“
I did not have sex with a mongoose.
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R.L. Naquin (Unamused Muse (Mt. Olympus Employment Agency: Muse #2))
“
Nobody quits the book club. Once you’re in the club, you’re in it forever.
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R.L. Naquin (Unamused Muse (Mt. Olympus Employment Agency: Muse #2))
“
Never underestimate the power of a well-timed, quality piece of chocolate.
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”
R.L. Naquin (Unamused Muse (Mt. Olympus Employment Agency: Muse #2))
“
1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere.
2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times....
3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions.
4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred.
5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth.
It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.
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Christopher Hitchens
“
Psychology’s service to U.S. national security has produced a variant of what the psychiatrist Robert Lifton has called, in his study of Nazi doctors, a “Faustian bargain.” In this case, the price paid has been the American Psychological Association’s collective silence, ethical “numbing,” and, over time, historical amnesia. 3 Indeed, Lifton emphasizes that “the Nazis were not the only ones to involve doctors in evil”; in defense of this argument, he cites the Cold War “role of …American physicians and psychologists employed by the Central Intelligence Agency…for unethical medical and psychological experiments involving drugs and mind manipulation.” 4
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Alfred W. McCoy (Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation)
“
In the Middle Ages there was no salvation outside the Church, and the theologians had a hard time explaining what God did with those pagans who were visibly virtuous or saintly. Similarly, in contemporary society effort is not productive unless it is done at the behest of a boss, and economists have a hard time dealing with the obvious usefulness of people when they are outside the corporate control of a corporation, volunteer agency, or labour camp.
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Ivan Illich (The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies)
“
The employment figures released by federal government agencies are fraudulent. Real unemployment in the United States is not under 7 percent; it’s closer to 37 percent, despite what the White House, the Fed, and the U.S. Treasury try to tell you. The Misery Index, a measure of how Americans feel about the economy, is over 14 percent, not at the 8 percent level the government claims.
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Michael Savage (Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth)
“
The more highly competitive the market for labor and for the employer’s products, the higher the cost paid for discrimination and consequently the less leeway the employer has for indulging his prejudices without risking his own profits and ultimately the financial survival of the business. On the other hand, enterprises not subject to the full stress of a competitive market—monopolies, non-profit enterprises, government agencies—have greater leeway.
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Thomas Sowell (Economic Facts and Fallacies)
“
It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience. If there be no penalty annexed to disobedience, the resolutions or commands which pretend to be laws will, in fact, amount to nothing more than advice or recommendation. This penalty, whatever it may be, can only be inflicted in two ways: by the agency of the Courts and Ministers of Justice, or by military force; by the coercion of the magistracy, or by the coercion of arms. The first kind can evidently apply only to men: the last kind must, of necessity, be employed against bodies politic, or communities, or States.
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Alexander Hamilton (The Federalist Papers)
“
In the biblical understanding of giftedness, gifts are never really ours or for ourselves. We have nothing that was not given us. Our gifts are ultimately God’s, and we are only “stewards”—responsible for the prudent management of property that is not our own. This is why our gifts are always “ours for others,” whether in the community of Christ or the broader society outside, especially the neighbor in need. This is also why it is wrong to treat God as a grand employment agency, a celestial executive searcher to find perfect fits for our perfect gifts. The truth is not that God is finding us a place for our gifts but that God has created us and our gifts for a place of his choosing—and we will only be ourselves when we are finally there.
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Os Guinness (The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life)
“
Hundreds of Nazi war criminals found a haven in the United States, either living in comfortable anonymity or actively employed by U.S. intelligence agencies during the cold war and otherwise enjoying the protection of high-placed individuals. Some of them found their way onto the Republican presidential campaign committees of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush.
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Michael Parenti (Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism)
“
These contradictions, of course, lead to explosions, crises, in which momentary suspension of all labour and annihilation of a great part of the capital violently lead it back to the point where it is enabled [to go on] fully employing its productive powers without committing suicide. Yet, these regularly recurring catastrophes lead to their repetition on a higher scale, and finally to its violent overthrow. There are moments in the developed movement of capital which delay this movement other than by crises; such as e.g. the constant devaluation of a part of the existing capital: the transformation of a great part of capital into fixed capital which does not serve as agency of direct production; unproductive waste of a great portion of capital etc.
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Karl Marx (Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy)
“
Humans and machines might merge so completely that humans will not be able to survive at all if they are disconnected from the network. They will be connected starting in the womb, and if later in life you choose to disconnect, insurance agencies might refuse to insure you, employers might refuse to employ you, and healthcare services might refuse to take care of you. In the big battle between health and privacy, health is likely to win hands down.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
Gordon Way, brother of Susan, employer of Richard MacDuff, was a rich man, the founder and owner of WayForward Technologies II. WayForward Technologies itself had of course gone bust, for the usual reason, taking his entire first fortune with it.
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Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently, #1))
“
Catholics form a majority in Chile, although there are more and more Evangelicals and Pentecostals who irritate everyone because they have a direct understanding with God while everyone else must pass through the priestly bureaucracy. The Mormons, who are also numerous and very powerful, serve their followers as a valuable employment agency, the way that members of the Radical Party used to do. Whoever is left is either Jewish, Muslim, or, in my generation, a New Age spiritualist, which is a cocktail of ecological, Christian, and Buddhist practices, along with a few rituals recently rescued from the Indian reservations, and with the usual accompaniment of gurus, astrologists, psychics, and other spiritual guides.
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Isabel Allende (My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile)
“
WILSON CONCOCTED and legitimized the magic elixir of judicial constitution-making and rule by administrative agencies, but Franklin D. Roosevelt employed it like an alchemist to transmute the American political system into a full-blown administrative state that resembled George III’s system of rulers and subjects as much as it did George Washington’s government.
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Myron Magnet (Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution)
“
GUNPOWDER, n. An agency employed by civilized nations for the settlement of disputes which might become troublesome if left unadjusted. By most writers the invention of gunpowder is ascribed to the Chinese, but not upon very convincing evidence. Milton says it was invented by the devil to dispel angels with, and this opinion seems to derive some support from the scarcity of angels.
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Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary)
“
Asked what he would undertake first,
Were he called upon to rule a nation,
Confucius replied: 'To correct language . . .
If language is not correct,
Then what is said is not what is meant,
Then what ought to be done remains undone;
If this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate;
If morals and art deteriorate, justice "All go astray;
If justice goes astray
The people will stand about in helpless confusion.
Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said.
This mattars above everything.'
Asked to surrender in World War Two,
The Japanese employed the word 'mokusatsu'
In replying to the Potsdam ultimatum.
The word given out by the Domei news agency
Was interpreted in Washington as 'treat with contempt'
Rather than 'withholding comment' - pending a decision
Its correct meaning.
The Americans concluded that their ultimatum had been rejected;
The boys in the back-room could play with their new toy
A hundred and forty thousand people lay round in helpless confusion.
Today 'peace' is mis-translated, and means a seething stalemate
Instead of calm;
'Strength' is mis-translated, and means paranoid force
Instead of right-minded confidence...
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”
Heathcote Williams
“
1920, blacks owned 350 businesses in Detroit, including a movie theater, the only African American–owned pawnshop in the United States, a co-op grocery, and a bank. The community included 17 physicians, 22 lawyers, 22 barbershops, 13 dentists, 12 cartage agencies, 11 tailors, 10 restaurants, 10 real estate dealers, 8 grocers, 6 drugstores, 5 undertakers, 4 employment offices, a few service-stations, and a candy maker.
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Jeremy Williams (Detroit: The Black Bottom Community (Images of America: Michigan))
“
If we analyse the classes of life, we readily find that there are three cardinal classes which are radically distinct in function. A short analysis will disclose to us that, though minerals have various activities, they are not "living." The plants have a very definite and well known function-the transformation of solar energy into organic chemical energy. They are a class of life which appropriates one kind of energy, converts it into another kind and stores it up; in that sense they are a kind of storage battery for the solar energy; and so I define THE PLANTS AS THE CHEMISTRY-BINDING class of life.
The animals use the highly dynamic products of the chemistry-binding class-the plants-as food, and those products-the results of plant-transformation-undergo in animals a further transformation into yet higher forms; and the animals are correspondingly a more dynamic class of life; their energy is kinetic; they have a remarkable freedom and power which the plants do not possess-I mean the freedom and faculty to move about in space; and so I define ANIMALS AS THE SPACE-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.
And now what shall we say of human beings? What is to be our definition of Man? Like the animals, human beings do indeed possess the space-binding capacity but, over and above that, human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them-I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define HUMANITY, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the TIME-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.
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”
Alfred Korzybski (Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of Human Engineering (Classic Reprint))
“
[To] explain the phenomena of the mineral kingdom ... systems are usually reduced to two classes, according as they refer to the origin of terrestrial bodies to FIRE or to WATER; and ... their followers have of late been distinguished by the fanciful names of Vulcanists and Neptunists. To the former of these Dr HUTTON belongs much more than to the latter; though, as he employs the agency both of fire and water in his system, he cannot, in strict propriety, be arranged with either.
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John Playfair (Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth)
“
what of the enormous power exercised today by lifetime-appointed judges, who micromanage more and more of society; unelected bureaucrats employed by scores of government departments and agencies, who legislate not through elected members of Congress but by the issuance of untold regulations and rules; and, the surrendering of sovereign legal and policy authority to international organizations, thereby conferring governing decisions to organizations that exist outside the Constitution’s framework?
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Mark R. Levin (Unfreedom of the Press)
“
Most of us felt that taking control of our neighborhoods was the first step toward liberation...First, we would take control of the schools; then we would take control of the hospitals; then we would take control of the colleges, the housing, etc., etc. We would have community controlled employment, welfare centers, and city, state, and federal agencies.
'Hold on for a minute,' somebody said. 'Where are y'all gonna get the money to run all that stuff?'
'We'll take community control of the banks,' someone answered.
'You'd better take community control of the army, too, because those banks aren't gonna just let you take their money lying down."
'We'll take control of the political institutions in our community. Then we'll take control of the congressional seats, the senate seats, the city council seats, the mayor's office, and every other office you can take control of. We'll take control of the political offices so we can allocate money to the people who need it.'
'Y'all just wishing and hoping,' someone said. 'You can control the social institutions and the political institutions, but unless you control the economic and military institutions, you can only go so far.
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Assata Shakur (Assata: An Autobiography)
“
But that avenue into economic stability, even for the college educated, was now threatened by two key developments: First, the federal government’s layoffs were concentrated in the social service agencies, where many African Americans worked. Reagan had exempted the Department of Defense, for example, while making it clear that “other divisions of Government would be hit especially hard by the employment reductions.” When one agency was abolished in 1981, jobs for nine hundred workers, 60 percent of them black, were wiped out. Then, the Department of Health and Human Services, a major agency for black employment, absorbed about half of the six thousand layoffs scheduled for 1982.
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Carol Anderson (White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide)
“
Two courses were open to us. We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead, we met the situation with proposals to private business and to the Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put that program in action. Our measures have repelled these attacks of fear and panic. . . . We have used the credit of the Government to aid and protect our institutions, both public and private. We have provided methods and assurances that none suffer from hunger or cold amongst our people. We have instituted measures to assist our farmers and our homeowners. We have created vast agencies for employment.
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Herbert Hoover (Messages and Papers of Herbert Hoover)
“
All of us—employers, parents, schools, government agencies, and interns themselves—are complicit in the devaluing of work, the exacerbation of social inequality, and the disillusionment of young people in the workplace that are emerging as a result of the intern boom. Informal, barely studied, and little regulated, internships demand our scrutiny. We need a view of the entire sprawling system and its history, a glimpse of its curious blend of privilege and exploitation; we need to hear from interns themselves, and also from those who proffer internships, the people who sell them, the few who work to improve them, an the many who are unable to access them at all. only then can we consider ethical, legal alternatives to a system that is broken, a practice that is often poisonous.
”
”
Ross Perlin
“
The new and real agencies of the learning machine are also literal-minded. If we program a machine for winning a war, we must think well what we mean by winning. A learning machine must be programmed by experience. The only experience of a nuclear war which is not immediately catastrophic is the experience of a war game. If we are to use this experience as a guide for our procedure in a real emergency, the values of winning which we have employed in the programming games must be the same values which we hold at heart in the actual outcome of a war. We can fail in this only at our immediate, utter, and irretrievable peril. We cannot expect the machine to follow us in those prejudices and emotional compromises by which we enable ourselves to call destruction by the name of victory.
”
”
Norbert Wiener (Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Reissue of the 1961 second edition)
“
And what could Billy know of man except of man as a mere sailor? And the old-fashioned sailor, the veritable man before the mast, the sailor from boyhood up, he, though indeed of the same species as a landsman, is in some respects singularly distinct from him. The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head—no intricate games of chess where few moves are made in straight-forwardness and ends are attained by indirection, an oblique, tedious, barren game hardly worth that poor candle burnt out in playing it. Yes, as a class, sailors are in character a juvenile race. Even their deviations are marked by juvenility, this more especially holding true with the sailors of Billy’s time. Then too, certain things which apply to all sailors do more pointedly operate here and there upon the junior one. Every sailor, too, is accustomed to obey orders without debating them; his life afloat is externally ruled for him; he is not brought into that promiscuous commerce with mankind where unobstructed free agency on equal terms—equal superficially, at least—soon teaches one that unless upon occasion he exercise a distrust keen in proportion to the fairness of the appearance, some foul turn may be served him. A ruled undemonstrative distrustfulness is so habitual, not with businessmen so much as with men who know their kind in less shallow relations than business, namely, certain men of the world, that they come at last to employ it all but unconsciously; and some of them would very likely feel real surprise at being charged with it as one of their general characteristics. 17
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Herman Melville (Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories)
“
Affirmative action is a tool to ensure that qualified minority applicants are given the same employment opportunities as white people. It is a flexible program—there are no quotas or requirements as commonly understood. Moreover, white women have been the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action, although the program did not initially include them. Corporations are more likely to favor white women and immigrants of color of elite backgrounds from outside the United States when choosing their executives.3 No employer is required to hire an unqualified person of color, but companies are required to be able to articulate why they didn’t hire a qualified person of color (and this requirement is rarely enforced). Additionally, affirmative action never applied to private companies—only to state and governmental agencies.
”
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Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
“
There were always such dwellings--the abode of the cook or the man who tended the yard, or the woman who did the washing and ironing; so normal and unexceptionable as to attract no attention, the places where lives were led in the shadow of the employer in the larger house. And the cause, Mma Ramotswe knew from long experience, of deep resentments and, on occasion, murderous hatreds. Those flowed from exploitation and bad treatment--the things that people would do to one another with utter predictability and inevitability unless those in authority made it impossible and laid down conditions of employment. She had seen shocking things in the course of her work, even here in Botswana, a good country where things were well run and people had rights; human nature, of course, would find its way round the best of rules and regulations.
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Alexander McCall Smith (The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, #12))
“
I was lost, and fell into a dark mood while I struggled with my conscience. I love my country, and I believe in public service—my whole family, my whole family line for centuries, is filled with men and women who have spent their lives serving this country and its citizens. I myself had sworn an oath of service not to an agency, nor even a government, but to the public, in support and defense of the Constitution, whose guarantee of civil liberties had been so flagrantly violated. Now I was more than part of that violation: I was party to it. All of that work, all of those years—who was I working for? How was I to balance my contract of secrecy with the agencies that employed me and the oath I’d sworn to my country’s founding principles? To whom, or what, did I owe the greater allegiance? At what point was I morally obliged to break the law?
”
”
Edward Snowden (Permanent Record)
“
As individuals, we also are apt to use the canon as a cannon. We invoke the stripling warriors of Helaman and the iron rod of Lehi’s vision to ground our own version of unflinching obedience. Or we invoke the lessons of the Liahona to support our more spontaneous and flexible approach to gospel living. In America, some Mormons find Jesus’ ministry to the downtrodden and King Benjamin’s words about withholding judgment but not relief from the beggar to be apt endorsement of their preferred political policies. At the other end of the spectrum, some invoke the war in heaven fought over agency and consider the Mormon ethic of self-reliance to be adequate support for a different political outlook. Or, sometimes individuals even employ the cannon against the canon, citing inconsistencies and imperfections in the record as grounds for nonbelief in the principle of inspiration, one’s faith tradition, or even God.
”
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Terryl L. Givens (The Crucible of Doubt: Reflections on the Quest for Faith)
“
A golden visa is a permanent residency visa issued to individuals who invest, often through the purchase of property, a certain sum of money into the issuing country.
The United States EB-5 visa program requires overseas applicants to invest a minimum of anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million, depending on the location of the project, and requires at least 10 jobs to be either created or preserved.[22] When these criteria are met, the applicant and their family become eligible for a green card. There is an annual cap of 10,000 applications under the EB-5 program.[citation needed] The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has offered its EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program since 1990. It is designed to encourage foreign investment in infrastructure projects in the U.S., particularly in Targeted Employment Areas (TEA), high unemployment areas. The funds are channeled through agencies called regional centers, now designated only by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The funding opportunities allow the investor to make a sound financial investment and obtain a U.S. “Green Card.
A large majority of users of such programs are wealthy Chinese seeking legal security and a better quality of life outside of their home country.
”
”
Wikipedia: Immigrant investor programs
“
If you want to know the real reasons why certain politicians vote the way they do - follow the money. Arch Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg (a.k.a. JackOff Grease-Smug) stands to make billions via his investment firm - Somerset Capital Management - if the UK crashes unceremoniously out of the European Union without a secure future trade deal. Why ? Because proposed EU regulations will give enforcement agencies greater powers to curb the activities adopted by the sort of off-shore tax havens his company employs. Consequently the British electorate get swindled not once, but twice. Firstly because any sort of Brexit - whether hard, soft, or half-baked - will make every man, woman and child in the UK that much poorer than under the status quo currently enjoyed as a fully paid up member of the EU. Secondly because Rees-Mogg's company, if not brought to heel by appropriate EU wide legislation, will deprive Her Majesty's Treasury of millions in taxes, thus leading to more onerous taxes for the rest of us. It begs the question, who else in the obscure but influential European Research Group (ERG) that he chairs and the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) that he subscribes to, have similar vested interests in a no-deal Brexit ? It is high time for infinitely greater parliamentary and public scrutiny into the UK Register of Members' Financial Interests in order to put an end to these nefarious dealings and appalling double standards in public life which only serve to further corrode public trust in an already fragile democracy.
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Alex Morritt (Lines & Lenses)
“
Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned
”
”
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: FROM THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty)
“
The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels.
Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps:
That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do.
That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet.
That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures.
And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it.
I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration.
It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.
”
”
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
“
In their eagerness to eliminate from history any reference to individuais and individual events, collectivist authors resorted to a chimerical construction, the group mind or social mind.
At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries German philologists began to study German medieval poetry, which had long since fallen into oblivion. Most of the epics they edited from old manuscripts were imitations of French works. The names of their authors—most of them knightly warriors in the service of dukes or counts—were known. These epics were not much to boast of. But there were two epics of a quite different character, genuinely original works of high literary value, far surpassing the conventional products of the courtiers: the Nibelungenlied and the Gudrun. The former is one of the great books of world literature and undoubtedly the outstanding poem Germany produced before the days of Goethe and Schiller. The names of the authors of these masterpieces were not handed down to posterity. Perhaps the poets belonged to the class of professional entertainers (Spielleute), who not only were snubbed by the nobility but had to endure mortifying legal disabilities. Perhaps they were heretical or Jewish, and the clergy was eager to make people forget them. At any rate the philologists called these two works "people's epics" (Volksepen). This term suggested to naive minds the idea that they were written not by individual authors but by the "people." The same mythical authorship was attributed to popular songs (Volkslieder) whose authors were unknown.
Again in Germany, in the years following the Napoleonic wars, the problem of comprehensive legislative codification was brought up for discussion. In this controversy the historical school of jurisprudence, led by Savigny, denied the competence of any age and any persons to write legislation. Like the Volksepen and the Volkslieder, a nation s laws, they declared, are a spontaneous emanation of the Volksgeist, the nations spirit and peculiar character. Genuine laws are not arbitrarily written by legislators; they spring up and thrive organically from the Volksgeist.
This Volksgeist doctrine was devised in Germany as a conscious reaction against the ideas of natural law and the "unGerman" spirit of the French Revolution. But it was further developed and elevated to the dignity of a comprehensive social doctrine by the French positivists, many of whom not only were committed to the principies of the most radical among the revolutionary leaders but aimed at completing the "unfinished revolution" by a violent overthrow of the capitalistic mode of production. Émile Durkheim and his school deal with the group mind as if it were a real phenomenon, a distinct agency, thinking and acting. As they see it, not individuais but the group is the subject of history.
As a corrective of these fancies the truism must be stressed that only individuais think and act. In dealing with the thoughts and actions of individuais the historian establishes the fact that some individuais influence one another in their thinking and acting more strongly than they influence and are influenced by other individuais. He observes that cooperation and division of labor exist among some, while existing to a lesser extent or not at ali among others. He employs the term "group" to signify an aggregation of individuais who cooperate together more closely.
”
”
Ludwig von Mises (Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution)
“
Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned out badly, you might get shot. Better to avoid all responsibility. An example of what could happen
”
”
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: FROM THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty)
“
Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare.
Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest.
Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine.
In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
Sex workers also require certain skills to do their jobs effectively, either for their own or their employers’ interests, vis-à-vis various social skills such as ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ acting. In this regard, dissociation is viewed not as a negative, but rather as a positive.
”
”
Gregory Gall (An Agency of Their Own: Sex Worker Union Organizing)
“
Is it not manifest that the employing so many of our preachers in these agencies and professorships is one of the great causes why we have such a scarcity of preachers to fill the regular work? Moreover, these presidents, professors, agents, and editors get a greater amount of pay, and get it more certainly, too, than a traveling preacher, who has to breast every storm, and often falls very far short of his disciplinary allowance. Here is a great temptation to those who are qualified to fill those high offices to seek them, and give up the regular work of preaching and trying to save souls. And is it not manifest to every candid observer that very few of those young men who believe they were called of God to preach the Gospel, and are persuaded to go to a college or a Biblical institute, the better to qualify them for the great work of the ministry, ever go into the regular traveling ministry? The reason as plainly this: having quieted their consciences with the flattering unction of obtaining a sanctified education, while they have neglected the duty of regularly preaching Jesus to dying sinners, their moral sensibilities are blunted, and they see an opening prospect of getting better pay as teachers in high schools or other institutions of learning, and from the prospect of gain they are easily persuaded that they can meet their moral obligations in disseminating sanctified learning. Thus, as sure as a leaden ball tends to the earth in obedience to the laws of gravity, just so sure our present modus operandi tends to a congregational ministry, And if this course is pursued a little longer, the Methodist Church will bid a long, long farewell to her beloved itinerancy, to which we, under God, owe almost every thing that is intrinsically valuable in Methodism.
”
”
Peter Cartwright (The Autobiography of Peter Cartwright)
“
That winter remains in my mind as one great blizzard of verbiage. It started with the insolvency of the Employment and Workforce Commission. The Commission had been running through funds budgeted for unemployment benefits at an alarming rate, and nobody had noticed that it was about to run out completely. The Commission blamed the legislature, the legislature blamed the Commission, and the governor blamed the legislature and the Commission, but especially the Commission. The Commission, it turned out, would have to apply for federal money to avoid a shortfall, and for the application to be legal the governor would have to sign it. It was a perfect set-up for him. He refused to sign the application unless the Commission agreed to his demands, one of which was an independent audit. The Commission delayed. The deadline approached; if it were to pass, the Commission would be unable to issue unemployment checks. There was great outrage from the people known for great outrage. Everybody (well, everybody in the state’s media—but it felt like everybody everywhere) was talking about “playing chicken.” The governor was “playing chicken” with the Employment and Workforce Commission; there was a “game of chicken” going on between the state’s chief executive and its workforce agency. The governor was also said to be “holding the unemployed hostage” in his vainglorious attempt to get what he wanted from a government agency; sometimes he was said to be “holding the unemployed hostage to his libertarian ideology” or “holding a state agency hostage for political gain.” The State actually combined these two images in one of its editorials: “You do not play chicken with the lives of 77,000 laid-off citizens, holding them hostage for your own political purposes.” No, I supposed, you do not.
”
”
Barton Swaim (The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics)
“
The agency was only a few years old, but tremendous resources had been poured into this facility and another massive building in St. Louis. The organization received $5 billion a year in federal funds, and employed thousands of personnel, both military and civilian.
”
”
Mark Greaney (Full Force and Effect (Jack Ryan Universe, #18))
“
Since September 11, 2001, we have constructed and identified a new satanic enemy, radical Islam. Rather than concentrate on those who perpetuated the horrors of 9/11, a broad brush was employed to demonize all who stood in the way of Empire. Not surprisingly, former president George W. Bush gave us, during his 2002 State of the Union address, the term "axis of evil," which included the countries of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. It would take only a few months before the list was expanded. Warning that the U.S. stood ready to take action, then Under Secretary of State and future U.S. representative to the United Nations, John Bolton, added three more countries to the "axis of evil" list in his May 2002 speech, "Beyond the Axis of Evil." The countries added were Cuba, Libya, and Syria.
Yet enemies of Empire and God need not be the only ones defined as evil. Anyone who questions U.S. exceptionalism or supremacy finds themselves labeled as Satan's mouthpiece. Academics, liberals, and politicians (including presidents) have all been portrayed in demonic terms for going against the prevailing mindset that equates America with that "shining city upon the hill." Unfortunately, such characterizations only stifle constructive discourse. [...] [W]e are left wondering whether humanity would have been better served if there had been no such figure as Satan, the personification of absolute Evil. How many so-called witches might not have been burned? How many holy crusades to rid the world of evil would have been averted? What if, instead, Satan was to be understood differently? What if Satan, or absolute Evil, played a different role in determining moral agency?
”
”
Miguel A. de la Torre (The Quest for the Historical Satan)
“
accommodate, within reason, the religious practices of workers and applicants unless they impose an “undue hardship” on the business. It is the latest in a line of Supreme Court cases that have elevated religious rights over secular interests, whether exercised by powerful corporations, government agencies or prison inmates. The majority opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia stressed two points that outline the role religion can have in the workplace. Employers must do more than handle religious practices in the same way they do secular ones, he wrote, because federal law gives faith-related expression “favored treatment, affirmatively obligating employers” to accommodate things they could otherwise refuse. Moreover, he wrote, an applicant or employee alleging religious discrimination doesn’t have to prove the employer was motivated by bias.
”
”
Anonymous
“
The situation was similar in the Soviet Union, with industry playing the role of sugar in the Caribbean. Industrial growth in the Soviet Union was further facilitated because its technology was so backward relative to what was available in Europe and the United States, so large gains could be reaped by reallocating resources to the industrial sector, even if all this was done inefficiently and by force. Before 1928 most Russians lived in the countryside. The technology used by peasants was primitive, and there were few incentives to be productive. Indeed, the last vestiges of Russian feudalism were eradicated only shortly before the First World War. There was thus huge unrealized economic potential from reallocating this labor from agriculture to industry. Stalinist industrialization was one brutal way of unlocking this potential. By fiat, Stalin moved these very poorly used resources into industry, where they could be employed more productively, even if industry itself was very inefficiently organized relative to what could have been achieved. In fact, between 1928 and 1960 national income grew at 6 percent a year, probably the most rapid spurt of economic growth in history up until then. This quick economic growth was not created by technological change, but by reallocating labor and by capital accumulation through the creation of new tools and factories. Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy.
”
”
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: FROM THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty)
“
Residents are arriving from other states, even other countries, to work for one of the universities, a downtown advertising agency, or Capital One, the region’s largest employer, bringing new energy and out-of-town perspectives.
”
”
Kristen Green (Something Must Be Done about Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle)
“
Alarab Recruiting MANPOWER RECRUITMENT SERVICE, help our clients to recruit people provide fast, efficient, and progressive recruitment service, please contact us Email: info(at)alarabrecruiting(dot)com
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”
Anonymous
“
Roosevelt’s administration ensured that African Americans were hired both by the New Deal agencies and by government contractors. The Work Projects Administration employed 350,000 African American workers, who accounted for 15 percent of the WPA’s workforce. African Americans comprised more than 10 percent of the National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Public Works Administration issued contracts only to companies that agreed to hire a certain number of African American workers.41
”
”
Rawn James Jr. (The Double V: How Wars, Protest, and Harry Truman Desegregated America’s Military)
“
Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned out badly, you might get shot. Better to avoid all responsibility. An example of what could happen
”
”
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: FROM THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty)
“
I was employed by an agency. Hikikomori agency. Parents paid the agency to find ways to get their sons back into the world. For many we were what you call in English “the last resort”: the parents had tried pets, Shinto priests, bribes, threats. ‘I was a very good rental sister – I had a high success rate. The fact that I dressed as a goth Lolita helped,
”
”
Gail Jones (A Guide to Berlin)
“
A non government sites has been launched by Rajeev Kumar and I am the founder of the jobinos.in websites. I collect latest various Govt jobs vacancy opening news from Newspaper,Magazines,Govt employment Agency and other third party sources, this would be by online or off line.
”
”
Rajeev
“
Ah, cruel parents indeed, who neglect the religious education of their children; more cruel in some respects than Herod; he slew the bodies of children, these murder souls; he murdered the children of others, these murder their own; he employed the agency of his servants, these do the work of slaughter themselves.
”
”
John Angell James (The Family Monitor, Or, a Help to Domestic Happiness)
“
by its full-member committee, the ACRC required the
concerned public agencies to dismiss and accuse the
3 re-employed officials among them who violated the
”
”
강남출장안마번호
“
Misconduct, or non-conforming behaviour, as it is sometimes called, can be tackled in many ways such as counseling, warning, etc. In extreme cases such as, criminal breach of trust, theft, fraud, etc. the employer is also at liberty to initiate action against the employee, if the misconduct of the latter falls within the purview of the penal provisions of the law of the land. However such proceedings generally conducted by the State agencies, are time consuming and call for a high degree of proof. In addition to the above option, the employer also has an option to deal with the erring employee within the terms of employment. In such an eventuality, the employee may be awarded any penalty which may vary from the communication of displeasure, to the severance of the employer-employee relationship i.e. dismissal from service. Disciplinary authorities play a vital role in this context. Efficiency of the disciplinary authorities is an essential pre-requisite for the effective functioning of the reward and punishment function, more specifically the latter half of it.3. There was a time when the employer was virtually free to hire and fire the employees. Over a period of time, this common law notion has gone. Today an employer can inflict punishment on an employee only after following some statutory provisions depending upon the nature of the organisation.Briefly, the various statutory provisions which govern the actions of different types of organisation are as under: (a) Government: Part XIV of the Constitution relates to the terms of employment in respect of persons appointed in connection with the affairs of the State. Any action against the employees of the Union Government and the State Governments should conform to these Constitutional provisions, which confer certain protections on the 1
”
”
Anonymous
“
President Lyndon Johnson's Economic Opportunity Act, which established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and launched the “War on Poverty.” In the Pacific Northwest, OEO community development grants helped establish a host of organizations to address employment, health, housing, education and various legal needs. Beginning in 1965, the Yakima Valley Council for Community Action YVCCA opened centers to meet the farmworkers' health and social service needs. A year later they expanded to educational and legal services, offering adult basic education, English as a second language, high school equivalency programs, vocational training, health clinics, and day care. Volunteer attorneys helped workers address conflicts with immigration authorities and social service agencies.
”
”
David J Jepsen (Contested Boundaries: A New Pacific Northwest History)
“
In 1987, the EEOC issued guidelines advising employers that discrimination against people with criminal histories is permissible if—and only if—employers consider the nature and gravity of the offense or offenses, the time that has passed since the conviction and/or completion of the sentence, and the nature of the job held or sought. According to the agency, an absolute bar to employment based on prior convictions—without consideration of these factors—violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act if such a bar has a racially disparate impact. EEOC guidelines do not have the force of law, but judges frequently turn to them when evaluating whether unlawful discrimination has occurred, and the EEOC has the power to sue employers that run afoul of
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
THE HORROR OF THE UNPROFESSIONAL I was surprised to learn that when Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter wanted to scold Russia for its campaign of airstrikes in Syria in the fall of 2015, the word he chose to apply was “unprofessional.” Given the magnitude of the provocation, it seemed a little strange—as though he thought there were an International Association of Smartbomb Deployment Executives that might, once alerted by American officials, hold an inquiry into Russia’s behavior and hand down a stern reprimand. On reflection, slighting foes for their lack of professionalism was something of a theme of the Obama years. An Iowa Democrat became notorious in 2014, for example, when he tried to insult an Iowa Republican by calling him “a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.” Similarly, it was “unprofessionalism” (in the description of Thomas Friedman) that embarrassed the insubordinate Afghan-war General Stanley McChrystal, who made ill-considered remarks about the president to Rolling Stone magazine. And in the summer of 2013, when National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden exposed his employer’s mass surveillance of email and phone calls, the aspect of his past that his detractors chose to emphasize was … his failure to graduate from high school. How could such a no-account person challenge this intensely social-science-oriented administration?
”
”
Thomas Frank (Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People)
“
American citizens are self-absorbed, and the U.S. government devotes its immense resources to achieving the capitalistic demands of its citizenry. Thoughts do not saturate American politics. Corporations employ lobbyist and they fund political action committees that exert inordinate influence in shaping the outcome of this nation’s political agendas. Lobbyist devote their paid for services to sway government officials including legislators and members of regulatory agencies to carry out the programs of powerful corporations and wealthy individuals, granting unprecedented socioeconomic power in the hallowed chambers of the American government to wealthy segments of society. American corporations and affluent people exploit American culture, morals, and religion to push their private interests including inexplicable economic and military incursions into foreign counties. I feel increasingly disenfranchised and unrepresented in America’s supposedly participatory democratic government given the entrenchment of power in a select few. American democracy grants material benefits to the wealthy, vulgarizes the middle class, and ignores the disenfranchised poor. Many Americans applaud prosperous groups exploiting the lower classes, presumably because everyone aspires to become rich. A person and a society that employs vanities and greediness to measure their worthiness is hopelessly doomed. Future historians will venerate an empire that pursued achievement of great deeds based upon virtuous principles. Conversely, the historians of tomorrow will skewer contemporary Americans for their compulsive need to consume the ecosystem and trounce upon the rights of other nations to live peacefully. American vanities and unchecked desire to enjoy an easy life could destroy the world, as we know it.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Whereas “a living” can be dispensed via money through a relief agency, “meaningful work” is likely to be delivered only within an employing institution that is living by a new ethic.
”
”
Robert K. Greenleaf (Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness)
“
Those without ready access to personal contacts or networks turned to employment agencies to secure work. The majority of these “employment bureaus” or “intelligence offices” were for-profit enterprises that relied on fees from both employers and employees, and the aid they could provide depended upon the social contacts of their owners. The state of Massachusetts required intelligence offices to be licensed starting in 1848, but these offices still operated in a fairly unregulated market.
”
”
Cristina Viviana Groeger (The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston)
“
Broadly speaking, the new moral history employed in this book is concerned with the nature of causation and agency in the course of human events. It attempts to explain behavior in given historical contexts by showing the relationship between principles and practice in the day-to-day actions and interactions of men and women in a social context.
”
”
C. Bradley Thompson (America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It)
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What are your feelings from Bush to Obama?
Besides being responsible for the death of half a million people, I feel like Bush dealt a huge economic and social blow to the USA, one from which we may never fully recover. He directly flushed 3 trillion dollars down the toilet on hopeless, pointlessly destructive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq …and they’re not even over! For years to come, we’ll be paying costs for all the injured veterans (over 50,000) and destabilizing three countries, because you have to look at the impact that the Afghan war has on Pakistan. Bush expanded the use of torture, and created a whole new layer of government bureaucracy (the “Department of Homeland Security”) to spy on Americans. He created Indefinite Detention (at Guantanamo and other US military bases) and expanded the use of executive-ordered assassinations using the new drone technology. On economic issues, his administration allowed corporations to run things and regulate themselves. The agency that was supposed to regulate oil drilling had lobbyist-paid prostitutes sleeping with employees while oil industry lobbyists basically ran the agency. Energy companies like Enron, and the country’s investment banks were deregulated at the end of the Clinton administration and Bush allowed them to run wild. Above all, he was incompetent and appointed some really stupid people to important positions at every level of government.
Certainly, Obama has been involved in many of these same activities. A few he’s increased, such as the use of drone assassinations, but most of them he has at least tried to scale back. At the beginning of his first term, he tried to close the Guantanamo prison and have trials for many of the detainees in the United States but conservatives (including many Democrats) stirred up public resistance and blocked this from happening. He tried to get some kind of universal healthcare because over 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance. This is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcies and foreclosures because someone gets sick in a family, loses their job, loses their health insurance (because American employers are source of most people’s healthcare) and they can’t pay their health bills or their mortgage. Or they use up all their money caring for a sick family member. So many people in the US wanted health insurance reform or single-payer, universal health care similar to what you have in the UK. Members of Obama’s own party (The Democrats) joined with Republicans to narrowly block “The public option” but they managed to pass a half-assed but not-unsubstantial reform of health insurance that would prevent insurers from denying you coverage when you’re sick or have a “preexisting condition.” The minute it was signed into law, Republicans sued in the courts (all the way to the supreme court) and fought, tooth and nail to block its implementation. Same thing with gun control, even as we’re one of the most violent industrial countries in the world. (Among industrial countries, our murder rate is second only to Russia). Obama has managed to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan over Republican opposition but, literally, everything he tries to do, they blast it in the media and fight it in Congress. So, while I have a lot of criticisms of Obama, he is many orders of magnitude less awful than Bush and many of the positive things he’s tried to do have been blocked.
That said, the Democratic and Republican parties agree on more things than they disagree. Both signed off on the Afghan and Iraq wars. Both signed off on deregulation of banks, of derivatives, of mortgage regulations and of the energy and telecom business …and we’ve been living with the consequences ever since. I’m guessing it’s the same thing with Labor and Conservatives in the UK. Labor or Democrats will SAY they stand for certain “progressive” things but they end up supporting the same old crap...
(2014 interview with iamhiphop)
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Andy Singer
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The most insidious of the destructive forces behind Africatown’s demise involves the paper mills, which were at the heart of a billion-dollar lawsuit filed by residents. After seventy years as the main employers of Africatown’s residents, both mills shut down in 2000. Suddenly, nearly two thousand jobs disappeared, along with the perpetual and noxious stench associated with paper making. But the job losses were just a scratch on the surface compared to the real, almost invisible damage the mills had inflicted. To fully understand the story, we must step back in time to the 1980s, to a time when environmental laws in Alabama were essentially meaningless. Today, Alabama ranks last in the nation for what it spends to protect the environment, and is widely regarded by industry trade groups as the most permissive state in the country when it comes to setting or enforcing pollution limits. Back in the eighties and nineties, things were much worse. James Warr, who was the head of the Alabama Department of Environmental Management from its inception in the 1980s until the early 2000s, was opposed to vigorous application of environmental regulations for businesses. He was an odd fit for the head of an environmental agency tasked with regulating polluters, but I believe that is precisely why he was chosen—to ensure that the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act didn’t slow industrial production in Alabama. I was an environment reporter for the Mobile newspaper for eighteen years, beginning in 2000, and had numerous interactions with Warr and his agency. During an interview in 2003, Warr told me that the federal Superfund law was illegal and he had no intention of enforcing it or adding new sites in Alabama to the list.
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Ben Raines (The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning)
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Sanctify them through thy truth." John 17:17 Sanctification begins in regeneration. The Spirit of God infuses into man that new living principle by which he becomes "a new creature" in Christ Jesus. This work, which begins in the new birth, is carried on in two ways--mortification, whereby the lusts of the flesh are subdued and kept under; and vivification, by which the life which God has put within us is made to be a well of water springing up unto everlasting life. This is carried on every day in what is called "perseverance," by which the Christian is preserved and continued in a gracious state, and is made to abound in good works unto the praise and glory of God; and it culminates or comes to perfection, in "glory," when the soul, being thoroughly purged, is caught up to dwell with holy beings at the right hand of the Majesty on high. But while the Spirit of God is thus the author of sanctification, yet there is a visible agency employed which must not be forgotten. "Sanctify them," said Jesus, "through thy truth: thy word is truth." The passages of Scripture which prove that the instrument of our sanctification is the Word of God are very many. The Spirit of God brings to our minds the precepts and doctrines of truth, and applies them with power. These are heard in the ear, and being received in the heart, they work in us to will and to do of God's good pleasure. The truth is the sanctifier, and if we do not hear or read the truth, we shall not grow in sanctification. We only progress in sound living as we progress in sound understanding. "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path." Do not say of any error, "It is a mere matter of opinion." No man indulges an error of judgment, without sooner or later tolerating an error in practice. Hold fast the truth, for by so holding the truth shall you be sanctified by the Spirit of God.
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Charles Haddon Spurgeon (MORNING AND EVENING: DAILY READINGS)
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The Kremlin employs what disinformation expert Ben Nimmo has dubbed the 4D Approach: Dismiss, Distort, Distract, Dismay.
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Eliot Higgins (We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People)
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She watched the others looking at Louis, animated, handsome and the centre of attention. He was a sham, she thought angrily, he was a fraud and a con trick. Why had she wasted her life on him? Why was she not back in Lough Glass where she belonged with her family, with her children who needed her? What was she doing in this ridiculous house in London, working her guts out for an employment agency up the road, drinking a toast to Ivy and Ernest in a roomful of people she hardly knew? This was a Saturday night, she should be at home in Lough Glass. A terrible emptiness took hold of her. At home in Lough Glass doing what?
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Maeve Binchy (The Glass Lake)
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No employer is required to hire an unqualified person of color, but companies are required to be able to articulate why they didn’t hire a qualified person of color (and this requirement is rarely enforced). Additionally, affirmative action never applied to private companies—only to state and governmental agencies. Still, this program has been systematically chipped away at, and several states have eliminated affirmative action programs altogether.
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Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
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The national team players were in camp in Orlando, Florida, preparing for a pair of friendlies against Colombia when Rich Nichols and Jeffrey Kessler scheduled a conference call with the players on the team’s CBA committee. It was then that Hope Solo, Carli Lloyd, Alex Morgan, Becky Sauerbrunn, and Megan Rapinoe were presented with the idea of filing a wage-discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, against U.S. Soccer. If the players agreed to sign on, they would be asking a government agency to investigate whether U.S. Soccer was violating U.S. laws against workplace discrimination. In other words, the players were going to publicly accuse U.S. Soccer of discriminating against the women’s national team. It was a move guaranteed to ratchet up the tension between the national team and the federation. “I was nervous about that call the entire week because, in essence, what we were asking these great players to do was to sue their current employer for wage discrimination,” Nichols says. “That takes huge courage from anybody.
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Caitlin Murray (The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer)
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Could these groundbreaking and often unsung activists have imagined that only forty years later the 'official' gay rights agenda would be largely pro-police, pro-prisons, and pro-war - exactly the forces they worked so hard to resist? Just a few decades later, the most visible and well-funded arms of the 'LGBT movement' look much more like a corporate strategizing session than a grassroots social justice movement. There are countless examples of this dramatic shift in priorities. What emerged as a fight against racist, anti-poor, and anti-queer police violence now works hand in hand with local and federal law enforcement agencies - district attorneys are asked to speak at trans rallies, cops march in Gay Pride parades. The agendas of prosecutors - those who lock up our family, friends, and lovers - and many queer and trans organizations are becomingly increasingly similar, with sentence- and police-enhancing legislation at the top of the priority list. Hate crimes legislation is tacked on to multi-billion dollar 'defense' bills to support US military domination in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Despite the rhetoric of an 'LGBT community,' transgender and gender-non-conforming people are our 'lead' organizations - most recently in the 2007 gutting of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of gender identity protections. And as the rate of people (particularly poor queer and trans people of color) without steady jobs, housing, or healthcare continues to rise, and health and social services continue to be cut, those dubbed the leaders of the 'LGBT movement' insist that marriage rights are the way to redress the inequalities in our communities.
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Eric A. Stanley (Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex)
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partners to make progress toward clearly defined goals. The work, however, should begin with identifying challenges and understanding them on their own terms and from the perspective of “the other.” I asked our team not only to map the interests of rivals, adversaries, and enemies, but also to consider the emotions, aspirations, and ideologies that drive and constrain them. The options we developed, if approved, would become integrated strategies. I insisted that these strategies must identify not only goals, but also our assumptions—especially assumptions concerning the degree of agency and control that we and our partners could expect in order to make progress toward those goals. The strategies needed to be logical with regard to the means employed and the desired ends. We would also work hard to describe what was at stake and to explain why accomplishing those ends was worth the risks and potential cost in treasure and, especially, blood. I then laid out what I saw, from my more than three decades in the military and from studying national security as a historian, as the four categories of challenges to national and international security. These would be our priorities as we developed integrated strategies for the president.
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H.R. McMaster (Battlegrounds)
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The Radiomarine Corporation’s relationship with shipping lines was impersonal: it was essentially a powerful employment agency supplying specialist staff. A ship was forced to accept a radio operator assigned by the corporation. The corporation was responsible for checking a radioman’s qualifications, but no check was ever made into a man’s background.
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Gordon Thomas (Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle)
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And now what shall we say of human beings? What is to be our definition of Man? Like the animals, human beings do indeed possess the space-binding capacity but, over and above that, human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them—I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent [pg 060] natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define humanity, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the time-binding class of life.
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Alfred Korzybski (Manhood of Humanity: Unlocking Human Potential: A Journey Through Language, Symbolism, and Time-Binding)
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Disinformation Systems consist of elaborate deceptions, constructed by intelligence agencies like the C.I.A., K.G.B. or England's M.I.5, in which a cover story, when created, has within it a second deception, disguised to look like "the hidden truth" to any suspicious rival who successfully digs below the surface. Since Disinformation Systems have multiplied like bacteria in our increasingly clandestine world, any perception psychologist who looks into modern politics will recognize that quantum logic, probability theory and strong doses of zeteticism make the best tools to employ in estimating if the President has just told us another whooping big lie or has just uttered the truth for once.
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Robert Anton Wilson (Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World)
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Government implies the power of making laws. It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience. If there be no penalty annexed to disobedience, the resolutions or commands which pretend to be laws will, in fact, amount to nothing more than advice or recommendation. This penalty, whatever it may be, can only be inflicted in two ways: by the agency of the courts and ministers of justice, or by military force; by the coercion of the magistracy, or by the coercion of arms. The first kind can evidently apply only to men; the last kind must of necessity, be employed against bodies politic, or communities, or States.
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Alexander Hamilton (The Federalist Papers)
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Robbert Murray
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With the ‘modern labour market services’ legislation (‘Hartz I and II’), part-time employment and agency work were liberalized. The latter particularly abolished the ban on ‘synchronization’ and dismissal (it had previously been illegal for employment agencies to take on workers only for the duration of a particular job in a client company).90 The boom in agency and low-paid work in the following years was a direct result of these measures. On top of this, precarious workers, particularly agency and subcontracted staff, are considered second-class citizens in terms of employment.
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Oliver Nachtwey (Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe)
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With the ‘modern labour market services’ legislation (‘Hartz I and II’), part-time employment and agency work were liberalized. The latter particularly abolished the ban on ‘synchronization’ and dismissal (it had previously been illegal for employment agencies to take on workers only for the duration of a particular job in a client company).90 The boom in agency and low-paid work in the following years was a direct result of these measures. On top of this, precarious workers, particularly agency and subcontracted staff, are considered second-class citizens in terms of employment.91 This is particularly clear in the case of agency workers. In formal legal terms, although the modernization of employment law in 2001 gave these workers additional rights of co-determination, in practice these were curtailed: within the agency they have the same rights as other employees, but in the firm where they actually work, possibly for several years, they have only very limited participation rights. Appearing on the balance sheet as ‘material resources’, they have no protection from dismissal, they often earn only half as much as permanent staff for the same work, and their position is inferior in terms of labour and health protection. As a result, they fall into a new dependency—for example, earning so little that their income does not cover their needs and they are forced to seek greater support from the state.
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Oliver Nachtwey (Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe)
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It is deceptive to believe that such models only involve low-skilled activities. Besides the downward spiral under way in the individual factory, the flexibilization bound up with atypical forms of employment also influences the realm of highly skilled jobs. Both IT and engineering services are increasingly subject to agency work. ‘Crowd-working’, as practised in both the software and automobile industries, ever more frequently abolishes well-defined activities; this adds fuel to speculation about an ‘end of fixed employment’.
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Oliver Nachtwey (Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe)
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This is something I have frequently encountered in my research: an engineer or IT expert working for a car manufacturer enjoys a senior professional position, a good income and a high level of security. But alongside the plant where he works there are now other research and development service companies, where engineers and IT experts work for the same car manufacturer, but on a subcontract basis. They also earn well, but not quite as well as their colleagues employed directly by the main firm, nor do they enjoy the same participation rights. For many highly qualified staff, activity of this kind is quite attractive, up to a certain point. As long as they are young and flexible, they value working for a good salary in different places for a different firm each time. Even a master craftsman, employed by an agency, opined in an interview: ‘When you’re young, you think: never mind, I have two good hands.’ But this generally changes over the years. Then the need for greater security makes itself felt even among engineers, especially if they want to start a family.
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Oliver Nachtwey (Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe)
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The attitude of the permanent staff toward those precariously employed ranges from negativity to empathy and solidarity. While many seek a better position for agency workers and their integration into the firm’s social community, I came across cases—for instance, in an energy technology company, where the most unpleasant tasks (with negative health effects) were deliberately given exclusively to agency workers. Many permanent staff see agency workers as a buffer that protects their own employment in case of a crisis or threat of dismissal.
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Oliver Nachtwey (Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe)
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By their readiness to do more than their colleagues, agency workers can be used by management to reduce the ‘comfort zones’ of permanent employees, as a personnel manager explained in an interview. In the average firm, moreover, the permanent staff experience precarious employment as a means of social discipline that bridges the internal and external labour markets; this has altered the ‘reserve army’ mechanism on the labour market.71 In the past, it was the unemployed who filled the ranks of the capitalist reserve army, exerting an external structural pressure on wages and working conditions. Precarious employment now internalizes this function within the firm. The agency workers may be inside the firm, but they have one foot outside of it in unemployment, so their mere presence reminds the permanent staff that their future might also become less secure.
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Oliver Nachtwey (Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe)
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Specifically, we’ll discuss six types of magic words: words that (1) activate identity and agency, (2) convey confidence, (3) ask the right questions, (4) leverage concreteness, (5) employ emotion, and (6) harness similarity (and difference).
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Jonah Berger (Magic Words)
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And Jim couldn't get a job, though he hunted for one — desperately, eagerly, anxiously. Walking from one employment agency to another; spending long hours in the musty agency waiting-rooms, reading old newspapers. Waiting, waiting, waiting to be called up for a job. He would come home shivering from the cold, saying, 'God damn white people anyway. I don't want favors. All I want is a job. Just a job. Don't they know if I know how I'd change the color of my skin?
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Ann Petry (The Street)
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Wacey had called Etbauer “the ultimate government employee,” a man who had never collected a paycheck in his life that wasn’t from either the state or the Federal government. He had attained his rank due to a particularly bureaucratic method known as ADV or “advanced due to vacancy.” That meant that Etbauer simply put in his time and moved up as others moved out or retired. As state employees either left to take other jobs or start businesses of their own, bureaucrats like Etbauer (who no private sector employer would ever want on the payroll) simply grew in power and seniority like a tumor within the agency, amassing security and building a fine pension.
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C.J. Box (Open Season (Joe Pickett #1))
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Such proposals may seem impractical and even incredible. But what is truly impractical and incredible is that America, with its enormous wealth, has allowed Watts to become what it is and that a commission empowered to study this explosive situation should come up with answers that boil down to voluntary actions by business and labor, new public relations campaigns for municipal agencies, and information-gathering for housing, fair employment, and welfare departments. The Watts manifesto is a response to realities that the McCone Report is barely beginning to grasp. Like the liberal consensus which it embodies and reflects, the commission's imagination and political intelligence appear paralyzed by the hard facts of Negro deprivation it has unearthed, and it lacks the political will to demand that the vast resources of contemporary America be used to build a genuinely great society that will finally put an end to these deprivations. And what is most impractical and incredible of all is that we may very well continue to teach impoverished, segregated, and ignored Negroes that the only way they can get the ear of America is to rise up in violence.
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Bayard Rustin (Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin)
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Whenever an argument arose, a tactic that she had long practised was to imagine herself in the skin of the person disagreeing with her. It was a simple device—one she had learned from her father—and it seemed to work. Obed Ramotswe had employed it when negotiating the purchase of cattle. If you thought yourself into the skin of the other side, he said, then you might see the shortcomings of the cattle you were trying to sell. And if you did that, you could address those issues. Yes, that cow was a bit thin, but she had been in an overgrazed area and time was needed to get her back up to her proper weight; and yes, that bull was limping, but there was a positive side to it: a bull who limped would not wander, would not waste the energy he needed for his real task on pointless meandering through the bush—such a bull would be on permanent duty, and surely that was a good thing, was it not?
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Alexander McCall Smith (Precious and Grace (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency #17))
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+1 to the Bomb Surgeon Skill +1 to the Trap Engineer Skill +1 to Unarmed Combat Skill -25% Damage when using bladed weapons +25% Mana cost for damage-dealing spells +5% skill progression speed in all trap-making and bomb-making skills. + 2 Hide in Shadows Skill + Fear spell + 1 Intelligence + 5 Charisma +5 to the Find Trap Skill +5 to the Backfire Skill +5 to the Escape Plan Skill Access to the Desperado Club (already obtained) Access to the Naughty Boys Employment Agency This is an Earth Class. As an incentive to choose an Earth Class, you will receive a Silver Earth Box upon choosing this class. Compensated Anarchists must choose a subclass upon descent to the sixth floor.
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Matt Dinniman (Carl's Doomsday Scenario (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #2))
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On January 21, 2021, the day after inauguration, Biden reversed the order. It was one of his first actions as president. No wonder, because, as The Hill reported, this executive order would have been “the biggest change to federal workforce protections in a century, converting many federal workers to ‘at will’ employment.” How many federal workers in agencies would have been newly classified at Schedule F? We do not know because only one completed the review before their jobs were saved by the election result. The one that did was the Congressional Budget Office. Its conclusion: fully 88% of employees would have been newly classified as Schedule F, thus allowing the president to terminate their employment. This would have been a revolutionary change, a complete remake of Washington, DC, and all politics as usual. If the HHS Administrative State is to be dismantled, so that it will become possible to manage the various Executive Branch agencies once again, Schedule F provides an excellent strategy and template to achieve the objective. If this most important of all tasks is not achieved, then we will remain at risk that HHS will once again attempt to trade our national sovereignty for additional power by aligning with the WHO, as was recently attempted in the case of the surreptitious January 28, 2022, proposed modifications to the International Health Regulations [434]. These actions, which were not made public until April 12, 2022, clearly demonstrate that the HHS Administrative State represents a clear and present danger to the US Constitution and national sovereignty and must be dismantled as soon as possible.
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Robert W Malone MD MS (Lies My Gov't Told Me: And the Better Future Coming)
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Until 1912 the various steamship lines dealt directly with their musicians, signing them up as members of the crew like stewards, firemen, and ordinary seamen. The pay was union scale, which worked out at £6 10s. a month, plus a monthly uniform allowance of 10s. Then the Blacks entered the picture. An enterprising talent agency based in Liverpool, they promised the steamship companies a simpler and cheaper way to good music. One after another the companies signed contracts, giving the Blacks the exclusive right to supply bands to their vessels. The musicians still signed the ship’s articles for a token shilling a month (putting them clearly under the captain’s authority), but they were now really working for the Blacks, and could get no jobs except through the Blacks. Since the musicians worked for the Blacks or not at all, they had to take what the Blacks were willing to pay them—which turned out to be a sharp cut in salary. Instead of a basic pay of £6 10s., they now got only £4. Instead of a uniform allowance of 10s. a month, they now got nothing at all. The terms of employment were also hard: if the steamship company objected to any musician, the Blacks had the right to remove the man without any investigation or explanation.
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Walter Lord (The Complete Titanic Chronicles: A Night to Remember and The Night Lives On (The Titanic Chronicles))
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It was natural, then, for the musicians’ families to turn first to the White Star Line for financial benefits under the Workmen’s Compensation Act. Sorry, said White Star, the bandsmen were Second Class passengers and not covered by the Act. The Line suggested that the families contact C. W. and F. N. Black, the real employers. Sorry, said the Blacks. The problem wasn’t their responsibility. They carried insurance to cover such matters, and any claims should be laid at the insurer’s door. Sorry, said the insurance company, the bandsmen were not workmen as covered by the policy. They were independent contractors, using the Blacks as a booking agency, and the insurance company was under no liability. Months passed while White Star, the Blacks, and the insurer tossed this hot potato back and forth. Finally, in exasperation the families took the Blacks to court. The judge was sympathetic, but that was all. The bandsmen, he decided, were not the employees of anybody. They were passengers in the case of the White Star Line, and independent contractors in the case of the Blacks and the insurers.
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Walter Lord (The Complete Titanic Chronicles: A Night to Remember and The Night Lives On (The Titanic Chronicles))
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More and more, providers are being held to higher (legal) standards of care without the appropriate support from their employers. That is, medics are being investigated and sanctioned at a more aggressive rate than ever before over smaller and smaller clinical infractions. To get with the times, agencies need to spend much more of their allotted training time on skills like 12 lead EKG application and interpretation, assessment algorithms, and intubation or advanced parenteral route access, for example. The list of available and important topics is as long and diverse as the national, state, and local scopes of practice. On the other hand, agencies that resist this reality cannot be surprised to discover that their care is generally substandard, for which there can be grave legal consequences. They can’t throw their bottles on the floor and cry because they don’t have them. I predict that any agency that emphasizes drilling on patient care as much as or even more than firefighting will very quickly see a dramatic shift in the culture from EMS apathy to EMS advocacy. That culture shift should be a welcome bonus; the key benefit being finally providing the superior care about which they already brag. Yes, there will be some resistance at first and that is great. Resistance is the surest way to quickly identify those who are not committed, because they will whine and complain the most and they will require the most work. If they are not willing to do the work, then maybe they don’t belong.
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David Givot (Sirens, Lights, and Lawyers: The Law & Other Really Important Stuff EMS Providers Never Learned in School)
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The Role of Technology in Preventing and Solving Burglaries
The world of crime and law enforcement has seen significant technological advancements in recent years. One area where technology has played a vital role is in preventing and solving burglaries. In this blog, we will explore the evolving role of technology in addressing burglary and the various ways it is employed by both law enforcement agencies and homeowners to combat this crime.
1. Home Security Systems One of the most visible and effective uses of technology in burglary prevention is home security systems. These systems often include surveillance cameras, motion sensors, and alarm systems. The ability to monitor and control these systems remotely through smartphone apps has given homeowners a valuable tool in protecting their property.
2. Smart Locks and Access Control Modern technology has given rise to smart locks and access control systems. Homeowners can now control and monitor access to their properties through smartphone apps. This technology allows for greater security and easier management of who enters your home, making it harder for burglars to gain unauthorized access.
3. Artificial Intelligence and Predictive Policing Law enforcement agencies are using artificial intelligence and data analysis to predict and prevent burglaries. By analyzing historical crime data, AI can identify patterns and hotspots, enabling police to allocate resources more effectively. Predictive policing can lead to faster response times and a more proactive approach to preventing burglaries.
4. Video Surveillance and Facial Recognition High-definition video surveillance and facial recognition technology have become powerful tools for both homeowners and law enforcement. Surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities can help identify and track potential suspects. This technology can aid in capturing clear images of burglars, making it easier to apprehend them.
5. Social Media and Digital Footprints Social media has become a valuable source of information for law enforcement. Burglars often inadvertently leave digital footprints, such as posts, photos, or location data, that can link them to crime scenes. Detectives can use these digital clues to build cases and identify suspects.
6. DNA Analysis and Forensics Advancements in DNA analysis and forensics have revolutionized the way burglary cases are investigated. DNA evidence can link suspects to crime scenes and help secure convictions. This technology has not only led to the solving of cold cases but also to the prevention of future crimes through the fear of leaving DNA evidence behind.
7. Community Apps and Reporting Many communities now use smartphone apps to report suspicious activities and communicate with neighbors. These apps have become effective in preventing burglaries through community engagement. They facilitate quick reporting of unusual incidents and can be a deterrent to potential burglars.
Conclusion
Technology has significantly improved the prevention and solving of burglaries. Homeowners now have access to advanced security systems, while law enforcement agencies use data analysis, surveillance, and forensics to track and apprehend suspects. The synergy between technology and law enforcement has made it increasingly challenging for burglars to operate undetected. As technology continues to advance, the fight against burglaries will only become more effective, ultimately making our communities safer.
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Jamesadams
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He smiles and holds my head to his. “How the hell did I ever get you?” “Smithson Employment agency,” I pant.
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T.L. Swan (Mr. Masters (Mr. Series, #1))
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Global Pakistani Manpower Recruitment Agency and Overseas
Employment Promoter
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Imran Khan
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For Swedish society, gender equality meant the equal distribution of society’s opportunities, positions, and wealth among women and men in every walk of life. It was qualitative, ensuring women’s and men’s knowledge and experience to promote society’s progress. Women and men were treated equally in educational institutions and workplaces. If any discrimination was noticed, educational institutions, authorities, and employers were bound to investigate and take preventive actions. The Swedish constitution was above all religions, religious beliefs, myths, superstitions, and gods. There was a gender equality agency that organized gender mainstream programs, and the goal was gender equality in every realm of people’s lives.
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Varghese V Devasia (Women of God’s Own Country)
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For the aspiring provincial, the university looks like a ladder. An education is a tool for climbing. Sadly, we live in an age in which the university has adopted this picture of itself. Colleges are credential factories, and the Ivy League is a ridiculously expensive employment agency connecting the new meritocracy with hedge funds and Supreme Court clerkships that function as escalators to wealth and power.
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James K.A. Smith (On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts)
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Unveiling London E-commerce Triumph: Decoding Data with WooCommerce Analytics
In the bustling realm of London e-commerce, navigating the digital landscape requires not just intuition but informed decision-making backed by data. This is where the marriage of WooCommerce and analytics becomes a game-changer. In this exploration, we delve into the nuances of leveraging WooCommerce Analytics for e-commerce success in London. As we embark on this journey, the expertise of a dedicated woocommerce development in london adds a unique perspective, unraveling the potential of data decoding in the heart of the e-commerce landscape.
Understanding the London E-commerce Scene
This section emphasizes the importance of understanding the unique characteristics of the London e-commerce landscape. It underscores the need for businesses to be attuned to local market trends, consumer preferences, and the digital sophistication of the London audience to effectively leverage WooCommerce Analytics.
The Role of WooCommerce Agency in London E-commerce Analytics
1. Proactive Data Strategy: Setting the Foundation
This point explains the proactive role of a WooCommerce agency in London in establishing a robust data strategy. It involves setting up analytics tools, defining KPIs, and aligning data collection with the specific goals of London e-commerce businesses.
2. Tailoring Analytics to London Market Trends
Here, the focus is on tailoring analytics solutions to capture and interpret data that is directly relevant to the ever-evolving market trends of London. A WooCommerce agency in London customizes analytics approaches to provide actionable insights for businesses in the local market.
Key Metrics and KPIs for London E-commerce Success
3. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Turning Clicks into Transactions
This point explores the pivotal role of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) in London e-commerce. It delves into how a WooCommerce agency in London optimizes the conversion rate by refining the checkout process, analyzing user journeys, and enhancing the overall user experience to maximize sales.
4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Fostering Long-Term Relationships
The focus here is on the importance of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) analytics. It explains how a WooCommerce agency in London helps businesses identify high-value customers, tailor marketing strategies, and foster long-term relationships for sustained success.
WooCommerce Analytics Tools and Implementations
5. Google Analytics Integration for Comprehensive Insights
This point delves into the integration of Google Analytics with WooCommerce. It explains how a WooCommerce agency in London guides businesses through the integration process, utilizing Google Analytics to gain comprehensive insights into user behavior, traffic sources, and website performance.
6. Custom Reports and Dashboards: Tailoring Insights for London Businesses
Here, the emphasis is on the creation of custom reports and dashboards by a WooCommerce agency in London. These tailored insights provide businesses with specific information relevant to their products, target audience, and market trends, enhancing decision-making accuracy.
Analyzing User Behavior for Enhanced User Experience
7. Heatmaps and User Flow Analysis: Optimizing the Customer Journey
This point explores the use of heatmaps and user flow analysis to optimize the customer journey in London e-commerce. A WooCommerce agency in London employs these tools to uncover patterns, identify bottlenecks, and make strategic adjustments for a seamless user experience.
8. Abandoned Cart Analysis: Recovering Lost Opportunities
This section discusses the significance of abandoned cart analysis. It explains how a WooCommerce agency in London utilizes analytics to understand the reasons behind cart abandonment and implements targeted strategies to recover potentially lost sales through personalized retargeting campaigns.
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Webskitters uk
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It was a strike against the edifice of policy and politics coming to rest upon Keynesian concepts of savings and consumption. Years later, Friedman spelled out the ultimate implications. Dorothy and Rose’s paper fed into a much larger body of research, the permanent income hypothesis, that “removes completely one of the pillars of the ‘secular stagnation’ thesis.” It also had implications for the Keynesian proposition that there was “no automatic force in a monetary economy to assure the existence of a full-employment equilibrium.”9 On the surface, Dorothy and Rose had published a basic research report. Considered in the bigger picture, their conclusions spoke to the politically charged question of consumption. Was the paper deliberately framed as an attack upon Keynes?10 Both women were dedicated empiricists, and the problem in the data was compelling. At the same time, the solution they came up with dovetailed nicely with each woman’s intellectual inclinations. The paper’s emphasis on relative income reflected the traditional approach of consumption research that Dorothy knew well. Dorothy’s long tenure in reformist D.C. agencies suggests that like most consumption economists, she was probably sympathetic to New Deal social spending. By contrast, although Rose has left little trace of her thinking in this period, she was among the most loyal of Frank Knight’s students. His teachings would have primed her to be skeptical of both the New Deal and the Keynesian concepts that were newly popular among economists.
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Jennifer Burns (Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative)
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Do not understand only the words; also understand their contexts since they illuminate you precisely.
If you vote wisely, you won’t have to fight for your rights and peace everywhere.
The political mafia is the mother of all mafias and often causes wars and uses vetoes to disrupt global peace.
My every minute of life is for the entire humanity and human rights; it is a core prayer of all my prayers.
What is a mafia, how do you understand it, and when do you overcome it? It is neither easy nor difficult; just be brave for your rights and never ignore them. No one can stand in front of your rights if you truly believe that.
I have described the context of the mafia in the form of quotations that may guide and enlighten your life journey honourably.
When a nation faces the Mafia Judiciary, which employs and applies an unfair way that fractures justice, the criminal mafia groups become licensed, and freehand is a juristic disaster.
Wherever the medical, trade, business, media, and political interests of the mafia prevail, there is certainly neither a cure nor freedom possible nor justice nor peace.
A vote holds not only significant power; it also carries a key to a system, essence to the welfare, surety to the career of a future generation, and a magnet to the stability of the state. The wrong choice or emotional pledge and favor of the vote-casting can indeed victimize a voter himself as a consequence. Realize this power and use it wisely, disregarding all external influences and tricks.
Such a political party remains the proprietorship of a particular family, a rich circle, a corrupt mafia, or an establishment that accomplishes neither transparent democratic legitimacy nor fair democracy. Undoubtedly, such a party enforces majority dictatorship when it comes to power. It is mendacious dishonesty and severe corruption in a precise democratic voting context.
I have been critical of the undemocratic rule, but now I think it may be the option of neutral law, but not martial law, which is essential for the stability and unity of Pakistan’s state, constitution, economy, and institutions to eliminate the democratic mafia and terror.
International intelligence agencies and their hired ones avoid the weapons now; however, they utilize deadly chemicals to kill their rivals, whether high-level or low-level, whereas doctors diagnose that as a natural death. Virtually becoming infected and a victim of deathly diseases through chemicals is neither known publicly nor common. As a fact, the intelligence mafia can achieve and gain every task for their interests.
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Ehsan Sehgal