Agent J Quotes

But— Why didn’t you say?” “Secret agent. Secret.

Everybody is fucked up and we are all freaks in our own ways"-Agent Reed

She shook her head slowly. “I don’t believe you. You can’t be a cop.” “Not a cop.” “Federal agent?” “FBI.” “Even more unlikely.” “J. Edgar rolls over in his grave every day, but that’s the way it is.

I wish I could trust you, Reed, but I know I can’t.” His brow furrows in confusion, but there is a wry tilt to his lips, “Why?” I give him a small smile of my own, “You think you’re different from men like Caleb. You see everything in black and white, you don’t care about the whole story; you don’t care about the gray. Some stories aren’t black and white, Agent Reed.

The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself—not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of logic or science. It comes simply from the hard work that biochemistry has done over the past forty years, combined with consideration of the way in which we reach conclusions of design every day.

Asshole FBI agents that want to shoot Girl Scouts.

There are no nonsmokers in this business. Just people trying to quit, and people who haven’t started yet.

A.J. is an agent like me, but for whom or for what no one has been able to discover. It is rumored that he represents a trust of giant insects from another galaxy...

This is exciting," said J.Lo. "We are sneaky agent men, like Bond James Bond." "I don't know where you pick this stuff up.

I wasn’t afraid of your average dark alley. I had standard Agency-issue spells in my coat and a nine millimeter in my purse for dealing with the less dangerous pests, but even I knew you have to be careful with an upset woman.

My mind found yours in the darkness. Across an ocean. No fancy crystal required. You think that's nothing?

I have been sexually assaulted by a madwoman, agent. She hit my head on the ground and forced my face against her breasts. There may have been humping.

Agent Reed returned this morning, ready for another round of what he calls an interview and what I refer to as an interrogation.

I’m Special Agent Jax, Miss Aston. And I have a few questions for you. Please come with me.

So you and the lovely Agent Scully are going down to investigate?' Frohike said, sounding hopeful. 'Yeah, we leave for Cancun tomorrow.' 'Our tax dollars at work,' Langly snorted. 'I'd love to see Agent Scully with a healthy tropical tan,' Frohike said. 'Down, Frohike,' Mulder said.

In my day, those who could weave the Art, and summon the natural powers of the world to their bidding, were considered agents of the gods—sacrosanct. Today they burn you if you accidentally guess tomorrow’s weather.

An agent does not have a model of its world - it is a model. In other words, the form, structure, and states of our embodied brains do not contain a model of the sensorium - they are that model. Every aspect of our brain and body can be predicted from our environment.

An unwise woman once said that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. She was wrong. A truly wise woman knows that the way to a man's heart is through his dick.

I don't know what it is about this man that makes me melt into a puddle.

You remind me that I'm alive,' she said, voice thick. 'You remind me that goodness can exist in the world.

In their 2001 study 'The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain,' Diane E Hoffmann and Anita J. Tarzian pointed out that women are 'more likely to have their pain reports discounted as 'emotional' or 'psychogenic' and, therefore, 'not real.' This invalidation parallels the invalidation of women's anger, which is similarly often reduced to proof of women's mental weakness. One study of postoperative pain relief for patients who had undergone coronary artery bypass surgery revealed that men in pain were given pain relief medication, but women were given sedatives. Sedatives aren't pain relievers, or analgesics. They're calming and dulling agents that 'take the edge off.' But for whom, exactly?

Some of us, I imagine, write out of anger; some out of pain; some write out of prejudice or loss, some out of passion, the promise of something better, perhaps the belief that—even now—a book can be capable of changing a life. Some of us write to remember, some to forget; some to change things, some to ensure things stay the same. Some of us—as my editor and agent will all too easily testify—write because we cannot stop.

I'm going to find you,' he said against her burning hair. 'I'll find you one day, I promise.' She shuddered but melted into him. Like she'd yielded any attempt at restraint. 'You remind me that I'm alive, too,' he whispered.

The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout corporate America, which has become used to the typos, misspellings, missing words and mangled syntax so acceptable in cyberspace. The CEO of LoseItAll.com, an Internet startup, said the virus had rendered him helpless. “Each time I tried to send one particular e-mail this morning, I got back this error message: ‘Your dependent clause preceding your independent clause must be set off by commas, but one must not precede the conjunction.’ I threw my laptop across the room.”  . . . If Strunkenwhite makes e-mailing impossible, it could mean the end to a communication revolution once hailed as a significant timesaver. A study of 1,254 office workers in Leonia, N.J., found that e-mail increased employees’ productivity by 1.8 hours a day because they took less time to formulate their thoughts. (The same study also found that they lost 2.2 hours of productivity because they were e-mailing so many jokes to their spouses, parents and stockbrokers.)  . . . “This is one of the most complex and invasive examples of computer code we have ever encountered. We just can’t imagine what kind of devious mind would want to tamper with e-mails to create this burden on communications,” said an FBI agent who insisted on speaking via the telephone out of concern that trying to e-mail his comments could leave him tied up for hours.

IF I HAD a dime for every time I’ve heard “We’re all going to die” or “I’ll kill you,” I could afford a better apartment. You can only listen to so many threats of destruction, doom, or death before you start tuning them all out. So I followed the wolf out of the building, then went home.

Original sin and conscious awareness of human fallibility is the perpetual agent of transformation in human affairs. Humankind’s behavior is pathological; it is an admixture of instinct and reason, kindness and cruelty, immorality and seeking redemption.

How knowledgeable is the agent about the market? Ask where he sees interest rates going in the next six to twelve months. What does the supply of homes look like, and what will the future supply be? An educated agent will give his views and quote his sources about the future of the market.

I saw, during the midterm campaign of 2006, how difficult it was for opponents of stem cell research to run against hope. And so it was in the 2008 presidential contest. This was hope in the collective, a definition that should always apply to the expression of a people's political will. Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope. In this case, the informing agent was us. Granted, it may all look different in six months to a year, but it is hard not to be buoyed by the desire for positive change as articulated and advanced by Barack Obama. It is okay to hope. This time the aspiration of many will not be derided as desperation by a few, as it was during the stem cell debate of '06. By the time you read this book, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have established federal funding for stem cell research. The dam has broken. Just as I'd hoped.

Not tingling as much as a rapid-burning desire and longing. I want him to f**k me. Right here. Right now.

I don't know how to wake up. Open your eyes. No shit.

But that is what Catalysts did. They made the difficult choices, the ones no one else had the courage, or insight, to make. They were, after all, the agents of change.

The transition of nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any agent.

Ask prospective agents to explain step-by-step how they are going to negotiate the highest price for the home—from receipt of the offer to counteroffers until acceptance.

Bond Team could forget about secret-agenting in the field for a while. To begin with, they could hardly find their way around the school, let alone a supervillain’s secret complex.

Gradually I began to realize that modern advertising could be seen less as an agent of materialism than as one of the cultural forces working to disconnect human beings from the material world.

Twenty highly trained agents versus one eighteen year old high school drop out and he managed to kick all your asses. Okay, did we get really bad at this over night or is this kid really that good?!

The mysteries of life include the external and the internal conundrums that each person encounters in a world composed of competing ideologies and agents of change. Conflicting ideas include political, social, legal, and ethical concepts. Agents of change include environmental factors, social pressure to conform, aging, and the forces inside us that made us into whom we are as well as the forces compelling us to be a different type of person.

ROSA MET ME at the door with a shotgun. Strictly speaking, not aimed at me, but you don’t really have to aim a sawed-off shotgun. She swung it toward me. “You, get in there.” She turned her attention to the crowd. “The rest of you will take a number and have a seat.” Her paperwork skills might have been lousy, but her personal touch was something I aspired to.

Josy was certain of a few things in his life. He wanted to be an actor. He had an agent who cared about his future. He had friends he’d somehow managed to carve into a family. He liked weed and funky socks with animals on them. He was good at radio trivia (which for some reason didn’t translate so well to bar trivia). He had a bong named Vlad the Inhaler, and maybe his parents would never come around to seeing that while his life would never be what they wanted, it was still a life worth living. And Josiah Erickson was certain that what he felt for Quincy Moore went beyond simple affection. Regardless of what happened tomorrow or any day after, he would remember this moment when he felt so full of light he thought he’d burst.

Loyalty is the quantizing basis of all emotions. Faithfulness is the cornerstone to love, hate, anger, patriotism, friendship, compassion, and self-respect. Love is the agent of universal synthesis. Love links and draws together the elements of the world.

If J. Edgar Hoover had something like Total Information Awareness, would his agents have used it, as they did all the other means available to them, to harass civil rights activists, reds, poor people's organizations, unionists, & peaceniks? Most certainly!

As Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, "The answer to the ancient question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that 'nothing' is unstable." ... In short, the natural state of affairs is something rather than nothing. An empty universe requires supernatural intervention--not a full one. Only by the constant action of an agent outside the universe, such as God, could a state of nothingness be maintained. The fact that we have something is just what we would expect if there is no God.

You looked at all the houses in your price range currently on the market, and you made your buying decision. Make sure the agent’s pricing strategy is based on what buyers are going to compare your home to, including new construction, because it is competing for your buyer also.

During World War II, a secret apartment in London was maintained by the office of the Special Operations Executive. Within it, operatives created false documents and designed elaborate disguises for use by British undercover agents. The apartment was located at number 64 Baker Street.

One reason why many statistical models are incomplete is that they do not specify the sources of randomness generating variability among agents, i.e., they do not specify why otherwise observationally identical people make different choices and have different outcomes given the same choice.

I have had a two-hour meeting with Putin,” Trump told Tillerson. “That’s all I need to know. . . . I’ve sized it all up. I’ve got it.” Tillerson’s moral code and experience climbing the corporate ladder taught him to respect America’s commander in chief. In this moment, he had to deploy every diplomatic skill he had acquired to tell his boss to be careful, reminding him that Putin had a history of taking advantage if he saw an opening. Putin was a master manipulator, a former KGB agent trained to find the soft spots of his foes and to exploit them. But Trump waved him off. “I know more about this than you do,” Trump said.

The subject matter is perhaps best characterized as “the subjective quality of experience.” When we perceive, think, and act, there is a whir of causation and information processing, but this processing does not usually go on in the dark. There is also an internal aspect; there is something it feels like to be a cognitive agent. This internal aspect is conscious experience. Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experiences of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one’s tongue; from mundane sounds and smells to the encompassing grandeur of musical experience; from the triviality of a nagging itch to the weight of a deep existential angst; from the specificity of the taste of peppermint to the generality of one’s experience of selfhood. All these have a distinct experienced quality. All are prominent parts of the inner life of the mind. We can say that a being is conscious if there is something it is like to be that being, to use a phrase made famous by Thomas Nagel.1

It was clearly chiseled by God because Michelangelo couldn't have sculpted something so perfect. And I can't wait to run my tongue over every inch of it.

This time, when I look into his eyes, I see a gleam of mischief. And that's f**king exciting.

If all the women in the city fought like that, muggers would take up safer occupations, like wrestling rabid tigers.

The universe always brings you where you need to be, at the time you need to be there.

In a world full of enemies, you're my only friend.' 'Well, maybe I should give you friendship lessons, because you fucking blow at it.

This figure upon the Cross is not a MVD agent or a Gestapo inquisitor, but a Divine Physician, Who only asks that we bring our wounds to Him in order that He may heal them. If our sins be as scarlet, they shall be washed white as snow, and if they be as red as crimson, they shall be made white as wool. Was it not He Who told us, “I say to you, that even so there shall be more joy in Heaven upon one sinner that doth penance than upon ninety-nine just who need not penance” (Luke 15:7)? In the story of the prodigal, did He not describe the Father as saying, “Let us eat and make merry: because this my son was dead and is come to life again; was lost and is found” (Luke 15:23, 24)? Why is there more joy in Heaven for the repentant sinner than for the righteous? Because God’s attitude is not judgment but love. In judgment, one is not as joyful after doing wrong as before; but in love, there is joy because the danger and worry of losing that soul is past. He who is sick is loved more than he who is well, because he needs it more. Some will feign sickness to solicit love and pretend wounds that the beloved may bind them.

Thirty years ago, travel agents made our airline and rail reservations, salesclerks helped us find what we were looking for in stores, and professional typists or secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most of those things ourselves. The information age has off-loaded a great deal of the work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us. We are doing the jobs of ten different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favorite TV shows. It’s no wonder that sometimes one memory gets confounded with another, leading us to show up in the right place but on the wrong day, or to forget something as simple as where we last put our glasses or the remote.

An Organizing System is an abstract characterization of how some collection of resources is described and arranged to enable human or computational agents to interact with the resources. The Organizing System is an architectural and conceptual view that is distinct from the physical arrangement of resources that might embody it, and also distinct from the person, enterprise, or institution that implements and operates it.

As soon as I stepped onto the train, I knew why Shifters and Weres shunned the contraptions like E.coli avoided antibacterial agents on a petri dish. It smelled. Badly. A putrid mix of old man, sweaty socks, and cigarettes. My nose hairs didn't shrivel; they curled into the fetal position before they withered and died, leaving my nasal passage a dry, barren wasteland no longer capable of being harmed by the olfactory assault.

Trump said he wished he had fired Comey at the beginning of the administration but now he wanted Comey out. Bannon disagreed and offered this argument to Trump alone in the Oval Office: “Seventy-five percent of the agents do hate Comey. No doubt. The moment you fire him he’s J. fucking Edgar Hoover. The day you fire him, he’s the greatest martyr in American history. A weapon to come and get you. They’re going to name a special fucking counsel. You can fire Comey. You can’t fire the FBI. The minute you fire him, the FBI as an institution, they have to destroy you and they will destroy you.” Bannon thought Trump did not understand the power of the permanent institutions—the FBI, CIA, the Pentagon and the broader military establishment. He also did not understand the sweeping powers of a special counsel who could be appointed to investigate everything a president touched.

Getting licensed was one of the best things we ever did for our business. My wife got her license right after our third rehab -- we were getting frustrated with our real estate agents and we felt as if we had very little control over our deals; I got my license several years later and currently we’re both licensed. Given our experiences, I couldn’t imagine being a full-time real estate investor and not having someone in our business who had their license.

We can think about our own thoughts, reason about our own reasons, and communicate with each other through a shared language. We can access the machine code running in our brains by translating high-level abstract concepts into causally efficacious patterns of neural activity. This gives a physical basis for how decisions are made in real time, not just as the outcome of complex physical interactions but also for consciously accessible reasons, and it provides a firm footing for the otherwise troublesome concept of mental causation.

rats?” Alex leaned forward in disbelief. “Of course! Why not?” the chancellor held a look of honest confusion. “Now mind you, it wasn’t a very strong demon, but demons can make exceedingly gifted pest exterminators. They are perhaps the second most naturally gifted killing agents in all the planes.” Alex swallowed. “What’s the most gifted? Dragons? War-spirits?” “The common housecat.” “What? That can’t be right.” “Several extinct species of bird, small mammal, and reptile would beg to differ were they not, of course, extinct,” he said.

When he disappeared again, I texted Agent de Cabrera for emergency positivity. I got socked by a poltergeist. I wanna give up. Elian texted: Winston Churchill said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” He ended with a smiley face. I texted back: Probably, Churchill wasn’t being punched in the gob by eldritch spirits. Then, to add that pinch of positivity, I added, I’m positive his enthusiasm was a sign of mental instability. There was a thud from somewhere beyond the hall, and a shout of alarm.

A friend once told me a story about a former Black Panther leader in a Midwest community who in the 1960s had his phone tapped, while federal agents followed him everywhere. Forced to go underground, he later entered the drug trade & eventually got good at it. However, he told my friend, soon after this nobody kept tabs on him--he wasn't followed or harassed. He later became the number one drug dealer in the area. As he said this, my friend noted a breaking in his voice; the pain, perhaps, of being pushed away from being a committed community activist.

Lesson one, don't shit on your friends when you have a bad day.' 'Right.' 'Lesson two. Your true friends won't mind when you do, so long as you own up to it and apologise. Usually in the form of buying them a beer.' Another laugh, softer this time. 'I'll buy you a beer, then.

I shook my head. “I thought you had a ‘No princesses’ rule.” “Rules are made to be broken,” said Grimm. Ari sat back in the chair, her eyes closed. “Of course, young lady, there’s the matter of how we sign our contracts.” “Not gonna happen.” Ari threw a pen at the mirror for emphasis.

He spoke fast and hard. “I’ve got it bad for Marissa. She won’t see me. That’s it, the whole story. Now tell me about your nightmare.” Rhage had to smile. “The idea I’m not the only one on the skids is a relief.” “That tells me nothing. I want details.” “The female threw me out of her house early this morning after doing a job on my ego.” “What kind of hatchet did she use?” “An unflattering comparison between me and a free-agent canine.” “Ouch.” Butch twisted the shirt in the other direction. “So naturally, you’re dying to see her again.” “Pretty much.” “You’re pathetic.” “I know.

From REQUSISITION FOR: A THIEF - Book 1 Female Reporter: "Agent Garret, could you answer one more question?... Why can't the FBI catch this guy?" Director Denny Garret: "The problem is two-fold, really. ...If we're ever gonna catch him it's gonna be because he's failed. If you want to see Gregg Hadyn fail, a jewel heist is the last place to look." Carly Macklin: "What is your thing, Gregg Hadyn?" Gregg Hadyn: "You know, I'm really good at taking things that don't belong to me." Director Denny Garret: "Bobby pins?" International Jewel Thief Gregg Hadyn: "They make the best handcuff picks.

An artist adopts a radically different view regarding the importance of time than a businessperson does. Instead of perceiving time as a merchantable facet doled out incrementally according to marketplace demands, an artist portrays time as an agent of destruction. The irrevocability of time frames the human condition. Time might the medium of all human experience, but its passage obscures and eventually obliterates all human endeavors. Time unchecked leads to a blank slate of nothingness. Time’s destructive march towards meaningless is arrested through memory and art depicting humankind’s struggles and accomplishments.

First, the moment INTPs stop sharing certain thoughts with their partners is the moment they begin to detach from and devalue them. At that moment, the INTP is no longer relating to his or her partner, but has chosen to become a free agent. Second, when INTPs fail to share their thoughts, the relationship immediately becomes less interesting to them. Remember, the most honest and authentic reason for INTPs to be in a relationship is to learn and explore with their partner. So as soon as they turn down an independent path and start moving away from their partner, they have forsaken the primary purpose of the relationship.

Love is a form of energy, and similar to all forms of energy, it is both essential for life and dangerous. Love can enrich a person’s life or destroy a person’s world. Love is a catalytic agent of change because it makes us dare to become the best person that we can be. Falling in love for the first time drives a person to the cusp of madness, while the bitter aftermath of a love lost irrevocably alters the positive and negative aspects of a person’s character. Withstanding rejection by a lover, we discover within us those ingredients that we will need in order to find our life mate and complete ourselves as man and woman.

JFK asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to break up organized crime. Nobody high-up in government has tangled the Mafia. J. E. Hoover, the hired hands of FBI and CIA, ran the assassination teams. They have been used since World War II. JFK was attempting to end the oil-tax depletion rip-offs, to get tax money from oil companies. JFK instituted the nuclear test ban treaty, often called “the kiss of death,” to oppose the Pentagon. JFK called off the Invasion of Cuba. He allowed Castro to live, antagonized narcotics and gambling, oil and sugar interests, formerly in Cuba. JFK asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to break up the CIA, the “hidden government behind my back.” Allen Dulles was fired. Dulles, the attorney for international multinationals, was angry. JFK planned to withdraw troops from Vietnam after the 1964 elections. Nov. 24, 1963, two days after JFK’s burial, the Pentagon escalated the Vietnam war … with no known provocations, after JFK was gone. There was no chance Kennedy could survive antagonizing the CIA, oil companies, Pentagon, organized crime. He was not their man. The assassination of JFK employed people from the Texas-Southwest. It was not a Southern plot. Upstarts could not have controlled the northern CIA, FBI, Kennedy family connections. This was a more detailed, sophisticated conspiracy that was to set the pattern for future murders to take place. The murder was funded by Permindex, with headquarters in Montreal and Switzerland. Their stated purpose was to encourage trade between nations in the Western world. Their actual purpose was fourfold: 1) To fund and direct assassinations of European, Mid-East and world leaders considered threats to the western world, and to Petroleum Interests of their backers. 2) Provide couriers, agents for transporting and depositing funds through Swiss Banks for Vegas, Miami and the international gambling syndicate. 3) Coordinate the espionage activities of White Russian Solidarists and Division V of the FBI, headed by William Sullivan. 4) Build, acquire and operate hotels and gambling casinos. See: Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal, by William Torbitt.

You want me to stay?' 'Honestly? Yeah. I do.' 'Why?' 'Because I feel calm around you. There's so much shit going down, and I... I like being here. With you.' 'I don't think most females would be flattered to be called 'calming' by a handsome male.' 'Who says I'm handsome?' 'You talk like someone who's well aware of his good looks.' 'Like an arrogant asshole, then.' 'Your words, not mine.

Although there were serious attempts to unify the various strands of the French Resistance, the political situation remained somewhat complex throughout the war. It was into this complicated state of affairs that the first F Section agent of the SOE was parachuted into central France on the night of May 5-6, 1941. In the end, more than 400 SOE agents were sent into France during the course of the occupation, and 39 of them were women. Pearl Witherington was one of those women. Although the SOE trained her to be a courier for a Resistance circuit called the Stationer network, nothing but her own strength, intelligence, and determination could have prepared her for the drastic change in roles that occurred while she was working in occupied France, a change that has made her one of the most celebrated female agents in SOE history

I say, it sounds like some dangerous psychotic killer wrote this, and this buttoned-down schizophrenic could probably go over the edge at any moment in the working day and stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-180 carbine gas-operated semiautomatic. My boss just looks at me. The guy, I say, is probably at home every night with a little rattail file, filing a cross into the tip of every one of his rounds. This way, when he shows up to work one morning and pumps a round into his nagging, ineffectual, petty, whining, butt-sucking, candy-ass boss, that one round will split along the filed grooves and spread open the way a dumdum bullet flowers inside you to blow a bushel load of your stinking guts out through your spine. Picture your gut chakra opening in a slow-motion explosion of sausage-casing small intestine. My boss takes the paper out from under my nose. Go ahead, I say, read some more. No really, I say, it sounds fascinating. The work of a totally diseased mind. And I smile. The little butthole-looking edges of the hole in my cheek are the same blue-black as a dog’s gums. The skin stretched tight across the swelling around my eyes feels varnished. My boss just looks at me. Let me help you, I say. I say, the fourth rule of fight club is one fight at a time. My boss looks at the rules and then looks at me. I say, the fifth rule is no shoes, no shirts in the fight. My boss looks at the rules and looks at me. Maybe, I say, this totally diseased fuck would use an Eagle Apache carbine because an Apache takes a thirty-shot mag and only weighs nine pounds. The Armalite only takes a five-round magazine. With thirty shots, our totally fucked hero could go the length of mahogany row and take out every vice-president with a cartridge left over for each director. Tyler’s words coming out of my mouth. I used to be such a nice person. I just look at my boss. My boss has blue, blue, pale cornflower blue eyes. The J and R 68 semiautomatic carbine also takes a thirty-shot mag, and it only weighs seven pounds. My boss just looks at me. It’s scary, I say. This is probably somebody he’s known for years. Probably this guy knows all about him, where he lives, and where his wife works and his kids go to school. This is exhausting, and all of a sudden very, very boring. And why does Tyler need ten copies of the fight club rules? What I don’t have to say is I know about the leather interiors that cause birth defects. I know about the counterfeit brake linings that looked good enough to pass the purchasing agent, but fail after two thousand miles. I know about the air-conditioning rheostat that gets so hot it sets fire to the maps in your glove compartment. I know how many people burn alive because of fuel-injector flashback. I’ve seen people’s legs cut off at the knee when turbochargers start exploding and send their vanes through the firewall and into the passenger compartment. I’ve been out in the field and seen the burned-up cars and seen the reports where CAUSE OF FAILURE is recorded as "unknown.” No, I say, the paper’s not mine. I take the paper between two fingers and jerk it out of his hand. The edge must slice his thumb because his hand flies to his mouth, and he’s sucking hard, eyes wide open. I crumble the paper into a ball and toss it into the trash can next to my desk. Maybe, I say, you shouldn’t be bringing me every little piece of trash you pick up.

I say that the modern 'clerks' [intellectuals] have preached that the State should be strong and care nothing about being just.... -Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, p. 107 We must organize the intellectuals. -Willi Munzenberg, communist organizer, 1919 The present situation may be characterized as follows: All our institutions are breaking down, and social chaos rises on every side: (1) the breakdown of the family, of motherhood and fatherhood; (2) the breakdown of morality, especially honesty; (3) the breakdown of Constitutional government and of national security, the phenomenon of the imposter president, cowardly legislators, careerist generals, intelligence officials who are double agents; (4) an educational system that is anti-patriotic; (5) epidemic narcissism, selfishness, entertainment culture and materialism. From all of this we also see the breakdown of the individual into madness – as expressed in the social reinforcement of the above.

Violent anti-communist fears by the military and munition makers justified the transformation of a once democratic nation into the fascist state we have today. Members of the Nazi Party now hold key positions in our universities, factories, aircraft and aerospace programs.14 When the Nazi empire collapsed in 1945, General Reinhard Gehlen joined forces with our OSS. Gehlen was placed in charge of wartime intelligence for Foreign Armies East. “It was not long before Gehlen was back in business, this time for the United States. Gehlen named his price and terms.”15 A series of meetings was arranged at the Pentagon with Nazi Gehlen, Allen Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover and others.16 The Gehlen organization combined forces and agents with the OSS, which was soon to become known as the CIA. Experts in clandestine and illegal control of Germany through political assassinations and reversal of judicial processes became the teachers of Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. They helped form the new CIA in 1947, based upon clandestine activities in Nazi Germany.17

In the weeks ahead, Oppenheimer, Acheson and Lilienthal did their best to keep the Acheson-Lilienthal plan alive, lobbying the bureaucracy and the media. In response, Baruch complained to Acheson that he was “embarrassed” that he was being undercut. Hoping that he could still influence Baruch, Acheson agreed to bring everyone together at Blair House on Pennsylvania Avenue on Friday afternoon, May 17, 1946. But as Acheson worked to contain the atomic genie, others were working to contain, if not destroy, Oppenheimer. That same week, J. Edgar Hoover was urging his agents to step up their surveillance of Oppenheimer. Though he hadn’t a shred of evidence, Hoover now floated the possibility that Oppenheimer intended to defect to the Soviet Union. Having decided that Oppenheimer was a Soviet sympathizer, the FBI director reasoned that “he would be far more valuable there as an advisor in the construction of atomic plants than he would be as a casual informant in the United States.” He instructed his agents to “follow Oppenheimer’s activities and contacts closely. . . .

The establishment of what would become the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1908—led from 1924 until 1972 by J. Edgar Hoover—was a direct response to the revolutionary wave that gripped the American working class. FBI agents, often little more than state-employed goons and thugs, ruthlessly hunted down those on the left. The FBI spied on and infiltrated labor unions, political parties, radical groups—especially those led by African Americans—antiwar groups, and later the civil rights movement in order to discredit anyone, including politicians such as Henry Wallace, who questioned the power of the state and big business. Agents burglarized homes and offices. They illegally opened mail and planted unlawful wiretaps, created blacklists, and demanded loyalty oaths. They destroyed careers and sometimes lives. By the time they were done, America’s progressive and radical movements, which had given the country the middle class and opened up our political system, did not exist. It was upon the corpses of these radical movements, which had fought for the working class, that the corporate state was erected in the late twentieth century.

Burns, a former Secret Service agent, had succeeded Pinkerton as the world’s most celebrated private eye. A short, stout man, with a luxuriant mustache and a shock of red hair, Burns had once aspired to be an actor, and he cultivated a mystique, in part by writing pulp detective stories about his cases. In one such book, he declared, “My name is William J. Burns, and my address is New York, London, Paris, Montreal, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New Orleans, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and wherever else a law-abiding citizen may find need of men who know how to go quietly about throwing out of ambush a hidden assassin or drawing from cover criminals who prey upon those who walk straight.” Though dubbed a “front-page detective” for his incessant self-promotion, he had an impressive track record, including catching those responsible for the 1910 bombing of the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times, which killed twenty people. The New York Times called Burns “perhaps the only really great detective, the only detective of genius, whom this country has produced,” and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave him the moniker he longed for: “America’s Sherlock Holmes.

The Republican Roosevelt wanted to fight plutocrats as well as anarchists. Their plunder of oil, coal, minerals, and timber on federal lands appalled him, in his role as the founder of America’s national parks. Corporate criminals, carving up public property for their private profit, paid bribes to politicians to protect their land rackets. Using thousand-dollar bills as weapons, they ransacked millions of acres of the last American frontiers. In 1905, a federal investigation, led in part by a scurrilous Secret Service agent named William J. Burns, had led to the indictment and conviction of Senator John H. Mitchell and Representative John H. Williamson of Oregon, both Republicans, for their roles in the pillage of the great forests of the Cascade Range. An Oregon newspaper editorial correctly asserted that Burns and his government investigators had used “the methods of Russian spies and detectives.” The senator died while his case was on appeal; the congressman’s conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court on grounds of “outrageous conduct,” including Burns’s brazen tampering with jurors and witnesses. Burns left the government and became a famous private eye; his skills at tapping telephones and bugging hotel rooms eventually won him a job as J. Edgar Hoover’s

Taking on a mortgage to buy a house is the classic definition of “good debt.” But don’t be so sure. The easy availability of mortgage loans tempts far too many into buying houses they don’t need or that are far more expensive than prudent. Shamefully, this overspending is often encouraged by real estate agents and mortgage brokers. If your goal is financial independence, it is also to hold as little debt as possible. This means you’ll seek the least house to meet your needs rather than the most house you can technically afford. Remember, the more house you buy, the greater its cost. Not just in higher mortgage payments, but also in higher real estate taxes, insurance, utilities, maintenance and repairs, landscaping, remodeling, furnishing, and opportunity costs on all the money tied up as you build equity. To name a few. More house also means more stuff to maintain and fill it. The more and greater things you allow in your life, the more of your time, money, and life energy they demand. Houses are an expensive indulgence, not an investment. That’s OK if and when the time for such an indulgence comes. I’ve owned them myself. But don’t let yourself be blinded by the idea that owning one is necessary, always financially sound, and automatically justifies taking on this “good debt.

She shifted her voice into a lilting, sweet croon. “I’m looking for custom ash-wood floors, seven-by-seven pieces?” “One moment, please.” Another ring. Then another female said, “This is Custom Ash-Wood Floors, Seven by Seven.” Lidia let out a small breath. She had only called once before, long ago. They’d sent her burner phone after burner phone, in case of an emergency. Each month she’d destroyed them, unused. Well, this was an emergency. “This is Daybright,” she said in her normal voice. The female on the line sucked in a breath. “Solas.” Lidia continued quickly, “I need all agents mobilized and ready to move in three days.” The female on the line cleared her throat. “I … Agent Daybright, I don’t think there’s anyone to mobilize.” Lidia blinked slowly. “Explain.” “We’ve taken too many hits, lost too many people. And after the death of Agent Silverbow, a good number abandoned the cause.” “How many are left?” “A couple hundred, perhaps.” Lidia closed her eyes. “And none can be spared right now to—” “Command’s put an end to all missions. They’re going into hiding.” “Patch me through to Command, then.” “I … I’m not authorized to do that.” Lidia opened her eyes. “Tell Command I’ll speak to them and only them. This information is something that might buy them a shot at survival.” The dispatcher paused, considering. “If it’s not—” “It is. Tell them it’s about something they’ve wanted to do for a very long time.” Another pause. Thinking through all she knew, probably. “One moment.

At this point, another trope makes its appearance. It can be called the invention of anachronistic space, and it reached full authority as an administrative and regulatory technology in the late Victorian era. Within this trope, the agency of women, the colonized and the industrial working class are disavowed and projected onto anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity. According to the colonial version of this trope, imperial progress across the space of empire is figured as a journey backward in time to an anachronistic moment of prehistory. By extension, the return journey to Europe is seen as rehearsing the evolutionary logic of historical progress, forward and upward to the apogee of the Enlightenment in the European metropolis. Geographical difference across space is figured as a historical difference across time. The ideologue J.-M. Degerando captured this notion concisely: “The philosophical traveller, sailing to the ends of the earth, is in fact travelling in time; he is exploring the past.” 46 The stubborn and threatening heterogeneity of the colonies was contained and disciplined not as socially or geographically different from Europe and thus equally valid, but as temporally different and thus as irrevocably superannuated by history. Hegel, for example, perhaps the most influential philosophical proponent of this notion, figured Africa as inhabiting not simply a different geographical space but a different temporal zone, surviving anachronistically within the time of history. Africa, announces Hegel, “is no Historical part of the world … it has no movement or development to exhibit.” Africa came to be seen as the colonial paradigm of anachronistic space, a land perpetually out of time in modernity, marooned and historically abandoned. Africa was a fetish-land, inhabited by cannibals, dervishes and witch doctors, abandoned in prehistory at the precise moment before the Weltgeist (as the cunning agent of Reason) manifested itself in history.

en vérité il est très agréable de se réunir, de s’asseoir et de bavarder des intérêts publics. Parfois même je suis prêt à chanter de joie, quand je rentre dans la société et vois des hommes solides, sérieux, très bien élevés, qui se sont réunis, parlent de quelque chose sans rien perdre de leur dignité. De quoi parlent-ils ? ça c’est une autre question. J’oublie même, parfois, de pénétrer le sens de la conversation, me contentant du tableau seul. Mais jusqu’ici, je n’ai jamais pu pénétrer le sens de ce dont s’entretiennent chez nous les gens du monde qui n’appartiennent pas à un certain groupe. Dieu sait ce que c’est. Sans doute quelque chose de charmant, puisque ce sont des gens charmants. Mais tout cela paraît incompréhensible. On dirait toujours que la conversation vient de commencer ; comme si l’on accordait les instruments. On reste assis pendant deux heures et, tout ce temps, on ne fait que commencer la conversation. Parfois tous ont l’air de parler de choses sérieuses, de choses qui provoquent la réflexion. Mais ensuite, quand vous vous demandez de quoi ils ont parlé, vous êtes incapable de le dire : de gants, d’agriculture, ou de la constance de l’amour féminin ? De sorte que, parfois, je l’avoue, l’ennui me gagne. On a l’impression de rentrer par une nuit sombre à la maison en regardant tristement de côté et d’entendre soudain de la musique. C’est un bal, un vrai bal. Dans les fenêtres brillamment éclairées passent des ombres ; on entend des murmures de voix, des glissements de pas ; sur le perron se tiennent des agents. Vous passez devant, distrait, ému ; le désir de quelque chose s’est éveillé en vous. Il vous semble avoir entendu le battement de la vie, et, cependant, vous n’emportez avec vous que son pâle motif, l’idée, l’ombre, presque rien. Et l’on passe comme si l’on n’avait pas confiance. On entend autre chose. On entend, à travers les motifs incolores de notre vie courante, un autre motif, pénétrant et triste, comme dans le bal des Capulet de Berlioz. L’angoisse et le doute rongent votre coeur, comme cette angoisse qui est au fond du motif lent de la triste chanson russe : Écoutez... d’autres sons résonnent. Tristesse et orgie désespérées... Est-ce un brigand qui a entonné, là-bas, la chanson ? Ou une jeune fille qui pleure à l’heure triste des adieux ? Non ; ce sont les faucheurs qui rentrent de leur travail... Autour sont les forêts et les steppes de Saratov.

Edgar brushed aside all talk of recruiting women, claiming that they ‘could never gunfight, and all our agents must know how to do that.

The Bureau boasted thirteen blacks by the end of that year, out of a total agent force of 6,000 men.

drawer of some kind. “Got it,” she said. “I found what we needed in the second place I looked.” “Hey,” Nelson objected. “Wait a minute. That’s part of the linen closet. You can’t take that.” “You’re right,” Robin replied. “This drawer is part of the linen closet, but we can take it. Have you ever bothered looking inside it?” Drexel Nelson answered with a shrug. “Me? Why would I? Washing clothes and making beds aren’t my responsibility around here.” They will be now, buddy boy, Joanna thought. “What did you find, Agent Watkins?” she asked aloud. “The top couple of layers in the drawer contained exactly what you’d expect in a linen closet—sheets and pillowcases—but underneath those is a gold mine of material: handwritten letters and notes from what looks like a whole flock of lovesick boys. At least that’s what the ones on the top of the stack appear to be.” “Letters?” Joanna asked. “As in snail mail letters?” “Not exactly,” Robin replied. “I think it’s more likely that the notes were cloak-and-dagger stuff, dropped off somewhere and collected by hand rather than sent through USPS. But now we know why nothing

[T]hink about culture as the collective manifestation of value—where value is that which is valuable to “sufficiently complex” agents, from which meaning, purpose, ethics, and aesthetics can be derived.

Vous n'êtes que chaos, confusion, marmelade de souvenirs et de peurs et de fantômes et de vaines anticipations, mais quelqu'un de plus calme, à l'intérieur de vous, veille et fait son rapport. Evidemment, l'alcool et les drogues font de cet agent secret un agent double, pas fiable du tout. Pourtant je continuais, j'ai toujours plus ou moins continué et si je m'obstine à écrire ce livre, ma version à moi de ces livres de développement personnel qui marchent si bien en librairie, c'est pour rappeler ce que disent rarement les livres de développement personnel : que les pratiquants d'arts martiaux, les adeptes du zen, du yoga, de la méditation, de ces grandes choses lumineuses et bienfaisantes que j'ai toute ma vie courtisées, ne sont pas forcément des gens calmes, apaisés et sereins, mais quelques fois, mais souvent, des gens comme moi, pathétiquement névrosés, et que ça n'empêche pas, et qu'il faut, selon la forte phrase de Lénine, "travailler avec le matériel existant", et que même s'il ne vous conduit nulle part on a raison malgré tout de s'obstiner sur ce chemin.

Charlestown’s most characteristic pastime had long been the reckless sport of “looping.” The young “looper” played by a rigid set of rules. First, he stole a car in downtown Boston. Then he roared into Charlestown, accelerating as he reached City Square, where the District 15 police station stood in a welter of bars, nightclubs, and pool halls. Often he had to take a turn around the square before the first policeman dashed for his patrol car or motorcycle. Then the chase was on: down Chelsea Street to Hayes Square, up the long slope of Bunker Hill Street to St. Francis de Sales’ Church at the crest, then down again, picking up speed, often to 70 or 80 miles per hour, until a screeching left into Sullivan Square took him onto Main Street, where, dodging the stanchions of the El, he roared into City Square again, completing the “loop.” All that remained was to ditch the car before the police caught up. Looping was an initiation rite, proof that a Townie had come of age. But it was something else as well: a challenge flung at authority, a middle finger raised to the powers that be. Before long, looping became a kind of civic spectacle, pitting the Town’s young heroes against the forces of law and order. Plans for a loop circulated well in advance. At the appointed hour, hundreds of men, women, and children gathered along Bunker Hill Street, awaiting the gladiators. When the stolen car came in sight, racing up the long hill, a cheer would rise from the spectators, followed by jeers for the pursuing policemen. The first recorded “loop” was performed in 1925 by a sixteen-year-old daredevil named Jimmy “Speed King” Murphy, but most renowned of all was “Shiner” Sheehan, the teenage son of a federal alcohol agent, whose exploits so electrified the Town that he drew round him a group of young acolytes. Membership in their “Speeders Club” was limited to those who could produce newspaper clippings showing they had bested the police.

while Bill Gates walks around like a humanitarian in the public eye when he’s anything but…truly an agent of the global pedo-Satanists.

Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India by J. S. Furnivall Quoting page 85-87: Lower Burma when first occupied … was a vast deltaic plain of swamp and jungle, with a secure rainfall; when the opening of the canal created a market for rice, this wide expanse of land was rapidly reclaimed by small cultivators … Formerly, the villager in Lower Burma, like peasants in general, cultivated primarily for home consumption, and it has always been the express policy of the Government to encourage peasant proprietorship. Land in the delta was abundant … The opening of the canal provided a certain and profitable market for as much rice as people could grow. … men from Upper Burma crowded down to join in the scramble for land. In two or three years a labourer could save out of his wages enough money to buy cattle and make a start on a modest scale as a landowner. … The land had to be cleared rapidly and hired labour was needed to fell the heavy jungle. In these circumstances newly reclaimed land did not pay the cost of cultivation, and there was a general demand for capital. Burmans, however, lacked the necessary funds, and had no access to capital. They did not know English or English banking methods, and English bankers knew nothing of Burmans or cultivation. … in the ports there were Indian moneylenders of the chettyar caste, amply provided with capital and long accustomed to dealing with European banks in India. About 1880 they began to send out agents into the villages, and supplied the people with all the necessary capital, usually at reasonable rates and, with some qualifications, on sound business principles. … now the chettyars readily supplied the cultivators with all the money that they needed, and with more than all they needed. On business principles the money lender preferred large transactions, and would advance not merely what the cultivator might require but as much as the security would stand. Naturally, the cultivator took all that he could get, and spent the surplus on imported goods. The working of economic forces pressed money on the cultivator; to his own discomfiture, but to the profit of the moneylenders, of European exporters who could ensure supplies by giving out advances, of European importers whose cotton goods and other wares the cultivator could purchase with the surplus of his borrowings, and of the banks which financed the whole economic structure. But at the first reverse, with any failure of the crop, the death of cattle, the illness of the cultivator, or a fall of prices, due either to fluctuations in world prices or to manipulation of the market by the merchants, the cultivator was sold up, and the land passed to the moneylender, who found some other thrifty labourer to take it, leaving part of the purchase price on mortgage, and with two or three years the process was repeated. … As time went on, the purchasers came more and more to be men who looked to making a livelihood from rent, or who wished to make certain of supplies of paddy for their business. … Others also, merchants and shopkeepers, bought land, because they had no other investment for their profits. These trading classes were mainly townsfolk, and for the most part Indians or Chinese. Thus, there was a steady growth of absentee ownership, with the land passing into the hands of foreigners. Usually, however, as soon as one cultivator went bankrupt, his land was taken over by another cultivator, who in turn lost with two or three years his land and cattle and all that he had saved. [By the 1930s] it appeared that practically half the land in Lower Burma was owned by absentees, and in the chief rice-producing districts from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. … The policy of conserving a peasant proprietary was of no avail against the hard reality of economic forces…

Books When Books Went to War, Molly Guptill Manning Books as Weapons, John B. Hench The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance, Anders Rydell The Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson Gay Berlin, Robert Beachy Articles Leary, William M. “Books, Soldiers and Censorship during the Second World War.” American Quarterly Von Merveldt, Nikola. “Books Cannot Be Killed by Fire: The German Freedom Library and the American Library of Nazi-Banned Books As Agents of Cultural Memory.” John Hopkins University Press Appelbaum, Yoni. “Publishers Gave Away 122,951,031 Books During World War II.” The Atlantic “Paris Opens Library of Books Burnt by Nazis.” The Guardian Archives Whisnant, Clayton J. “A Peek Inside Berlin’s Queer Club Scene Before Hitler Destroyed It.” The Advocate “Between World Wars, Gay Culture Flourished in Berlin.” NPR’s Fresh Air More The Great Courses: A History of Hitler’s Empire, Thomas Childers “Hitler: YA Fiction Fan Girl,” Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards Podcast Magnus Hirschfeld, Leigh Pfeffer and Gretchen Jones, History Is Gay Podcast “Das Lila Lied,” composed by Mischa Spoliansky, lyrics by Kurt Schwabach

He'd always played a lot of games: baseball, basketball, different card games, war and finance games, horseracing, football, and so on, all on paper of course. Once, he'd got involved in a tabletop war-games club, played by mail, with mutual defense pacts, munition sales, secret agents, and even assassinations, but the inability of the other players to detach themselves from their narrow-minded historical preconceptions depressed Henry. Anything more complex than a normalized two-person zero-sum game was beyond them. Henry had invented for the a variation on Monopoly, using twelve, sixteen, or twenty-four boards at once and an unlimited number of players, which opened up the possibility of wars run by industrial giants with investments on several boards at once, the buying off of whole governments, the emergence of international communications and utilities barons, strikes and rebellions by the slumdwellers between "Go" and "Jail," revolutionary subversion and sabotage with sympathetic ties across the boards, the creation of international regulatory bodies by the established power cliques, and yet without losing any of the basic features of their own battle games, but it never caught on. He even introduced health, sex, religious, and character variables, but that made even less of a hit, though he did manage, before leaving the club, to get a couple pieces on his "Intermonop" game published in some of the club literature.

And then, at some point, actors emerged on this stage. Simple lifeless components were somehow assembled into forms that held themselves apart from these general happenings and instead acted on the world. Entities that do things came into existence.

but I'm bipolar on top of that; and there he is, cleaning up my messes. Making amends with those I piss off. Being my agent, my public relations coordinator, my banker, my pharmacist, not to forget all while being a dad, a hard worker, and just trying to be my husband in general.

Hello, Agent Silverbow,” Aidas crooned, then vanished.

Cormac leaned against his cue and studied the empty bar before saying, “Sofie was in contact with our most vital spy in the rebellion—Agent Daybright.” Unease wended through Ruhn. He really, really didn’t want to know this. Cormac went on, “Daybright has direct access to the Asteri—Ophion has long wondered whether Daybright is one of the Asteri themselves. Daybright and Sofie used codes on crystal-fueled radios to pass along messages. But with Sofie’s … disappearance, it’s become too dangerous to keep using the old methods of communicating. The fact that the Hind was able to be on the scene so quickly that night indicates that someone might have intercepted those messages and broken our codes. We need someone who can mind-speak to be in direct contact with Agent Daybright.

He smiled slightly. “So what’s the intel?” “The hit on the Spine is a go.” Ruhn’s smile faded. “When’s the shipment?” “Three days from now. It leaves from the Eternal City at six in the morning their time. No planned stops, no refueling. They’ll travel swiftly northward, all the way to Forvos.” “The mech-suit prototype will be on the train?” “Yes. And along with it, Imperial Transport is moving fifty crates of brimstone missiles to the northern front, along with a hundred and twelve crates of guns and about five hundred crates of ammunition.” Burning Solas. “You’re going to stage a heist?” “I’m not doing anything,” Agent Daybright said. “Ophion will be responsible. I’d recommend destroying it all, though. Especially that new mech-suit. Don’t waste time trying to unload anything from the trains or you’ll be caught.

Cormac had veiled his face in shadows, and they pulled away now as he met Ruhn’s stare. “The agent told me they think the Asteri suspect that Emile came here after he fled Ophion. It’s possible the Hind brought the dreadwolves to hunt for him.

Cormac sighed. “They’re shipping the prototype here.” Bryce started. “To Lunathion?” “To the Coronal Islands.” Close enough—two hours away by boat. “To a base on Ydra.” “Shit,” Dec said. “They’re going to start something here, aren’t they?” “Yes, likely with Pippa and her Lightfall squadron at the head.” “Don’t they know she’s nuts?” Bryce asked. “She’s successful with her ops. That’s all that matters.” “What about Emile?” Bryce pushed. “Was she successful with him?” “No. He’s still out there. The agent said the hunt for him continues.