Civil Contractors Quotes

The only perfection available to you without compromise is that of intention and effort. If you endeavor to be the best pencil sharpener you can be, and tailor your actions accordingly, you can be certain all else will be forgiven in the final accounting.

Katrina was not unforeseeable. It was the result of a political structure that subcontracts its responsibility to private contractors and abdicates its responsibility altogether. —Harry Belafonte, American musician and civil rights activist, September 20052

Once you use a toothbrush to clean a pencil sharpener, you should no longer use it to clean your teeth.

bear-portraits demand a heavy line so as to capture the burly ferocity of their subjects.

Over the last 30 odd years, Democrats have moved to the right and the right has moved into the mental hospital. So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge fund managers, credit card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture and the pharmaceutical lobby... That's the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat-earthers and civil war re-enactors who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans and who actually worry that Obama is a socialist. Socialist? He's not even a liberal.

The blast wave that passed through my sister’s office doubtless passed through devout Muslims, atheist Muslims, gay Muslims, funny Muslims, and lovestruck Muslims—not to mention Pakistani Christians, Chinese engineers, American security contractors, and Indian Sikhs. What civilization, then, did the bomb target? And from what civilization did it originate?

Like Barry before him, Diop complained that Chinese projects were negotiated with a total lack of transparency. “If we are paying for big projects we want them to include real transfer of technology and of expertise, but the Chinese bring all their own workers, and the few Guineans are reduced to the role of task boys. In one case we had here, a Chinese company was hired to build a bridge and they did most of their work at night, and they wouldn’t let anyone onto their site. Between the groundbreaking and inauguration ceremonies, they give out no information at all, nothing.” Diop said that his group and others in the civil society coalition had repeatedly tried to speak with Chinese contractors and Chinese diplomats to impress upon them the need to reconsider their approach to things in Guinea, but had been either patronized or turned away. “You go to see them and they say go see your minister, or go see your president, he’s the one who approved these arrangements.” I heard very similar language from disgruntled civil society figures virtually everywhere I traveled.

The word “collect” has a very special definition, according to the Department of Defense. It doesn’t mean collect; it means that a person looks at, or analyzes, the data. In 2013, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper likened the NSA’s trove of accumulated data to a library. All those books are stored on the shelves, but very few are actually read. “So the task for us in the interest of preserving security and preserving civil liberties and privacy is to be as precise as we possibly can be when we go in that library and look for the books that we need to open up and actually read.” Think of that friend of yours who has thousands of books in his house. According to this ridiculous definition, the only books he can claim to have collected are the ones he’s read. This is why Clapper asserts he didn’t lie in a Senate hearing when he replied “no” to the question “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” From the military’s perspective, it’s not surveillance until a human being looks at the data, even if algorithms developed and implemented by defense personnel or contractors have analyzed it many times over.

a freshly sharpened pencil is about starting over, and never ceasing to hope for—and work for—the perfect point. While that perfection may never be attained, it is cowardly not to try.

How well you do know your own mind? This is, no doubt, a sobering question. Yet it must be answered before proceeding. The utility of any tool is defined, in part, by consistency in deployment and predictability of outcome—the absence of unforeseen surprises once it is in use. A pencil sharpener whose blade engages erratically is no asset and should be culled from your tool kit. So, too, is a mind whose unseen contours hide jarring or potentially compromising impulses, memories, panics, prejudices, weaknesses, and the like.

Quoting page 150-151: Political camouflage, needed by legislators eager to please civil rights and minority organizations while avoiding punishment by voters for supporting racial quotas, was provided by the bureaucratic obscurity of the government’s procurement process. Voters did not understand the complexities of government contracting and agency regulation. … The weaknesses of minority set-asides were chiefly two. First, they were indubitably racial and ethnic quotas, and hence were politically controversial. As government benefits tied to ancestry, they violated the classic liberal creed that Americans possessed equal individual rights. … Nonminority contractors were barred by their ancestry or their skin color from even bidding on contracts paid for by taxpayer dollars, including their own. Second, and less obviously, set-aside programs produced a common set of flaws in implementation. The most severe problem was the concentration of set-aside contracts on a few successful firms. Agency officials, needing to spend a large amount of money on minority procurement contractors every fiscal year, found very few minority contractors able to do the job. Four-fifths of all certified minority firms had no employees, their personnel roster consisting solely of the owner of the enterprise. As a consequence, agency set-aside contracts were typically concentrated on only a few firms large enough and sufficiently experienced to meet the terms of the contracts, providing constructing, street paving, computer services, military uniforms, or other goods and services. In 1990, for example, only fifty firms, representing less than 2 percent of the certified minority firms in the 8(a) program, accounted for 40 percent of the $4 billion awarded. … such firms never seemed to “graduate” from the set-aside program, weaned from the incubator and ready to compete in the normal marketplace of competitive government contracting. … Almost all the contracts were awarded on a no-bid or “sole source” basis; in fiscal 1991, for example, only 1.9 percent of the 4,576 contracts in the 8(a) program were awarded on a competitive basis.

Five years into King Saud’s reign, the country was facing bankruptcy. Civil servants, soldiers, and contractors were not being paid. The American-owned oil company Aramco refused to make additional loans against future Saudi production.19 The Saudi Riyal was devalued by 50 percent, inflation soared, and there was labor unrest in the Eastern Province. By 1957, the kingdom was forced to seek a loan from the International Monetary Fund, which insisted on seeing the country’s first detailed budget. That financial plan sharply reduced royal family living expenses. Over the next six years privy-purse expenditures fell by two thirds. In Riyadh, many half-finished palaces were abandoned, and infuriated princes correctly blamed their distress on King Saud’s financial mismanagement.

To build his pyramid Cheops packed some pounds of rice into the stomachs of innumerable Egyptians and Israelites. We today would pack some pounds of coal inside steam boilers to do the same thing, and this might be cited as an instance of the superiority of modern civilization over ancient brute force. But when referred to the sun, our true standard of reference, the comparison is naught, because to produce these few pounds of coal required a thousand times more solar energy than to produce the few pounds of rice. We are simply taking advantage of an accidental circumstance. It took Cheops twenty years to build his pyramid, but if he had had a lot of Trustees, contractors, and newspaper reporters to worry him, he might not have finished it by that time. The advantages of modern engineering are in many ways over balanced by the disadvantages of modern civilization.

This is the problem with the gig economy, I think as I squirm around in the trunk. Everyone is so vulnerable and the rules for what constitutes civilized behavior--well, they're coming apart so quickly I've decided those rules were illusions all along. We have stopped seeing each other as people, as fellow travelers on this dying earth; we just see a gig or an economy.... The system is designed to keep us so depleted that we forget our sense of decency and become so mercenary about our own survival that we have nothing left to contribute to the common good.

Government of baboons invests in police 'n defense contracts, while a truly civilized government invests in education.

Need Teachers Not Cops (The Sonnet) The world needs less cops and more teachers, While cops enforce law, teachers instill accountability. Thus law enforcement only produces an illusion of order, It's the teachers who can create a crime-free society. If students are the future, teachers are future maker, So be civilized and focus on lifting teachers and students. Government of baboons invests in police 'n defense contracts, While a truly civilized government invests in education. Arm the teachers with books and students with sustenance, Then watch them accomplish the impossible future, A future of true lasting order, reform and harmony, Which a billion police cannot achieve in a billion years. Society that empowers teachers empowers peace. Society that empowers police empowers malice.

With his hopes fading of seeing his brothers criminally prosecuted, Bill Koch pressed an alternative legal strategy that stirred even greater problems for Koch Industries. In his own display of the family’s relentlessness, he filed a whistle-blower lawsuit against Koch Industries under the False Claims Act, accusing the company of stealing oil from government lands. A Civil War–era statute allows citizens to bring such qui tam suits in instances where they can prove that private contractors have defrauded the government. It was essentially the same case as the one that the Oklahoma grand jury had rejected, but the level of proof required in civil cases is lower.

Illegal sand mining runs a wide gamut. At one end, it includes legitimate businesses overstepping the boundaries of their permits. In 2003, for instance, California filed a lawsuit41 against Hanson Aggregates, a global mining outfit, for unauthorized dredging of sand from the San Francisco Bay. “These sand pirates have enriched themselves by stealing from the state and ripping off taxpayers,” the state’s attorney general declared at the time. Hanson eventually settled, paying the state $42 million. At the other extreme are outright criminals, from petty thieves to well-organized gangs willing to kill to protect their sand business. In 2015, New York state authorities slapped a $700,000 fine on a Long Island contractor who had illegally gouged thousands of tons of sand from a 4.5-acre patch of land near the town of Holtsville and then refilled the pit with toxic waste. These “scoop and fill” operations have become common as the area’s legitimate sources of sand have been increasingly depleted, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.42 In other countries, the black market takes more dramatic forms. One of Israel’s most notorious gangsters, a man allegedly involved in a spate of recent car bombings, got his start stealing sand from public beaches. In Morocco, fully half the sand used for construction is estimated to be mined illegally; whole stretches of beach in that country are disappearing.

Nobody wants another man’s blood on his pencil.

RELATIVE DIFFICULTY OF KNIFE-BASED ACTIVITIES FROM EASIEST TO MOST DIFFICULT, WITH SHARPENING A PENCIL REPRESENTING THE MEDIAN If you can REACH FOR A KNIFE then you can PICK UP A KNIFE If you can PICK UP A KNIFE then you can DIP A KNIFE IN A BATHTUB If you can DIP A KNIFE IN A BATHTUB then you can SMEAR JELLY WITH A KNIFE If you can SMEAR JELLY WITH A KNIFE then you can CUT A LOAF OF BREAD WITH A BREAD KNIFE If you can CUT A LOAF OF BREAD WITH A BREAD KNIFE then you can CUT A STEAK WITH A STEAK KNIFE If you can CUT A STEAK WITH A STEAK KNIFE then you can CARVE A TURKEY WITH A CARVING KNIFE If you can CARVE A TURKEY WITH A CARVING KNIFE then you can CARVE A TOTEM POLE WITH A CHAINSAW If you can CARVE A TOTEM POLE WITH A CHAINSAW then you can SHARPEN A PENCIL WITH A POCKETKNIFE If you can SHARPEN A PENCIL WITH A POCKETKNIFE then you can WHITTLE A DUCK WITH A POCKETKNIFE If you can WHITTLE A DUCK WITH A POCKETKNIFE then you can SHAVE A THREAD WITH A STRAIGHT RAZOR If you can SHAVE A THREAD WITH A STRAIGHT RAZOR then you can REMOVE A CORNEA WITH A SCALPEL If you can REMOVE A CORNEA WITH A SCALPEL then you can MAKE A LOT OF MONEY If you can MAKE A LOT OF MONEY then you can HAVE AN AFFAIR WITH YOUR SECRETARY If you can HAVE AN AFFAIR WITH YOUR SECRETARY then you can BE BLACKMAILED If you can BE BLACKMAILED then you can IMAGINE COMMITTING A CRIME If you can IMAGINE COMMITTING A CRIME then you can REACH FOR A KNIFE

Even relatively routine misconduct by Ferguson police officers can have significant consequences for the people whose rights are violated. For example, in the summer of 2012, a 32-year-old African-American man sat in his car cooling off after playing basketball in a Ferguson public park. An officer pulled up behind the man’s car, blocking him in, and demanded the man’s Social Security number and identification. Without any cause, the officer accused the man of being a pedophile, referring to the presence of children in the park, and ordered the man out of his car for a pat-down, although the officer had no reason to believe the man was armed. The officer also asked to search the man’s car. The man objected, citing his constitutional rights. In response, the officer arrested the man, reportedly at gunpoint, charging him with eight violations of Ferguson’s municipal code. One charge, Making a False Declaration, was for initially providing the short form of his first name (e.g., “Mike” instead of “Michael”), and an address which, although legitimate, was different from the one on his driver’s license. Another charge was for not wearing a seat belt, even though he was seated in a parked car. The officer also charged the man both with having an expired operator’s license, and with having no operator’s license in his possession. The man told us that, because of these charges, he lost his job as a contractor with the federal government that he had held for years.

I could not help but marvel at the way in which the military had got stuck into trying to improve the lives of the Kirkukis. They were identifying priority projects in the province, tendering out work to local contractors, and managing large amounts of money. Tank commanders were working on economic development, paratroopers on governance, civil affairs officers on education. They were totally dedicated to the task at hand.

Since 1884 Bath Iron Works was incorporated by General Thomas W. Hyde who had served in the Union Army during the Civil War. At first the shipyard made iron hardware and windlasses for the wooden ships of the day but soon built warships for the United States Navy although it also started builting commercial vessels. The USS Machias a schooner rigged, steam driven, gunboat was one of two 190-foot (58 m) gunboats, first built by the company. It has been said that Chester Nimitz commanded the Machias during World War I, although this has not been substantiated. In 1892 the yard built their first commercial vessel, the 2,500-ton steel passenger steamer the SS City of Lowell. From these humble beginnings BIW became a major United States shipyard and has designed and built almost every type of naval vessel that the US Navy had or has, including the new stealth destroyers of the Zumwalt class. I first saw Bath Iron Works when I crossed the Kennebec River in 1952. I wrote about this in “Seawater One” describing how our bus crossed on the Carlton Lift Bridge and how I saw the USS Dealey (DE-1006) being built. During World War II, ships built at BIW were considered by Navy officers and sailors to be the toughest afloat, giving rise to the slogan "Bath-built is best-built." In 1995, BIW became a subsidiary of General Dynamics and at that time was the fifth-largest defense contractor in the world.