Clearance Quotes

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

Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact. Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising alone in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you--do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, closeout, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?
Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)
We are experiencing a level-one security breach and all elevators have been temporarily shut down. Please enjoy a hot cup of tea while we wait for clearance.
Marissa Meyer (Cress (The Lunar Chronicles, #3))
Plastic ware," he said slowly, "like knives and forks and spoons?" I brushed a bit of dirt off the back of my car—was that a scratch?—and said casually, "Yeah, I guess.Just the basics, you know." "Did you need plastic ware?" he asked. I shrugged. "Because," he went on, and I fought the urge to squirm, "it's so funny, because I need plastic ware. Badly." "Can we go inside, please?" I asked, slamming the trunk shut. "It's hot out here." He looked at the bag again, then at me. And then, slowly, the smile I knew and dreaded crept across his face. "You bought me plastic ware," he said. "Didn't you?' "No," I growled, picking at my license plate. "You did!" he hooted, laughing out loud. "You bought me some forks. And knives. And spoons. Because—" "No," I said loudly. "—you love me!" He grinned, as if he'd solved the puzzler for all time, as I felt a flush creep across my face. Stupid Lissa. I could have killed her. "It was on sale," I told him again, as if this was some kind of an excuse. "You love me," he said simply, taking the bag and adding it to the others. "Only seven bucks," I added, but he was already walking away, so sure of himself. "It was on clearance, for God's sake." "Love me," he called out over his shoulder, in a singsong voice. "You. Love. Me.
Sarah Dessen (This Lullaby)
We wait to be rescued, but for whatever reason, no one comes. We figure that if no one protects us then we must not be worth protecting so we become prey and are easily picked off. Our wounded, kicked-puppy gazes attract sly predators and we sell ourselves for clearance sale prices, mistaking screwing for caring.
Laura Wiess (Such a Pretty Girl)
…This… ’stuff’? I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? …And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.
Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada (The Devil Wears Prada, #1))
This assignment is my duty to perform for the US Army. My job is outside your command, my friend. You know my security clearance level remains the same. Copying the SCI is a safety measure, in case there is an electrical glitch. So, I believe we’ve talked enough about this subject. Agree?
Karl Braungart (Lost Identity (Remmich/Miller, #1))
What is it that constitutes virtue, Mrs. Graham? Is it the circumstance of being able and willing to resist temptation; or that of having no temptations to resist? - Is he a strong man that overcomes great obstacles and performs surprising achievements, though by dint of great muscular exertion, and at the risk of some subsequent fatigue, or he that sits in his chair all day, with nothing to do more laborious than stirring the fire, and carrying his food to his mouth? If you would have your son to walk honourably through the world, you must not attempt to clear the stones from his path, but teach him to walk firmly over them - not insist upon leading him by the hand, but let him learn to go alone.' 'I will lead him by the hand, Mr. Markham, till he has strength to go alone; and I will clear as many stones from his path as I can, and teach him to avoid the rest - or walk firmly over them, as you say; - for when I have done my utmost, in the way of clearance, there will still be plenty left to exercise all the agility, steadiness, and circumspection he will ever have. - It is all very well to talk about noble resistance, and trials of virtue; but for fifty - or five hundred men that have yielded to temptation, show me one that has had virtue to resist. And why should I take it for granted that my son will be one in a thousand? - and not rather prepare for the worst, and suppose he will be like his - like the rest of mankind, unless I take care to prevent it?
Anne Brontë (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall)
The rain forest has its own defenses. The earth’s immune system, so to speak, has recognized the presence of the human species and is starting to kick in. The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by the human parasite. Perhaps AIDS is the first step in a natural process of clearance.
Richard Preston (The Hot Zone)
She stood and looked at James as if he was on clearance at Vanity, which was her favorite store at the moment.
Aaron M. Patterson (Airel: The Awakening (The Airel Saga: Book 1, Part 1))
Sometimes we just need to put down our phones, close our eyes and take a few deep breaths. Ideas are often in flight patterns around our brains, just waiting for clearance to land.
Sam Harrison
You bought me plastic ware," he said. "Didn't you?' "No," I growled, picking at my license plate. "You did!" he hooted, laughing out loud. "You bought me some forks. And knives. And spoons. Because—" "No," I said loudly. "—you love me!" He grinned, as if he'd solved the puzzler for all time, as I felt a flush creep across my face. Stupid Lissa. I could have killed her. "It was on sale," I told him again, as if this was some kind of an excuse. "You love me," he said simply, taking the bag and adding it to the others. "Only seven bucks," I added, but he was already walking away, so sure of himself. "It was on clearance, for God's sake." "Love me," he called out over his shoulder, in a singsong voice. "You. Love. Me.
Sarah Dessen (This Lullaby)
Not merely in the realm of commerce but in the world of ideas as well our age is organizing a regular clearance sale. Everything is to be had at such a bargain that it is questionable whether in the end there is anybody who will want to bid.
Søren Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling)
Music is crucial... Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising along in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you - do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, close-out, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?
Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)
We wait to be rescued, but for whatever reason, no one comes. We figure that if no one protects us then we must not be worth protecting so we become prey and are easily picked off. Our wounded, kicked-puppy gazes attract sly predators and we sell ourselves for clearance sale prices, mistaking screwing for caring. We binge, purge, sleep around. We drink too much and get too high, anything to blot out the past.
Laura Wiess (Such a Pretty Girl)
She frowned severely. ‘You can’t fire missiles at the Inland Revenue.’ ‘Sorry.’ ‘You can’t get clearance over the walls. The angles are wrong.
Jodi Taylor (Hard Time (The Time Police, #2))
Take time for the clearance of the mind, preparing for adherence to perseverance for the journey of another thousand miles.
Curtis Tyrone Jones
Settling for less is just like putting diamonds on the clearance rack. Know your worth because just what you accept in your life will be exactly what you get. ~S. Turner~
Shatika Turner
I have a need of such clearance as the Savior effected in the temple of Jerusalem a riddance of clutter of what is secondary that blocks the way to the all-important central emptiness which is filled with the presence of God alone. 4 —Jean Danielou
Peter Scazzero (Daily Office)
While most ‘pinheads’ do indeed begin with a casually acquired flashy novelty pin, followed by the contents of their grandmothers’ pincushion, haha, the path to a truly worthwhile collection lies not in the simple disbursement of money in the nearest pin emporium, oh no. Any dilettante can become ‘kingpin’ with enough expenditure, but for the true ‘pinhead’ the real pleasure is in the joy of the chase, the pin fairs, the house clearances, and, who knows, a casual glint in the gutter that turns out to be a well-preserved Doublefast or an unbroken two-pointer. Well is it said: ‘See a pin and pick it up, and all day long you’ll have a pin.
Terry Pratchett (Going Postal (Discworld, #33))
Vacare Deum. Be free for God.     I have a need of such a clearance as the Saviour effected in the temple of Jerusalem a riddance of the clutter of what is secondary that blocks the way to the all-important central emptiness which is filled with the presence of God alone.   Jean Danielou
Esther de Waal (Lost in Wonder: Rediscovering the Spiritual Art of Attentiveness)
Another group tried putting a new type of protective boot onto the hind leg of a mule deer for testing. Given that deer lack toes and heels and people lack hooves, and that no country I know of employs mule deer in land mine clearance, it is hard—though mildly entertaining—to try to imagine what the value of such a study could have been.
Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)
Despite the endless drumbeat in the conservative media, filled with exaggerated scandals and breathless revelations of little practical import, Hillary Clinton’s case, at least as far as we knew at the start, did not appear to come anywhere near General Petraeus’s in the volume and classification level of the material mishandled. Although she seemed to be using an unclassified system for some classified topics, everyone she emailed appeared to have both the appropriate clearance and a legitimate need to know the information.
James Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
Takes a special kind to go another kind to stay here ........ Nowhere do such patriots so embrace the leaving of the place
Kate Tough (26 Treasures)
She sat with him at any rate, in the grey clearance—as sad as a winter dawn—made by their meeting.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
Kushner was the classic profile of a person who would be rejected for a national security clearance, and Kelly’s move to downgrade his clearance level provided comfort to the CIA.
Philip Rucker (A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America)
In the era of security clearances, to be an Irish Catholic became prima facie evidence of loyalty. Harvard men were to be checked; Fordham men would do the checking.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
483,000 government contractors hold top-secret clearances: a third of the 1.4 million people cleared at that level.
Bruce Schneier (Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World)
He remembers when you didn’t need FBI clearance to talk to a ballplayer and baseball was what you did until you grew up.
Jane Leavy (Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy)
Ivanka lied to her father’s face, saying her security clearance had been downgraded as well,” a White House adviser recalled. “She told her father that Kelly had taken her clearance. It was a complete lie.
Philip Rucker (A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America)
You maintain a really wide stance. Standing, sitting. It's like you think your dick is enormous. I mean, your dick is nice. I like it. I like it a lot. It just doesn't need the kind of clearance you're giving it.
Marshall Thornton (Femme)
Rowan sighed. “Yes.” She folded her hands before her on the table, sat gazing at them a moment. “But.” She looked up at the Outskirter. “Bel, no matter how clever we are, no matter how much we can discover, I believe that the common folk will, at the end of this, need magic. Even if we defeat Slado, or kill him, Routine Bioform Clearance will have to be reestablished according to its proper use, and maintained, and intelligently so.
Rosemary Kirstein (The Language of Power (The Steerswoman, #4))
In contrast to those Hillary Clinton corresponded with, the author did not have the appropriate clearance or a legitimate need to know the information, which included notes of discussions with President Obama about very sensitive programs.
James Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
I found some unicorn sheets that were on clearance, but when I picked them up, she said, without even looking at me: “Don’t even think about it, Liss. Just because I’m on watch for guardians doesn’t mean I’m oblivious to poor retail decisions.
Richelle Mead (Vampire Academy: The Untold Stories)
it’s rarely worth the expense for a private company to sponsor your clearance application and then pay you to wait around for a year for the government’s approval. It makes more financial sense for a company to just hire an already-cleared government employee.
Edward Snowden (Permanent Record)
Part of Wordsworth’s complaint was directed towards the smoke, congestion, poverty and ugliness of cities, but clean-air bills and slum clearance would not, by themselves, have eradiated his critique. For it was the effect of cities on our souls, rather than on our health, that concerned him. The poet accused the cities of fostering a family of life-destroying emotions: anxiety about our position in the social hierarchy, envy at the success of others, pride and desire to shine in the eyes of strangers. City dwellers had no perspective, he alleged, they were in thrall of what was spoken of in the street or at the dinner table. However well provided for, they had a relentless desire to new things, which they did not genuinely lack and on which happiness did not depend. And in this crowded, anxious sphere, it seemed harder that it did on an isolated homestead to begin sincere relationships with others. ‘One thought baffled my understanding,’ wrote Wordsworth of his residence in London: ‘How men lived even next-door neighbors, as we say, yet still strangers, and knowing not each other’s names.
Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel)
We are missing this!" Since Faith's exploits tended to be a bit of a morale boost, if not for the squeamish, the helmet cam videos were available for public view. And the Gurkhas had decided to see who this child was who carried a kukri as if she was due and was going to "instruct" them on clearance. "I can go to war!" Lance Corporal Ombahadur Ghale shouted. "I can fight! Let us go to war!" "There will be war aplenty to come," Sergeant Jitbahadur Rai said. "We must regain our strength to fight these battles. And if this is the way of such war...A great war it shall be! Oooiya Ghorkali! Look at her go!
John Ringo (Islands of Rage & Hope (Black Tide Rising, #3))
I learn so much that I previously did not know about the world of the immobile that it is hard to believe it all takes place over a few hours. At random: I learn about the casual indifference of the London cabbie to the wheelchair user and that the clearance on accessible entrances is measured in millimetres less than a knuckle. I learn how intractable it is to push a grown man around for hours and how spontaneity is the privilege of the able-bodied. In solid counterpart to all this grief, I learn about the lengths nurses are prepared to go to assist a purely recreational and ambitious project by one of their patients.
Marion Coutts (The Iceberg)
My political adviser, Jenny Brickman, is practically pulling her hair. She doesn’t have security clearance, either, so she doesn’t know the whole story, but her main concern is that she wants me to be seen as a fighter in this hearing. If you can’t fight back, she said, then don’t go. You’ll just be their political piñata.
Bill Clinton (The President Is Missing)
Feeling Faint Issue: I’m happy losing weight with a low carbohydrate diet, but I’m always tired, get light headed when I stand up, and if I exercise for more than 10 minutes I feel like I’m going to pass out. Response: Congratulations on your weight loss success, and with just a small adjustment to your diet, you can say goodbye to your weakness and fatigue. The solution is salt…a bit more salt to be specific. This may sound like we’re crazy when many experts argue that we should all eat less salt, however these are the same experts who tell us that eating lots of carbohydrates and sugar is OK. But what they don’t tell you is that your body functions very differently when you are keto-adapted. When you restrict carbs for a week or two, your kidneys switch from retaining salt to rapidly excreting it, along with a fair amount of stored water. This salt and water loss explains why many people experience rapid weight loss in the first couple of weeks on a low carbohydrate diet. Ridding your body of this excess salt and water is a good thing, but only up to a point. After that, if you don’t replace some of the ongoing sodium excretion, the associated water loss can compromise your circulation The end result is lightheadedness when you stand up quickly or fatigue if you exercise enough to get ‘warmed up’. Other common side effects of carbohydrate restriction that go away with a pinch of added salt include headache and constipation; and over the long term it also helps the body maintain its muscles. The best solution is to include 1 or 2 cups of bouillon or broth in your daily schedule. This adds only 1-2 grams of sodium to your daily intake, and your ketoadapted metabolism insures that you pass it right on through within a matter of hours (allaying any fears you might have of salt buildup in your system). This rapid clearance also means that on days that you exercise, take one dose of broth or bouillon within the hour before you start.
Jeff S. Volek (The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living: An Expert Guide to Making the Life-Saving Benefits of Carbohydrate Restriction Sustainable and Enjoyable)
Is this what it’s like for adults? When we were in school, we wanted to do nothing but travel the world and have fun and do all sorts of crazy shit. Remember our plans to go to Patagonia? Hike the southern tip of the world? It’s all funny now because right now all I want to do is raid a Pottery Barn store for clearance bedding.
Noah Harris (Ride Em Hard (Copper Hill #1))
(People) either overestimate Satan's influence and power, living with an inflated, erroneous perspective of his abilities. Or they underestimate him. They don't assign him any credit at all for the difficulties he's stirring up beneath the surface of our lives... Satan is not God. And he is not God's counterpart or peer... Satan is nothing but a copycat trying desperately to convince you he's more powerful than he actually is... So even though he's given temporary clearance to strategize and antagonize, we don't need to pray from a position of fear or weakness against him... But we can't expect to experience this power unless we're serious about joining the battle in prayer.
Priscilla Shirer (Fervent: A Woman's Battle Plan to Serious, Specific and Strategic Prayer)
Workforces are flexible, jobs are outsourced, and people are expendable. Moving from employer to employer is now the norm. This means that secrets are shared with more people, and those people care less about them. Recall that five million people in the US have a security clearance, and that a majority of them are contractors rather than government employees.
Bruce Schneier (Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World)
During one of his activities as director of Chicago’s annual Polish Constitution Day Parade, Gacy met and was photographed with the then First Lady, Rosalynn Carter, on May 6, 1978. The famous photograph even has her autograph, an embarrassing reminder to the Secret Service – who gave special clearance to Gacy – that they still had a bit to learn, once they found out who and what John Wayne Gacy truly was.
Tyler Crane (John Wayne Gacy: The True Crime Story of the Killer Clown (Serial Killers, True Crime))
FMSF Advisory Board Members Dr Martin Orne and Dr Louis Jolyon West are CIA and military mind control contractors with TOP SECRET CIA clearance. Both received MKULTRA contracts to study dissociative disorders, implantation of false memories, and techniques for creation of Manchurian Candidates. The dissociative disorders, false memories, and the therapist-created multiple personality are the focus of the FMSF campaign.
Colin A. Ross (The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists)
I anticipate with joy the approaching period when the stigmas of poverty and pride so liberally bestowed on the highlanders by our southern gentry will be as inapplicable to the inhabitants of that country as of any in the island.
James Hogg (Highland Journeys (The Stirling / South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg))
Right now, in Chicago there are clusters of murdered Black and Brown women whose bodies have been found since 2001 and their murders are largely going unsolved. Chicago police have insisted there is no evidence of a serial killer in action, though in a city with a police murder clearance rate of only 25 percent it’s difficult to assess how much work has been done to solve these crimes. Murder clearance rates are down around the country, with a national average
Mikki Kendall (Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women White Feminists Forgot)
Because the decimation of the second, reborn Greenwood can also be laid at the feet of men and women who sat in air-conditioned offices and did their work with pencils and calculators, blue-line maps, real estate estimates, and government statistics. For the efforts to carve up the city's historic African American district had not ended with the attempted land grab for a new railroad terminal back in 1921. Now they had new names. Urban renewal. Redlining. Slum clearance. Model Cities. Opportunity. Progress.
Scott Ellsworth (The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice)
At the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, in early July Trump wanted to talk with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. In violation of security rules he invited Turnbull into his Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). Only those with the highest U.S. security clearances for Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information were allowed in the SCIF. It was an absolute rule, intended to prevent someone planting listening devices. This facility, a large steel room, had to be torn down after the meeting.
Bob Woodward (Fear: Trump in the White House)
I imagine a hierarchy of happiness; first purchased in the 1970s, a couple would sit here, dining on meals cooked from brand-new recipe books, eating and drinking from wedding china like proper grown-ups. They’d move to the suburbs after a couple of years; the table, too small to accommodate their growing family, passes on to a cousin newly graduated and furnishing his first flat on a budget. After a few years, he moves in with his partner and rents the place out. For a decade, tenants eat here, a whole procession of them, young people mainly, sad and happy, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, lovers. They’d serve fast food here to fill a gap, or five stylish courses to seduce, carbohydrates before a run and chocolate pudding for broken hearts. Eventually, the cousin sells up and the house clearance people take the table away. It languishes in a warehouse, spiders spinning silk inside its unfashionable rounded corners, bluebottles laying eggs in the rough splinters. It’s given to another charity. They gave it to me, unloved, unwanted, irreparably damaged. Also the table.
Gail Honeyman (Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine)
I saw you the second I walked into the bar that night. I saw you and felt you were different.” His lips had moved so close to hers that if she edged forward a bit, his mouth would be on hers. “I’m actually not different,” she said, hating that her voice sounded all breathy and nervous. “I’m similar to lots of people. I can even list off a bunch of people who look like me. And these boots aren’t really kick-ass boots. I bought them because they were on the clearance rack.” A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth before his lips touched hers, and all her carefully constructed reasons as to why she’d never get involved with a man like Matt burned to ashes.
Victoria James (Falling for the P.I. (Still Harbor, #1))
The citizens of Buffalo, then a smallish lakeside town, embarked on a brief campaign, led by a local judge named Wilkeson, to clear their own eponymous riverway and so tempt the canal engineers to route the Erie Canal to a terminus nearby. Energetic lobbying, together with the clearance of the creek, evidently worked, for the engineers did eventually end their labors there, and the fact that more than a million people now still brave one of the country’s cruelest climates (with roof-topping lake-effect snowfalls drowning the city each winter) to live in and around Buffalo is testimony to the wisdom of Judge Wilkeson and the city fathers of 1825 in doing all the persuading, as well as dredging and prettifying the banks of Buffalo Creek.
Simon Winchester (The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible)
To Komarr, my lord? Or Sergyar?” “No. Calculate the shortest possible jump route directly to Rho Ceta.” Vorpatril’s head jerked back in startlement. “If the orders I received from Sector Five HQ mean what we think, you’ll hardly get passage there. Reception by plasma fire and fusion shells the moment you pop out of the wormhole would be what I’d expect.” “Unpack, Miles,” Ekaterin’s voice drifted in. He grinned briefly at the familiar exasperation in her voice. “By the time we arrive there, I will have arranged our clearances with the Cetagandan Empire.” I hope. Or else they were all going to be in more trouble than Miles ever wanted to imagine. “Barrayar is bringing their kidnapped haut babies back to them. On the end of a long stick. I get to be the stick.
Lois McMaster Bujold (Diplomatic Immunity (Vorkosigan Saga, #13))
After the 2013 revelations, the US government would try to disparage me by referring to me as “only a contractor” or “a former Dell employee,” with the implication that I didn’t enjoy the same kinds of clearance and access as a blue-badged agency staffer. Once that discrediting characterization was established, the government proceeded to accuse me of “job-hopping,” hinting that I was some sort of disgruntled worker who didn’t get along with superiors or an exceptionally ambitious employee dead-set on getting ahead at all costs. The truth is that these were both lies of convenience. The IC knows better than anyone that changing jobs is part of the career track of every contractor: it’s a mobility situation that the agencies themselves created, and profit from.
Edward Snowden (Permanent Record)
He couldn’t have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life. This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn’t exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges. The owner took her time unpacking the books she’d bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She’d never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called 'The Age of Silence.' The owner of the secondhand bookstore lowered the volume of the radio. She flipped to the back flap of the book to find out more about the author, but all it said was that Zvi Litvinoff had been born in Poland and moved to Chile in 1941, where he still lived today. There was no photograph. That day, in between helping customers, she finished the book. Before locking up the shop that evening, she placed it in the window, a little wistful about having to part with it. The next morning, the first rays of the rising sun fell across the cover of The History of Love. The first of many flies alighted on its jacket. Its mildewed pages began to dry out in the heat as the blue-gray Persian cat who lorded over the shop brushed past it to lay claim to a pool of sunlight. A few hours later, the first of many passersby gave it a cursory glance as they went by the window. The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it. And that’s what happened. One afternoon a tall young man saw the book in the window. He came into the shop, picked it up, read a few pages, and brought it to the register. When he spoke to the owner, she couldn’t place his accent. She asked where he was from, curious about the person who was taking the book away. Israel, he told her, explaining that he’d recently finished his time in the army and was traveling around South America for a few months. The owner was about to put the book in a bag, but the young man said he didn’t need one, and slipped it into his backpack. The door chimes were still tinkling as she watched him disappear, his sandals slapping against the hot, bright street. That night, shirtless in his rented room, under a fan lazily pushing around the hot air, the young man opened the book and, in a flourish he had been fine-tuning for years, signed his name: David Singer. Filled with restlessness and longing, he began to read.
Nicole Krauss
At the trial in March 1952, Turing pled guilty, though he made clear he felt no remorse. Max Newman appeared as a character witness. Convicted and stripped of his security clearance,VI Turing was offered a choice: imprisonment or probation contingent on receiving hormone treatments via injections of a synthetic estrogen designed to curb his sexual desires, as if he were a chemically controlled machine. He chose the latter, which he endured for a year. Turing at first seemed to take it all in stride, but on June 7, 1954, he committed suicide by biting into an apple he had laced with cyanide. His friends noted that he had always been fascinated by the scene in Snow White in which the Wicked Queen dips an apple into a poisonous brew. He was found in his bed with froth around his mouth, cyanide in his system, and a half-eaten apple by his side. Was that something a machine would have done?
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
But ultimately, I couldn’t. Something kept preventing me. It just felt wrong. To blank my posts from the face of the earth wasn’t illegal, and it wouldn’t even have made me ineligible for a security clearance had anyone found out. But the prospect of doing so bothered me nonetheless. It would’ve only served to reinforce some of the most corrosive precepts of online life: that nobody is ever allowed to make a mistake, and anybody who does make a mistake must answer for it forever. What mattered to me wasn’t so much the integrity of the written record but that of my soul. I didn’t want to live in a world where everyone had to pretend that they were perfect, because that was a world that had no place for me or my friends. To erase those comments would have been to erase who I was, where I was from, and how far I’d come. To deny my younger self would have been to deny my present self’s validity.
Edward Snowden (Permanent Record)
The Secret Team does not like criticism, investigation, or history and is always prone to see the world as divided into but two camps—“Them” and “Us.” Sometimes the distinction may be as little as one dot, as in “So. Viets” and “Soviets,” the So. Viets being our friends in Indochina, and the Soviets being the enemy of that period. To be a member, you don’t question, you don’t ask; it’s “Get on the Team” or else. One of its most powerful weapons in the most political and powerful capitals of the world is that of exclusion. To be denied the “need to know” status, like being a member of the Team, even though one may have all the necessary clearances, is to be totally blackballed and eliminated from further participation. Politically, if you are cut from the Team and from its insider’s knowledge, you are dead. In many ways and by many criteria the Secret Team is the inner sanctum of a new religious order.
L. Fletcher Prouty (The Secret Team: The CIA & its Allies in Control of the United States & the World)
Why the two [gigantic obelisks left unfinished at the Aswan quarry] were never finished is unknown. It appears that the workers simply stopped and never came back. The same possibly was the case at the Serapeum at Saqqara, where most of the 100 ton boxes were never finished. If these are pre-dynastic works as expected, then the great cataclysm of 12,000 years ago could have been the culprit - massive earthquakes and possibly solar blasts devastating all life in these and other areas. There is a massive horizontal crack in the bottom of the right channel of the great obelisk that also may have been the reason [...]. On another note, the left and right channels of the great obelisk would have been too narrow for workers to be shaping them with dolerite stone pounders. A lot of force would be required to remove any material at all, and having a foot or two of clearance would result in very little if any stone removal.
Brien Foerster (Aftershock: The Ancient Cataclysm That Erased Human History)
Flouting federal laws governing record-keeping requirements. Failing to preserve emails sent or received from her personal accounts, as required by law. Circumventing the Freedom of Information Act. Instructing her aides to send classified materials on her unsecure network. Running afoul of the “gross negligence” clause of the Espionage Act (which meant prosecutors would not have to prove “intent” to find her guilty). Pretending she didn’t know that Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) was classified. Transferring classified material that originated at the CIA, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence sources, to her unsecured network. Authoring hundreds of emails with classified information to people who did not have security clearance. Inducing aides to commit perjury. Lying to the FBI. Engaging in public corruption by using the office of secretary of state to feather the nest of the Clinton family foundation.
Edward Klein (Guilty as Sin: Uncovering New Evidence of Corruption and How Hillary Clinton and the Democrats Derailed the FBI Investigation)
By the end of June, Strauss had the votes of all but one commissioner. The only scientist on the Commission, Professor Smyth had made it clear that he thought Oppenheimer’s security clearance should be restored. As the author of the 1945 “Smyth Report,” an unclassified scientific history of the Manhattan Project, Smyth was familiar with both Oppenheimer and the security issues at stake. On a personal level, he didn’t particularly care for Oppenheimer; they had been Princeton neighbors for ten years, and Oppenheimer had always struck him as a vain and pretentious man. What mattered was that Smyth didn’t find the evidence convincing. In early May, he and Strauss had lunch and proceeded to argue about the verdict. At the end of their lunch, Smyth said, “Lewis, the difference between you and me is that you see everything as either black or white and to me everything looks gray.” “Harry,” Strauss snapped back, “let me recommend you to a good oculist.
Kai Bird (American Prometheus)
An author who composes while walking, on the other hand, is free from such bonds; his thought is not the slave of other volumes, not swollen with verifications, nor weighted with the thought of others. It contains no explanation owed to anyone: just thought, judgement, decision. It is thought born of a movement, an impulse. In it we can feel the body’s elasticity, the rhythm of a dance. It retains and expresses the energy, the springiness of the body. Here is thought about the thing itself, without the scrambling, the fogginess, the barriers, the customs clearances of culture and tradition. The result will not be long and meticulous exegesis, but thoughts that are light and profound. That is really the challenge: the lighter a thought, the more it rises, and becomes profound by rising – vertiginously – above the thick marshes of conviction, opinion, established thought. While books conceived in the library are on the contrary superficial and heavy. They remain on the level of recopying.
Frédéric Gros (A Philosophy of Walking)
grin. “If I’m going to lay down a fortune for the privilege of experiencing your quivering virgin flesh, I think it goes without saying that I expect to do it without a barrier.” I sat back, clenching my teeth so hard that my head started to ache. My gaze was held fast by the challenge in his ebony eyes. He might have been the most gorgeous creature I’d ever laid my eyes on, but he was also an asshat. He tilted his head at me, puzzled. “Why is that a problem? If we are both cleared by a physician—” I unclenched my jaw just long enough to reply. “Recent medical clearance is not sufficient for me. I’d require celibacy for at least the previous six months, so—” “Then there isn’t a problem.” I highly doubted that. I opened my mouth to call him a liar when Heath leaned forward and put his hand on the table in front of me. Drake’s lawyer cleared his throat, throwing a bland look at me and turning to Drake. “We can work all these details out later in mediation. Mr. Drake does have a plane to catch later today.” Drake’s eyes darted to Heath and back to me. I could tell he was trying to gauge our relationship. It wasn’t the first time a person had looked at the two of us in that unsure, questioning way. Heath was not obviously gay in any way. He wasn’t “fabulous” or flamboyant. He was very masculine in his behavior and mannerisms, so he rarely set off people’s gaydar. My gaze turned back to Drake, drawn to him like a flame pulled into a hot, dry wind. I resented the heat on my cheeks. I was not a habitual blusher. Hardly ever, actually. But this man was bringing my Irish up, as my mother liked to say. And what was worse, the more annoyed I grew with him, the more amused he seemed to be. Drake flicked a glance at Heath and then his lawyer. “Gentlemen, could you excuse us for a moment? You’re free to wait just outside the door.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he glanced at me. “If, of course, that is okay with the lady?” My face flamed hotter and I folded my hands on my lap. “Fine,” I said, wondering if the thirty-something New Yorker was still interested in the
Brenna Aubrey (At Any Price (Gaming the System, #1))
As Garrison had tried to show, belatedly, the Gray Board hearings were patently unfair and outrageously extrajudicial. The primary responsibility for the proceedings lay with Lewis Strauss. But as chairman of the board, Gordon Gray could have ensured that the hearing was conducted properly and fairly. He did not do his job. Instead of taking control of the hearing to maintain fairness, which would have required him to rein in Robb’s illicit tactics, he allowed Robb to control the proceedings. Prior to the hearing, Gray permitted Robb to meet exclusively with the board to review the FBI files, a direct violation of the AEC’s 1950 “Security Clearance Procedures.” He accepted Robb’s recommendation that Garrison be denied a similar meeting; he acquiesced to Robb’s refusal to reveal his witness list to Garrison; he did not share Lawrence’s damaging written testimony with the defense; he did nothing to expedite a security clearance for Garrison. The Gray Board was, in sum, a veritable kangaroo court in which the head judge accepted the prosecutor’s lead. As AEC commissioner Henry D. Smyth would insist, any objective legal review of how the hearing was conducted surely would result in its nullification.
Kai Bird (American Prometheus)
Amongst democratic nations, as well as elsewhere, the number of official appointments has in the end some limits; but amongst those nations, the number of aspirants is unlimited; it perpetually increases, with a gradual and irresistible rise in proportion as social conditions become more equal, and is only checked by the limits of the population. Thus, when public employments afford the only outlet for ambition, the government necessarily meets with a permanent opposition at last; for it is tasked to satisfy with limited means unlimited desires. It is very certain that of all people in the world the most difficult to restrain and to manage are a people of solicitants. Whatever endeavors are made by rulers, such a people can never be contented; and it is always to be apprehended that they will ultimately overturn the constitution of the country, and change the aspect of the State, for the sole purpose of making a clearance of places. The sovereigns of the present age, who strive to fix upon themselves alone all those novel desires which are aroused by equality, and to satisfy them, will repent in the end, if I am not mistaken, that they ever embarked in this policy: they will one day discover that they have hazarded their own power, by making it so necessary; and that the more safe and honest course would have been to teach their subjects the art of providing for themselves.
Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America)
The cart slowed as they came to a place so dark and quiet that it seemed as if they had entered some remote forest. Peeking beneath the hem of the cart's canvas covering, Garrett saw towering gates covered with ivy, and ghostly sculptures of angels, and solemn figures of men, women, and children with their arms crossed in resignation upon their breasts. Graveyard sculptures. A stab of horror went through her, and she crawled to the front of the cart to where West Ravenel was sitting with the driver. "Where the devil are you taking us, Mr. Ravenel?" He glanced at her over his shoulder, his brows raised. "I told you before- a private railway station." "It looks like a cemetery." "It's a cemetery station," he admitted. "With a dedicated line that runs funeral trains out to the burial grounds. It also happens to connect to the main lines and branches of the London Ironstone Railroad, owned by our mutual friend Tom Severin." "You told Mr. Severin about all this? Dear God. Can we trust him?" West grimaced slightly. "One never wants to be in the position of having to trust Severin," he admitted. "But he's the only one who could obtain clearances for a special train so quickly." They approached a massive brick and stone building housing a railway platform. A ponderous stone sign adorned the top of the carriage entrance: Silent Gardens. Just below it, the shape of an open book emblazoned with words had been carved in the stone. Ad Meliora. "Toward better things," Garrett translated beneath her breath.
Lisa Kleypas (Hello Stranger (The Ravenels, #4))
He would have known or found out that the sewer-pipe running out of Cellblock 5 was the last one in Shawshank not hooked into the new waste-treatment plant, and he would have known it was do it by mid-1975 or do it never, because in August they were going to switch us over to the new waste-treatment plant, too. Five hundred yards. The length of five football fields. Just shy of half a mile. He crawled that distance, maybe with one of those small Penlites in his hand, maybe with nothing but a couple of books of matches. He crawled through foulness that I either can’t imagine or don’t want to imagine. Maybe the rats scattered in front of him, or maybe they went for him the way such animals sometimes will when they’ve had a chance to grow bold in the dark. He must have had just enough clearance at the shoulders to keep moving, and he probably had to shove himself through the places where the lengths of pipe were joined. If it had been me, the claustrophobia would have driven me mad a dozen times over. But he did it. At the far end of the pipe they found a set of muddy footprints leading out of the sluggish, polluted creek the pipe fed into. Two miles from there a search party found his prison uniform—that was a day later. The story broke big in the papers, as you might guess, but no one within a fifteen-mile radius of the prison stepped forward to report a stolen car, stolen clothes, or a naked man in the moonlight. There was not so much as a barking dog in a farmyard. He came out of the sewer-pipe and he disappeared like smoke. But I am betting he disappeared in the direction of Buxton.
Stephen King (Different Seasons: Four Novellas)
They had assumed the attack would be just another barely noted, barely investigated skirmish in South Central-- in short, a typical gang case-- until word got back to them that they had killed a police officer's son. The case was eminently solvable-- once the right kind of pressure was applied. Lyle Prideaux had called Skaggs "a hard man." But he was not exactly hard. He as just unequivocal. In his hands, the murders were elevated in law to what they were in fact: Atrocities that must be answered for every single time. The world wasn't watching. The public, his superiors, and a large share of the country's thinking classes gave only glancing notice to the battle Skaggs had devoted his life to. But Skaggs didn't care; Skaggs turned his back to the parade. And just as it is impossible to imagine that things in the South would not have been different if the legal system had operated differently-- had black men's lives, for example, been afforded profound value as measured by the response of legal authorities-- it is impossible to imagine that the thousands of young men who died on the streets of Los Angeles County during Skaggs's career would have done so had their killers anticipated a "John Skaggs Special" in every case. If every murder and every serious assault against a black man on the streets were investigated with Skaggs's ceaseless vigor and determination-- investigated as if one's own child were the victim, or as if we, as a society, could not bear to lose these people-- conditions would have been different. If the system had for years produced the very high clearance rates that Skaggs was so sure were possible-- if it did not function, in the aggregate, as a "forty percenter"-- the violence could not have been so routine. The victims would not have been so anonymous, and Bryant Tennelle might not have died in the nearly invisible, commonplace way in which he did.
Jill Leovy
Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret. I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you. First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all—so much! incredible!—suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well. You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t … and that all those other people are fools. Over a longer period of time—not too long, but a matter of two or three years—you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn. In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: “What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?” And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues … and with myself. You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.
Greg Grandin (Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman)
Lieutenant Smith was asked by Mister Zumwald to get him a drink,” Wilkes said. “She responded with physical violence. I counseled her on conduct unbecoming of an officer and, when she reacted with foul language, on disrespect to a superior officer, sir, and I’ll stand by that position. Sir.” “I agree that her actions were unbecoming, Captain,” Steve said, mildly. “She really should have resolved it with less force. Which I told her as well as a strong lecture on respect to a superior officer. On the other hand, Captain, Mister Zumwald physically accosted her, grabbing her arm and, when she protested, called her a bitch. Were you aware of that, Captain?” “She did say something about it, sir,” Wilkes said. “However… ” “I also understand that you spent some time with Mister Zumwald afterwards,” Steve said. “Rather late. Did you at any time express to Mister Zumwald that accosting any woman, much less an officer of… what was it? ‘The United States Naval services’ was unacceptable behavior, Captain?” “Sir,” Wilkes said. “Mister Zumwald is a major Hollywood executive… ” “Was,” Steve said. “Excuse me, sir?” Wilkes said. “Was a major Hollywood executive,” Steve said. “Right now, Ernest Zumwald, Captain, is a fucking refugee off a fucking lifeboat. Period fucking dot. He’s given a few days grace, like most refugees, to get his headspace and timing back, then he can decide if he wants to help out or go in with the sick, lame and lazy. And in this case he’s a fucking refugee who thinks it’s acceptable to accost some unknown chick and tell him to get him a fucking drink. Grab her by the arm and, when she tells him to let go, become verbally abusive. “What makes the situation worse, Captain, is that the person he accosted was not just any passing young hotty but a Marine officer. He did not know that at the time; the Marine officer was dressed much like other women in the compartment. However, he does not have the right to grab any woman in my care by the fucking arm and order them to get him a fucking drink, Captain! Then, to make matters worse, following the incident, Captain, you spent the entire fucking evening getting drunk with a fucktard who had physically and verbally assaulted a female Marine officer! You dumbshit.” “Sir, I… ” Wilkes said, paling. “And not just any Marine officer, oh, no,” Steve said. “Forget that it was the daughter of the Acting LANTFLEET. Forget that it was the daughter of your fucking rating officer, you retard. I’m professional enough to overlook that. I really am. There’s personal and professional, and I do actually know the line. Except that it was, professionally, a disgraceful action on your part, Captain. But not just any Marine officer, Captain. No, this was a Marine officer that, unlike you, is fucking worshipped by your Marines, Captain. This is a Marine officer that the acting Commandant thinks only uses boats so her boots don’t get wet walking from ship to ship. This is a Marine officer who is the only fucking light in the darkness to the entire Squadron, you dumbfuck! “I’d already gotten the scuttlebutt that you were a palace prince pogue who was a cowardly disgrace to the Marine uniform, Captain. I was willing to let that slide because maybe you could run the fucking clearance from the fucking door. But you just pissed off every fucking Marine we’ve got, you idiot. You incredible dumbfuck, moron! “In case you hadn’t noticed, you are getting cold-shouldered by everyone you work with while you were brown-nosing some fucking useless POS who used to ‘be somebody.’ ‘Your’ Marines are spitting on your shadow and that includes your fucking Gunnery Sergeant! Captain, am I getting through to you? Are you even vaguely recognizing how badly you fucked up? Professionally, politically, personally?
John Ringo (To Sail a Darkling Sea (Black Tide Rising, #2))
have security clearances anymore.” “So
David Baldacci (King and Maxwell (Sean King & Michelle Maxwell, #6))
FDA classifies devices according to the risk they pose to consumers. Premarket review is required for moderate- and high-risk devices. There are two paths that manufacturers can use to bring such devices to market. One path consists of conducting clinical studies, submitting a premarket approval (PMA) application and requires evidence providing reasonable assurance that the device is safe and effective. The other path involves submitting a 510(k) notification demonstrating that the device is substantially equivalent to a device already on the market (a predicate device) that does not require a PMA. The 510(k) process results in FDA clearance and tends to be much less expensive and less time-consuming than seeking FDA approval via PMA.
Judith A. Johnson (FDA Regulation of Medical Devices)
The cropped photo that Life printed with Oswald holding a rifle was found in a box removed from the garage and taken to the police department, then returned the next day with no one present to identify its origin. Accessory after the fact, a letter was delivered to Marina in December undated and unsigned to cover up General Walker’s anxiety over blaming a “Communist,” Lee Oswald, for shooting at him in April. Ruth Paine gave the letter to Marina. It wasn’t in the home before then. The Warren Commission required planted evidence to divert attention from Oswald’s links to the Defense Department. Michael Paine was employed by Bell Aircraft, a DoD contractor. This job required security clearances—what would the Oswalds, an American “defector” and his transplanted Russian wife, be doing in his home?
Mae Brussell (The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America)
A new voice pops up on the comm, relayed from the station. March. "What the frag are you doing, Triumph? Who's at the helm? I didn't give clearance for a pleasure cruise." "Can't talk, Commander," Hit answers smoothly. "We're busy saving your ass.
Ann Aguirre (Killbox (Sirantha Jax, #4))
You can never clear a thought from someone's mind, which is incepted by a external cause. thy you know the truth, let it pass patience and self realization is the key to clearance.
Pushkar Saraf
We wait to be rescued, but for whatever reason, no one comes. We figure that if no one protects us then we must not be worth protecting so we become prey and are easily picked off. Our wounded, kicked-puppy gazes attract sly predators and we sell ourselves for clearance.
Laura Wiess (Such a Pretty Girl)
So unless you have had your intelligence clearance reinstated AND elevated, you will just have to live with the uncertainty of not knowing.
E.C. Kelley (Find A Way Or Make One (Finding Love Book 1))
Minutes later,United 175 turned southwest without clearance from air traffic control. At 8:47, seconds after the impact of American 11, United 175’s transponder code changed, and then changed again.These changes were not noticed for several minutes, however, because the same New York Center controller was assigned to both American 11 and United 175. The controller knew American 11 was
Anonymous
There were other important reasons for the growth of American individualism at the expense of community in the second half of the twentieth century besides the nature of capitalism. The first arose as an unintended consequence of a number of liberal reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Slum clearance uprooted and destroyed many of the social networks that existed in poor neighborhoods, replacing them with an anonymous and increasingly dangerous existence in high-rise public housing units. “Good government” drives eliminated the political machines that at one time governed most large American cities. The old, ethnically based machines were often highly corrupt, but they served as a source of local empowerment and community for their clients. In subsequent years, the most important political action would take place not in the local community but at higher and higher levels of state and federal government. A second factor had to do with the expansion of the welfare state from the New Deal on, which tended to make federal, state, and local governments responsible for many social welfare functions that had previously been under the purview of civil society. The original argument for the expansion of state responsibilities to include social security, welfare, unemployment insurance, training, and the like was that the organic communities of preindustrial society that had previously provided these services were no longer capable of doing so as a result of industrialization, urbanization, decline of extended families, and related phenomena. But it proved to be the case that the growth of the welfare state accelerated the decline of those very communal institutions that it was designed to supplement. Welfare dependency in the United States is only the most prominent example: Aid to Familles with Dependent Children, the depression-era legislation that was designed to help widows and single mothers over the transition as they reestablished their lives and families, became the mechanism that permitted entire inner-city populations to raise children without the benefit of fathers. The rise of the welfare state cannot be more than a partial explanation for the decline of community, however. Many European societies have much more extensive welfare states than the United States; while nuclear families have broken down there as well, there is a much lower level of extreme social pathology. A more serious threat to community has come, it would seem, from the vast expansion in the number and scope of rights to which Americans believe they are entitled, and the “rights culture” this produces. Rights-based individualism is deeply embedded in American political theory and constitutional law. One might argue, in fact, that the fundamental tendency of American institutions is to promote an ever-increasing degree of individualism. We have seen repeatedly that communities tend to be intolerant of outsiders in proportion to their internal cohesiveness, because the very strength of the principles that bind members together exclude those that do not share them. Many of the strong communal structures in the United States at midcentury discriminated in a variety of ways: country clubs that served as networking sites for business executives did not allow Jews, blacks, or women to join; church-run schools that taught strong moral values did not permit children of other denominations to enroll; charitable organizations provided services for only certain groups of people and tried to impose intrusive rules of behavior on their clients. The exclusiveness of these communities conflicted with the principle of equal rights, and the state increasingly took the side of those excluded against these communal organizations.
Francis Fukuyama (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity)
I wanted to be a spy,” Olga said, shrugging. “I applied to the CIA. I was turned down. I did not meet the psychological profile. Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Basically, I have a hard time taking orders from idiots.” “Don’t think of me as an idiot and I won’t give you an idiotic order,” Sophia said. “But if I give you one, you’d better do it. Because it’s probably going to mean surviving or dying.” “You I don’t mind,” Olga said. “Or I wouldn’t have joined your crew. Don’t ask me about Nazar. So I was in Spain with the troupe. When the Plague hit, they shut down travel. And all my guns were in America. In a zombie apocalypse. I was quite upset.” “You should have seen Faith when they told her she had to be disarmed in New York,” Sophia said. “Then they gave her a taser and that was mistake. What kind of guns?” “I like that your family prefers the AK series,” Olga said. “I really do think it’s superior to the M16 series in many ways. Much more reliable. They say it is less accurate but that is at longer ranges. The round is not designed for long range.” “I can hit at a thousand meters with my accurized AK,” Sophia said. “It’s a matter of knowing the ballistics. It’s not real powerful at that range, but try doing the same thing with an M4. I’ll wait.” “Oh, jeeze, you two,” Paula said. “Get a room.” “So continue with how you got on the yacht,” Sophia said. “We don’t want our cook getting all woozy with gun geeking.” “We were called by the agency and asked if anyone wanted to ‘catch a ride’ on a yacht,” Olga said. “When they said who owned the boat… I nearly said no. We all knew Nazar. Or at least of him. Not a nice man, as you might have noticed. We knew what we were getting into. But then we were told he had vaccine… ” she shrugged again. “Accepting Nazar’s offer was perhaps not the worst decision I have made in my life. I survived. Not how I would have preferred to survive, but I was vaccinated and I survived. But I did not even hint that I knew more about his men’s weapons than they did. They were pigs. Tough guys. But none of them were military and none of them really knew what they were doing with them. When they brought out the RPG, I nearly peed myself. Irinei had no idea what he was doing with it. I don’t think he even knew the safety was off.” “You know how to use an RPG?” Sophia said. “My family liked the United States very much,” Olga said, sadly. “We all like guns and anything that goes boom. And in the US, you could find people who had licenses for anything. I’ve fired an RPG, yes.” “Well, if we find an RPG you can have it,” Sophia said. “Oh, thank you, captain!” Olga said, clapping her hands girlishly. “But we’ll be keeping the rounds and the launcher separate,” Sophia said. “Oh, my, yes,” Olga said. “And both will have to be in a well sealed container. This salt air would cause corrosion quickly.” “I guess you miss your guns?” Paula said. “That’s not a request for an inventory and loving description of each, by the way. Got that enough from Faith.” “I do,” Olga said. “But I miss my books more.” “Books,” Paula said. “Now you’re talking my language.” “I have more books than shelves,” Olga said. “And I had many shelves. I collect old manuscripts when I can afford them.” “If we do any land clearance, look in the libraries and big houses,” Sophia said. “I bet around here you can probably pick up some great stuff.” “This is okay?” Olga said. “We can, salvage?” “If there’s time and if we clear the town,” Sophia said. “Sure.” “Oh, thank you, captain!” Olga said, kissing her on the cheek. “Okay, now you definitely need to get a room.
John Ringo
certain employees can only trade Amazon.com securities during designated trading windows, and certain employees must obtain pre-clearance from the Amazon Legal
Anonymous
But the evidence collated by the Central Bank of Ireland once the crisis was finally resolved in November 1970 showed quite the opposite. Their review of the closure concluded not only that “the Irish economy continued to function for a reasonably long period of time with its main clearing banks closed for business,” but that “the level of economic activity continued to increase” over the period.37 Both before and after the event, it seemed unbelievable—but somehow, it had worked: for six and a half months, in one of the then thirty wealthiest economies in the world, “a highly personalized credit system without any definite time horizon for the eventual clearance of debits and credits substituted for the existing institutionalized banking system.
Anonymous
Many people think that the high blood sugar seen in diabetes is due to a failure in clearance because the cells cannot take up the glucose in the blood for fuel. Even the textbooks say it. Glucose enters cells through a receptor called GLUT4. While the number of GLUT4 receptors in people with diabetes does not increase in response to dietary glucose as much as it does in healthy people, it this seems that this is not the major cause of hyperglycemia. People with diabetes still have enough of these receptors under most conditions. The major problem, as shown in Figure 10-1, appears to be the persistence of glucose production from the liver.
Richard David Feinman (The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution)
Alan Turing was another cryptanalyst who did not live long enough to receive any public recognition. Instead of being acclaimed a hero, he was persecuted for his homosexuality. In 1952, while reporting a burglary to the police, he naively revealed that he was having a homosexual relationship. The police felt they had no option but to arrest and charge him with “Gross Indecency contrary to Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885.” The newspapers reported the subsequent trial and conviction, and Turing was publicly humiliated. Turing’s secret had been exposed, and his sexuality was now public knowledge. The British Government withdrew his security clearance. He was forbidden to work on research projects relating to the development of the computer. He was forced to consult a psychiatrist and had to undergo hormone treatment, which made him impotent and obese. Over the next two years he became severely depressed, and on June 7, 1954, he went to his bedroom, carrying with him a jar of cyanide solution and an apple. Twenty years earlier he had chanted the rhyme of the Wicked Witch: “Dip the apple in the brew, Let the sleeping death seep through.” Now he was ready to obey her incantation. He dipped the apple in the cyanide and took several bites. At the age of just forty-two, one of the true geniuses of cryptanalysis committed suicide.
Simon Singh (The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography)
someone who could be given Presidential and Lindbergh clearances, and I needed him right
W.E.B. Griffin (The Assassination Option (Clandestine Operations, #2))
Cissy had proven to be a major asset during the journey home. Fueled by journalistic pride and booze, she drove ahead of Cormac, honking at oncoming traffic to make sure that they allowed the Volvo ample clearance. At one point in time, she tried to lead them on a shortcut through a city park. Cormac didn't think the couch could handle an off-road journey, so he stuck to the road. Cissy later confirmed that she'd actually nodded off at the wheel. She said that she'd hit a goose, and would prefer not to discuss it.
Conor Lastowka (Gone Whalin')
declarations and clearance documents
Steve Martini (Trader Of Secrets (Paul Madriani, #12))
scholars and academics invited for conferences or seminars require security clearance before they will be given visas. Corporate executives and businessmen do not.
Anonymous
When on October 5, 1917, the Passchendaele offensive was sinking into the mire, and the Cabinet sought to bring it to a conclusion, Robertson was compelled to rest himself upon ‘the unsatisfactory state of the French armies and of the general political situation in France, which was still far from reassuring’;10 and again: ‘The original object of the campaign—the clearance of the Belgian coast—was seen to be doubtful of attainment long before the operations terminated, owing to the bad weather experienced and to the delay in starting caused by the change of plan earlier in the year. But, as already explained, there were strong reasons why activity had to be maintained. We must give the French armies time to recover their strength and morale, make every effort to keep Russia in the field in some form or other, and try to draw enemy troops to Flanders which might otherwise be sent against Italy, especially after her defeat at Caporetto. All these purposes of distraction were achieved, and in addition heavy losses were inflicted upon the German armies.’11 For these ‘purposes of distraction’ the killing, maiming or capture of over 400,000 British soldiers was apparently considered a reasonable price to pay. It appears however that although Robertson drove the Cabinet remorselessly forward, he had convinced himself that none of the British attacks for which he bore responsibility in 1915 and in 1916 had had any chance of decisive success. ‘With respect to the alleged error of always attacking where the enemy was strongest,’ he writes,12 ‘I could not refrain from saying that the greatest of all errors was that of not providing before the war an army adequate to enforce the policy adopted…. Until this year we have not had the means to attack with the hope of getting a decision,13 and therefore we have had no choice in the point of attack.’ He used these words on his own avowal on June 21, 1917; so that the highest expert authority responsible for procuring the support of the Cabinet to two years of offensive operations had already convinced himself that up till 1917 the British Army ‘had not the means to attack with the hope of getting a decision.’ Undeterred however by this slowly-gained revelation, he proceeded to drive the unfortunate Ministers to authorize the prolongation into the depths of winter of the Passchendaele offensive.
Winston S. Churchill (The World Crisis, Vol. 3 Part 1 and Part 2 (Winston Churchill's World Crisis Collection))
How they got in touch with each other in other instances, only they know. But paying a mistress with taxpayer funds and giving her a security clearance? These were new lows.
Gary J. Byrne (Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate)
Despite the richness of the frameworks presented in these and other materials, a significant proportion of today’s police organizations remain narrowly focused on the same categories of indicators that have dominated the field for decades:        1.   Reductions in the number of serious crimes reported, most commonly presented as local comparisons against an immediately preceding time period        2.   Clearance rates        3.   Response times        4.   Measures of enforcement productivity (for example, numbers of arrests, citations, or stop-and-frisk searches)
Malcolm K. Sparrow (Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform)
Drone-flying farmers may gain clearance
Anonymous
constrict cutaneous muscle and splanchnic vasculature and promote salt and water retention. h e synthesis of vasodilating prostaglandins (prostacyclin and PGE 2 ) and nitric oxide in the kidneys and the intrarenal action of angiotensin II recurrent angina signals the need for angiography, if it has not already been performed. Intraaortic balloon counterpulsation is usually reserved for hemodynamically compromised patients with refractory ischemia. Temporary pacing following AMI is indicated for Mobitz type II and complete heart block, a new bifascicular block, and bradycardia with hypotension. Emergency treatment of arrhythmias constantly evolves and we recommend that the guidelines for Advanced Cardiac Life Support be followed. In general, ventricular tachycardia, if treated medically is best managed with amiodarone (150 mg intravenous bolus over 10 min). Synchronized cardioversion may be used in patients with ventricular tachycardia and with a pulse. Patients with a stable narrow-complex supraventricular tachycardia should be treated with amiodarone. Patients with paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia, whose ejection fraction is preserved, should be treated with a calcium channel blocker, a β blocker, or DC cardioversion. Medically unstable hypotensive patients should receive cardioversion. Patients with ectopic or multifocal atrial tachycardia should not receive DC cardioversion; instead they should be treated with calcium channel blockers, a β blocker, or amiodarone. Acute Kidney Injury & Failure Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a rapid deterioration in renal function that is not immediately reversible by altering factors such as blood pressure, intravascular volume, cardiac output, or urinary l ow. h e hallmark of AKI is azotemia and frequently oliguria. Azotemia may be classii ed as prerenal, renal, and postrenal.Moreover, the diagnosis of renal azotemia is one of exclusion; thus, prerenal and postrenal causes must always be excluded.However, not all patients with acute azotemia have kidney failure.Likewise, urine output of more than 500 mL/d does not imply that renal function is normal. Basing the diagnosis of AKI on creatinine levels or an increase in blood urea nitrogen (BUN) is also problematic because creatinine clearance is not always a good measure of glomerular i ltration 12 r a t e . h e criteria developed by the Acute Kidney Injury Network are now most ot en used
Anonymous
Can you help me move those tables against the wall?” Mama pointed to five tables in the back corner. “The funeral home said they needed four feet of clearance all the way around.
Katie Graykowski (Place Your Betts (The Marilyns, #1))
primitive planes that probably wouldn’t even get a safety clearance in her day. If this were a movie or a cheap, particularly stupid novel, it was the point at which she would call up Jan Zumbach and order him to get his crazy-arse Poles back to base. But
John Birmingham (Designated Targets (Axis of Time, #2))
True Global Man The true global man: wears Italian parties Brazilian furnishes Swedish drives German drinks Scotch banks Swiss fights Asian haggles Jewish meditates Indian budgets Welsh swims Australian smokes Jamaican dances African cooks-the-books Greek eats Japanese jokes American and fucks Latin. As Opposed to Me: wears what's on clearance parties drug-free furnishes Craigslist drives German (check ~ Mercedes 450SL) drinks coffee banks credit unions fights dirty then cleverly avoids capture haggles Jewish (surprise, surprise!) meditates SFB (San Francisco Bay) budgets Russian (meaning no budget) swims away from the sharks smokes salmon (preferably on a bagel with a shmear) dances geek cooks-the-books Jewish CPA style eats pussy and the occasional crow jokes global and fucks Latin ~ (check ~ but I'm alone watching porn).
Beryl Dov
Her version of Jesus suggested that though he may have loved me, he merely tolerated me. The mantra 'hate the sin, love the sinner' troubled me. Because if you were under the impression that being gay was inherently wrong, you were operating from the frame of mind that I was inherently wrong. You thought I was the equivalent of irregular denim bought at an outlet mall. I was nobody's clearance-ass jean. My packaging was fine.
Michael Arceneaux (I Can't Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I've Put My Faith in Beyoncé)
A task force of the American Bar Association described the bleak reality facing someone convicted of a petty drug offense this way: [The] offender may be sentenced to a term of probation, community service, and court costs. Unbeknownst to this offender, and perhaps any other actor in the sentencing process, as a result of his conviction he may be ineligible for many federally-funded health and welfare benefits, food stamps, public housing, and federal educational assistance. His driver’s license may be automatically suspended, and he may no longer qualify for certain employment and professional licenses. If he is convicted of another crime he may be subject to imprisonment as a repeat offender. He will not be permitted to enlist in the military, or possess a firearm, or obtain a federal security clearance. If a citizen, he may lose the right to vote; if not, he becomes immediately deportable.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
Q clearance as well as Executive presidential, called MAJESTIC) approval. This is ironic, due to the fact that the President of the United States does not have clearance to visit the site. The alien bases and exchange of technology actually took place in an area code-named Dreamland above ground, and the underground portion was dubbed "the Dark Side of the Moon.
Milton William Cooper (Behold! a Pale Horse, by William Cooper: Reprint recomposed, illustrated & annotated for coherence & clarity (Public Cache))
She took a step forward, leaving maybe a quarter of an inch of clearance between her belly and the tip of his boxer-tented doodle.
Neal Stephenson (Fall; or, Dodge in Hell)
Although he was wanted in Europe for Nazi war crimes, senior State Department and CIA leaders intervened on Hilger’s behalf and brought him to the United States under an alias, giving him high-level security clearance and the veneer of respectability through postings at Harvard and Johns Hopkins. Hilger made no apologies for his Nazi loyalties.
Eric Lichtblau (The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men)