Agency And Accountability Quotes

He was sure people detested accountants; they were boring. In fact, he had put down his profession as an airline pilot on the form he had filled in for a dating agency. As an airline pilot you could be away just the right amount of time, when you needed a break from your love life, without facing awkward questions from her when you got back.

She had not made a lot of money, but she had not made a loss, and she had been happy and entertained. That counted for infinitely more than a vigorously healthy balance sheet. In fact, she thought, annual accounts should include an item specifically headed Happiness, alongside expenses and receipts and the like.

Let us account for all we see by the facts we know. If there are things for which we cannot account, let us wait for light. To account for anything by supernatural agencies is, in fact to say that we do not know. Theology is not what we know about God, but what we do not know about Nature.

If it's a monster, we made it that way.

Once an autocrat gets into office, it is very hard to get them out. They will disregard term limits, they will purge the agencies that enforce accountability, they will rewrite the law so that they are no longer breaking it. They will take your money, they will steal your freedom, and if they are clever, they will eliminate any structural protections you had before the majority realizes the extent of the damage.

Accountability is the natural product of agency and is the basis of the plan of life. We are responsible for our own actions and accountable to God for what we choose to do with our lives. Life is God’s gift to us, and what we do with it is our gift to him.

Pick a man, any man. That man there. See him. That man hatless. You know his opinion of the world. You can read it in his face, in his stance. Yet his complaint that a man’s life is no bargain masks the actual case with him. Which is that men will not do as he wishes them to. Have never done, never will do. That’s the way of things with him and his life is so balked about by difficulty and become so altered of its intended architecture that he is little more than a walking hovel hardly fit to house the human spirit at all. Can he say, such a man, that there is no malign thing set against him? That there is no power and no force and no cause? What manner of heretic could doubt agency and claimant alike? Can he believe that the wreckage of his existence is unentailed? No liens, no creditors? That gods of vengeance and of compassion alike lie sleeping in their crypt and whether our cries are for an accounting or for the destruction of the ledgers altogether they must evoke only the same silence and that it is this silence which will prevail?

We’re told by this system that you are the car you drive or the size of your house or the number in your bank account. We’re taught from an early age by advertising agencies that we’re only as good as the wealth we have. It isn’t true. We’re not their slaves. We’re people. We’re not numbers on a spreadsheet. We aren’t disposable if we don’t make enough. This is our country, not theirs.

If we believed that those agencies were appointed by a benevolent Providence as the means of accomplishing wise purposes which could not be compassed if they did not exist, then everything done by mankind which tends to chain up these natural agencies or to restrict their mischievous operation, from draining a pestilential marsh down to curing the toothache, or putting up an umbrella, ought to be accounted impious ; which assuredly nobody does account them, notwithstanding an undercurrent of sentiment setting in that direction which is occasionally perceptible.

Every second of every day, a man is the sum effect of every second that has touched him before; he routinely encounters influences that will produce changes and actions that he cannot begin to predict or understand. And yet to acknowledge the complexity of these causes and motives was not to disallow agency. In that, all men are equal, even the cloistered monk--equally innocent, equally guilty. A man is not wholly responsible for what he becomes, but he is absolutely accountable for who he is.

Set yourself to becoming the best-informed person in the agency on the account to which you are assigned. If, for example, it is a gasoline account, read books on oil geology and the production of petroleum products. Read the trade journals in the field. Spend Saturday mornings in service stations, talking to motorists. Visit your client’s refineries and research laboratories. At the end of your first year, you will know more about the oil business than your boss, and be ready to succeed him. Most

The key insight behind Radical Candor is that command and control can hinder innovation and harm a team’s ability to improve the efficiency of routine work. Bosses and companies get better results when they voluntarily lay down unilateral power and encourage their teams and peers to hold them accountable, when they quit trying to control employees and focus instead on encouraging agency. The idea is that collaboration and innovation flourish when human relationships replace bullying and bureaucracy.

And the peanut butter-eaters on Earth were preparing to conquer the shazzbutter-eaters on the planet in the book by Kilgore Trout. By this time, the Earthlings hadn't just demolished West Virginia and Southeast Asia. They had demolished everything. So they were ready to go pioneering again. They studied the shazzbutter-eaters by means of electronic snooping, and determined that they were too numerous and proud and resourceful ever to allow themselves to be pioneered. So the Earthlings infiltrated the ad agency which had the shazzbutter account, and they buggered the statistics in the ads. They made the average for everything so high that everybody on the planet felt inferior to the majority in very respect. Then the Earthling armored space ships came and discovered the planet. Only token resistance was offered here and there, because the natives felt so below average. And then the pioneering began.

Surveyor, in your thoughts you may be reproaching Sordini for not having been prompted by my claim to make inquiries about the matter in other departments. But that would have been wrong, and I want this man cleared of all blame in your thoughts. One of the operating principles of authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account. This principle is justified by the excellence of the entire organization and is also necessary if matters are to be discharged with the utmost rapidity. So Sordini couldn’t inquire in other departments, besides those departments wouldn’t have answered, since they would have noticed right away that he was investigating the possibility of an error.” “Chairman, allow me to interrupt you with a question,” said K., “didn’t you mention a control agency? As you describe it, the organization is such that the very thought that the control agency might fail to materialize is enough to make one ill.” “You’re very severe,” said the chairman, “but multiply your severity by a thousand and it will still be as nothing compared with the severity that the authorities show toward themselves. Only a total stranger could ask such a question. Are there control agencies? There are only control agencies. Of course they aren’t meant to find errors, in the vulgar sense of that term, since no errors occur, and even if an error does occur, as in your case, who can finally say that it is an error.

In an agential realist account, agency is cut loose from its traditional humanist orbit. Agency is not aligned with human intentionality or subjectivity. Nor does it merely entail resignification or other specific kinds of moves within a social geometry ofantihumanism. The space of agency is not only substantially larger than that allowed for in Butler's performative account, for example, but also, perhaps rather surprisingly, larger than what liberal humanism proposes. Significantly, matter is an agentive factor in its iterative materialization.

Jamaica was the Ophir of the West of Scotland in those times. Upon its sugar fields and by the agency of its slave labour, Glasgow slowly emerged from its primeval state of small borough town, to be a business centre, rivalling and soon surpassing Bristol in its West India trade.

By connecting Oswald to several parts of the JFK–Almeida coup plan, those working for Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli could ensure that when Oswald surfaced as the main suspect, the CIA and other agencies would have to cover up much information to protect the coup plan—which is exactly what happened

God cries for us in the same way we cry for others. His tears most often spill over for the pain and suffering caused from the mortal misuse of a gift called agency. He will not revoke the gift. It was promised to us for the duration of our time on Earth. But He will hold each one of us accountable in the end for how we applied this power of agency.

The record suggests that official secrecy does more to protect intelligence agencies from domestic accountability for their own follies than to shield them from enemy penetration.

Bethesda … Would I be wrong in guessing you work for Uncle Sam?" "Why, yes. You must be very familiar with Washington, Mr. Fenton. Does your work bring you there often?" Anywhere but on our sandbar the little ploy would have worked. My hunter's gene twitches. "Which agency are you with?" She gives up gracefully. "Oh, just GSA records. I'm a librarian." Of course. I know her now, all the Mrs. Parsonses in records divisions, accounting sections, research branches, personnel and administration offices. Tell Mrs. Parsons we need a recap on the external service contracts for fiscal '73. - 'The Women Men Don't See

The wealthy have also fought to underfund and defang the Internal Revenue Service, so it doesn’t have the resources to audit or fight dubious deductions. Only about 6 percent of tax returns of those with income of more than $1 million are audited, along with 0.7 percent of business tax returns. Meanwhile, there is one group that the IRS scrutinizes rigorously: the working poor with incomes below $20,000 a year who receive the Earned Income Tax Credit. More than one-third of all tax audits are focused on that group struggling to make ends meet, even as the agency cuts back on audits of the wealthy—while the top 5 percent of taxpayers account for more than half of all underreported income.

According to the International Energy Agency, air-conditioning and electric fans combined already account for around 10 percent of all global electricity usage, and they expect AC usage will more than triple over the next thirty years.

All experienced murderers seek cover. By putting the Agency’s fingerprints on [Mafia] operations, the mob could anticipate that the CIA would [be forced to] cooperate in the cover-up of crucial information related to JFK's assassination

And yet,’ he went on, ‘who talks about forgiveness these days, other than the people who come to this place, or to places like this? What politician, what public person, do we hear standing up and saying that we must forgive? The message we are more likely to hear is one of blame, of how this person or that person must be held to account for something bad that has happened. It is a message of retribution – that is all it is – a message of pure retribution, sometimes dressed up in concern about victims and public safety and matters of that sort. But if you do not forgive, and you think all the time about getting even, or punishing somebody who has done you a wrong, what are you achieving? You are not going to make that person better by hating or punishing him; oh no, that will not happen. When we punish somebody, we are often just punishing ourselves, you know. If people lock others away, they are simply increasing the amount of suffering there is in the world; they may think they are diminishing it, but they are not. They are adding to the burden that suffering creates. Of course, sometimes you have no alternative but to do it – people must be protected from harm – but you should always remember that there are other ways of changing a man’s ways. ‘My brothers and sisters: do not be afraid to profess forgiveness. Do not be afraid to tell people who urge you to seek retribution or revenge that there is no place for any of that in your heart. Do not be embarrassed to say that you believe in love, and that you believe that water can wash away the sins of the world, and that you are prepared to put this message of forgiveness right at the heart of your world. My brothers and sisters, do not be afraid to say any of this, even if people laugh at you, or say that you are old-fashioned, or foolish, or that you believe things that cannot be believed. Do not worry about any of that – because love and forgiveness are more powerful than any of those cynical, mocking words and will always be so. Always.

Spiritual maturity is understanding that we cannot blame anybody else for our actions. Some factors may make it harder for us to perform according to God’s plan for us but being accountable for how we use our agency means being answerable for our own behavior.

The obvious pollution occurring in many places - worst of all, in the planned societies- has encouraged the growth of the environmental movement, which, however, as shown in previous chapters, has an agenda that goes far beyond clean-up and beautification, far beyond the stewardship of nature that is commanded by ancient religious tradition. Embracing the "biospheric vision" in the "spirit of deep ecology", the movement sees human beings as the chief enemy in the struggle on behalf of a deified Nature. The environmental movement, therefore, is the perfect vehicle for population control. It is popular - people do love trees and animals and beautiful scenery - and it is unequivocal in its devotion to reducing human numbers. The environmental agencies of the United Nations, with their chilling blueprints for "demographic transition" and a standardless, undefined but totally planned and controlled "sustainable development", combine the fervor of nature worship with the lack of accountability of an unelected, international bureaucracy.

Sometimes moving forward requires looking backward. Institutions also need to hold themselves accountable and increase their awareness of how government agencies, systems, and leaders have enacted harm toward marginalized populations in the near and distant past.

She did not have strong views on politics. She did not like the confrontational nature of much political discussion; why could people not argue politely, she wondered, taking into account the views of others and accepting that people might differ with one another in perfectly good faith?

If you expose what it is that we’re doing, if you inform your fellow citizens about all the things that we’re doing in the dark, we will destroy you. This is what their spate of prosecutions of whistleblowers have [sic] been about. It’s what trying to threaten journalists, to criminalize what they do, is about. It’s to create a climate of fear, so that nobody will bring accountability to them. It’s not going to work. I think it’s starting to backfire, because it shows their true character and exactly why they can’t be trusted to operate with power in secret. And we’re certainly not going to be deterred by it in any way. The people who are going to be investigated are not the people reporting on this, but are people like Dianne Feinstein and her friends in the National Security Agency, who need investigation and transparency for all the things that they’ve been doing.

We are being brainwashed to give up our constitutional right to bear arms; constrained to give powers to secret agencies not accountable to Congress and extended powers to the president that would have appalled our Founding Fathers and the generation that followed, all in the name of “fighting terrorism.

The gargantuan, ever-growing, ever-less-accountable, impossible-to-uproot federal bureaucracy is actually the sleeper issue of our time. It’s at the heart of the conservative critique of modern government: faceless bureaucrats writing incomprehensible regulations that complicate our lives for no good reason.

The harm done by the FDA does not result from defects in the people in charge—unless it be a defect to be human. Many have been able and devoted civil servants. However, social, political, and economic pressures determine the behavior of the people supposedly in charge of a government agency to a far greater extent than they determine its behavior. No doubt there are exceptions, but they are rare—almost as rare as barking cats. That does not mean that effective reform is impossible. But it requires taking account of the political laws governing the behavior of government agencies, not simply berating officials for inefficiency and waste or questioning their motives and urging them to do better. The

The model of God as essentially kenotic says God’s eternal nature is uncontrolling love. Because of love, God necessarily provides freedom/agency to creatures, and God works by empowering and inspiring creation toward well-being. God also necessarily upholds the regularities of the universe because those regularities derive from God’s eternal nature of love.

When we understand what is right and what is wrong, we are in a position to exercise our freedom in making choices. In so doing, we must stand accountable for our decisions, and we cannot escape the inevitable consequences of these choices. Such freedom to exercise moral agency is essential in an environment where people have the highest prospects for progress and development.

According to the international energy agency, air conditioning and electric fans combined already account for around 10% of all global electricity usage. And they expect AC usage will more than triple over the next 30 years. And like most other energy intensive innovations, AC primarily benefits people in rich communities while the consequences of climate change are born disproportionately by people in impoverished communities.

Thiel’s loathing for government spending did not apply when the government spent money on him. His next big startup, Palantir—a name borrowed from Tolkien—depended for survival upon the least transparent, least accountable, and most profligate extension of the federal government, the CIA. The agency invested in Thiel through its Silicon Valley VC front, In-Q-Tel. With Palantir, this self-described “civil libertarian” became an important player in the growth of a secretive, invasive, and patently unconstitutional global surveillance apparatus. Asked in a 2014 online chat if Palantir was “a front for the CIA,” Thiel replied, “No, the CIA is a front for Palantir.” With 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget going to the private sector, this dismissive wisecrack was not so much an outright denial as it was a sly wink at the extent of corporate dominance over even the most powerful federal agencies.

We’re terribly worried about Uncle Henry. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ ‘Well, why don’t you send him to the doctor?’ ‘Well, we would, only we need the eggs.’ ” Standish stared at her as if a small but perfectly formed elderberry tree had suddenly sprung unbidden from the bridge of her nose. “Say that again,” he said in a small, shocked voice. “What, all of it?” “All of it.” Kate stuck her fist on her hip and said it again, doing the voices with a bit more dash and Southern accents this time. “That’s brilliant,” Standish breathed when she had done. “You must have heard it before,” she said, a little surprised by this response. “It’s an old joke.” “No,” he said, “I have not. We need the eggs. We need the eggs. We need the eggs. ‘We can’t send him to the doctor because we need the eggs.’ An astounding insight into the central paradoxes of the human condition and of our indefatigable facility for constructing adaptive rationales to account for it. Good God.” Kate

She thinks suddenly that what has spooked her is not good luck but the vivid fact of luck itself. Even with all her preparation and the long knowledge of the horsemen, her account of the weather and the odds, only preposterous chance could have led to this result. And if there was such good luck in the world, and if it could outpace her own agency and her own knowledge, then bad luck must be the same, and no luck, too. She has been seen and accommodated by luck, and she wants out of its sight line.

One day in September 2015, FBI agent Adrian Hawkins placed a call to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., and asked to speak to the person in charge of technology. He was routed to the DNC help desk, which transferred the call to Yared Tamene, a young IT specialist with The MIS Department, a consulting firm hired by the DNC. After identifying himself, Hawkins told Tamene that he had reason to believe that at least one computer on the DNC’s network was compromised. He asked if the DNC was aware of this and what it was doing. Tamene had nothing to do with cybersecurity and knew little about the subject. He was a mid-level network administrator; his basic IT duties for the DNC were to set up computer accounts for employees and be on call to deal with any problems. When he got the call, Tamene was wary. Was this a joke or, worse, a dirty trick? He asked Hawkins if he could prove he was an FBI agent, and, as Tamene later wrote in a memo, “he did not provide me with an adequate response.… At this point, I had no way of differentiating the call I received from a prank call.” Hawkins, though, was real. He was a well-regarded agent in the FBI’s cyber squad. And he was following a legitimate lead in a case that would come to affect a presidential election. Earlier in the year, U.S. cyber warriors intercepted a target list of about thirty U.S. government agencies, think tanks, and several political organizations designated for cyberattacks by a group of hackers known as APT 29. APT stood for Advanced Persistent Threat—technojargon for a sophisticated set of actors who penetrate networks, insert viruses, and extract data over prolonged periods of time.

In some instances, even when crisis intervention has been intensive and appropriate, the mother and daughter are already so deeply estranged at the time of disclosure that the bond between them seems irreparable. In this situation, no useful purpose is served by trying to separate the mother and father and keep the daughter at home. The daughter has already been emotionally expelled from her family; removing her to protective custody is simply the concrete expression of the family reality. These are the cases which many agencies call their “tragedies.” This report of a child protective worker illustrates a case where removing the child from the home was the only reasonable course of action: Division of Family and Children’s Services received an anonymous telephone call on Sept. 14 from a man who stated that he overheard Tracy W., age 8, of [address] tell his daughter of a forced oral-genital assault, allegedly perpetrated against this child by her mother’s boyfriend, one Raymond S. Two workers visited the W. home on Sept. 17. According to their report, Mrs. W. was heavily under the influence of alcohol at the time of the visit. Mrs. W. stated immediately that she was aware why the two workers wanted to see her, because Mr. S. had “hurt her little girl.” In the course of the interview, Mrs. W. acknowledged and described how Mr. S. had forced Tracy to have relations with him. Workers then interviewed Tracy and she verified what mother had stated. According to Mrs. W., Mr. S. admitted the sexual assault, claiming that he was drunk and not accountable for his actions. Mother then stated to workers that she banished Mr. S. from her home. I had my first contact with mother and child at their home on Sept. 20 and I subsequently saw this family once a week. Mother was usually intoxicated and drinking beer when I saw her. I met Mr. S. on my second visit. Mr. S. denied having had any sexual relations with Tracy. Mother explained that she had obtained a license and planned to marry Mr. S. On my third visit, Mrs. W. was again intoxicated and drinking despite my previous request that she not drink during my visit. Mother explained that Mr. S. had taken off to another state and she never wanted to see him again. On this visit mother demanded that Tracy tell me the details of her sexual involvement with Mr. S. On my fourth visit, Mr. S. and Mrs. S. were present. Mother explained that they had been married the previous Saturday. On my fifth visit, Mr. S. was not present. During our discussion, mother commented that “Bay was not the first one who had Tracy.” After exploring this statement with mother and Tracy, it became clear that Tracy had been sexually exploited in the same manner at age six by another of Mrs. S.'s previous boyfriends. On my sixth visit, Mrs. S. stated that she could accept Tracy’s being placed with another family as long as it did not appear to Tracy that it was her mother’s decision to give her up. Mother also commented, “I wish the fuck I never had her.” It appears that Mrs. S. has had a number of other children all of whom have lived with other relatives or were in foster care for part of their lives. Tracy herself lived with a paternal aunt from birth to age five.

To be sure, the cost of managing capital and of “formal” financial intermediation (that is, the investment advice and portfolio management services provided by a bank or official financial institution or real estate agency or managing partner) is obviously taken into account and deducted from the income on capital in calculating the average rate of return (as presented here). But this is not the case with “informal” financial intermediation: every investor spends time—in some cases a lot of time—managing his own portfolio and affairs and determining which investments are likely to be the most profitable. This effort can in certain cases be compared to genuine entrepreneurial labor or to a form of business activity.

the right way.’ Each went something like this: Step 1: They got me excited about all the new leads they would bring.   Step 2: I’d go through an onboarding process that felt valuable (and sometimes was).   Step 3: They assigned their “best” senior rep to my account.   Step 4: I saw some results.   Step 5: They moved my senior rep to the newest customer...   Step 6: A junior rep starts managing my account. My results suffered.   Step 7: I complained.   Step 8: The senior rep would come back once in a while to make me feel better.   Step 9: Results still suffered. And I’d eventually cancel.   Step 10: I’d search for another agency and repeat the cycle of insanity.   Step 11: For the zillionth time–Start wondering why I wasn’t getting results like the first time.

As always, behind the flow of money necessary for such mergers and acquisitions were the banks. Once there were hundreds of banks in America, owned by individuals and local families. But due to government regulations put into place during the Reagan-Bush years, these banks either faded away or consolidated. In 1990, there were thirty-seven major banks in the U.S. By 2009, buy-outs, mergers, and bankruptcies had reduced this number to four. Those left standing were Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, according to the General Accounting Office. Ominously, in June 2012, the giant global rating agency Moody’s downgraded the ratings of Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan, citing concerns for the stability of the world’s financial system.

A sixteenth-century poet, especially one who knew that he ought to be a curious and universal scholar, would possess some notions, perhaps not strictly philosophical, about the origin of the world and its end, the eduction of forms from matter, and the relation of such forms to the higher forms which are the model of the world and have their being in the mind of God. He might well be a poet to brood on those great complementary opposites: the earthly and heavenly cities, unity and multiplicity, light and dark, equity and justice, continuity--as triumphantly exhibited in his own Empress--and ends--as sadly exhibited in his own Empress. Like St. Augustine he will see mutability as the condition of all created things, which are immersed in time. Time, he knows, will have a stop--perhaps, on some of the evidence, quite soon. Yet there is other evidence to suggest that this is not so. It will seem to him, at any rate, that his poem should in part rest on some poetic generalization-some fiction--which reconciles these opposites, and helps to make sense of the discords, ethical, political, legal, and so forth, which, in its completeness, it had to contain. This may stand as a rough account of Spenser's mood when he worked out the sections of his poem which treat of the Garden of Adonis and the trial of Mutability, the first dealing with the sempiternity of earthly forms, and the second with the dilation of being in these forms under the shadow of a final end. Perhaps the refinements upon, and the substitutes for, Augustine's explanations of the first matter and its potentialities, do not directly concern him; as an allegorist he may think most readily of these potentialities in a quasi-Augustinian way as seeds, seminal reasons, plants tended in a seminarium. But he will distinguish, as his commentators often fail to do, these forms or formulae from the heavenly forms, and allow them the kind of immortality that is open to them, that of athanasia rather than of aei einai. And an obvious place to talk about them would be in the discussion of love, since without the agency represented by Venus there would be no eduction of forms from the prime matter. Elsewhere he would have to confront the problem of Plato's two kinds of eternity; the answer to Mutability is that the creation is deathless, but the last stanzas explain that this is not to grant them the condition of being-for-ever.

Flouting federal laws governing record-keeping requirements. Failing to preserve emails sent or received from her personal accounts, as required by law. Circumventing the Freedom of Information Act. Instructing her aides to send classified materials on her unsecure network. Running afoul of the “gross negligence” clause of the Espionage Act (which meant prosecutors would not have to prove “intent” to find her guilty). Pretending she didn’t know that Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) was classified. Transferring classified material that originated at the CIA, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence sources, to her unsecured network. Authoring hundreds of emails with classified information to people who did not have security clearance. Inducing aides to commit perjury. Lying to the FBI. Engaging in public corruption by using the office of secretary of state to feather the nest of the Clinton family foundation.

It is certainly possible that an individual can, qua individual, suffer some failure of meaning, as in pathological boredom or depression. But any given social world is also a nexus of common significances, saliences, taboos, and a general shared orientation that can also either be sustained or can fail. Indeed one of the most interesting aspects of such a social condition, shared meaningfulness, or intelligibility, is that it can fail, go dead, lose its grip, and a very great deal of what interests Hegel is simply what such shared practical meaningfulness must be that it could fail, and how we should integrate our account of action into a fuller theory of the realization of such a condition and its failure. (His general name for the achievement and maintenance of such a form of intelligible life is “Sittlichkeit” and his case for this sort of priority of Sittlichkeit over strictly individualist accounts of mindedness in-action has not, I want to argue, been properly appreciated.)

It is implausible that judges are unaware that the most dangerous environment for children is precisely the single-parent homes they themselves create when they remove fathers in custody proceedings. Yet they have no hesitation in removing them, secure in the knowledge that they will never be held accountable for any harm that comes to the children. On the contrary, if they do not they may be punished by feminist-dominated family law sections of the bar associations and social work bureaucracies whose earnings and funding depend on a constant supply of abused children. A Brooklyn judge, described as “gutsier than most” by the New York Law Journal, was denied reappointment when he challenged social service agencies’ efforts to remove children from their parents. A lawyer close to the Legal Aid Society said that “many of that group’s lawyers, who [claim to] represent the children’s interests in abuse cases, and lawyers with agencies where [allegedly?] abused children are placed, have been upset by Judge Segal’s attempts to spur fam ily reunifications.” Though no evidence indicated that his rulings resulted in any child being abused or neglected, “most of the opposition [to his reappointment] came from attorneys who represent children in neglect and abuse proceedings.” An Edmonton, Alberta, judge was forced by feminists to apologize for saying, “That parties who decide to have children together should split for any reason is abhorrent to me,”...

Well, Gordon assigned me to write a major piece of software for the Apple Macintosh. Financial spreadsheet, accounting, that sort of thing, powerful, easy to use, lots of graphics. I asked him exactly what he wanted in it, and he just said, ‘Everything. I want the top piece of all-singing, all-dancing business software for that machine.’ And being of a slightly whimsical turn of mind I took him literally. “You see, a pattern of numbers can represent anything you like, can be used to map any surface, or modulate any dynamic process—and so on. And any set of company accounts are, in the end, just a pattern of numbers. So I sat down and wrote a program that’ll take those numbers and do what you like with them. If you just want a bar graph it’ll do them as a bar graph, if you want them as a pie chart or scatter graph it’ll do them as a pie chart or scatter graph. If you want dancing girls jumping out of the pie chart in order to distract attention from the figures the pie chart actually represents, then the program will do that as well. Or you can turn your figures into, for instance, a flock of seagulls, and the formation they fly in and the way in which the wings of each gull beat will be determined by the performance of each division of your company. Great for producing animated corporate logos that actually mean something. “But the silliest feature of all was that if you wanted your company accounts represented as a piece of music, it could do that as well. Well, I thought it was silly. The corporate world went bananas over it.

The charity and ally models, on the other hand, are so strongly rooted in the ideas of 'I' and 'the other' that they force people to fit into distinct groups with preordained relationships to one another. According to ally politics, the only way to undermine one's own privilege is to give up one's role as an individual political agent, and follow the lead of those more or differently oppressed. White allies, for instance, are taught explicitly to not seek praise for their ally work--especially from people of color--yet there is often a distinctly self-congraulatory air to the work of allyship, as if the act of their humility is exaggerated to receive the praise they can't ask for. Many white allies do their support work in a way that recentralizes themselves as the only individuals willing to come in and do the hard work of fighting racism for people of color. Where ally politics suggest that in shifting your role from actor to ally you can diminish your culpability, a liberator or anarchist approach presumes that each person retains their own agency, insisting that the only way you can be accountable is by acting for your own desires while learning to understand and respond to the desires of other groups. Unraveling our socialized individualization until we can feel how our survival/liberation is infinitely linked to the survival/liberation of others fosters independence, and enables us to take responsibility for our choices, with no boss or guidance counselor to blame for our decisions. Original Zine: Ain't no PC Gonna Fix it, Baby. 2013. Featured in: A Critique of Ally Politics. Taking Sides.

if consumption by the one billion people in the developed countries declined, it is certainly nowhere close to doing so where the other six billion of us are concerned. If the rest of the world bought cars and trucks at the same per capita rate as in the United States, the world’s population of cars and trucks would be 5.5 billion. The production of global warming pollution and the consumption of oil would increase dramatically over and above today’s unsustainable levels. With the increasing population and rising living standards in developing countries, the pressure on resource constraints will continue, even as robosourcing and outsourcing reduce macroeconomic demand in developed countries. Around the same time that The Limits to Growth was published, peak oil production was passed in the United States. Years earlier, a respected geologist named M. King Hubbert collected voluminous data on oil production in the United States and calculated that an immutable peak would be reached shortly after 1970. Although his predictions were widely dismissed, peak production did occur exactly when he predicted it would. Exploration, drilling, and recovery technologies have since advanced significantly and U.S. oil production may soon edge back slightly above the 1970 peak, but the new supplies are far more expensive. The balance of geopolitical power shifted slightly after the 1970 milestone. Less than a year after peak oil production in the U.S., the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) began to flex its muscles, and two years later, in the fall of 1973, the Arab members of OPEC implemented the first oil embargo. Since those tumultuous years when peak oil was reached in the United States, energy consumption worldwide has doubled, and the growth rates in China and other emerging markets portend further significant increases. Although the use of coal is declining in the U.S., and coal-fired generating plants are being phased out in many other developed countries as well, China’s coal imports have already increased 60-fold over the past decade—and will double again by 2015. The burning of coal in much of the rest of the developing world has also continued to increase significantly. According to the International Energy Agency, developing and emerging markets will account for all of the net global increase in both coal and oil consumption through the next two decades. The prediction of global peak oil is fraught with

By pointing to the captain’s foolhardy departure from standard procedure, the officials shielded themselves from the disturbing image of slaves overpowering their captors and relieved themselves of the uncomfortable obligation to explain how and why the events had deviated from the prescribed pattern. But assigning blame to the captain for his carelessness afforded only partial comfort, for by seizing their opportunity, the Africans aboard the Cape Coast had done more than liberate themselves (temporarily at least) from the slave ship. Their action reminded any European who heard news of the event of what all preferred not to contemplate too closely; that their ‘accountable’ history was only as real as the violence and racial fiction at its foundation. Only by ceaseless replication of the system’s violence did African sellers and European buyers render captives in the distorted guise of human commodities to market. Only by imagining that whiteness could render seven men more powerful than a group of twice their number did European investors produce an account naturalizing social relations that had as their starting point an act of violence. Successful African uprisings against European captors were of course moments at which the undeniable free agency of the captives most disturbed Europeans—for it was in these moments that African captives invalidated the vision of the history being written in this corner of the Atlantic world and articulated their own version of a history that was ‘accountable.’ Other moments in which the agency and irrepressible humanity of the captives manifested themselves were more tragic than heroic: instances of illness and death, thwarted efforts to escape from the various settings of saltwater slavery, removal of slaves from the market by reason of ‘madness.’ In negotiating the narrow isthmus between illness and recovery, death and survival, mental coherence and insanity, captives provided the answers the slave traders needed: the Africans revealed the boundaries of the middle ground between life and death where human commodification was possible. Turning people into slaves entailed more than the completion of a market transaction. In addition, the economic exchange had to transform independent beings into human commodities whose most ‘socially relevant feature’ was their ‘exchangeability’ . . . The shore was the stage for a range of activities and practices designed to promote the pretense that human beings could convincingly play the part of their antithesis—bodies animated only by others’ calculated investment in their physical capacities.

Stoic ethics is a species of eudaimonism. Its central, organizing concern is about what we ought to do or be to live well—to flourish. That is, we make it a lemma that all people ought to pursue a good life for themselves as a categorical commitment second to none. It does not follow from this that they ought to pursue any one particular version of the good life, or to cling tenaciously to the one they are pursuing. … Living virtuously is the process of creating a single, spatiotemporal object—a life. A life has a value as an object, as a whole. It is not always the case that its value as an object will be a function of the value of its spatiotemporal parts considered separately. But it is always the case that an evaluation of the parts will be incomplete until they are understood in the context of the whole life. What seems so clearly valuable (or required or excellent) when we focus on a thin temporal slice of a life (or a single, long strand of a life) may turn out to be awful or optional or vicious when we take a larger view. And it is the life as a whole that we consider when we think about its value in relation to other things, or its value as a part of the cosmos. … In our view, a focus on the parts of a life, or on the sum of its parts, obscures some important features of ethical inquiry. One such feature is the extent to which an agent’s own estimate of the value of his life is necessarily inconclusive: others will have to judge his life as a whole, because its character as a whole is not likely to be predictable while he is around to judge it, and because many important holistic considerations, such as its beauty, excellence, justice, and net effect, are things that he is either not well situated to judge or at least not in a privileged position to judge. Another feature obscured is the range of ways in which a single event or characteristic, without wide causal connections to other elements of one’s life, can nonetheless ruin it; for example, the possibility that a monstrously unjust act can indelibly stain a whole life. A third, related obscurity introduced by ignoring a whole-life frame of reference is the extent to which both aesthetic criteria and the notion of excellence have clear roles in the evaluation of a life. The whole-life frame of reference, together with a plausible account of the variety of ways in which a life can be a good one, keeps Stoicism sharply distinct from Epicurean doctrines, or their modern “welfarist” offshoots. How well my life is going from the inside, so to speak, in terms of the quality of my experience, is only one of the things that enters into a Stoic evaluation of it. We hold that there is a single unifying aim in the life of every rational agent, and that aim, guided by the notion of a good life (happiness, eudaimonia), is virtue, understood as the perfection of agency.

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.

We have seen what bondage is only in relation to lordship. But it is a self-consciousness, and we have now to consider what it is, in this regard, in and for itself. In the first instance, the master is taken to be the essential reality for the state of bondage; hence, for it, the truth is the independent consciousness existing for itself, although this truth is not taken yet as inherent in bondage itself. Still, it does in fact contain within itself this truth of pure negativity and self-existence, because it has experienced this reality within it. For this consciousness was not in peril and fear for this element or that, nor for this or that moment of time, it was afraid for its entire being; it felt the fear of death, the sovereign master. It has been in that experience melted to its inmost soul, has trembled throughout its every fibre, and all that was fixed and steadfast has quaked within it. This complete perturbation of its entire substance, this absolute dissolution of all its stability into fluent continuity, is, however, the simple, ultimate nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure self-referrent existence, which consequently is involved in this type of consciousness. This moment of pure self-existence is moreover a fact for it; for in the master it finds this as its object. Further, this bondsman’s consciousness is not only this total dissolution in a general way; in serving and toiling the bondsman actually carries this out. By serving he cancels in every particular aspect his dependence on and attachment to natural existence, and by his work removes this existence away. Φ 195. The feeling of absolute power, however, realized both in general and in the particular form of service, is only dissolution implicitly; and albeit the fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom, consciousness is not therein aware of being self-existent. Through work and labour, however, this consciousness of the bondsman comes to itself. In the moment which corresponds to desire in the case of the master’s consciousness, the aspect of the non-essential relation to the thing seemed to fall to the lot of the servant, since the thing there retained its independence. Desire has reserved to itself the pure negating of the object and thereby unalloyed feeling of self. This satisfaction, however, just for that reason is itself only a state of evanescence, for it lacks objectivity or subsistence. Labour, on the other hand, is desire restrained and checked, evanescence delayed and postponed; in other words, labour shapes and fashions the thing. The negative relation to the object passes into the form of the object, into something that is permanent and remains; because it is just for the labourer that the object has independence. This negative mediating agency, this activity giving shape and form, is at the same time the individual existence, the pure self-existence of that consciousness, which now in the work it does is externalized and passes into the condition of permanence. The consciousness that toils and serves accordingly attains by this means the direct apprehension of that independent being as its self. Φ 196. But again, shaping or forming the object has not only the positive significance that the bondsman becomes thereby aware of himself as factually and objectively self-existent; this type of consciousness has also a negative import, in contrast with its moment, the element of fear. For in shaping the thing it only becomes aware of its own proper negativity, existence on its own account, as an object, through the fact that it cancels the actual form confronting it. But this objective negative element is precisely alien, external reality, before which it trembled. Now, however, it destroys this extraneous alien negative, affirms and sets itself up as a negative in the element of permanence, and thereby becomes for itself a self-existent being.

Though separated by more than two centuries, our answer should be that of the American colonists after the Revolution…. The institutions of government, the officers and agencies of government, exist for the people, to serve the interests of the people, and, as such, are accountable to the people….

Quinn wrote a script. He took the character Luke Gray out of the store and, in an inspired moment, renamed him Fibber McGee. He called his script Fibber McGee and Molly, but for some reason the agency people handling the Johnson account didn’t like it. They wanted to call it Free Air. It was, after all, about a middle-aged pair of married vagabonds who travel down America’s highways, stopping occasionally for gasoline and some engaging talk about Johnson’s Car Wax. But there was a problem with this title: Sinclair Lewis had used it on a short story and, as Yoder was told, wanted $50,000 for its release. So Fibber it was—perhaps the luckiest bad break in all radio. An audition record was made, and Johnson’s Wax bought the show. It would premiere on Monday night, April 16, 1935, with Smackout still running on the same (Blue) network, as a six-a-week quarter-hour feature at 10 A.M.

How to become the President of Liberia from “Liberia & Beyond” In 1973, Charles Taylor enrolled as a student at Bentley University, in Waltham, Massachusetts. A year later Taylor became chairman of the Union of Liberian Associations in America, which he founded on July 4, 1974. The mission of ULAA was meant to advance the just causes of Liberians and Liberia at home and abroad. In 1977 Taylor graduated from Bentley University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics. Returning to Liberia he supported the violent coup, led by Samuel Doe, and became the Director General of the General Services Agency most likely because of his supposed loyalty. His newly acquired elevated position put him in charge of all the purchases made for the Liberian government. Taylor couldn’t resist the urge of stealing from the till, and in May of 1983, he was found out and fired for embezzling nearly a million dollars in State funds. During this time he transferred his ill-gotten money to a private bank account in the United States. On May 21, 1984, seizing the opportunity, Taylor fled to America where he was soon apprehended and charged with embezzlement by United States Federal Marshals in Somerville, Massachusetts. Taylor was held in the Plymouth, County jail until September 15, 1985, when he escaped with two of his cohorts, by sawing through the steel bars covering a window in his cell. He precariously lowered himself down 20 feet of knotted sheets and then deftly escaped into the nearby woodlands. He most likely had accomplices, since his wife Jewel Taylor conveniently met him with a car, which they then drove to Staten Island in New York City.

Indeed, it is the quantum entanglement between the “object” and the “agencies of observation,” in this case, between the atom and the apparatus that is precisely what we need to attend to in making the interference pattern evident. Once again we see evidence for the ontological priority of phenomena over objects. If one focuses on abstract individual entities the result is an utter mystery, we cannot account for the seemingly impossible behavior of the atoms. It’s not that the experimenter changes a past that had already been present or that atoms fall in line with a new future simply by erasing information. The point is that the past was never simply there to begin with and the future is not simply what will unfold; the “past” and the “future” are iteratively reworked and enfolded through the iterative practices of spacetimemattering—including the which-slit detection and the subsequent erasure of which-slit information—all are one phenomenon.

Rather, objectivity is a matter of accountability to marks on bodies. Objectivity is based not on an inherent ontological separability, a relation of absolute exteriority, as Einstein would have it, but on an intra-actively enacted agential separability, a relation of exteriority within phenomena. The reproducibility and unambiguous communication of laboratory results are possible because the agential cut enacts determinate boundaries, properties, and meanings, as well as a causal structure in the marking of the “measuring agencies” (“effect”) by the “measured object” (“cause”) within the phenomenon.

The coal story is a classic example of how those entrusted with safeguarding the nation’s natural resources allowed it to be frittered away to agencies who were neither capable of exploiting the resources nor had the intent to do so. In the process, they lost the licenses which were later cancelled by the court. Power generation—the avowed objective—fell by the wayside and, finally, it was the economy that suffered by being deprived of that critical input which would have been the engine for growth.

Our understanding of mentalization is not just as a cognitive process, but developmentally commences with the “discovery” of affects through the primary-object relationships. For this reason, we focus on the concept of “affect regulation,” which is important in many spheres of developmental theory and theories of psychopathology (e.g., Clarkin and Lenzenweger 1996). Affect regulation, the capacity to modulate affect states, is closely related to mentalization in that it plays a fundamental role in the unfolding of a sense of self and agency. In our account, affect regulation is a prelude to mentalization; yet, we also believe that once mentalization has occurred, the nature of affect regulation is transformed. Here we distinguish between affect regulation as a kind of adjustment of affect states and a more sophisticated variation, where affects are used to regulate the self. The concept of “mentalized affectivity” marks a mature capacity for the regulation of affect and denotes the capacity to discover the subjective meanings of one’s own affect states. Mentalized affectivity lies, we suggest, at the core of the psychotherapeutic enterprise. It represents the experiential understanding of one’s feelings in a way that extends beyond intellectual understanding.

Reflecting a long-standing schism within the profession, which persists into the twenty-first century, RASSW argued that “a dichotomy exists within NASW between” social activists and clinical practitioners, which is exacerbated by the promotion of licensing. When all social services are threatened by the conservative political and ideological climate, a focus on licensing undermines the profession’s efforts to fight for “the survival and well-being of millions” (RASSW, February 1,1976, p. 3). Citing the opposition to licensing by such groups as the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW), RASSW asserted that efforts by NASW to promote licensing contradict its stated intent to fight racism within the social service field and were destructive of professional unity. Promoting licensing, in lieu of uniting around this struggle “is to fiddle while Rome burns” (p. 3). The paper also disputed the linkage between licensing and service quality. It added an interesting twist to the growing debate over professionalization by arguing that “under current political conditions licensure may actually decrease the accountability of social workers to their clients” (RASSW, February 1,1976, p. 5). The paper concluded that licensure neither protected nor improved service quality; rather, it divided workers and undermined their job security, as the recent attack on public education in New York City had demonstrated. Instead of fighting for licensure, RASSW proposed an alternative strategy that focused on building worker-client-labor-community coalitions and combating racism in social service agencies and other institutions.

The UPA government, instead of implementing the Supreme Court order—which would have been the defining indicator of its bona fides in retrieving the black money looted from the people of India— instead demanded a recall of the order. This establishes its complete mala fide, connivance and conspiracy, and confirms that it has no intention of taking any substantive steps to recover the black money stashed away abroad, or take any serious action to combat this grievous economic crime impoverishing our nation—the 21st century version of UPA imperialism. The nation should be informed that no investigation has taken place regarding the issues before it since the Supreme Court judgement, but the finance minister chose to conceal these extremely pertinent facts in his Paper. The White Paper coyly discussed the dimensions of black money stashed away abroad by quoting statistics that are more than a decade old, saying that these are being researched upon by three agencies whose report is expected in September 2012. From this it would appear that the government had no knowledge of the quantum of black money lying abroad. One wonders why the government presented the paper at this stage. Interestingly, the Paper officially disclosed a figure regarding Indian accounts held with Swiss banks, at around only US $213 billion (as against $88 billion projected by the International Monetary Fund, and $213.2 billion by GFI), down 60% between 2006 and 2010. A reasonable conclusion that can be drawn is that black money holders, in anticipation of international and national public pressure (not governmental) transferred their money to other safe havens, the safest, it is said, being India. The last two years have seen several enabling statutes and mechanisms to stealthily repatriate the ill-gotten wealth back to India. I am also given to understand that there is evidence of a huge disparity between export figures, particularly of metals quoted by the government, and actual exports through data available from independent sources. The same applies to figures regarding FIIs. The game is clear. Use every government tool and instrument available to repatriate the money to India, without disclosure, culpability or punishment. There must be ways, and ways that we can never fathom or document, but the black money holders control legislation, either through being important politicians, or big businesses, who can buy safe passage, necessary loopholes and escape routes through statute or legislation. The finance minister through his negligence and active cooperation with the criminals allowed the stolen money to be removed from the accounts in which it was held and only a small fraction now remains, which too he is determined to place beyond the reach of the people of India who are its legitimate owners.

In case of India neither the politicians nor the bureaucrats of the general administration and the intelligence community are accountable to anyone. The intelligence agencies get away even after mercenaries drop arms at Purulia and a Kargil happens to the country and the top men of such organisations are rewarded with gubernatorial assignments. It happens because the buck stops with the Home Minister and the Prime Minister.

The attorney general also spelled out some of the authorities the FBI would use under the Patriot Act, which passed the Senate that same day: capturing e-mail addresses, tapping cell phones, opening voice-mails, culling credit card and bank account numbers from the Internet. All of this would be done under law, he said, with subpoenas and search warrants. But the Patriot Act was not enough for the White House. On October 4, Bush commanded the National Security Agency to work with the FBI in a secret program code-named Stellar Wind. The

records in any form I request under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act within thirty days and for a reasonable handling and processing fee. If this material is not quickly forthcoming, I will file a complaint with the federal Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights, which prosecutes HIPPA violations. Sincerely, 3. TO CHALLENGE OUTRAGEOUS CHARGES/BILLING ERRORS Dear Sirs or Madam: I’m writing to protest what I regard as excessive charges for my operation/hospitalization/procedure at your medical facility. The operation/hospitalization/procedure was billed to my insurer/me at $__________,__________. This total included several itemized charges that were well above norms for our nation and our region, such as a $__________,__________ charge for __________ and a $__________,__________ charge for __________. The Healthcare Bluebook says a “fair price” is $__________,__________ and $__________,__________. Likewise, my bill includes entries for treatments I simply did not receive, such as $__________ for __________ and $__________ for __________. Before sending in any payment, I’m requesting that your billing and coding department review my chart to revise the charges, or explain to me the size and the nature of such entries. I have been a loyal customer of your hospital for many years and have been happy with my excellent medical care. But if these billing issues are not resolved, I feel compelled to report them to the state attorney general/consumer protection agency, to investigate fraudulent or abusive billing practices. Sincerely,

Accountability for agency operations is fragmented. Each office in a network is a separate profit center. Each department in an office self-defines its missions. Creative heads focus on creativity; finance directors focus on headcounts, overhead and budgeted/ actual costs and profits; client heads manage the service that they provide to their ‘disorganized’ clients and keep them coming back for more. (Despite this there seem to be very few happy clients.) Managing

Accounts of the genocide, whether academic or popular, suffer from three silences. The first concerns the history of genocide: many write as if genocide has no history and as if the Rwandan genocide had no precedent, even in this century replete with political violence. The Rwandan genocide thus appears as an anthropological oddity. For Africans, it turns into a Rwandan oddity; and for non-Africans, the aberration is Africa. For both, the temptation is to dismiss Rwanda as exceptional. The second silence concerns the agency of the genocide: academic writings, in particular, have highlighted the design from above in a one-sided manner. They hesitate to acknowledge, much less explain, the participation—even initiative—from below.5 When political analysis presents the genocide as exclusively a state project and ignores its subaltern and “popular” character, it tends to reduce the violence to a set of meaningless outbursts, ritualistic and bizarre, like some ancient primordial twitch come to life. The third silence concerns the geography of the genocide. Since the genocide happened within the boundaries of Rwanda, there is a widespread tendency to assume that it must also be an outcome of processes that unfolded within the same boundaries. A focus confined to Rwandan state boundaries inevitably translates into a silence about regional processes that fed the dynamic leading to the genocide.

It’s the damn holidays,” Krystal said. “If all you have is an addiction, then seeing everyone connecting with friends and family will leave you feeling lonely. So running off to the only thing that seems to give you joy and validation sounds like a good idea. It’s a sad scenario, and I wish my agency was doing more to help it.

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This story of ordinary men is not the story of all men. The reserve policemen faced choices, and most of them committed terrible deeds. But those who killed cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did. For even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped killing. Human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter.

Understanding human agency and human accountability, a cardinal feature of the law is understanding the active sense of foraging for some coherence

Today we are suffering because those who know better choose not to entertain politics and those who don’t know. The ones without integrity choose to sing the tune and praises of the one who gives them money, who feeds them or who promised to give them something. They see corruption as connections. Oppositions as spies, agencies, puppet masters, proxies, sellouts, stogies or clever blacks. Accountability to them means they are being targeted and hated. They choose to see themselves and those they support as victims when they must answer for their crimes or wrongdoings.

If we fail to hold ourselves to that standard of responsibility, then other people regard us as lacking in ethics and integrity. And it does not end there. Just as we hold people (including ourselves) accountable for the wrongs they have done, or the good they have failed to do, we also believe (or at least act out the proposition) that someone who has made a good decision freely, deserves whatever benefit might come of that decision. It is for that reason that we believe each person should justly receive the fruit of their honest and voluntary labor. There seems something natural and inevitable about such judgments; something at work within them that is universal and inescapable, psychologically and socially. What all this means is that everyone—child, adult, self, others—will rebel against being treated as a cog in a wheel, incapable of choice and devoid of freedom, and (similarly) that it is practically impossible to establish a positive relationship with any other (or even our private selves) without that attribution of personal agency, free will, and responsibility.

1.2.1 Action item: The U.S. Department of Justice should develop and disseminate case studies that provide examples where past injustices were publicly acknowledged by law enforcement agencies in a manner to help build community trust. 1.3 Recommendation: Law enforcement agencies should establish a culture of transparency and accountability in order to build public trust and legitimacy. This will help ensure decision making is understood and in accord with stated policy.

Be wary of interpretations that do not provide equal weight to reader, text, and author. In grade school, we likely learned these various ways of deciphering books. Most of us were quizzed on authorial intent. Students were taught either to rank the author’s intent first in interpretation or to ignore it altogether as unnecessary….More is at work in artistic creation than the author’s intention, but these external factors do not negate the author’s agency. Rather, when we interpret, we must take into account all three aspects of the reading experience: the author, their text or creation, and the reader or receiver. (p. 82)

On the right there was the suspicion, sometimes well founded, that public-sector institutions were being run more for the benefit of their employees than their clients and constituents. In some schools, police departments, and other government agencies, time-serving was indeed a reality, even if not as predominant or universal as its critics alleged. The culture of metric accountability was an understandable attempt to break the stranglehold of entrenched gerontocracy. When institutional establishments came under populist attack, they too resorted to metrics as a means of defense to demonstrate their effectiveness.

From the standpoint of physics, I had merely introduced into my brain a small collection of foreign particles. But that change was enough to eliminate the familiar impression that I freely control the activities playing out in my mind. While the reductionist-level template remained in full force (particles governed by physical laws), the human-level template (a reliable mind endowed with free will navigating through a stable reality) was upended. Of course, I am not presenting a mind-altering moment as an argument for or against free will. But the experience made visceral an understanding that would otherwise have remained abstract. Our sense of who we are, the capacities we have, and the freedom of will we seemingly exert all emerge from the particles moving through our heads. Fiddle with the particles, and those familiar qualities can fall away. It’s an experience that helped align my rational grasp of the physics with my intuitive sense of the mind. Everyday experience and everyday language are filled with references, implicit and explicit, to free will. We speak of making choices and coming to decisions. We speak of actions that depend on those decisions. We speak of the implications that these actions have on our lives and the lives of those we touch. Again, our discussion of free will does not imply that these descriptions are meaningless or need to be eliminated. These descriptions are told in the language appropriate to the human-level story. We do make choices. We do come to decisions. We do undertake actions. And those actions do have implications. All of this is real. But because the human-level story must be compatible with the reductionist account, we need to refine our language and assumptions. We need to set aside the notion that our choices and decisions and actions have their ultimate origin within each of us, that they are brought into being by our independent agencies, that they emerge from deliberations that stand beyond the reach of physical law. We need to recognize that although the sensation of free will is real, the capacity to exert free will—the capacity for the human mind to transcend the laws that control physical progression—is not. If we reinterpret “free will” to mean this sensation, then our human-level stories become compatible with the reductionist account. And together with the shift in emphasis from ultimate origin to liberated behavior, we can embrace an unassailable and far-reaching variety of human freedom.

Years ago, I represented a client, a firefighter/paramedic, in an administrative trial after he had been terminated for allegedly providing patient care that was below the department’s established standards. One central issue was the ongoing, on-the-job training firefighters/paramedics receive. Throughout the trial, senior officers of the department, including the Chief himself, preached and bloviated on and on about how the department is committed to providing only the best patient care and how their paramedics are held to a higher standard; how they are committed to serving the community with the highest level of blah, blah, blah. On cross examination, however, I asked each of them about how many hours a day each provider spends drilling or practicing firefighting technique and equipment. Each of them answered proudly that every firefighter/EMT and firefighter/paramedic, regardless of assignment, spends at least three hours each day practicing firefighting skills and/or rehearsing the use of various firefighting equipment; hoses, ladders, saws, and other firefighter equipment. Ok, that’s great. Through testimony, we determined that, based on a 10-shift work month, each firefighter/paramedic, regardless of assignment, spends at least 30 hours per month drilling, practicing, and/or rehearsing firefighting skills & equipment. That’s at a minimum of 360 hours per year of ongoing, on-the-job firefighter training. Outstanding. When the smoke is showing and the flames are roiling, they will be ready. They all displayed the same proud grin at how well trained their people are. For each of them, however, that smug grin quickly turned when I then asked about the number of hours per day each firefighter/paramedic spends drilling on or practicing patient care related techniques, skills, and tools. Every one of them squirmed as they responded with the truth that the department only offers three hours of patient care related education per month. That’s roughly a maximum of 36 hours of paramedic training for the entire year. It got worse when further testimony showed that patient care related calls account for more than 80 percent of their call volume and fire related calls less than 20 percent, I could see each of them deflate on the witness stand when I asked how they could truthfully say they were committed to providing the best patient care when barely 10 percent of their training addresses patient care, which constitutes over 80 percent of your department’s calls. The answers were more disjointed and nonsensical than a White House press briefing. Of course, across America the 10:1 ratio of ongoing firefighting training to EMS training is pretty consistent, which begs the question: Don’t they get it? Excellence is the product of practice. How can any rational person look at a 10:1 training ratio and declare themselves committed to the highest level of care? How can an agency neglect training on the most significant aspect of the business and then be surprised when issues of negligence and liability arise? Once again, it seems that old-school culture leaves EMS stuck in the mud and the law is not going to wait for agencies to figure out that living in the past compromises the future.

In the current system, to manage the laborious process of cross-firm reconciliation, middlemen ledger-keepers have been created—clearinghouses, settlement agencies, and correspondent banks, custodial banks, and others. Those intermediaries solve some of the trust problems but they also add cost, time, and risk. In the United States, the final settlement of a trade takes two days for U.S. Treasury bonds and up to thirty days for instruments such as syndicated loans. Not only do massive errors and omissions still occur, but the time lag paralyzes literally trillions of dollars of potentially useful capital, which must wait in escrow accounts or collateral agreements until all parties have cleared their books and the trade is settled. A more efficient, real-time system would unlock those funds, sending a wall of money into the world’s markets—yes, to make bankers richer, but also to provide more credit to businesses and households. In theory, R3’s distributed ledger could achieve all that. It could unleash a tidal wave of money.

The amalgamation of information that goes into proving that we can be trusted as a member of society has historically depended upon institutions that record and affirm our life events and credentials—bank accounts, birth certificates, changes of address, educational records, driver’s licenses, etc.—and keep track of our financial transactions. To lose all of that, as refugees often do when thrust into “statelessness,” is to be put in a highly vulnerable position, one that’s inherently easy for the worst of the world’s criminals and terrorist organizations to exploit. If you are unable to prove who you are, you are at the mercy of strangers. Among all the work that agencies such as the UNHCR and the WFP do, this core function—the creation of stand-in societal institutions—is just as important as the food they provide.

According to WFP spokesman Alex Sloan, the pilot has already shown success: it has saved money and created a much more efficient way of dealing with inconsistencies in refugees’ accounts. It’s so successful, in fact, that the agency is looking to extend the service to a larger population of 100,000 refugees. In the not too distant future, Sloan says, 20 million food program beneficiaries who receive disbursements in cash could be eligible for the blockchain program.

Holding yourself accountable empowers you. It reminds you that you have agency and choice over the decisions you make.

Back in the ’70s, a former prosecutor named Jules Kroll founded his eponymous firm, catering to law firms and banks, and staffed by former cops, FBI agents, and forensic accountants. The formula, and a generation of copycats, flourished. In the 2000s, Israel became a hotbed for such firms. The country’s mandatory military service, and the legendary secrecy and accomplishment of its intelligence agency, Mossad, created a ready pipeline of trained operatives. The Israeli firms began emphasizing less conventional forms of corporate espionage, including “pretexting”: using operatives with false identities.

cyberspace retains the fundamental Oedipal structure of an intervening Third Order which, in its very capacity of the agency of mediation/mediatization, sustains the subject’s desire, while simultaneously acting as the agent of Prohibition which prevents its direct and full gratification—on account of this intervening Third, every partial gratification/satisfaction is marked by a fundamental “this is not THAT.

Communication Experiments The intent behind communication experiments was to test the hypothesis that some agency that appeared to exhibit intelligence was responsible for the 20-year history of anomalies on Skinwalker Ranch. Secondly, during the term of the NIDS presence on Skinwalker Ranch (1996–2002), some early success had been achieved with the use of games and puzzles. The NIDS team had found on a couple of occasions that games patterns that had been left in a controlled environment with no humans present would be interfered with and new patterns created that involved moving game components in an apparently non-random manner. Such activity was observed in a small number of cases when interference by humans, animals, seismic effects, or weather had been ruled out. The majority of the communication strategies on Skinwalker Ranch used by BAASS were traditional and involved the initiation of a variety of games, puzzles, and other approaches in order to establish communication. A pre-locked game or puzzle would be set up in a location that would not be disturbed by human or animal. No access to the game was possible without keys that were housed in Las Vegas. The initial configuration of the game would be photographed, then re-photographed again 24 hours later. If any component of the game had moved during the previous 24 hours, the movement would be detectable by comparing the “before” and “after” photographs. The strategy and data from these communication games were described in the 360-page report entitled “Utah Ranch Investigation: August 2009–February 2010” delivered to DIA in April 2010.

Democrat who could not be easily removed by a subsequent president. Second, they funded the agency through the profits of the Federal Reserve rather than through congressional appropriations, ensuring there would be no oversight, accountability, or budgetary constraints. Finally, according to Rubin, they staffed the

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The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many

Roosevelt’s administration ensured that African Americans were hired both by the New Deal agencies and by government contractors. The Work Projects Administration employed 350,000 African American workers, who accounted for 15 percent of the WPA’s workforce. African Americans comprised more than 10 percent of the National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Public Works Administration issued contracts only to companies that agreed to hire a certain number of African American workers.41

go badly wrong. Sex, she thought. That is what is going to go wrong here. And she was right. “This woman,” Mma Gabane Gabane went on, “this foolish, foolish woman met a young man who worked in the same office. He wasn’t an accountant—nothing like that—he was a trainee, Mma Ramotswe, just a trainee. He was eighteen.” There was a sharp intake of breath from Mma Phumele, who looked at Mma Ramotswe to gauge her reaction. She would be every bit as shocked as the rest of them, she imagined. And Mma Ramotswe was shocked.

Truth be told, nobody thought Dell’s direct business model would work, at least back in the early 90s. As Bill Sharpe, head of the advertising agency that held the Dell Canada account from 1996 to 2006, told me, “I had a business partner in California who said, we have a client, Dell. It sells computers over the phone, and ships them to you. I said, ‘There’s no way. Who’s gonna buy a computer over the phone? They’re complicated.

Truth be told, nobody thought Dell’s direct business model would work, at least back in the early 90s. As Bill Sharpe, head of the advertising agency that held the Dell Canada account from 1996 to 2006, told me, “I had a business partner in California who said, we have a client, Dell. It sells computers over the phone, and ships them to you. I said, ‘There’s no way, who’s gonna buy a computer over the phone? They’re complicated.

The Main Revenue Accounts and Their Origin Revenue Chart of Accounts Air sales, Domestic Air Sales, International Cost of Domestic Air Sales Cost of Intl Air Sales Tour Sales Cruise Sales Cost of Tour Sales

At the time of writing, the problem of how to deal with the more recent events of 2009 – the accusations of war crimes, the alleged failure of international agencies – remains unresolved. This book reminds us that this is not the first time that Sri Lanka has had to deal with the scars of its own internal violence, and as it makes abundantly clear, the question of how to ‘deal with’ such a bitter past is never easy and never straightforward. However, it is a question of great importance, and Dhana Hughes is to be thanked for providing her readers with this exemplary account of the ways in which ordinary people struggle every day to deal with their own past and their possible complicity in times of great danger and fear.

Gibraltar Steamship Corporation never did any trading, and never owned or operated any ships, however it did operate a 50,000-watt, pirate radio station. Its president was Thomas Dudley Cabot, who in reality was the U.S. Department of State’s Director of the Office of International Security Affairs. In actual fact, the radio station, called Radio Swan, was a Central Intelligence Agency covert, black operation, known in intelligence circles as “Black Ops.” The station was in operation from 1960 to 1968. Pretending to be a normal radio station, it had commercial accounts including R. J. Reynolds, Philip Morris Tobacco, and Kleenex. It broadcast religiously-oriented programs, such as “The Radio Bible Class,” “The World Tomorrow” and a Christian program from the Dominican Republic, as well as others. Their news broadcasts were sponsored by the Cuban Freedom Committee, a part of Christianform, an anti-communist foundation. In May of 1960, the pirate radio station started transmitting Spanish language broadcasts to Cuba from Swan Island, or Islas del Cisne, in the western Caribbean Sea, near the coastline of Honduras. In 1961, Radio Swan became Radio America, with its headquarters in Miami.

PARTNERS IN CRIME HOW THE CLINTONS WENT FROM DEAD BROKE TO FILTHY RICH And the money kept rolling in from every side. —Song from the musical Evita The quotation above refers to the Juan and Evita Peron Foundation, established in 1948 by Evita Peron for the purpose of helping Argentina’s poor. Evita professed to be a champion of the campesinos—the wretched workers who lived in shanties on the outskirts of Buenos Aires—and they trusted Evita. She had, after all, risen up herself from poverty and obscurity. Her fame was the result of her marriage to the general who became the military leader of the country, Juan Peron. Long before the Clintons, Argentina had its own power couple that claimed to do good and ended up doing very well for themselves. There are, obviously, differences between the Clintons and the Perons. Despite her personal popularity, Evita remained an appendage of her husband, seeking but never obtaining political office. At one point, Evita had her eye on an official position, but the political establishment vigorously opposed her, and her husband never supported her in this effort. Hillary, by contrast, was elected senator and now, having deployed her husband on the campaign trail, seeks election to the nation’s highest office previously held by him. The Perons also had a foundation that took in millions of pesos—the equivalent of $200 million—from multiple foreign sources, Argentine businesses, as well as contributions from various individuals and civic groups. With its 14,000 employees, the foundation was better equipped and more influential than many agencies within the Argentinian government. Evita and her cronies were experts at shaking down anyone who wanted something from the government; donations became a kind of tax that opened up access to the Peron administration. Trade unions sent large contributions because they saw Evita and her husband as champions of their cause. In 1950, the government arranged that a portion of all lottery, movie, and casino revenues should go to the foundation. While the foundation made symbolic, highly publicized gestures of helping the poor, in reality only a fraction of the money went to the underprivileged. Most of it seems to have ended up in foreign bank accounts controlled by the Perons, who became hugely wealthy through their public office profiteering. When Evita died in 1954 and the foundation was shut down, Argentines discovered stashes of undistributed food and clothing. No one from the foundation had bothered to give it away, so it sat unused for years. Helping the poor, after all, wasn’t the real reason Evita set up her foundation. No, she had a different set of priorities. Like so many Third World potentates, the Perons used social justice and provision for the poor as a pretext to amass vast wealth for themselves. The Clintons have done the same thing in America; indeed, Hillary may be America’s version of Evita Peron.

Just last year, Mrs. Clinton claimed that as secretary of state she didn’t carry a work phone. It was too cumbersome and inconvenient for her to carry two phones. She didn’t have room for them. Then we learned she carried an iPhone and BlackBerry, neither government issued nor encrypted. Then we learned she carried an iPad and an iPad mini. But she claimed she didn’t do email. Then we learned she had email—on a private server. But then she claimed her email was for personal correspondence, yoga, and wedding planning. Then we learned her email contained government business as well—lots of it. Listen, nobody transmits classified material on the Internet! Nobody! You transmit classified material via a closed-circuit, in-house intranet or even physically via courier. You can’t even photocopy classified data except on a machine specially designed for hush-hush material, and even then you still require permission from whatever agency and issuer the document originated. So the only way for that material to be transmitted over an email is for her or someone in her office to dictate, Photoshop, or white-out the classified material in question, to remove any letterhead, or to duplicate the material by rewriting it in an email. Government email accounts are never allowed to accept emails from nongovernment email accounts. We’re supposed to delete them right away. Exceptions exist for communications with private contractors, but those exceptions are built into the system. I repeat: To duplicate classified material without permission or to send it over an unsecured channel is completely illegal. That’s why every government agency employs burn bags, safes, and special folders for anything marked Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. People have lost their careers and gone to jail for far less. Yet Hillary Clinton transmitted classified material by the figurative ton. No one else can operate like that in government. But she takes her normal shortcuts and continues to lie about it. There is no greater example of double standards in leadership than First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Is it too inconvenient or cumbersome for her to follow the same rules that agents in the field have to follow? Maybe it would make morale too high? Clinton’s behavior harkens to the old motto: “The beatings will continue until morale improves.

( O1O'2920'8855 )PCASH( O1O'2920'8855 ) Accordingly, the ACRC is making various efforts to establish the foundation to prevent civil complaints in advance and to improve the capacity of administrative agencies. First, the Commission assesses the current status of administrative agencies in solving civil complaints in order to enhance the fairness and accountability of the agencies

Senator Warren questions SEC chair on broker reforms 525 words By Sarah N. Lynch WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senator Elizabeth Warren said Friday that the Labor Department should press ahead with brokerage industry reforms, and not be deterred by the Securities and Exchange Commission's plans to adopt its own separate rules.    President Barack Obama, with frequent Wall Street critic Warren at his side, last month called on the Labor Department to quickly move forward to tighten brokerage standards on retirement advice, lending new momentum to a long-running effort to implement reforms aimed at reducing conflicts of interest and "hidden fees." But that effort could be complicated by a parallel track of reforms by the SEC, whose Chair Mary Jo White on Tuesday said she supported moving ahead with a similar effort to hold retail brokers to a higher "fiduciary" standard. "I want to see the Department of Labor go forward now," Warren told Reuters in an interview Friday. "There is no reason to wait for the SEC. There is no question that the Department of Labor has the authority to act to ensure that retirement advisers are serving the best interest of their clients." Warren said that while she has no concerns with the SEC moving forward to write its own rules, she fears its involvement may give Wall Street a hook to try to delay or water down a separate ongoing Labor Department effort to craft tough new rules governing how brokers dole out retirement advice. She also raised questions about White's decision to unveil her position at a conference hosted by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), a trade group representing the interests of securities brokerage firms. Not only is the SEC the lead regulator for brokers, but unlike the Labor Department, it is also bound by law to preserve brokers' commission-based compensation in any new fiduciary rule.     "I was surprised that (Chair) White announced the rule at a conference hosted by an industry trade group that spent several years and millions of dollars lobbying members of Congress to block real action to fix the problem," Warren said. Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who frequently challenges market regulators as too cozy with industry, stopped short of directly criticizing White. The SEC and SIFMA both declined to comment on Warren's comments. SIFMA has strongly opposed the Labor Department's efforts, fearing its rule will contain draconian measures that would cut broker profits, and in turn, force brokers to pull back from offering accounts and advice to American retirees. It has long advocated for the SEC to take the lead on a rule that would create a new uniform standard of care for brokers and advisers. The SEC has said it has been coordinating with the Labor Department on the rule-writing effort, but on Tuesday White also acknowledged that the two can still act independently of one another because they operate under different laws. The industry and reform advocates have been waiting now for years to see whether the SEC would move to tighten standards.     Warren expressed some skepticism on Friday about whether the SEC will ever in fact actually adopt a rule, saying that for years the agency has talked about taking action, but has not delivered. (Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Christian Plumb)