be his idea. Yet he simply took over the power of a popular revolution which we resisted at the time. He took power as a despot and he was little better than his predecessors. These people are getting fed up with despots. They obviously want to achieve some kind of better government, particularly in Azerbaijan.… That revolt in Azerbaijan doesn't have to be a Russian idea. It is really the continuation of five or six revolutions, all of them trying to get rid of corrupt governments. This time they seen to be succeeding. Our idea is to stop it.... Every level of government in Iran is corrupt from top to bottom, including the court, the police, and the parliament. Government is organized corruption. The ministers prey on the population like buzzards; they arragne taxes, laws, finances, famines; everything to the purpose of making money. The last Shah might have wiped out some of it; but that meant he became the biggest grafter of them all. He controlled the little fellows, and took the best of everything for himself. By the end of his rule he owned about a fifth of this entire country. He is not the hero we think he is, and his police regime was as brutal as anything the Germans had. Though we co-operated with him, he was a little tougher than the others and he always held out for more. Once, he threatened to wipe out our oil concession but we brought him off. He could always be bought off, like all the other grafters.
James Aldridge (The Diplomat)
This pattern became particularly apparent in the 2000s. In 2002 the presidential election was won by Álvaro Uribe. Uribe had something in common with the Castaño brothers: his father had been killed by the FARC. Uribe ran a campaign repudiating the attempts of the previous administration to try to make peace with the FARC. In 2002 his vote share was 3 percentage points higher in areas with paramilitaries than without them. In 2006, when he was reelected, his vote share was 11 percentage points higher in such areas. If Mancuso and his partners could deliver the vote for Congress and the Senate, they could do so in presidential elections as well, particularly for a president strongly aligned with their worldview and likely to be lenient on them. As Jairo Angarita, Salvatore Mancuso’s deputy and the former leader of the AUC’s Sinú and San Jorge blocs, declared in September 2005, he was proud to work for the “reelection of the best president we have ever had.” Once elected, the paramilitary senators and congressmen voted for what Uribe wanted, in particular changing the constitution so that he could be reelected in 2006, which had not been allowed at the time of his first election, in 2002. In exchange, President Uribe delivered a highly lenient law that allowed the paramilitaries to demobilize. Demobilization did not mean the end of paramilitarism, simply its institutionalization in large parts of Colombia and the Colombian state, which the paramilitaries had taken over and were allowed to keep.
Anonymous
There is a distinction between leadership and management. Leadership is more about change, inspiration, setting the purpose and direction, and building the enthusiasm, unity and staying power for the journey ahead. Management, on the other hand, is less about change, more about stability and making the best use of resources to get things done – good administration, essentially.
James Scouller (The Three Levels of Leadership)
You are the grand estate and administrator of — now.
Bryant McGill (Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life)
Chris Krueger, long-time Capitol Hill watcher for Guggenheim Securities, says the people expecting this kind of kumbaya moment are “Pollyannas”. He said: “My reading of the White House is that they already feel pretty good about their legacy, having done what no administration since Harry Truman has done and extended access to healthcare.” These are the facts on the ground, which bode ill for investors, but there is a conundrum: history suggests we are at a point in the political cycle when markets usually do well. After some volatility around the midterms, the stock market has historically settled into a very strong year in the third year of the presidential cycle, according to an analysis by Jeff Hirsch, editor of the Stock Trader’s Almanac. Sweeping in 180 years of data on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and predecessor indices, he calculates the average Year 3 gain to be 10.4 per cent, almost double the next best year, the presidential election year itself.
Anonymous
strongest reasons early adopters of Linux chose it over, say, Windows NT was the powerful command line interface which made the “difficult tasks possible.” What This Book Is About This book is a broad overview of “living” on the Linux command line. Unlike some books that concentrate on just a single program, such as the shell program, bash, this book will try to convey how to get along with the command line interface in a larger sense. How does it all work? What can it do? What's the best way to use it? This is not a book about Linux system administration. While any serious discussion of the command line will invariably lead to system administration topics, this book only touches on a few administration issues. It will, however, prepare the reader for additional study by providing a solid foundation in the use of the command line, an essential tool for any serious system administration task. This book is very Linux-centric. Many other books try to broaden their appeal by including other platforms such as generic Unix and OS X. In doing so, they “water down” their content to feature only general topics. This book, on the other hand, only covers contemporary Linux distributions. Ninety-five percent of the content is useful for users of other Unix-like systems, but this book is highly
Anonymous
The American navy captured fifty merchantmen, but the real damage to British commerce in 1812 was done by what one Republican called “our cheapest & best Navy”—American privateers.181 Congress laid down the rules for privateering a week after the declaration of war, and several days later the administration began issuing commissions.182 The first privateers were small pilot boats armed with one large center-pivot gun, called a “Long Tom,” and carrying fifty or sixty men armed with assorted small arms: muskets, sabers, boarding pikes, and the like. According to one privateer captain, this “was quite enough to capture almost any British merchantman, at this stage of the war.
Donald R. Hickey (The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, Bicentennial Edition)
It is above all in their writings that one can best study the true nature” of the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in L’ancien régime et la Révolution, of the Économistes or Physiocrats of the mid-eighteenth century, of Quesnay and Letrosne and Morelly and Mercier de la Rivière. The “Economists have had less brilliance in history than the philosophers,” he wrote; they nonetheless express, even more than the philosophers, the “single notion” in which “the political philosophy of the eighteenth century consists.” This is the idea that it is appropriate “to substitute simple and elementary rules, derived from reason and from natural law, for the complicated and traditional customs” of particular societies at particular times. The past, for the Économistes, was “the object of a limitless scorn.” They argued for the abstract and the general; for administrative simplicity, for “public utility” without “private rights,” for “laisser faire” or “the free exchange of commodities” without “political freedoms.
Emma Rothschild (Economic Sentiments)
A Teacher To significantly enhance the educational experience leading to an enriched and rewarding life for all students Improve reading and writing skills Establish classroom management and discipline Integrate real-life experiences into the classroom Introduce real-life experiences outside the classroom Serve as an effective student-parent liaison Work collaboratively with administration and peers Possess strong academic credentials Have nine years of experience supported by excellent references
Jay A. Block (101 Best Ways to Land a Job in Troubled Times)
One important lesson to take away from this is that you should always take care of any administrative things the code must do during initialization. This may include allocating memory, or reading configuration from a file, or even precomputing some values that will be needed throughout the lifetime of the program. This is important for two reasons. First, you are reducing the total number of times these tasks must be done by doing them once up front, and you know that you will be able to use those resources without too much penalty in the future. Secondly, you are not disrupting the flow of the program; this allows it to pipeline more efficiently and keep the caches filled with more pertinent data. We also learned more about the importance of data locality and how important simply getting data to the CPU is. CPU caches can be quite complicated, and often it is best to allow the various mechanisms designed to optimize them take care of the issue. However, understanding what is happening and doing all that is possible to optimize how memory is handled can make all the difference. For example, by understanding how caches work we are able to understand that the decrease in performance that leads to a saturated speedup no matter the grid size in Figure 6-4 can probably be attributed to the L3 cache being filled up by our grid. When this happens, we stop benefiting from the tiered memory approach to solving the Von Neumann bottleneck.
Micha Gorelick (High Performance Python: Practical Performant Programming for Humans)
An IT College Graduate To advance the goals and objectives of the IT department by utilizing strong programming skills and to improve organizational efficiencies and productivity through the use of state-of-the-art technologies Perl, MySQL, Linux, Apache, Mason, XML, XSL, HTML, JavaScript, Java, MS C11, ASP, 8086 Assembly, Fortran, COBOL, network firewall and hack-proof server installation and configuration, and automatic mass Web site building Internet-based public relations for online applications Network administration Wireless applications Speech recognition Excellent customer service skills Complex, technical troubleshooting and problem solving abilities Projects on time and within budget
Jay A. Block (101 Best Ways to Land a Job in Troubled Times)
Who is responsible for the incredible mess the present-day generation of Americans find themselves in? In this book, I hope to show exactly how this happened. A series of deadly, inexplicable decisions by our elected leaders and corporate executives have paved the way to the crisis we must deal with now. Corruption has grown entrenched, like an inoperable disease, in nearly every organ of the establishment. We must heed the words of one of America’s greatest statesmen, Thomas Jefferson: “Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day. But a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers [administrations], too plainly proves a deliberate systematic plan of reducing us to slavery.” The American people have been dealing with just such a “series of oppressions” now for well over a century, and there can be little doubt that it is the result of a “deliberate systematic plan.” The best word to describe it is conspiracy.
Donald Jeffries (Hidden History: An Exposé of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics)
The relations outlined on an organization chart provide a framework within which fuller and more spontaneous human behavior takes place. The formal system may draw upon that behavior for added strength; it will in its turn be subordinated to personal and group egotism. Every official and employee will try to use his position to satisfy his {9} psychological needs. This may result in a gain for the organization if he accepts its goals and extends himself in its interests. But usually, even in the best circumstances, some price is paid in organizational rigidity.
Philip Selznick (Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation)
After Rep. Martin Sweeney of Ohio delivered a scathing attack on the Roosevelt administration for allegedly using conscription as a way to get the United States into the war, Rep. Beverly Vincent of Kentucky, who was next to Sweeney, loudly muttered that he refused “to sit by a traitor.” Sweeney swung at Vincent, who responded with a sharp right to the jaw that sent Sweeney staggering. It was, said the House doorkeeper, the best punch thrown by a member of Congress in fifty years.
Lynne Olson (Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941)
Summary Gaining insight from massive and growing datasets, such as those generated by large organizations, requires specialized technologies for each step in the data analysis process. Once organizational data is cleaned, merged, and shaped into the form desired, the process of asking questions about data is often an iterative one. MapReduce frameworks, such as the open-source Apache Hadoop project, are flexible platforms for the economical processing of large amounts of data using a collection of commodity machines. Although it is often the best choice for large batch-processing operations, MapReduce is not always the ideal solution for quickly running iterative queries over large datasets. MapReduce can require a great deal of disk I/O, a great deal of administration, and multiple steps to return the result of a single query. Waiting for results to complete makes iterative, ad hoc analysis difficult. Analytical databases
Anonymous
A second and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class, by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economic relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be effected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
Some of these tasks are interesting. Tinkering with machines is fun. Marketing decisions, especially how to manage the Web site and AdWords, are an intellectual challenge. Some are unpleasant but lead to a satisfying conclusion, like nagging customers for past-due payments. (They've always paid me, eventually.) Some are frightening, I can change an employee's life with my decisions about pay rates and whether to hire and fire. And many are just aggravating: the taxes, insurance purchases, legal issues, and some of the employee interactions. Each layer of government, each enormous and indifferent private bureaucracy, requires its own special knowledge: the right form filled out the correct way and filed at the right time. Learning how to complete on type of tax filing tells you nothing whatsoever about how to fill out the next form. One health insurer presents a quote one way, another in an entirely different way, and both require extensive study to determine the best choice. It's like stepping back to an old, old world where every tree, every rock, every stream is inhabited by its own resident spirit, and each needs to be mollified in the correct manner. Or very bad things happen. I didn't start my company to do any of this. I had no idea, when I decided that I would make furniture in exchange for money, that this was in my future. And the strange universe of administration expands as the company grows.
Paul Downs
Lync has its title altered. And so what sort of computer software is it now? Well, it is identified as Lync Mac Business. The particular motive for carrying this out is a need to combine the familiar experience and level of popularity from consumers associated with Lync Mac along with security regarding Lync as well as control feature set. Yet another thing which Lync has got influenced in this specific new version of Lync happens to be the transformation associated with particular graphical user interface aspects which are used in the popular program of Lync Mac. It has been chose to utilize the same icons as in Lync as an alternative to attempting to make new things. Microsoft Company furthermore included the particular call monitor screen which happens to be applied within Lync in order that consumers could preserve an active call seen inside a small display when customers happen to be focusing on yet another program. It is additionally essential to point out that absolutely no features which were obtainable in Lync are already eliminated. And you should additionally understand that Lync Mac happens to be nevertheless utilizing the foundation regarding Lync. And it is very good that the actual software is nevertheless operating on the previous foundation since it happens to be known for the security. However what helps make Lync Mac a great choice if perhaps you're searching for an immediate texting software? There are a wide range of advantages which this particular application has got and we'll have a look at a few of these. Changing from instantaneous messaging towards document sharing won't take a great deal of time. Essentially, it provides a flawless incorporation associated with the software program. An improved data transfer administration is yet another factor that you'll be in a position enjoy from this program. Network supervisors can assign bandwidth, limit people and also split video and audio streams throughout each application and control the effect of bandwidth. In case you aren't making use of Microsoft Windows operating system and prefer Lync in that case possibly you're concerned that you will not be able to utilize this particular application or it is going to possess some constraints? The reply happens to be no. As we've talked about many times currently, Lync is currently best-known as being Lync For Mac Business .There is nothing that is actually extracted from the main edition therefore the full functionality is actually offered for you. And it is certainly great to understand the fact that Lync that we should simply call Lync For Mac version is actually capable to provide you all the characteristics which you'll need. If you happen to be trying to find a fantastic application for your own organization, in that case this is the one particular you are in search of Lync For Mac which will still be acknowledged as being Lync for a long period edition is actually competent to present you with everything that is actually necessary for your organization even if you decided to not utilize Microsoft operating system. Know about more detail please visit lyncmac.com
Addan smith
Perhaps the best known of these training programs is Operation Pipeline. The DEA launched Operation Pipeline in 1984 as part of the Reagan administration’s rollout of the War on Drugs. The federal program, administered by over three hundred state and local law enforcement agencies, trains state and local law enforcement officers to use pretextual traffic stops and consent searches on a large scale for drug interdiction. Officers learn, among other things, how to use a minor traffic violation as a pretext to stop someone, how to lengthen a routine traffic stop and leverage it into a search for drugs, how to obtain consent from a reluctant motorist, and how to use drug-sniffing dogs to obtain probable cause.23 By 2000, the DEA had directly trained more than 25,000 officers in forty-eight states in Pipeline tactics and helped to develop training programs for countless municipal and state law enforcement agencies.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
Hiring and paying ones own regulators is as easy as hiring a private rent-a-cop. In Canada, for about $100 million, the financial industry can fund any of our Securities Commissions, and the ability to then obtain exemptions to the law from the regulator, is by itself worth hundreds of billions. Just ONE exemption to the law, can earn billions. Capturing and funding regulators is the simply best (but corrupt) investment any industry can make. Another example comes to us from Boeing in late 2019, with the 737 Max, and the news that Boeing’s influence over the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA ) was powerful enough to allow Boeing itself to legally approve its own aircraft, which is like being able to mark your own exams…(or print your own money).
Larry Elford (Farming Humans: Easy Money (Non Fiction Financial Murder Book 1))