Defense Industry Quotes

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How can you protect yourself by carrying a sword if you don’t know how to use it?’ Not me, sir. Other people. They see the sword and don’t attack me,’ said Maladict patiently. Yes, but if they did, lad, you wouldn’t be any good with it,’ said the sergeant. No, sir. I’d probably settle for just ripping their heads off, sir. That’s what I mean by protection, sir. Theirs, not mine. And I’d get hell from the League if I did that, sir.
Terry Pratchett (Monstrous Regiment (Discworld, #31; Industrial Revolution, #3))
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The industrial mind is a mind without compunction; it simply accepts that people, ultimately, will be treated as things and that things, ultimately, will be treated as garbage. (A Defense of the Family Farm, 1986)
Wendell Berry
Peace is bad for business. When the former Soviet Union fell apart, the U.S. defense industry was staring into the face of a falling market share: To grow, it would have to find a new enemy. It would also help if it expanded its product line from building fighter jets to the newfangled demand for applications involving surveillance.
Naomi Wolf (The End of America)
The best defense industry is to build good relationships with your neighbors! The best missile, the best tank, the best atomic bomb is to be good friends with other countries! Enmity and its measures belong to the world of stupidity!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The more automated society gets and the more powerful the attacking AI becomes, the more devastating cyberwarfare can be. If you can hack and crash your enemy’s self-driving cars, auto-piloted planes, nuclear reactors, industrial robots, communication systems, financial systems and power grids, then you can effectively crash his economy and cripple his defenses. If you can hack some of his weapons systems as well, even better.
Max Tegmark (Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Depending on how we spend them, our food dollars can either go to support a food industry devoted to quantity and convenience and “value” or they can nourish a food chain organized around values—values like quality and health. Yes, shopping this way takes more money and effort, but as soon you begin to treat that expenditure not just as shopping but also as a kind of vote—a vote for health in the largest sense—food no longer seems like the smartest place to economize.
Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)
Every action taken by human beings is based in love or fear, not simply those dealing with relationships. Decisions affecting business, industry, politics, religion, the education of your young, the social agenda of your nations, the economic goals of your society, choices involving war, peace, attack, defense, aggression, submission; determinations to covet or give away, to save or to share, to unite or to divide—every single free choice you ever undertake arises out of one of the only two possible thoughts there are: a thought of love or a thought of fear. Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hoards, harms. Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals. Fear wraps our bodies in clothing, love allows us to stand naked. Fear clings to and clutches all that we have, love gives all that we have away. Fear holds close, love holds dear. Fear grasps, love lets go. Fear rankles, love soothes. Fear attacks, love amends. Every human thought, word, or deed is based in one emotion or the other. You have no choice about this, because there is nothing else from which to choose. But you have free choice about which of these to select.
Neale Donald Walsch (The Complete Conversations with God)
With the changing ownership of media giants, several have been taken over by corporations based in the defense or entertainment industry, reinforcing the tendency to treat news as marketable entertainment. Yet another reason for the continuing erosion of press freedom arises from the common sense that the press shares with those in power.
Mahmood Mamdani (Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror)
In the 1950s, the tobacco industry realized that they could protect their product by casting doubt on the science and insisting the dangers of smoking were unproven. In the 1990s, they realized that if you could convince people that science in general was unreliable, then you didn’t have to argue the merits of any particular case, particularly one—like the defense of secondhand smoke—that had no scientific merit. In the demonizing of Rachel Carson, free marketeers realized that if you could convince people that an example of successful government regulation wasn’t, in fact, successful—that it was actually a mistake—you could strengthen the argument against regulation in general.
Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
Freedom means being in control (either as an individual or as a member of a SMALL group) of the life-and-death issues of one's existence; food, clothing, shelter and defense against whatever threats there may be in one's environment. Freedom means having power; not the power to control other people but the power to control the circumstances of one's own life.
Theodore John Kaczynski (Industrial Society and Its Future)
What was shocking were the rewards my father's cousins had gathered in the intervening couple of decades. They farmed now on thousands of acres, not hundreds. They drove fancy pickup trucks, owned lakefront property and second homes. A simple Internet search offered the truth of where their riches had come from: good ol' Uncle Sam. Recently I clicked again on a database of farm subsidy payments, and found that five of my father's first cousins had been paid, all told, $3 million between 1995 and 2005 - and that on top of whatever they'd earned outright for the sale of their corn and soybeans. They worked hard, certainly. They'd saved and scrimped through the lean years. They were good and honorable yeoman, and now they'd come through to their great reward: a prime place at the trough of the welfare state. All that corn syrup guzzled down the gullets of America's overweight children, all that beef inefficiently fattened on cheap feed, all that ethanol being distilled in heartland refineries: all of it underwritten by as wasteful a government program as now exists this side of the defense industry. In the last ten years, the federal government has paid $131 million in subsidies and disaster insurance in just the county [in Minnesota] where I grew up. Corn is subsidized to keep it cheap, and the subsidies encourage overproduction, which encourages a scramble for ever more ways to use corn, and thus bigger subsidies - the perfect feedback loop of government welfare.
Philip Connors
The driving forces of this [defense] industry is that they want the conflict with the Palestinians to go forever. Moral considerations are never considered when Israel aids dictatorships. It’s about money and being a powerful nation.
Antony Loewenstein (The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World)
[FDR] Roosevelt did issue an important executive order in 1941 creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee to combat discrimination in the defense industry, which avoided a threatened march on Washington led by the civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph. With Roosevelt’s death, on April 12 1945, and the assumption of the presidency by Vice President Harry Truman, civil rights leaders hoped that the new leader might be more willing to publicly embrace their cause.
Richard Gergel (Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring)
Because Japan had no defense industry, he knew, and not even an airplane industry, the best engineers of a generation were being funneled into other, seemingly more prosaic sectors, like automobiles, for example, and steel. These industries, which in America were having increasing difficulty competing for top engineers, were getting the absolute cream in Japan. This advantage in talent was already making a considerable difference, Hayashi believed, as Japan’s heavy industries began to compete in the world’s markets.
David Halberstam (The Reckoning)
Cannes was to blame, he told himself defensively. It was a city made for the indulgence of the senses, all ease and sunshine and provocative flesh. “What had he seen, what had he learned? He had seen all kinds of movies, good and bad, mostly bad. He had been plunged into a carnival, a delirium of film. In the halls, on the terraces, on the beach, at the parties, the art or industry or whatever it deserved to be called in these few days was exposed at its essence. The whole thing was there—the artists and pseudo-artists, the businessmen, the con men, the buyers and sellers, the peddlers, the whores, the pornographers, critics, hangers-on, the year’s heroes, the year’s failures. And then the distillation of what it was all about, a film of Bergman's and one of Bunuel's, pure and devastating.
Irwin Shaw (Evening in Byzantium)
Collectively, the medical industry has become the country’s biggest lobbying force, spending nearly half a billion dollars each year. In 2015 the oil and gas industry spent $130 million, securities and investment firms about $100 million, and the defense/aerospace industry a mere $75 million.
Elisabeth Rosenthal (An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back)
Gaia giveth even as she taketh away. The warming of the global climate over the past century had melted permafrost and glaciers, shifted rainfall patterns, altered animal migratory routes, disrupted agriculture, drowned cities, and similarly necessitated a thousand thousand adjustments, recalibrations and hasty retreats. But humanity's unintentional experiment with the biosphere had also brought some benefits. Now we could grow oysters in New England. Six hundred years ago, oysters flourished as far north as the Hudson. Native Americans had accumulated vast middens of shells on the shores of what would become Manhattan. Then, prior to the industrial age, there was a small climate shift, and oysters vanished from those waters. Now, however, the tasty bivalves were back, their range extending almost to Maine. The commercial beds of the Cape Cod Archipelago produced shellfish as good as any from the heyday of Chesapeake Bay. Several large wikis maintained, regulated and harvested these beds, constituting a large share of the local economy. But as anyone might have predicted, wherever a natural resource existed, sprawling and hard of defense, poachers would be found.
Paul Di Filippo (Wikiworld)
Finally, and in light of what was about to take place, the most crucial bit of background information is to know something about military culture, particularly the inviolate concepts of honor and duty, of adhering to principle. (The overtly corrupt world where Congress, the military, and the defense industry come together, and the political world of generals, are obvious exceptions.) If a civilian can’t get his arms around the simple fact that honor and patriotism and adherence to a code of conduct are the inviolate core of the military heart, then he will never begin to understand the men and women in uniform.
Robert Coram (American Patriot: The Life and Wars of Colonel Bud Day)
North Korea’s defense budget eats up 25 percent of its gross national product—as opposed to an average of less than 5 percent for industrialized countries. Although there had been no fighting in Korea since 1953, the country kept one million men under arms, giving this tiny country, no bigger than Pennsylvania, the fourth-largest military in the world.
Barbara Demick (Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea)
When World War II was over, and the communists were still very much alive, THE SAME CORPORATIONS AND MULTINATIONAL COMPANIES THAT ARMED GERMANY AFTER WWI sent the Nazis and war criminals with their loot, counterfeit or otherwise, to the USA, Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America. Allen Dulles, Wall Street attorney, made arrangements for the Nazis’ exit. He became the first director of the CIA in 1947. The divisions and decoys we fall into, all the categories of conflict, never follow history or documents day-by-day to understand why we have so many assassinations and cover-ups. Over 600 Nazis were brought to our defense industries, universities and hospitals from 1945-1952 under Project Paperclip.
Mae Brussell (The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America)
That we can prescribe the terms of our own success, that we can live outside or in ignorance of the Great Economy are the greatest errors. They condemn us to a life without a standard, wavering in inescapable bewilderment from paltry self-satisfaction to paltry self-dissatisfaction. But since we have no place to live but in the Great Economy, whether or not we know that and act accordingly is the critical question, not about economy merely, but about human life itself. It is possible to make a little economy, such as our present one, that is so short-sighted and in which accounting is of so short a term as to give the impression that vices are necessary and practically justifiable. When we make our economy a little wheel turning in opposition to what we call “nature,” then we set up competitiveness as the ruling principle in our explanation of reality and in our understanding of economy; we make of it, willy-nilly, a virtue. But competitiveness, as a ruling principle and a virtue, imposes a logic that is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to control. That logic explains why our cars and our clothes are shoddily made, why our “wastes” are toxic, and why our “defensive” weapons are suicidal; it explains why it is so difficult for us to draw a line between “free enterprise” and crime. If our economic ideal is maximum profit with minimum responsibility, why should we be surprised to find our corporations so frequently in court and robbery on the increase? Why should we be surprised to find that medicine has become an exploitive industry, profitable in direct proportion to its hurry and its mechanical indifference? People who pay for shoddy products or careless services and people who are robbed outright are equally victims of theft, the only difference being that the robbers outright are not guilty of fraud.
Wendell Berry (What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth)
In giving protection instead of liberty to the industries for defense, the government has contracted to make them profitable; and if they become a burden to the taxpayers, whose fault is it? Thus there is not a grievance in the nation for which the government does not voluntarily make itself responsible. Is it surprising, then, that every failure increases the threat of another revolution in France?
Frédéric Bastiat (The Law)
Katayev’s notes show that the military-industrial complex was indeed as large as Gorbachev feared. In 1985, Katayev estimated, defense took up 20 percent of the Soviet economy.16 Of the 135 million adults working in the Soviet Union, Katayev said, 10.4 million worked directly in the military-industrial complex at 1,770 enterprises. Nine ministries served the military, although in a clumsy effort to mask its purpose, the nuclear ministry was given the name “Ministry of Medium Machine Building,” and others were similarly disguised. More than fifty cities were almost totally engaged in the defense effort, and hundreds less so. Defense factories were called upon to make the more advanced civilian products, too, including 100 percent of all Soviet televisions, tape recorders, movie and still cameras and sewing machines.17
David E. Hoffman (The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy)
I discovered this tie several years ago when reporting on an FDA source’s tip about the suspected link between antiperspirants and breast cancer. The FDA official told me that the agency was contemplating requiring a breast cancer warning on antiperspirants based on several studies suggesting a possible link. But some inside the FDA felt that industry opposition would be insurmountable. It was an inside debate that would interest many in the public. As I pursued the story, the cosmetics industry wouldn’t do an interview but referred me to the American Cancer Society, which, they assured me, would defend their interests. Indeed, the American Cancer Society was all too happy to agree to appear on camera debunking any idea of a link between antiperspirants and breast cancer. But in my pre-interview with the Cancer Society’s chief doctor, I discovered he hadn’t read—and apparently didn’t know about—the latest peer-reviewed, published studies suggesting a link. That’s when I thought to ask the Cancer Society if it got funding from the cosmetics industry. The answer was a very defensive “Yes.” But the charity wouldn’t disclose how much and said they wouldn’t go through with the on-camera interview unless I agreed not to ask about the antiperspirant industry funding. I forwarded the studies to the American Cancer Society’s doctor. When he did the on-camera interview with me, he reversed his earlier position that had claimed the antiperspirant–breast cancer link was a “myth.” Instead, he answered my questions by deflecting—repeatedly stating, when asked about the latest antiperspirant studies, that women have more important things to focus on, such as getting regular mammograms.
Sharyl Attkisson (Stonewalled: One Reporter's Fight for Truth in Obama's Washington)
Prioritize life over profit by rejecting GNP in favor of indicators that measure biodiversity, community coherence, personal well-being, and other life-affirming criteria; radically reducing public spending on “defense”; granting legal rights to ecosystems and nonhuman species; rewriting educational curricula to meet community and environmental needs rather than the needs of industry. ========== Revolution (Russell Brand)
Anonymous
We should reinforce modern machining facilities with high performance in line with the global trend of machine industry development, press the production of products, high-speed drawings, and unmanned automation," he said. "We should set up test sites for comprehensive measurement in the factory and allow various load, interlock tests and impact tests depending on the characteristics of the products." 정품구입문의하는곳~☎위커메신저:PP444☎라인:PPPK44↔☎텔레:ppt89[☎?카톡↔rrs9] 정품구입문의하는곳~☎위커메신저:PP444☎라인:PPPK44↔☎텔레:ppt89[☎?카톡↔rrs9] 정품구입문의하는곳~☎위커메신저:PP444☎라인:PPPK44↔☎텔레:ppt89[☎?카톡↔rrs9] On the first day, Kim conducted field guidance on plants in Jagang Province, including the Kanggye Tracker General Factory, the Kanggye Precision Machinery General Factory, the Jangja Steel Manufacturing Machinery Plant and the February 8 Machine Complex. All of these factories are North Korea's leading munitions factories with decades of history. Defense ministers of South Korea, the U.S. and Japan gathered together to discuss ways to cooperate on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and strengthen defense cooperation among the three countries. South Korean Defense Minister Chung Kyung-doo was acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shannahan and Japanese Defense Minister Takeshi Iwaya at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore, where the 18th Asia Security Conference was held from 9 a.m. on Sunday.
떨 판매매,떨판매,떨 판매.☎위커메신저:PP444,대마초판매사이트
I am against the planned political assassinations by our intelligence and defense agents.The CIA-FBI-DIA and DISC (Defense Industry Security Command) were set up originally to protect citizens of the USA. They became their own judges and juries, private servants of corporations with investments at home and abroad. I am against the constant destruction of evidence in criminal matters and political assassinations. Prime witnesses are murdered before or after testifying. Diaries are forged and planted in obvious places. Doubles are created to confuse. The Police Departments manipulate facts in cooperation with conspirators. I am outraged that our judicial system since 1947 has been patterned after Nazi Germany. Patsies are dead or locked away. The assassins walk the streets or leave the country - "home free". I am against using the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, to cover up the assassination of President Kennedy. When the highest court is corrupt, there is no hope at local levels.
Mae Brussell
Most cleantech companies crashed because they neglected one or more of the seven questions that every business must answer: 1. The Engineering Question Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? 2. The Timing Question Is now the right time to start your particular business? 3. The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market? 4. The People Question Do you have the right team? 5. The Distribution Question Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product? 6. The Durability Question Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future? 7. The Secret Question Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see? We’ve discussed these elements before. Whatever your industry, any great business plan must address every one of them. If you don’t have good answers to these questions, you’ll run into lots of “bad luck” and your business will fail. If you nail all seven, you’ll master fortune and succeed. Even getting five or six correct might work.
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future)
The standard of living attained in the most advanced industrial areas is not a suitable model of development if the aim is pacification. In view of what this standard has made of Man and Nature, the question must again be asked whether it is worth the sacrifices and the victims made in its defense. The question has ceased to be irresponsible since the “affluent society” has become a society of permanent mobilization against the risk of annihilation, and since the sale of its goods has been accompanied by moronization, the perpetuation of toil, and the promotion of frustration. Under these circumstances, liberation from the affluent society does not mean return to healthy and robust poverty, moral cleanliness, and simplicity. On the contrary, the elimination of profitable waste would increase the social wealth available for distribution, and the end of permanent mobilization would reduce the social need for the denial of satisfactions that are the individual’s own—denials which now find their compensation in the cult of fitness, strength, and regularity.
Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society)
Meanwhile, U.S. rates of infections and deaths were among the worst in the world. Finally, Trump openly rejected the idea that the federal government had any responsibility for managing the pandemic. He insisted that governors should be the ones to issue stay-at-home orders, and he refused to use the Defense Production Act (DPA) to speed up production of PPE, although he did use it to enable meatpacking industry leaders to continue production without addressing the health and safety of their workers. He told states they were on their own for testing and masks.
Heather Cox Richardson (Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America)
We cannot pick and choose whom among the oppressed it is convenient to support. We must stand with all the oppressed or none of the oppressed. This is a global fight for life against corporate tyranny. We will win only when we see the struggle of working people in Greece, Spain, and Egypt as our own struggle. This will mean a huge reordering of our world, one that turns away from the primacy of profit to full employment and unionized workplaces, inexpensive and modernized mass transit, especially in impoverished communities, universal single-payer health care and a banning of for-profit health care corporations. The minimum wage must be at least $15 an hour and a weekly income of $500 provided to the unemployed, the disabled, stay-at-home parents, the elderly, and those unable to work. Anti-union laws, like the Taft-Hartley Act, and trade agreements such as NAFTA, will be abolished. All Americans will be granted a pension in old age. A parent will receive two years of paid maternity leave, as well as shorter work weeks with no loss in pay and benefits. The Patriot Act and Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the military to be used to crush domestic unrest, as well as government spying on citizens, will end. Mass incarceration will be dismantled. Global warming will become a national and global emergency. We will divert our energy and resources to saving the planet through public investment in renewable energy and end our reliance on fossil fuels. Public utilities, including the railroads, energy companies, the arms industry, and banks, will be nationalized. Government funding for the arts, education, and public broadcasting will create places where creativity, self-expression, and voices of dissent can be heard and seen. We will terminate our nuclear weapons programs and build a nuclear-free world. We will demilitarize our police, meaning that police will no longer carry weapons when they patrol our streets but instead, as in Great Britain, rely on specialized armed units that have to be authorized case by case to use lethal force. There will be training and rehabilitation programs for the poor and those in our prisons, along with the abolition of the death penalty. We will grant full citizenship to undocumented workers. There will be a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions. Education will be free from day care to university. All student debt will be forgiven. Mental health care, especially for those now caged in our prisons, will be available. Our empire will be dismantled. Our soldiers and marines will come home.
Chris Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour)
However, before that I owned a gun store. We were a Title 7 SOT (Special Occupational Taxpayer), which means we worked with legal machine guns, suppressors, and pretty much everything except for explosives. We did law enforcement sales and worked with equipment that’s unavailable from most dealers, which meant lots of government inspections and compliance paperwork. I had to be exceedingly familiar with federal gun laws, and there are a multitude of those. I worked with many companies in the gun industry and still have friends and contacts at various manufacturers. When I hear people tell me the gun industry is unregulated, I have to resist the urge to laugh in their faces.
Larry Correia (In Defense of the Second Amendment)
To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship. What can one do? Here is a list, probably not definitive: 1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life. 2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of “quality control”: You will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat. 3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence. 4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers. 5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions? 6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening. 7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species. The
Wendell Berry (Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food)
Therefore a simple and poor society can exist as a democracy on a basis of sheer individualism. But a rich and complex industrial society cannot so exist; for some individuals, and especially those artificial individuals called corporations, become so very big that the ordinary individual is utterly dwarfed beside them, and cannot deal with them on terms of equality. It therefore becomes necessary for these ordinary individuals to combine in their turn, first in order to act in their collective capacity through that biggest of all combinations called the Government, and second, to act, also in their own self-defense, through private combinations, such as farmers' associations and trade unions.
Theodore Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography)
In the USA, the “corporament” exists as the: military (defense/offense) + industrial + academic (schooling – at all levels – as prison) + “corporament” entertainment (Hollywood, media, advertising/consumerism/commercialization, propaganda/psychological warfare) + judicial (defense and prosecutorial lawyers, judges, law enforcement/police, prisons) + financial (banks, accounting firms) + religion + petrochemical/pharmaceutical (drugs, antibiotics, antibacterials, vaccines, pesticides – toxins to kill or put you at “dis-ease” and drugs to “treat” you) + imperial commu-soci-capitofasdemocracism system/society/economy/Western thinking = Military-industrial-academic-“corporament” entertainment-judicial-financial-religion-petrochemical/pharmaceutical complex.
Irucka Ajani Embry (Balancing the Rift: ReCONNECTualizing the Pasenture)
Finally, we arrive at the question of the so-called nonpolitical man. Hitler not only established his power from the very beginning with masses of people who were until then essentially nonpolitical; he also accomplished his last step to victory in March of 1933 in a "legal" manner, by mobilizing no less than five million nonvoters, that is to say, nonpolitical people. The Left parties had made every effort to win over the indifferent masses, without posing the question as to what it means "to be indifferent or nonpolitical." If an industrialist and large estate owner champions a rightist party, this is easily understood in terms of his immediate economic interests. In his case a leftist orientation would be at variance with his social situation and would, for that reason, point to irrational motives. If an industrial worker has a leftist orientation, this too is by all mean rationally consistent—it derives from his economic and social position in industry. If, however, a worker, an employee, or an official has a rightist orientation, this must be ascribed to a lack of political clarity, i.e., he is ignorant of his social position. The more a man who belongs to the broad working masses is nonpolitical, the more susceptible he is to the ideology of political reaction. To be nonpolitical is not, as one might suppose, evidence of a passive psychic condition, but of a highly active attitude, a defense against the awareness of social responsibility. The analysis of this defense against consciousness of one's social responsibility yields clear insights into a number of dark questions concerning the behavior of the broad nonpolitical strata. In the case of the average intellectual "who wants nothing to do with politics," it can easily be shown that immediate economic interests and fears related to his social position, which is dependent upon public opinion, lie at the basis of his noninvolvement. These fears cause him to make the most grotesque sacrifices with respect to his knowledge and convictions. Those people who are engaged in the production process in one way or another and are nonetheless socially irresponsible can be divided into two major groups. In the case of the one group the concept of politics is unconsciously associated with the idea of violence and physical danger, i.e., with an intense fear, which prevents them from facing life realistically. In the case of the other group, which undoubtedly constitutes the majority, social irresponsibility is based on personal conflicts and anxieties, of which the sexual anxiety is the predominant one. […] Until now the revolutionary movement has misunderstood this situation. It attempted to awaken the "nonpolitical" man by making him conscious solely of his unfulfilled economic interests. Experience teaches that the majority of these "nonpolitical" people can hardly be made to listen to anything about their socio-economic situation, whereas they are very accessible to the mystical claptrap of a National Socialist, despite the fact that the latter makes very little mention of economic interests. [This] is explained by the fact that severe sexual conflicts (in the broadest sense of the word), whether conscious or unconscious, inhibit rational thinking and the development of social responsibility. They make a person afraid and force him into a shell. If, now, such a self-encapsulated person meets a propagandist who works with faith and mysticism, meets, in other words, a fascist who works with sexual, libidinous methods, he turns his complete attention to him. This is not because the fascist program makes a greater impression on him than the liberal program, but because in his devotion to the führer and the führer's ideology, he experiences a momentary release from his unrelenting inner tension. Unconsciously, he is able to give his conflicts a different form and in this way to "solve" them.
Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism)
According to Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project, for example, one’s “cultural worldview”—that would be political leanings or ideological outlook to the rest of us—explains “individuals’ beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any other individual characteristic.”16 More powerfully, that is, than age, ethnicity, education, or party affiliation. The Yale researchers explain that people with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality, and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Conversely, those with strong “hierarchical” and “individualistic” worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry, and a belief that we all pretty much get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.17 The evidence is striking. Among the segment of the U.S. population that displays the strongest “hierarchical” views, only 11 percent rate climate change as a “high risk,” compared with 69 percent of the segment displaying the strongest “egalitarian” views.18 Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes the tight correlation between “worldview” and acceptance of climate science to “cultural cognition,” the process by which all of us—regardless of political leanings—filter new information in ways that will protect our “preferred vision of the good society.” If new information seems to confirm that vision, we welcome it and integrate it easily. If it poses a threat to our belief system, then our brain immediately gets to work producing intellectual antibodies designed to repel the unwelcome invasion.19 As Kahan explained in Nature, “People find it disconcerting to believe that behavior that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behavior that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.” In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today. Furthermore, leftists are equally capable of denying inconvenient scientific evidence. If conservatives are inherent system justifiers, and therefore bridle before facts that call the dominant economic system into question, then most leftists are inherent system questioners, and therefore prone to skepticism about facts that come from corporations and government. This can lapse into the kind of fact resistance we see among those who are convinced that multinational drug companies have covered up the link between childhood vaccines and autism. No matter what evidence is marshaled to disprove their theories, it doesn’t matter to these crusaders—it’s just the system covering up for itself.20 This kind of defensive reasoning helps explain the rise of emotional intensity that surrounds the climate issue today. As
Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate)
These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt’s Limits of State Action, Kant’s insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable.
Noam Chomsky
It was this case,” Roosevelt later said, “which first waked me to . . . the fact that the courts were not necessarily the best judges of what should be done to better social and industrial conditions.” While the justices were well intentioned, they interpreted law solely from the vantage point of the propertied classes. “They knew nothing whatever of tenement house conditions,” he charged, “they knew nothing whatever of the needs, or of the life and labor, of three-fourths of their fellow-citizens in great cities.” In the years that followed, the court’s defense of free enterprise in this case would be repeatedly cited to block governmental regulation of industry. “It was,” Roosevelt observed, “one of the most serious setbacks which the cause of industrial and social progress and reform ever received.
Doris Kearns Goodwin (The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism)
The content industries like to portray fair use as a narrow and grudging defense against an otherwise valid case for copyright infringement—as if the claim were, “Yes, I trespassed on your land, which was wrong, I admit. But I was starving and looking for food. Please give me a break.” This is simply inaccurate. True, fair use is asserted as “an affirmative defense”; that is the way it is brought up in a copyright case. But in U.S. law, fair uses are stated quite clearly to be limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright holder—uses that were never within the copyright holder’s power to prohibit. The defense is not “I trespassed on your land, but I was starving.” It is “I did not trespass on your land. I walked on the public road that runs through it, a road you never owned in the first place.
Anonymous
Richard Lovelace makes a compelling case that the best defense is a good offense. “The ultimate solution to cultural decay is not so much the repression of bad culture as the production of sound and healthy culture,” he writes. “We should direct most of our energy not to the censorship of decadent culture, but to the production and support of healthy expressions of Christian and non-Christian art.”10 Public protests and boycotts have their place. But even negative critiques are effective only when motivated by a genuine love for the arts. The long-term solution is to support Christian artists, musicians, authors, and screenwriters who can create humane and healthy alternatives that speak deeply to the human condition. Exploiting “Talent” The church must also stand against forces that suppress genuine creativity, both inside and outside its walls. In today’s consumer culture, one of the greatest dangers facing the arts is commodification. Art is treated as merchandise to market for the sake of making money. Paintings are bought not to exhibit, nor to grace someone’s home, but merely to resell. They are financial investments. As Seerveld points out, “Elite art of the New York school or by approved gurus such as Andy Warhol are as much a Big Business today as the music business or the sports industry.”11 Artists and writers have been reduced to “talent” to be plugged into the manufacturing process. That approach may increase sales, but it will suppress the best and highest forms of art. In the eighteenth century, the world nearly lost the best of Mozart’s music because the adults in the young man’s life treated him primarily as “talent” to exploit.
Nancy R. Pearcey (Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning)
But scamming large amounts of money off the top seems even harder to catch. Fraud by American defense contractors is estimated at around $100 billion per year, and they are relatively well behaved compared to the financial industry. The FBI reports that since the economic recession of 2008, securities and commodities fraud in the United States has gone up by more than 50 percent. In the decade prior, almost 90 percent of corporate fraud cases—insider trading, kickbacks and bribes, false accounting—implicated the company’s chief executive officer and/or chief financial officer. The recession, which was triggered by illegal and unwise banking practices, cost American shareholders several trillion dollars in stock value losses and is thought to have set the American economy back by a decade and a half. Total costs for the recession have been estimated to be as high as $14 trillion—or about $45,000 per citizen.
Sebastian Junger (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)
The EEC was grounded in weakness, not strength. As Spaak’s 1956 report emphasized, ‘Europe, which once had the monopoly of manufacturing industries and obtained important resources from its overseas possessions, today sees its external position weakened, its influence declining and its capacity to progress lost in its divisions.’ It was precisely because the British did not—yet—understand their situation in this light that they declined to join the EEC. The idea that the European Common Market was part of some calculated strategy to challenge the growing power of the United States—a notion that would acquire a certain currency in Washington policy circles in later decades—is thus quite absurd: the new-formed EEC depended utterly upon the American security guarantee, without which its members would never have been able to afford to indulge in economic integration to the exclusion of all concern with common defense.
Tony Judt (Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945)
9. HUMAN RIGHTS [70:9.1] Nature confers no rights on man, only life and a world in which to live it. Nature does not even confer the right to live, as might be deduced by considering what would likely happen if an unarmed man met a hungry tiger face to face in the primitive forest. Society's prime gift to man is security. [70:9.2] Gradually society asserted its rights and, at the present time, they are Assurance of food supply. Military defense—security through preparedness. Internal peace preservation—prevention of personal violence and social disorder. Sex control—marriage, the family institution. Property—the right to own. Fostering of individual and group competition. Provision for educating and training youth. Promotion of trade and commerce—industrial development. Improvement of labor conditions and rewards. The guarantee of the freedom of religious practices to the end that all of these other social activities may be exalted by becoming spiritually motivated.
Urantia Foundation (The Urantia Book)
As it stands, a large number of firms in all advanced economies specialize in warfare as a business, and are thus reliant on perpetuating war to continue being in business. They live off government spending exclusively, and have their entire existence reliant on there being perpetual wars necessitating ever‐larger arms spending. In the United States, whose defense spending is almost equal to that of the rest of the planet combined, these industries have a vested interest in keeping the U.S. government involved in some form of military adventure or other. This, more than any strategic, cultural, ideological, or security operations, explains why the United States has been involved in so many conflicts in parts of the world that cannot possibly have any bearing on the life of the average American. Only with unsound money can these firms grow to such enormous magnitude that they can influence the press, academia, and think tanks to continuously beat the drums of more war.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
But just then, as if to avoid a certain awkwardness, Seaman began to talk not about Newell but about Newell’s mother, Anne Jordan Newell. He described her appearance (pleasing), her work (she had a job at a factory that made irrigation systems), her faith (she went to church every Sunday), her industriousness (she kept the house as neat as a pin), her kindness (she always had a smile for everyone), her common sense (she gave good advice, wise advice, without forcing it on anyone). A mother is a precious thing, concluded Seaman. Marius and I founded the Panthers. We worked whatever jobs we could get and we bought shotguns and handguns for the people’s self-defense. But a mother is worth more than the Black Revolution. That I can promise you. In my long and eventful life, I’ve seen many things. I was in Algeria and I was in China and in several prisons in the United States. A mother is a precious thing. This I say here and I’ll say anywhere, anytime, he said in a hoarse voice.
Roberto Bolaño (2666)
madness is a passive as well as an active state: it is a paralysis, a refusal of the nerves to respond to the normal stimuli, as well as an unnatural stimulation. There are commonwealths, plainly to be distinguished here and there in history, which pass from prosperity to squalor, or from glory to insignificance, or from freedom to slavery, not only in silence, but with serenity. The face still smiles while the limbs, literally and loathsomely, are dropping from the body. These are peoples that have lost the power of astonishment at their own actions. When they give birth to a fantastic fashion or a foolish law, they do not start or stare at the monster they have brought forth. They have grown used to their own unreason; chaos is their cosmos; and the whirlwind is the breath of their nostrils. These nations are really in danger of going off their heads en masse; of becoming one vast vision of imbecility, with toppling cities and crazy countrysides, all dotted with industrious lunatics. One
G.K. Chesterton (In Defense of Sanity: The Best Essays of G.K. Chesterton)
From every direction, the place is under assault—and unlike in the past, the adversary is not concentrated in a single force, such as the Bureau of Reclamation, but takes the form of separate outfits conducting smaller attacks that are, in many ways, far more insidious. From directly above, the air-tour industry has succeeded in scuttling all efforts to dial it back, most recently through the intervention of Arizona’s senators, John Kyl and John McCain, and is continuing to destroy one of the canyon’s greatest treasures, which is its silence. From the east has come a dramatic increase in uranium-mining claims, while the once remote and untrammeled country of the North Rim now suffers from an ever-growing influx of recreational ATVs. On the South Rim, an Italian real estate company recently secured approval for a massive development whose water demands are all but guaranteed to compromise many of the canyon’s springs, along with the oases that they nourish. Worst of all, the Navajo tribe is currently planning to cooperate in constructing a monstrous tramway to the bottom of the canyon, complete with a restaurant and a resort, at the confluence of the Little Colorado and the Colorado, the very spot where John Wesley Powell made his famous journal entry in the summer of 1869 about venturing “down the Great Unknown.” As vexing as all these things are, what Litton finds even more disheartening is the country’s failure to rally to the canyon’s defense—or for that matter, to the defense of its other imperiled natural wonders. The movement that he and David Brower helped build is not only in retreat but finds itself the target of bottomless contempt. On talk radio and cable TV, environmentalists are derided as “wackos” and “extremists.” The country has swung decisively toward something smaller and more selfish than what it once was, and in addition to ushering in a disdain for the notion that wilderness might have a value that extends beyond the metrics of economics or business, much of the nation ignorantly embraces the benefits of engineering and technology while simultaneously rejecting basic science.
Kevin Fedarko (The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon)
New Rule: Democrats must get in touch with their inner asshole. I refer to the case of Van Jones, the man the Obama administration hired to find jobs for Americans in the new green industries. Seems like a smart thing to do in a recession, but Van Jones got fired because he got caught on tape saying Republicans are assholes. And they call it news! Now, I know I'm supposed to be all reinjected with yes-we-can-fever after the big health-care speech, and it was a great speech--when Black Elvis gets jiggy with his teleprompter, there is none better. But here's the thing: Muhammad Ali also had a way with words, but it helped enormously that he could also punch guys in the face. It bothers me that Obama didn't say a word in defense of Jones and basically fired him when Glenn Beck told him to. Just like dropped "end-of-life counseling" from health-care reform because Sarah Palin said it meant "death panels" on her Facebook page. Crazy morons make up things for Obama to do, and he does it. Same thing with the speech to schools this week, where the president attempted merely to tell children to work hard and wash their hands, and Cracker Nation reacted as if he was trying to hire the Black Panthers to hand out grenades in homeroom. Of course, the White House immediately capitulated. "No students will be forced to view the speech" a White House spokesperson assured a panicked nation. Isn't that like admitting that the president might be doing something unseemly? What a bunch of cowards. If the White House had any balls, they'd say, "He's giving a speech on the importance of staying in school, and if you jackasses don't show it to every damn kid, we're cutting off your federal education funding tomorrow." The Democrats just never learn: Americans don't really care which side of an issue you're on as long as you don't act like pussies When Van Jones called the Republicans assholes, he was paying them a compliment. He was talking about how they can get things done even when they're in the minority, as opposed to the Democrats , who can't seem to get anything done even when they control both houses of Congress, the presidency, and Bruce Springsteen. I love Obama's civility, his desire to work with his enemies; it's positively Christlike. In college, he was probably the guy at the dorm parties who made sure the stoners shared their pot with the jocks. But we don't need that guy now. We need an asshole. Mr. President, there are some people who are never going to like you. That's why they voted for the old guy and Carrie's mom. You're not going to win them over. Stand up for the seventy percent of Americans who aren't crazy. And speaking of that seventy percent, when are we going to actually show up in all this? Tomorrow Glenn Beck's army of zombie retirees descending on Washington. It's the Million Moron March, although they won't get a million, of course, because many will be confused and drive to Washington state--but they will make news. Because people who take to the streets always do. They're at the town hall screaming at the congressman; we're on the couch screaming at the TV. Especially in this age of Twitters and blogs and Snuggies, it's a statement to just leave the house. But leave the house we must, because this is our last best shot for a long time to get the sort of serious health-care reform that would make the United States the envy of several African nations.
Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
It doesn’t need a Che Guevara to raise a guerrilla army. The leaders have already been elected to state, local, and federal governments. Sympathizers have been infiltrated into our media establishment, entertainment industry, big tech, academia, even professional sports. Breitbart was right, ‘politics is downstream from culture.’ “You don’t need to take up arms in this war. Their weapons are hurled from social media platforms from which there is no defense and the assassinations are character assassinations. Public executions come not from a slice of the guillotine but by tweet, gleefully cheered on by the mob. You can fight it from your mom’s basement as you eat Cheetos and collect an unemployment check from the very government you seek to destroy. It doesn’t take courage, moral or physical, nor does it take resiliency. In fact, it takes the opposite of those once-lauded traits. It takes apathy. You don’t have to be creative, well-read, in shape, resourceful, or strong. The weaker your mind and body the better. You can be taken advantage of. You are ripe for recruitment. Racism is the witchcraft of the twenty-first century, and cancel culture is the stake at which you are burned.
Jack Carr (The Devil's Hand (Terminal List, #4))
WHY DIVERSIFY? During the bull market of the 1990s, one of the most common criticisms of diversification was that it lowers your potential for high returns. After all, if you could identify the next Microsoft, wouldn’t it make sense for you to put all your eggs into that one basket? Well, sure. As the humorist Will Rogers once said, “Don’t gamble. Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it.” However, as Rogers knew, 20/20 foresight is not a gift granted to most investors. No matter how confident we feel, there’s no way to find out whether a stock will go up until after we buy it. Therefore, the stock you think is “the next Microsoft” may well turn out to be the next MicroStrategy instead. (That former market star went from $3,130 per share in March 2000 to $15.10 at year-end 2002, an apocalyptic loss of 99.5%).1 Keeping your money spread across many stocks and industries is the only reliable insurance against the risk of being wrong. But diversification doesn’t just minimize your odds of being wrong. It also maximizes your chances of being right. Over long periods of time, a handful of stocks turn into “superstocks” that go up 10,000% or more. Money Magazine identified the 30 best-performing stocks over the 30 years ending in 2002—and, even with 20/20 hindsight, the list is startlingly unpredictable. Rather than lots of technology or health-care stocks, it includes Southwest Airlines, Worthington Steel, Dollar General discount stores, and snuff-tobacco maker UST Inc.2 If you think you would have been willing to bet big on any of those stocks back in 1972, you are kidding yourself. Think of it this way: In the huge market haystack, only a few needles ever go on to generate truly gigantic gains. The more of the haystack you own, the higher the odds go that you will end up finding at least one of those needles. By owning the entire haystack (ideally through an index fund that tracks the total U.S. stock market) you can be sure to find every needle, thus capturing the returns of all the superstocks. Especially if you are a defensive investor, why look for the needles when you can own the whole haystack?
Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the civil war to defend slavery. And its leaders made no secret of this motive. Slavery they argued Ad nauseam was the foundation for a virtuous biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states. When 19th century deep southerners spoke of defending their “traditions”, “heritage”, and way of life they proudly identified the enslavement of others as the center piece of all three. Indeed, many of their leaders even argued that all lower class people should be enslaved regardless of race for their own good. In response to Yankee and midland abolitionist the Deep South’s leaders developed an elaborate defense for human bondage. James Henry Hammond, former governor of South Carolina, published a seminal book arguing that enslaved laborers where happier, fitter and better looked after than their free counter parts in Brittan and the North, who were ruthlessly exploited by industrial capitalists. Free societies were therefore unstable as there was always a danger that the exploited would rise up creating a fearful crisis in republican institutions. Salves by contrast were kept in their place by violent means and denied the right to vote, resist or testify, ensuring the foundation of every well designed and durable republic. Enslavement of the white working class would be in his words a most glorious act of emancipation. Jefferson’s notion all men are created equal, he wrote, was ridiculously absurd. In the deep southern tradition, Hammond’s republic was modeled on those of ancient Greece and Rome. Featuring rights and democracy for the elite, slavery and submission for inferiors. It was sanctioned by the Christian god whose son never denounced the practice in his documented teachings. It was a perfect aristocratic republic, one that should be a model for the world. George Fitzhugh endorsed and expanded upon Hammond’s argument to enslave all poor people. Aristocrats, he explained, were really the nations Magna Carta because they owned so much and had the affection which all men feel for what belongs to them. Which naturally lead them to protect and provide for wives, children and slaves. Fitzhugh, whose books were enormously popular declared he was quite as intent on abolishing free society as you northerners are on abolishing slavery.
Colin Woodard (American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America)
Speech to the German Folk January 30, 1944 Without January 30, 1933, and without the National Socialist revolution, without the tremendous domestic cleansing and construction efforts, there would be no factor today that could oppose the Bolshevik colossus. After all, Germany was itself so ill at the time, so weakened by the spreading Jewish infection, that it could hardly think of overcoming the Bolshevik danger at home, not to mention abroad. The economic ruin brought about by the Jews as in other countries, the unemployment of millions of Germans, the destruction of peasantry, trade, and industry only prepared the way for the planned internal collapse. This was furthered by support for the continued existence of a senseless state of classes, which could only serve to transform the reason of the masses into hatred in order to make them the willing instrument of the Bolshevik revolution. By mobilizing the proletarian slaves, the Jews hoped that, following the destruction of the national intelligentsia, they could all the more reduce them for good to coolies. But even if this process of the Bolshevik revolt in the interior of Germany had not led to complete success, the state with its democratic Weimar constitution would have been reduced to something ridiculously helpless in view of the great tasks of current world politics. In order to be armed for this confrontation, not only the problems of political power but also the social and economic problems had to be resolved. When National Socialism undertook the realization of its program eleven years ago, it managed just in time to build up a state that did not only have the strength at home but also the power abroad to fulfill the same European mission which first Greece fulfilled in antiquity by opposing the Persians, then Rome [by opposing] the Carthaginians, and the Occident in later centuries by opposing the invasions from the east. Therefore, in the year 1933, we set ourselves four great tasks among many others. On their resolution depended not only the future of the Reich but also the rescue of Europe, perhaps even of the entire human civilization: 1. The Reich had to regain the internal social peace that it had lost by resolving the social questions. That meant that the elements of a division into classes bourgeoisie and proletariat-had to be eliminated in their various manifestations and be replaced by a Volksgemeinschaft. The appeal to reason had to be supplemented by the merciless eradication of the base elements of resistance in all camps. 2. The social and political unification of the nation had to be supplemented by a national, political one. This meant that the body of the Reich, which was not only politically, but also governmentally divided, had to be replaced by a unified National Socialist state, the construction and leadership of which were suited to oppose and withstand even the heaviest attacks and severest tests of the future. 3. The nationally and politically coherent centralized state had the mission of immediately creating a Wehrmacht, whose ideology, moral attitude, numerical strength, and material equipment could serve as an instrument of self-assertion. After the outside world had rejected all German offers for a limitation of armament, the Reich had to fashion its own armament accordingly. 4. In order to secure its continued existence in Europe with the prospect of actual success, it was necessary to integrate all those countries which were inhabited by Germans, or were areas which had belonged to the German Reich for over a thousand years and which, in terms of their national substance and economy, were indispensable to the preservation of the Reich, that is, for its political and military defense. Only the resolution of all these tasks could result in the creation of that state which was capable, at home and abroad, of waging the fight for its defense and for the preservation of the European family of nations.
Adolf Hitler
Security Division of NASA: Headed by Werner von Braun. Nazi headquarters were moved to the Caribbean after World War II. The National Security Council, patterned after Hitler’s intelligence apparat, provided the framework inside the White House for political assassinations, Watergate “Plumbers” and election manipulations. Agents from military intelligence and the armed forces were concealed inside defense projects. The Syndicate worked with the Defense Industrial Security Command. Robert Sheridan, appointed by George McGovern to “investigate Watergate for the Democrats,” was the direct liaison to departments involved in the Kennedy assassination. The Watergate parallels are too great to not suspect a continuous working of this operation.28
Mae Brussell (The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America)
Ultimately, the overarching prescription from President Eisenhower was similar to what Washington had counseled as the ultimate check and balance: vigorous citizenship. In a democracy, political father figures are never the last sources of responsibility. 'Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,' Ike advised, 'can compel the proper meshing of the huge industry and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
John P. Avlon (Washington's Farewell: The Founding Father's Warning to Future Generations)
The “Hands up, don’t shoot” tale has been dismantled to a point where even the left-leaning Washington Post added it to its annual list of shame, “The biggest Pinocchios of 2015”: “This phrase became a rallying cry for protests after the fatal shooting of a black 18-year-old by a white police officer, Darren Wilson. Witness accounts spread after the shooting that Michael Brown had his hands raised in surrender, mouthing the words “Don’t shoot” as his last words before being shot execution-style. Democratic lawmakers raised their hands in solidarity on the House floor. But various investigations concluded this did not happen — and that Wilson acted out of self-defense and was justified in killing Brown
Taleeb Starkes (Black Lies Matter: Why Lies Matter to the Race Grievance Industry)
Years later, when Ike gave his farewell speech warning against the power of a military-industrial complex, he was much heralded; but the truth was that such views were always the bedrock of his philosophy. He was the second President who had to make difficult choices about complex and expensive weapons systems. He worried about the potential drain on the economy, and he believed that the Joint Chiefs cared little or nothing about the dangers of inflation. He spoke often in private about the danger of spending so much on weaponry and defense and in the process destroying the economy and thus weakening the country these weapons were going to protect. The federal budget, he liked to say, had risen from $4 billion a year in 1932 to $85.5 billion in 1952—with some 57 percent of that increase going to the Pentagon. “This country,” he once noted, “can choke itself to death piling up expenditures just as surely as it can defeat itself by not spending enough for protection.” Defense spending, he believed quite passionately, was dead weight; it was inflationary and subtracted from the nation’s vitality rather than added to it.
David Halberstam (The Fifties)
The US government served as both a munificent venture capitalist that did not expect a return (not even co-ownership) yet acted as an inexpensive testbed. In 1965 Hewlett-Packard employed about 9,000 people, Fairchild had 10,000, and Lockheed’s Missile Division had 28,000 employees. The defense industry was still dominant.
Arun Rao (A History of Silicon Valley: The Greatest Creation of Wealth in the History of the Planet)
When we become an autonomous organization, we will be one of the largest unadulterated digital security organizations on the planet,” he told the annual Intel Security Focus meeting in Las Vegas. “Not only will we be one of the greatest, however, we will not rest until we achieve our goal of being the best,” said Young. This is the main focus since Intel reported on agreements to deactivate its security business as a free organization in association with the venture company TPG, five years after the acquisition of McAfee. Young focused on his vision of the new company, his roadmap to achieve that, the need for rapid innovation and the importance of collaboration between industries. “One of the things I love about this conference is that we all come together to find ways to win, to work together,” he said. First, Young highlighted the publication of the book The Second Economy: the race for trust, treasure and time in the war of cybersecurity. The main objective of the book is to help the information security officers (CISO) to communicate the battles that everyone faces in front of others in the c-suite. “So we can recruit them into our fight, we need to recruit others on our journey if we want to be successful,” he said. Challenging assumptions The book is also aimed at encouraging information security professionals to challenge their own assumptions. “I plan to send two copies of this book to the winner of the US presidential election, because cybersecurity is going to be one of the most important issues they could face,” said Young. “The book is about giving more people a vision of the dynamism of what we face in cybersecurity, which is why we have to continually challenge our assumptions,” he said. “That’s why we challenge our assumptions in the book, as well as our assumptions about what we do every day.” Young said Intel Security had asked thousands of customers to challenge the company’s assumptions in the last 18 months so that it could improve. “This week, we are going to bring many of those comments to life in delivering a lot of innovation throughout our portfolio,” he said. Then, Young used a video to underscore the message that the McAfee brand is based on the belief that there is power to work together, and that no person, product or organization can provide total security. By allowing protection, detection and correction to work together, the company believes it can react to cyber threats more quickly. By linking products from different suppliers to work together, the company believes that network security improves. By bringing together companies to share intelligence on threats, you can find better ways to protect each other. The company said that cyber crime is the biggest challenge of the digital era, and this can only be overcome by working together. Revealed a new slogan: “Together is power”. The video also revealed the logo of the new independent company, which Young called a symbol of its new beginning and a visual representation of what is essential to the company’s strategy. “The shield means defense, and the two intertwined components are a symbol of the union that we are in the industry,” he said. “The color red is a callback to our legacy in the industry.” Three main reasons for independence According to Young, there are three main reasons behind the decision to become an independent company. First of all, it should focus entirely on enterprise-level cybersecurity, solve customers ‘cybersecurity problems and address clients’ cybersecurity challenges. The second is innovation. “Because we are committed and dedicated to cybersecurity only at the company level, our innovation is focused on that,” said Young. Third is growth. “Our industry is moving faster than any other IT sub-segment, we have t
Arslan Wani
The best way to rein in the excesses of the complex—and make us safer—is for well-informed voters to elect the kind of enlightened leaders we need to bring about change. Eisenhower’s advice, delivered in 1961, still rings true today: “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
James McCartney (America's War Machine: Vested Interests, Endless Conflicts)
All of our uncertainties about nutrition should not obscure the plain fact that the chronic diseases that now kill most of us can be traced directly to the industrialization of our food: the rise of highly processed foods and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures; the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and the narrowing of the biological diversity of the human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn, and soy.
Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)
Kuribayashi had the benefit of having traveled in the United States, and he had even attended Harvard for a short time. In his travels, he learned that American industry could be militarized at the touch of a button, and that American popular opinion was sensitive to high casualties in conflicts. If anything, his openly stated view that the U.S. should not be engaged as a military enemy may have contributed to his being given the task of defending Iwo Jima by leadership who may have viewed the defense of the island as a suicide mission. Once assigned his post, however, he took on the matter of American sensitivity to casualties as a tangible strategy – “If American casualties are high enough, Washington will think twice before launching another invasion against Japanese territory.”[2] As for the Japanese view of casualties, a different mindset altogether was predominant: the strategy of sacrifice with no survivors. When
Charles River Editors (The Greatest Battles in History: The Battle of Iwo Jima)
(By the way, yes, it’s TASER in all caps. It’s an acronym for Thomas A. Swift’s Electronic Rifle, believe it or not. Never let it be said that law enforcement and the industries which serve it are totally devoid of whimsy.) So,
Massad Ayoob (Deadly Force - Understanding Your Right To Self Defense)
Instead, the weeds are being read as a parable, a lesson that a monolithic, oil-based urban culture is unsustainable in the twenty-first century, and that there might be other, more ecologically gentle ways of living in cities. Families too poor to buy fresh food are starting neighbourhood organic farms on the sites of demolished local blocks. Young people from all over America – musicians, Green activists, social pioneers – are flooding into the abandoned areas, keen to experiment with new patterns of urban living which accept nature – including its weedy frontiersmen – rather than attempting to drive it out. As Julien Temple, director of the remarkable TV documentary Requiem for Detroit, has written: ‘amid the ruins of the Motor City it is possible to find a first pioneer’s map to the post-industrial future that awaits us all’.
Richard Mabey (Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants)
These artists of war are active even when their societies are officially at peace, quests for power being unrelenting, and in the absence of open hostilities they can be found either hunting for ever-present enemies within or otherwise divvying up that booty always conveniently proximate to those capable of wanton slaughter, spoils these days often cloaked in purchasing contracts and share-price movements.
Mohsin Hamid (How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia)
As Kennedy documents in detail, Fauci ensured that the federal agencies that were supposed to regulate industries were instead controlled by the industries they were supposed to regulate. Fauci’s regulatory empire was built on a huge taxpayer-supplied budget and piles of money from big pharma, and all the power that money gave him over hospitals, doctors, research institutes, universities, and even medical journals. Even more, Fauci’s power extends far beyond the US because the reach of American pharmaceutical interests stretches over the globe (especially when mixed with concerns about biological weapons, which brings in our defense and intelligence agencies).
Troy E. Nehls (The Big Fraud: What Democrats Don’t Want You to Know about January 6, the 2020 Election, and a Whole Lot Else)
The ax fell on programs that could not muster strong support from Congress, industry, international allies, or the secretary of defense and his staff. In short, political wheeling and dealing, hidden agendas, and turf battles determined the future Air Force, rather than carefully weighed visions.
James G. Burton (The Pentagon Wars: Reformers Challenge the Old Guard)
American hubris had backfired. The irony of the limitations the U.S. had imposed on Japanese manufacturing was plain: while postwar American industry focused strongly on defense, wooing its best engineers into military work, Japan’s top scientific minds quietly went about growing their country’s consumer electronics industry into a force of tidal wave proportions. The U.S. had won the battle over military might, but ultimately lost the economic war for world dominance of the electronics market.
Albert Glinsky (Switched On: Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution)
Despite the rising tide of industry in the North, the numbers are beyond dispute: Slaves were the single most valuable asset class in America. Preservation of principal, not principle, formed the basis of every argument ever made in defense of slavery.
Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
Soon after the English conquest, Jamaica’s Jews convinced the island’s new leaders that the best way to defend the colony and have it prosper was to invite the pirates of the Caribbean to move there. The Spanish would think twice about attacking Jamaica if its principal port was the home base of the feared buccaneers of the West Indies. In return for a safe harbor, these pirates, the Brethren of the Coast, became Jamaica’s defense force and piracy its principal industry.
Edward Kritzler (Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom and Revenge)
When it got warmer, in the spring, the white nights began, and they started playing a terrible game in the camp cafeteria called ‘bait-fishing’. A ration of bread would be put on the table, and everyone would hide around the corner to wait for the hungry victim to approach, be enticed by the bread, touch it, and take it. Then everyone would rush out from around the corner, from the darkness, from ambush, and there would commence the beating to death of the thief, who was usually a living skeleton. I never ran into this form of amusement anywhere except at Jelhala. The chief organizer was Dr Krivitsky, an old revolutionary and former deputy commissar of defense industries. His accomplice in the setting out of these terrible baits was a correspondent from the newspaper Izvestia – Zaslavsky.
Varlam Shalamov (Kolyma Tales)
Thousands of plant and animal varieties have fallen out of commerce in the last century as industrial agriculture has focused its attentions on a small handful of high yielding and usually patented varieties, with qualities that suited them to things like mechanical harvesting and processing.
Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)
It is also unclear why physical inactivity might be a mismatch for the immune system apart from the generally negative effects of sedentariness on overall health and levels of stress (which, as we have seen, depresses the immune system). One possibility is that because heading off to the bush to hunt and gather potentially made our ancestors more likely to encounter pathogens, our immune systems evolved to compensate by ramping up our defenses when we are active. A related possible explanation stems from the stingy way our bodies use calories. The fatigue we experience when fighting a cold is a reminder that the immune system is often energetically costly. As a result, maybe our immune systems evolved to be less vigilant when they are less needed. For hunter-gatherers, unlike most industrial people, those times might have been when they were less physically active and thus less likely to be exposed to pathogens.
Daniel E. Lieberman (Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding)
He told me about attending the Paris Air Show in 2009, the world’s largest aerospace industry and air show exhibition. In a pop-up luxury hotel, he saw Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest defense company, advertising its equipment to an elite audience of global buyers. Elbit was showing a promotional video about killer drones, which have been used in Israel’s wars against Gaza and over the West Bank.
Antony Loewenstein (The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World)
Israeli caution toward Russia in 2022 was unsurprising because Israeli surveillance firm Cellebrite had sold Vladimir Putin phone-hacking technology that he used on dissidents and political opponents for years, deploying it tens of thousands of times. Israel didn’t sell the powerful NSO Group phone-hacking tool, Pegasus, to Ukraine despite the country having asked for it since 2019: it did not want to anger Moscow. Israel was thus complicit in Russia’s descent into autocracy. Within days of the Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, the global share prices of defense contractors soared, including Israel’s biggest, Elbit Systems, whose stock climbed 70 percent higher than the year before. One of the most highly sought-after Israeli weapons is a missile interception system. US financial analysts from Citi argued that investment in weapons manufacturers was the ethical thing to do because “defending the values of liberal democracies and creating a deterrent … preserves peace and global stability.”19 Israeli cyber firms were in huge demand. Israel’s Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked said that Israel would benefit financially because European nations wanted Israeli armaments.20 She said the quiet part out loud, unashamed of seeing opportunity in a moment of crisis. “We have unprecedented opportunities, and the potential is crazy,” an Israeli defense industry source told Haaretz.21
Antony Loewenstein (The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World)
Finally, it’s not clear that government and the tech industry are competing for exactly the same people. The biggest bidding wars among the tech giants and startups is for technologists who work with advanced technologies like AI and machine learning. Outside of national security and defense (where such skills are very much in demand), government is rarely competing for this talent pool. The skills most needed in government are good product management and service design. The work is hard not because the tech is complicated but because the environment is. Arrogance can be an asset in startups; in government, humility is not only necessary but soon acquired if one doesn’t start out with it. While emotional intelligence matters in all jobs more than the Silicon Valley caricature allows for, it is critical in public-sector work, which is more about change and human responses to change than about technology. The same goes for ethics: a sense of responsibility to the common good and a willingness to think deeply about what harm might come from your actions are assets in any field, but if you’re not already considering these factors, working in government will bring them front and center. When entrepreneurs say that government will never do tech well because lower pay means it won’t get the best people, it’s worth asking what they mean by “best.
Jennifer Pahlka (Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better)
Commander, I believe we share a belief that the country is at a crossroads.” “You sound more optimistic than I am.” “That’s the political way of saying ‘I don’t know if we can save it.’ The lobbyists, big tech, the defense industry, pharmaceutical companies—they have real power, real control. The people, as you correctly noted, get manipulated and taxed, with no recourse other than to vote, but that vote means less and less the more power and control these corporations accumulate.” “It’s a machine,” Reece said. “I don’t want any part of it.” “There is no New World, Commander. No faraway lands in which to plant a flag and start over.
Jack Carr (Only the Dead (Terminal List #6))