Chaye Quotes

So how big is this thing anyway?” Desideria asked Chayden made a sound of irritation. “You know, that’s not really a question I want to hear my younger sister ask a man, especially not one I consider a friend, while he’s lying bare-assed on my floor.” Hauk and Fain laughed. Desideria was less than amused. “Remember, brother, I’m currently the only one holding a weapon.” Caillen glared at him. “Really, Chay, why don’t you concentrate on the people trying to kill us right now? ’Preciate it, pun’kin.” He turned his attention to her. “About the size of your smallest fingernail.” Fain laughed again. “Damn, I should have been taping that response and using it for playback at every party from here until I die.

You amaze me," he said then, reaching out to lay the toy on her pillow. That wasn't where he had gotten it from. "You bring a toy to do a man's job, knowing the man is more than willing to provide the service. Where does that make sense, Chay?

My name is Nick Gautier and this is the story of my life. First off, get the name right. It’s pronounced Go-shay not Go-tee-ay or Goat-chay (that has an extra H in it and as my mom says we’re so poor we couldn’t afford the extra letter). I’m not some fancy French fashion designer. I’m just a regular kid… well as regular as someone with a stripper for a mother and a career felon for a father can be.

I have no idea what Paloma looks like-what she'll be like. I have no idea what to expect. I should've asked more questions. I should've used the last ten hours to grill Chay until he broke-until he confided every dark and dirty secret Paloma is hiding. Instead,I chose to eat.And read.And dream about some phantom boy with smooth brown skin,icy-blue eyes, and long glossy black hair-a boy I've never even met in real life. Lot of good it did me.

Can you do this?” “So long as we don’t get hit by a blast.” He cut a meaningful glare to their pilot. “Hold it steady, Chay.” “I make no promises and bear no liability for your lunacy, her clumsiness or any injury my unfortunate luck, uncharacteristic ineptitude or continual stupidity may cause.” Nice legal disclosure. Rotten bastard.

Some see the glass as half full, others see it as half empty, and then there are those who see it as a glass of water. Open your eyes and your mind to see beyond the obvious. " ~

Be careful. They’re here for you,” he murmured over his shoulder before slipping into the classroom. ~Chay

Corruption, it made plain, was not solely a humanitarian affair, an issue touching on principles or values alone. It was a matter of national security—Afghan national security and, by extension, that of the United States. And if corruption was driving people to violent revolt in Afghanistan, it was probably doing likewise in other places. Acute government corruption may in fact lie at the root of some of the world’s most dangerous and disruptive security challenges—among them the spread of violent extremism. That basic fact, elusive to this day, is what this book seeks to demonstrate.

What happened?" he asks,voice laced with concern. "I..." I merged with a cockroach-caught a ride next to your twin's Calvin Klein underwear label-and after I watched him play with a demon coyote and snack on bloodied bits that could've been either animal or human, he fed glowing, white orbs to the walking dead-then crushed me under the hell of his boot... "I'm not sure," I say,willing my head to feel better,to stop spinning, and a moment later it does. "I guess I passed out,or something..." I cringe,hating the lie but knowing there's no way I could ever present him the truth. I start to stand,pretending not to notice when he offers a hand. "I need to call my ride." I fumble for my phone, reluctant to bother Paloma and Chay at this hour,but they're pretty much my only real option. "Don't be silly.I'll drive you." Dace follows me out of the stall,watching as I call Paloma's number,then Chay's-face scrunching in confusion when they both fail to answer.It doesn't make any sense. "Daire-why won't you let me help you?" he says.My name on his lips sounding just like ti did in the dream. Our eyes meeting in the mirror,mine astonished, his chagrined,when he adds, "Yeah,I asked around.Uncovered your real name. So shoot me." And when he smiles,when he smiles and runs a nervous hand through his glossy,dark hair-well,I'm tempted to shake my head and refuse him again. Maybe he goes by the name of Whitefeather, but technically,he's still a Richter.A good Richter-a kind Richter-still,I need to do what I can to avoid him.To ignore that irresistible stream of kindness and warmth that swarms all around him. Need to cleanse myself of those dreams once and for all.We are not bound.Nor are we fated.I'm a Seeker-he's the spawn of a Richter-and my only destiny is to stop his brother from...whatever it is that he's doing. But,more immediately,I need to get home.And there's no denying I could do a lot worse than catching a ride with gorgeous Dace Whitefeather.

The phenomenon we confront is the worldwide equivalent of a forest fire, of the Blitz. We must react accordingly—with that same impulsive solidarity. Or, to restate this idea in terms of the other metaphor that has threaded through these pages: the only way to defeat the tiny but powerful coalition of meat hogs that is imperiling our whole community is to join together in a far-reaching egalitarian coalition and confront them in unison.

Some nine years before, Mr. Tan Chay Yan, scion of a well-known Peranakan Chinese family of Malacca, had converted his pepper garden into a rubber plantation. In 1897 this had seemed like a mad thing to do. Everyone had advised against it: rubber was known to be a risk. Mr. Ridley, the curator of the Singapore Botanical Gardens, had been trying for years to interest British planters in giving rubber a try. The imperial authorities in London had spent a fortune in arranging to have seed stocks stolen from Brazil.

Criticizing the “corrupt, questionable, and unqualified leaders [placed] into key positions,” the argument rested on the principle of command responsibility: “The international community has enabled and encouraged bad governance through agreement and silence, and often active partnership.” Moving the issue away from the humanitarian terrain where it often resides, we made corruption relevant to war fighters by explaining its centrality to prospects of victory. “Afghans’ acute disappointment with the quality of governance . . . has contributed to permissiveness toward, or collusion with,” the Taliban, we wrote, laboring to stultify our language with a credible amount of jargon. In plain English: why would a farmer stick out his neck to keep Taliban out of his village if the government was just as bad? If, because of corruption, an ex-policeman like Nurallah was threatening to turn a blind eye to a man planting an IED, others were going further. Corruption, in army-speak, was a force multiplier for the enemy. “This condition is a key factor feeding negative security trends and it undermines the ability of development efforts to reverse these trends,” our draft read.

Có một em bé ở nhà quê lên bán bánh. Người cô không cho em ở vì em không có tên trong tờ khai gia đình. Em ngủ ngoài nghĩa địa. Sợ ma. Một bữa nọ Tú Bà lại nói: 'Nếu con chịu ngủ với người ta thì con sẽ có nhiều tiền. Con được một trăm thì cô chỉ giữ lại hai chục để trả tiền nhà, tiền nước.' Nhà chứa không chánh thức; an ninh địa phương biết, nhưng được lo lót thì cũng để cho yên. Một sư cô thấy em bé nhỏ xíu, mới mười sáu tuổi mà đứng ngoài đường kiếm khách. Sư cô kêu em lại hỏi chuyện. 'Thôi, Tú Bà biết liều không sợ chứa chấp con thì cô cũng liều. Thay vì ở nhà Tú Bà thì con về ở chùa đi.' Cô cho em ở đậu và giúp em bày một xe bán bánh mì. Sư cô này hiện đang sống ở Sài Gòn, đã và đang làm những việc như vậy. Đừng nói rằng những chuyện đó là những chuyện quá khứ, những chuyện mình không làm được. Đó là một trong những chuyện đang xảy ra. Nếu sư cô nọ có thể giúp em bé kia thì sư cô cũng đã có thể giúp những em bé khác. Ngoài sư cô cũng còn biết bao nhiêu những sư cô khác đang làm được chuyện này. Đây không phải là chuyện lý thuyết. Sự thật ở Sài Gòn bây giờ có những sư cô buổi sáng mở cửa chùa cho trẻ con đường phố vô học. Các cô nói: 'Nếu các con chịu khó học được bốn tiếng đồng hồ thì trưa nay sẽ được ăn cơm chay.' Giữ con nít ở trong chùa để các em khỏi ra đường làm du đãng hay đào bới trong những đống rác. Ăn trưa xong các em có thể nằm lăn ra ngủ. Ở lại học buổi chiều từ ba đến sáu giờ thì các em lại được ăn cơm chiều. Nhìn bề ngoài thấy giống như trẻ em mỗi ngày được cung cấp mấy giờ học và hai bữa cơm. Kỳ thực kết quả lớn lắm! Các cô đã giữ được cho các em khỏi sa vào những ổ nhện và khỏi trở thành những trẻ em du đãng. Cho một em ăn trưa chỉ tốn 25 cents thôi. Ở Tây phương, 25 cents thì mua gì được! Nhưng vào tay sư cô, 25 cents là một bữa ăn cho một em bé. Bao nhiêu công việc như vậy. Rất đẹp, rất hay. Đạo Bụt là như thế, không phải là đạo nói trên trời dưới biển. Thúy Kiều bây giờ nhiều lắm. Có khắp nơi. Chỉ thương hại cho cô Thúy Kiều của cụ Nguyễn Du không thôi thì rất bất công. Cô này đã có người thương rồi, đã có một sư cô tên Giác Duyên lo cho rồi. Còn biết bao nhiều Thúy Kiều nhỏ tuổi, dại dột hơn Thúy Kiều này đang ở khắp nơi trên quê hương mình. Đọc Truyện Kiều với cái thấy này thì Truyện Kiều trở thành ra Kinh. Ích lợi như đọc Kinh. trang 118, 119 - 'Thả một bè lau - Truyện Kiều dưới cái nhìn Thiền quán' - Thích Nhất Hạnh

Where the cutting has been wholesale, and has lasted, is in Congress—Congress: the first branch of government, closest to the people; Congress, which on our behalf keeps an eye on all those unelected bureaucrats. Congressmen and -women have sabotaged their own institution’s ability to do that for us. They have smashed the tools it possessed to help fashion laws in the public interest. They have crippled their own capacity to come to independent conclusions as to the nature of the problems such laws would address. Congress has been disabled from inside. Most of this happened in one of those revisions of the House of Representatives’ internal rules when an election flipped the majority party. It was January 1995, and a last-minute geyser of campaign cash had delivered an upset Republican victory two months before. Newt Gingrich held the gavel. The very first provision of the new rules he hammered through on January 5 reads: “In the One Hundred Fourth Congress, the total number of staff of House committees shall be at least one-third less than the corresponding total in the One Hundred Third Congress.” Congressional staffers are the citizens’ subject matter experts. Over years, these scientists and auditors and lawyers and military veterans build up historical knowledge on the complex issues that jostle for House and Senate attention. They help members, who have to be generalists, drill down into specifics. Cut staffs, and members lose the bandwidth to craft wise legislation, the expertise to ask telling questions in hearings—the ability to hold oversight hearings at all. The Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office all suffered the cuts. The Office of Technology Assessment was abolished—because, in 1995, what new technology could possibly be poised on the horizon? Democrats, when they regained control of the House, did not repair the damage. Today, the number of staff fielding thousands of corporate lobbyists or fact-checking their jive remains lower than it was a quarter century ago.

The food absorbs the energy it's prepared with, as well as the energy it's met with. Bad energy, bad meal. ~Chay

We conclude this financial crisis was avoidable,” declared, in 2011, the commission charged with investigating the 2007–2008 financial cataclysm. That event caused more people to take their own lives in the United States than the 9/11 terrorist attacks caused casualties. It triggered what would be considered a humanitarian crisis in any African or Middle Eastern country, as millions of Americans, forced out of their homes, became internally displaced people.

Quyển nào dạy cách làm chả giò chay Thanh Dũng, hoặc đồ ăn chay truyền thống Việt Nam không

He wished, he said, to draw his listeners’ attention to “the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government.” But labor, the rail-splitter-turned-lawyer declared,

A mere builder of more industrial plants, a creator of more railroad systems, an organizer of more corporations, is as likely to be a danger as a help. The day of the great promoter or the financial Titan, to whom we granted anything if only he would build, or develop, is over. Our task now is not discovery or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources…of distributing wealth and products more equitably, of adapting existing economic organizations to the service of the people. If

Prehistoric learning’s fun, a Dino education...But nothing brings them back to life like your imagination

Tên doanh nghiệp: Chay Thuần Chay Ngày thành lập: 27/06/2024 Số điện thoại: 0325286214 Email: chaythuanchay@gmail.com Fanpage: Website: Sản phẩm cung cấp: Bánh chay, Gia vị chay Giới thiệu: Chào mừng bạn đến với Chay Thuần Chay – nơi mang đến những giá trị ẩm thực vừa ngon miệng vừa lành mạnh. Chúng tôi là một doanh nghiệp chuyên sản xuất và cung cấp các sản phẩm thực phẩm chay, cam kết đem đến sự hài lòng tuyệt đối cho khách hàng với chất lượng cao. Địa chỉ: Trịnh Văn Bô - Nam Từ Liêm - Hà Nội

...decision makers should realize that even with rational models and established parameters, situations will arise that may compel the United States to participate in peace operations. Humanitarian issues may seem compelling; domestic political pressures and pressures from allies may develop; and a range of foreign and domestic policy issues may require response, even if important U.S. security interests are not at stake directly. Military strategist and planners should be aware, also, that in a democratic society and an interdependent world, sometime decisions will be made outside established parameters for interventions. That makes the development of a strategy and the establishment of criteria all the more important, although planning for such events is necessarily less predictable and necessarily of lower priority. The systematic ability to analyze both the significance for national security and the immediate rationale for involvement may permit policy makers to withstand pressures if the consequences might be negative, or set limits that reduce potential harm. The...debate...about U.S. involvement in the former Yugoslavia is a microcosm of the varied and conflicting pressures that may arise. Some combination of assessment of national interest weighed against risk has militated against any commitment of ground troops while hostilities continue. Yet the importance of protecting allies may cause the policy to bend somewhat before the war ends, and the United States may become involved in an operation on a scale that may have been unnecessary if a strategy and the organization of national assets to support it had been available to prevent the crisis in the first place. Traditionally, peace operations, especially peacekeeping, were viewed as operations that came at the tail end of conflict. There will continue to be a need for peace operations to assist in bringing about and guaranteeing peace. However, the value of peace operations in dealing with precursor instabilities - to prevent, contain, or ameliorate incipient conflicts -- must be considered also. In this sense, peace operations are investments. Properly conducted by forces that have planned, prepared and trained for them within the proper strategic framework, peace operations may well preclude the need to deploy larger forces at substantial costs in both blood and treasure later.

Abram and Antonia Chayes even redefined sovereignty itself to mean not the right to be left alone but the right to participate in international organizations and networks.

Hãy viết mỗi ngày để mài ngòi!

A necessary result for which we are responsible and which must be present for another result to occur is no different from an additional condition and cause for the achievement of that second result.

The U.S. civilian leadership was shirking its responsibility to develop a high-level strategic approach to the most significant political and diplomatic challenge of this conflict. It was yet another example of America’s almost instinctive reflex to lead with the military in moments of international crisis. Civilian officials, as much as they may mistrust the Pentagon, are often the first to succumb. They seem remarkably adverse to exploring the panoply of tools they could bring to bear—let alone to putting in the work to develop a comprehensive strategic framework within which military action would be a component, interlocking with others. What is it, I found myself wondering, that keeps a country as powerful as the United States from employing the vast and varied nonmilitary leverage at its disposal? Why is it so easily cowed by the tantrums of weaker and often dependent allies? Why won’t it ever posture effectively itself? Bluff? Deny visas? Slow down deliveries of spare parts? Choose not to build a bridge or a hospital? Why is nuance so irretrievably beyond American officials’ grasp, leaving them a binary choice between all and nothing—between writing officials a blank check and breaking off relations? If the obstacle preventing more meaningful action against abusive corruption wasn’t active U.S. complicity, it sure looked like it.

In light of their views on the organization of society and political economy, Westerners, especially Americans, can be separated into two basic groups. One camp believes in the necessity, and the virtue, of government. People in this category tend to see governments, in whatever country, as essentially devoted to the common good—staffed by public servants, in the full sense of the term. Of course there are lapses; of course some officials are venal; but such cases are seen as exceptions. For this group of Westerners, the notion that an entire government might be transformed into what amounts to a criminal organization, that it might have entirely repurposed the mechanisms of state to serve its ends, is almost too conceptually challenging to contemplate. The other camp is characterized by suspicion of government. For people in this category, many of society’s problems can be blamed on an excess of government interference and regulation. Lack of development overseas is the inevitable result of a collectivist approach, including planned economies and state-run enterprises. Privatization and deregulation, in the view of this group, are key elements of the cure. For if left alone, freedom and the market will function to the greater good of all. The overwhelming evidence that the market liberalization, privatization, and structural adjustment programs the West imposed on developing countries in the 1990s have often helped catalyze kleptocratic networks—and may have actually exacerbated corruption, not reduced it—conflicts with this group’s orthodoxy, and so is hard to process. For most Westerners, in other words, seriously examining the nature and implications of acute corruption would imply a profound overhaul of their own founding mythologies.

In the end, none of our election recommendations was implemented. Afterward I asked ISAF’s intelligence chief, General Michael Flynn—among the most sympathetic officers to the anticorruption agenda—if any surveillance satellites had been assigned to monitor turnout. He seemed startled, as though we had never discussed the idea. Oh no, came his answer. They were too busy tracking insurgents.

Our questioning—again echoing Ghazali—of the likely impact of development efforts (“prosperity,” in his formula) also flew in the face of received wisdom. For years, the notion had prevailed that the best way to sway Afghan “hearts and minds” was by giving away stuff: blankets, bags of wheat, wells for drinking water, schoolrooms. Among the conditions fueling extremism, commentators and policy makers often repeat, is economic malaise, aggravated by demographic shifts or such externals as drought. Foreign assistance is seen as a palliative to those ills. Evolving U.S. military doctrine even referred to “money as a weapon system.” But examination of extremist leaders’ sociological backgrounds casts doubt on these presumptions. Studies by such analysts as Andrew Wilder have found that in Afghanistan, infusions of development resources often exacerbated local conflict rather than reducing it, by providing new prizes for opposing groups to fight over.6

In other words, development resources passed through a corrupt system not only reinforced that system by helping to fund it but also inflamed the feelings of injustice that were driving people toward the insurgency. Laboratory experiments over the past several decades have demonstrated humans’ apparently irrational revolt against such unjust bargains. The experiments, known as “ultimatum games,” allocate a sum of money to one player, with instructions to divide it with another. If the recipient accepts the offer, the deal goes through. If she rejects it, both players get nothing. Economists had presumed that a recipient, acting rationally, would accept any amount greater than zero. In fact, in experiment after experiment—even with stakes as high as a month’s salary—roughly half of recipients rejected offers lower than 20 percent of the total sum.7 These

His brother Najib owned an auto-parts store at bustling Shikarpur Gate, the mouth of the narrow road linking their village to the city—an ancient byway that had once led southward through the passes all the way to India. At dusk it is clogged with a riot of vegetable sellers’ handcarts beset by shoppers, Toyota pickup trucks, horse-drawn taxis, and three-wheeled rickshaws clambering around and through the throng like gaudy dung beetles. Nurallah’s brother Najib had gone to Chaman, just across the border in Pakistan, where the streets are lined with cargo containers serving as shops, and used motor oil cements the dust to the ground in a glossy tarmac, and every variety of automotive organ or sinew is laid bare, spread out, and strung up for sale. He had made his purchases and set off back to Kandahar. “He paid his customs dues”—Nurallah emphasized the remarkable point—“because that’s the law. He paid at every checkpoint on the way back, fifty afghanis, a hundred afghanis.” A dollar or two every time an unkempt, underage police boy in green fatigues slouched out of a sandbagged lean-to into the middle of the road—eight times in the sixty-six miles when last I counted. “And then when he reached the entrance to town, the police there wanted five hundred afghanis. Five hundred!” A double arch marks the place where the road that swoops down from Kabul joins the road leading in from Pakistan. The police range from one side to the other, like spear fishermen hunting trout in a narrows. “He refused,” Nurallah continued. “He said he had paid his customs dues—he showed them the receipt. He said he had paid the bribes at every checkpoint all along the way, and he was not paying again.” I waited a beat. “So what happened?” “They reached into his window and smacked him.” “They hit him?” I was shocked. Najib might be a sunny guy, but Kandahar tempers are strung on tripwires. For a second I thought we’d have to go bail him out. “What did he do?” Nurallah’s eyes, beneath his widow’s peak, were banked and smoldering. “What could he do? He paid the money. But then he pulled over to the side of the road and called me. I told him to stay right there. And I called Police Chief Matiullah Qatih, to report the officer who was taking the bribes.” And Matiullah had scoffed at him: Did he die of it? The police buzzards had seen Najib make the call. They had descended on him, snatched the phone out of his hand, and smashed it. “You call that law?” Now Nurallah was ablaze. “They’re the police! They should be showing people what the law is; they should be enforcing the law. And they’re the ones breaking it.” Nurallah was once a police officer himself. He left the force the day his own boss, Kabul police chief Zabit Akrem, was assassinated in that blast in the mosque in 2005.1 Yet so stout was Nurallah’s pride in his former profession that he brought his dark green uniform into work and kept it there, hung neatly on a hook in his locker. “My sacred oath,” he vowed, concluding: “If I see someone planting an IED on a road, and then I see a police truck coming, I will turn away. I will not warn them.” I caught my breath. So maybe he didn’t mean it literally. Maybe Nurallah wouldn’t actually connive with the Taliban. Still, if a former police officer like him was even mouthing such thoughts, then others were acting on them. Afghan government corruption was manufacturing Taliban.

Corruption is usually classified as a humanitarian aid problem, to be handled by donor agencies, not mainstreamed into overall foreign and defense policy. And while governments may support across-the-board efforts on a multilateral level, they almost never consider acute corruption as they shape their approach to specific countries. Human rights, religious freedom, protections for the LGBT community may enter the conversation, but corruption rarely does. Tools to raise the cost of kleptocratic practices exist—in abundance. It’s just a matter of finding the courage and finesse to use them. All the levers and incentives listed below can be further refined, and new ones imagined, in specific contexts. Particular corrupt officials or structures have unique vulnerabilities and desires; and timelines and windows of opportunity for effective action will be specific to individual cases and will suggest even more potential actions as they are examined. Many of the actions below can and should be routinized—folded into the everyday activities of relevant bureaucracies—so as to reduce the onus on leaders to sign their names to audacious and thus potentially career-threatening moves. But in other cases, a strategy may need to be carefully thought through and tailored to the specific conditions of a given country at a specific point in time.

The analysis in this book does not just apply to the extreme cases it has examined, where the whole of government has morphed into a criminal organization bent to no other business than personal enrichment, and has retooled the crucial gears of state power to that end. To highlight the problem of kleptocracy only in places like Nigeria and Afghanistan is to reinforce a tacit superiority complex: those populations, of the global south, are somehow unsuited to rational government. They are culturally prone to predation. Reform is not possible, only containment. It is also to duck the significance of the global economic meltdown of 2008. The analysis here applies, and strikingly, to countries closer to home, where governments have been dangerously encroached upon in recent years—even partially colonized—by what John Locke would call “some party of men.

Addressing this doubt, in order to explain the mind, it is taught: || citir eva cetana-padād avarūḍhā cetya-saṅkocinī cittam || 5 || Awareness (citi) itself, descending from its state of pure consciousness (cetana), becomes contracted by the object perceived: this is [called] the mind (citta). Far from teaching an absolute distinction of divine spirit and mundane matter, Tantra teaches that they are in fact different phases of one thing, i.e., Awareness. Take the example of h2o: in one phase, we call it steam, in another, water, in another, ice. These three states are very different from one another, and we necessarily interact with each of them in very different ways. This is a perfect analogy for what Kṣemarāja intends here: there are three different states or phases of one ‘thing’—in one state, we call it God, in another, pure consciousness, in another, the mind. The implications of this are of course huge. First, though, let’s explore the specific three terms that Kṣemarāja is using here for these three states of the One. First we have citi, introduced in the first sūtra, which we translate (imperfectly) as Awareness. Citi (pronounced CHIT-ee) is the state in which Awareness is fully expanded, that is to say, untouched by any trace of contraction, including that of subjectivity or selfhood. In other words, there is no concealment whatsoever operative on the citi level (not that it’s really a level, of course). When citi manifests as an individuated subject, then that is the phase called cetana, here translated as ‘pure consciousness’. We have to define this second phase, cetana, more carefully so that we don’t confuse it with the third phase (the mind). Cetana (CHAY-tuh-nuh) is the state of being the conscious knower or agent of consciousness. We experience cetana in the space between trains of thought, a space of awareness momentarily devoid of thought-forms (vikalpas). That’s why I translate it as ‘pure consciousness’. We experience it dozens of times a day, but usually only for a second, and usually without the reflective self-awareness (vimarśa) by which we can know that we are experiencing cetana. (This ‘knowing’, when it does occur, does not take the form of a thought, or else it is no longer the cetana state.) The cetana state is open and expansive awareness; in fact, it is as expanded as awareness can be while still having a subtle ‘sense of self’.

Mong đợi cuộc đời đối xử tốt với bạn vì bạn là một người tốt cũng giống như mong rằng con bò đực đang nổi giận sẽ không tấn công bạn chỉ vì bạn là người ăn chay

Khi Ðạo Phật tới, thì chọn lấy chỗ nào hay, còn chỗ nào không thích thì cứ việc bỏ đi. Sau này, đạo Thiên chúa truyền vào, thì những chỗ "vui nhộn", "bảnh bao" cũng đều được gạn lọc lấy. Chẳng hạn, chỉ có tiệc liên hoan Nôen, lễ cưới ở nhà thờ đã được chọn lấy. Chứ ma chay thì vẫn làm ở chùa, lễ Vu lan thì múa Bon Odori[13], tết nhất thì đi lễ đền. Vừa ngồi "tham thiền nhập định" lại cũng đi "rước kiệu". Tất cả những cái này người Nhật đều thực hành thoải mái không hề cảm thấy một mảy may mâu thuẫn nào hết.

But what if the Afghan government wasn’t really trying to govern? What if it was focused on another objective altogether? What if corruption was central to that objective and therefore to the government’s mode of operation? Perhaps GIRoA could best be understood not as a government at all but as a vertically integrated criminal organization—or a few such loosely structured organizations, allies but rivals, coexisting uneasily—whose core activity was not in fact exercising the functions of a state but rather extracting resources for personal gain.

In Afghanistan, faced with such moral and material depravity, a brutal and tenacious insurgency was serving up its idea of an antidote: a narrow reading of religious devotion. Many Afghans were swayed by the argument that government integrity could be achieved only through religious rectitude. Some appreciated the outlet that militancy provided for their anger. Still others just laid low, unwilling to take risks on behalf of a government that treated them almost as badly as the Taliban did. And it was all U.S. troops could do to keep that insurgency at bay.

Laboratory experiments over the past several decades have demonstrated humans’ apparently irrational revolt against such unjust bargains. The experiments, known as “ultimatum games,” allocate a sum of money to one player, with instructions to divide it with another. If the recipient accepts the offer, the deal goes through. If she rejects it, both players get nothing. Economists had presumed that a recipient, acting rationally, would accept any amount greater than zero. In fact, in experiment after experiment—even with stakes as high as a month’s salary—roughly half of recipients rejected offers lower than 20 percent of the total sum.7

I don’t want him dead. I’d like to haul him in for questioning if you can refrain from execution for a few.” “Lazy krikkin pacifists wanting to save the bunnies when they need to be skinned…” Chay grumbled under his breath before he called in for his fellow band of miscreants to help trap the assassin. “We’ll let him live, but you owe me, Dagan.” “Bullshit.

I don’t know how we became this, Chay. After everything we’ve been through. I never thought there’d be a day in my life without you in it. How did we end up like this? Barely talking. Awkward with each other. I hate it.

I’m in, Chay. All the way in. We’re going to have the best fucking life together … And I’ll love you, so fucking hard, that you’ll not once regret this decision.

Lawyers make their living mincing words. Many devote their skill and hard labor to constructing the apparatus of justification.

It was, in the words of the original indictment, the citizens’ “right to have the Commonwealth’s business and its affairs conducted honestly, impartially, free from corruption, bias, dishonesty, deceit, official misconduct, and fraud.

This time, the Supreme Court did not rule unanimously in favor of the corrupt politicians, not quite. The vote overturning their convictions was 7–2.*1 “The words ‘to defraud,’ ” the justices opined, “commonly refer to wronging one in his property rights by dishonest methods.” Then they minced “commonly” into “only.” “Defraud,” they decreed, could only mean “obtain money or property” by fraud, nothing other. The American people were stripped of their actionable right to the basic integrity of their public servants.

Here was the court, back to “only.” And here was Americans’ right to integrity back to mere money. Only if an official had taken dollars and cents—and only if she had done so by means of one of two narrowly defined crimes—had she violated anyone’s right to her good faith in performing her duties.

When people receive gifts, no matter how innocent, they feel obligated and try to reciprocate. It is a lovely reflex in everyday life and has furthered community bonding and artistic vocation. But in politics, it leads to corruption. An outright ban on such gifts would protect officials from the unintended worst consequences of their best reflexes—and from the temptations that will inevitably be dangled before them.

That means our places of worship, of course. It means our schools and universities, and our health-care facilities, the provision of our fundamental necessities, such as water and electricity and garbage collection, our food, and our natural surroundings. We must resist efforts to privatize these crucial functions. That means charter schools. It means public infrastructure such as railroads and ports and broadband. It means the fighting of our wars. Let us be adamant: money does not equal speech, that singularly human gift.

it is impossible to become a billionaire without bending the rules. Most of the members of that class run their operations and live their lives in ways that injure our communities. Most are trying to rig the system even further. These are not upstanding citizens. They are parasites and freeloaders—however they try to justify themselves. We do not owe them deference.

In other words, the U.S. government is creating a vast artificial market, where a handful of repeat offenders can fob off shoddy or defective products on American citizens at ever-increasing prices, without suffering any market consequences. Patriotism keeps us from quibbling. Fear, too: What would you not spend to stay safe? Another powerful pretext for this larceny is jobs. Defense contractors, we are told, employ people.

Red scares united Americans against not just the handful of violent anarchists, but against the hundreds of thousands of labor activists who were tarred with the same brush.

From the mid-1870s through the mid-1890s, an insurrection swept the backcountry of the nation’s South and West. Though disfigured by the white supremacy derived especially from its southern roots, this vast stirring in coveralls and calico, of sod houses and village schools and covered-wagon encampments across thousands of square miles, was the most significant mass democratic uprising the United States has ever seen.

The initial phase of this revolt was the Farmers’ Alliance movement, born on the Texas frontier.

Grounded in a common experience, nurtured by years of experimentation and self-education, [this culture] produced a party, a platform, a specific new democratic ideology, and a pathbreaking political agenda for the American nation.

Consider the implications. Last time humanity was locked onto this course, it led to the collapse of the global economy and two world wars—and genocide, starvation, plague, and the detonation of nuclear bombs that wiped some 200,000 human beings off the earth and gave us the power to end our species. What manner of calamity lies ahead of us now?

The recent alarming development and aggression of aggregated wealth, which, unless checked, will inevitably lead to the pauperization and hopeless degradation of the toiling masses, render it imperative, if we desire to enjoy the blessings of life, that a check should be placed upon its power and upon unjust accumulation

Objective thirteen on the Knights of Labor’s 1876 platform was “to secure for both sexes equal pay for equal work.” Women were seen and heard on the front lines, and were revered by embattled workingmen.

The euphoria lasted only days. Chicago’s elites had been beefing up public and private security forces for years. On May 3, police shot strikers at the gates to the McCormick harvester factory.

the history of the Gilded Age delivers one certainty, it is this: there is no way to access infinite wealth without rigging the system. No one becomes a billionaire honestly.

That consensus was far from complete. In a region where most, and the poorest, farmers were African American, they were ultimately excluded from the Farmers’ Alliance and had to build a separate and terribly unequal version, the Colored Alliance. The Farmers’ Alliance forced the Knights of Labor to abandon its rule welcoming members of all races as the price of a merger,

Its first battle was to sidestep the furnishing merchant by combining individuals’ supply needs into bulk orders, which an agent for the group could purchase directly at urban wholesalers. Alliance headquarters would pay on credit. The organization would secure that credit—for the total sum, including tenants’ orders—using landowning members’ holdings and current crop liens as collateral. Then everyone’s harvest, also combined in bulk, would be sorted and graded in a common warehouse. Farmers with surplus could store it there to gain higher prices out of season. The crop would be offered for sale directly to bulk purchasers in the North, or England or Germany.

The whole thrust of the platform suggests an insight of significance today. The Alliance saw the greatest threat to freedom not in government, but in big business. It looked to government as the only viable counterweight. Among the measures it advocated were an interstate commerce law to regulate railroad freight rates and laws to curb or prohibit financial speculation in railroad stock, agricultural futures, and land, and the strict enforcement of those laws.

Over the following years, the farmers adopted even more daring political proposals, such as the abolition of private interstate banking; the nationalization of railroads, of urban public transport, of the telegraph and the recently invented telephone; a graduated income tax, the secret ballot, and direct election of senators.

They were groping for a modern order that allowed citizens to participate in the new economies of scale instead of being subject to them, one that offered more freedom of choice to more members of society. Theirs was a version of modernity based on grassroots cooperation, not zero-sum competition

After fifteen years of trying other solutions, there was no alternative. The logic of Alliance thinking dictated a third party. And that is what emerged. The Populist Party was born on July 4, 1892, in Omaha, Nebraska, with Alliance members and thinking at its heart.

Workers who campaigned for Populist tickets were blacklisted and could not find jobs. Barriers to voting, such as the poll tax or education requirements, were stiffened. Press aligned with one party or the other “systematically played on racial, sectional, and class fears to alert readers to the Populist menace.

But leading lights of the Democratic Party and the businesses affiliated with them quickly embraced the new plutocratic ethos.

The Knights of Labor was the first and arguably the most dynamic and successful major drive to organize workers across identity divides.

This effervescence was on boisterous display in the big cities, magnets as they were for talent and ambition of all kinds. Here, labor unionism most closely overlapped with a second current of defiance against the Gilded Age system: revolutionary political movements such as socialism of various stripes, or anarchism.

When once free from the restrictions of extraneous authority,” hoped New York–based anarchist leaders Johann Most and Emma Goldman in 1896, men will enter into free relations; spontaneous organizations will spring up in all parts of the world, and every one will contribute to his and the common welfare as much labor as he or she is capable of, and consume according to their needs. All modern technical inventions and discoveries will be employed to make work easy and pleasant, and science, culture, and art will be freely used to perfect and elevate the human race, while woman will be coequal with man.

From the most distant prehistory, masked dancing and dramatic art have woven the fabric of group life. Declaiming and performing myths was a way of reinforcing a common worldview, bringing it to embodied life, imprinting it in members’ subconscious. That is what the anarchists were doing.

Unlike the recorded teachings of Jesus, however, anarchist ideology embraced the considered use of violence. Lucy Parsons avowed that had she been at Haymarket Square when the police arrived, had she seen their behavior and heard what transpired, she would have “flung the bomb [her]self.

In 2014—like those Nigerian officers who kept ghost soldiers on their budgets—Military Professional Resources Inc. billed the U.S. government for hours supposedly worked by employees who were actually home on leave.

But the massive crackdown and Red scare that followed the Haymarket bombing broke the wave of labor defiance of the mid-1880s. Until Lucy Parsons’s death in 1942 at nearly ninety, she kept it up, galvanizing people to fight the “wage slavery” she found little better than the “chattel slavery” she had witnessed as a child, inspiring them to seek autonomy and human development as individuals, while joining together in new inclusive structures that made decisions democratically and shared ownership of key resources.

hard lesson, too, is the difficulty and the importance of extending that structure and culture across the inherited barriers that divide the “plain people” in any complex modern society. But what a powerful inspiration, too, are those seventy years of struggle. There was a place in the effort for everyone. Startling talents emerged. Unexpected people played roles they would never have imagined for themselves. People who had been made to feel they were of no account, that they did not matter, found a meaning in the shared sacrifice and the bursts of imagination that were called for. All those people did matter. With their different gifts, their quirky talents and idiosyncrasies, or just their dogged perseverance, they were needed. In their struggle, they found suffering and disappointment, but they also found joy.

Curtailed, too, were hopes for a similarly democratic economy, based to any significant degree in joint local action in the interests of participating citizens. And yet, even in “failure,” these movements profoundly altered the American system—at least for a time.

over the 1982–84 period, taxes actually increased for all those making less than $30,000 a year….For those making over $200,000 a year, however, the Reagan cuts brought an average reduction of…15 percent.” Thus was perpetrated, say two other analysts, “what may well have been the most accelerated upwards redistribution of income in the nation’s history.

The whole thing was a lavishly funded laboratory experiment in the Reagan-era unfettered pro-business principles that the Clinton administration was validating. Harvard, with its liberal reputation, added to the validation. Simultaneously across Asia and Latin America, similar experiments were being launched. Unfortunately, the grotesque virus that resulted did not stay sealed inside the post-Soviet laboratory.

Trump has taken mafia government to heights unrivaled in this country’s history. His swiftness to trade U.S. policy concessions for personal advancement will be the most shameful legacy of his presidency.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, prompting a moratorium on most enforcement, EPA investigators across the country had to check with Washington before even requesting information from suspects or ordering laboratory tests that might prove a crime has been committed.

In the first two years of the Trump administration the numbers just collapsed—compared to the Obama and George W. Bush administrations alike. At the Department of Agriculture, to take just one other example, fines levied on meat and processed food conglomerates for cheating contract farmers and other violations plummeted by 2018 to a tenth of 2013 levels.

A December 2018 study found that the EPA had cleared about half as many cases nationwide as it had just the previous year, FY 2017. So enfeebled, what do the enforcers still enforce? With limited resources, they go for smaller fry. My neighbors out fishing are more likely to get a citation for a leaky outboard than the insulation factory a few towns over is for swilling gallons of formaldehyde into a river.

They are moral choices. And they are being made by a self-dealing network whose private-sector members have been handed control of the public trust to a degree unprecedented in the United States, even in the Gilded Age.

The five chairs of the power committees,” for example, “must contribute $500,000 [each] and raise an additional $1 million” for congressional campaign funds. Big donors thus get to choose not just who runs for office, but who, once elected, leads.

A Nigerian once answered a question about the social significance of money with an enigma: “People use money to intimidate people,” he stated. I knew what he meant, but I made polite conversation: “Really? How?” “By giving it to them.” That was not the answer I expected. I waited. “Then they can tell them what to do.” Afghans said the same, I remembered: “When someone eats your food, he should obey you. You don’t obey him.

Under neither the George W. Bush nor the Obama administrations were conditions attached to the taxpayer-funded assistance banks were handed. No one leveraged the collapse of the banks’ moral authority. The U.S. government chose not to use our money to intimidate the banks.

President Obama’s regulators could have imposed some decency. They could have rewired the incentive structure that had turned young traders into improvised explosives. They did not.

But to stave off threats that extreme, kleptocratic networks deftly execute other maneuvers. They disguise their members and activities, for example. They distract and disorganize potential grassroots opposition. In an examination of seven anticorruption insurrections on five continents, the tactic I found to be most common—and most effective—was to deliberately enflame identity-based divisions that could pit groups of the population against one another. This is how a vastly outnumbered dominator coalition defeats the rest of us.

That is a wonderful state of affairs for kleptocrats. Waving a red or blue flag, they hold on to camps of ardent loyalists while betraying them to serve the network instead. Most Americans disapprove of policies that benefit the superrich at everyone else’s expense. Both parties pursue such policies. We find reasons to vote our colors anyway, or opt out of the conversation.

When the hydra manipulates our loyalties, let’s recognize the tactic. We might explore how the networks of a previous era, bent on personal enrichment, deliberately invented and kept enflaming the same identity categories we fixate on today. We might explore how those outside our camp, and their ancestors, were mauled too.

In its most extravagant form,” writes Belgian anthropologist and art historian Anne-Marie Bouttiaux, “the ideal secret is one that consists in nothing. Initiates alone know that what they must cloak in silence doesn’t exist.” This paradox, a bit of which I experienced in the Pentagon, points to a deep purpose of secrets: to protect knowledge, perhaps, but also to shut people out of a group. And being shut out of a group inflicts on humans an acute variety of emotional pain.

Members of today’s kleptocratic networks who incorporate companies under fictitious or borrowed names are using a modern screening allegory on law enforcement and the public. Only initiates learn where the money comes from, how much there really is, and how much is being stolen from fellow citizens in the form of unpaid taxes. One entity has been particularly effective in its use of secrecy: the Koch network.

If these men wished to influence ideas and public policies, why the secrecy? Isn’t that what people do in a democracy? In a 1997 speech, Charles Koch provided an answer: “We are greatly outnumbered.” Meaning, most Americans don’t want what they want. Democracy can’t work for them.

The group within the cloak of secrecy is superior to the rest. Those not eligible for initiation are at best inferiors. They may be the enemy.

Like a drug, money can make its addicts betray almost anyone.

There is no magic formula, no step-by-step method for bringing the hydras that are laying waste to our societies under control.

A Nigerian friend once told me that an Islamic precept is not to punish a wrongdoer in a material he has in abundance. That is, a rich person should not be fined; it won’t trouble him. The trick then is to discover what is dearer to today’s kleptocrats than money—even in this era of full-blown Midas disease. Two such precious substances might be the prestige their money buys and the freedom—the “What the fuck” freedom to do anything they want with the people and the world around them.

For example, executives and HR departments should not offer the vice president of Enron a string of government jobs in the public-private international development and infrastructure industries after his company’s debacle.

A ratchet-up would be to expel violators like him from powerful jobs they currently hold if the wrongdoing continues or their contracts come up for renewal. The next notch would be to take their freedom—that is, to investigate, prosecute, and send them to jail. That option terrifies the dominator coalition. Why else would it have worked so hard for thirty years to eliminate it?

A third principle comes not from ancient Greece, but from the Farmers’ Alliance. It is the importance of ideas, the need for independent analysis, developed and transmitted in a constant exchange with and among neighbors, and the need to teach it actively. Too much dogma, unquestioned across the political spectrum—such as that unlimited growth is a sign of health—serves to reinforce the business model of the kleptocrats, or to distract us from it.