Factory Act Quotes

The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed. Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can. The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it's a job. Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people. I call the process of doing your art 'the work.' It's possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that's how you become a linchpin. The job is not the work.

I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.

What about animals slaughtered for our consumption? who among us would be able to continue eating pork chops after visiting a factory farm in which pigs are half-blind and cannot even properly walk, but are just fattened to be killed? And what about, say, torture and suffering of millions we know about, but choose to ignore? Imagine the effect of having to watch a snuff movie portraying what goes on thousands of times a day around the world: brutal acts of torture, the picking out of eyes, the crushing of testicles -the list cannot bear recounting. Would the watcher be able to continue going on as usual? Yes, but only if he or she were able somehow to forget -in an act which suspended symbolic efficiency -what had been witnessed. This forgetting entails a gesture of what is called fetishist disavowal: "I know it, but I don't want to know that I know, so I don't know." I know it, but I refuse to fully assume the consequences of this knowledge, so that I can continue acting as if I don't know it.

I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond! I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial! I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail. But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!

However much we obfuscate or ignore it, we know that the factory farm is inhumane in the deepest sense of the word. And we know that there is something that matters in a deep way about the lives we create for the living beings most within our power. Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless--it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another.

Maybe he's up to something, maybe he'ś not really crazy after all. Perhaps he just got fed up acting normal and decided to act crazy instead, and they locked him up because he went too far.

Perhaps he just got fed up acting normal and decided to act crazy instead, and they locked him up because he went too far.

Everyone believed in the Factory. Everyone was brainwashed by the Factory and did as they were told. They all used their reproductive organs for the Factory and did their jobs for the sake of the Factory. My husband and I were people they’d failed to brainwash, and anyone who remained unbrainwashed had to keep up an act in order to avoid being eliminated by the Factory.

Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless - it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another. Consistency is not required, but engagement with the problem is.

English people are not mass-produced. They do not come off a factory line all looking, speaking, thinking, acting the same. Neither do we.

I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace.

A toy boat, a toy boat, a toy boat,’ she repeated, thus enforcing upon herself the fact that it is not articles by Nick Greene on John Donne nor eight-hour bills nor covenants nor factory acts that matter; it’s something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a spirit; a splash; like those hyacinths (she was passing a fine bed of them); free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one’s kind; something rash, ridiculous, like my hyacinth, husband I mean, Bonthrop: that’s what it is — a toy boat on the Serpentine, ecstasy — it’s ecstasy that matters.

Ironically, the very advances that represent all that is modern in the world—hand sanitizers, treated water, factory farming—have created their own set of diseases. For example, triclosan—an antibacterial chemical used in many soaps and hand sanitizers—has been shown to kill human cells,26 and even the FDA admits it acts as an endocrine disruptor in animals.27 When combined with chlorinated water, it produces chloroform28—a probable carcinogen according to the EPA.29

Does anyone beside me experience a deep sorrow that someone called a "Hero for the Planet" and a "star of the sustainability movement" is designing truck factories and Nike headquarters? Ninety percent of the large fish in the ocean are gone. Ninety-seven percent of the world's native forests have been cut. There are 2 million dams just in the United States. Once-mighty flocks of passenger pigeons are gone. Islands full of great aucks, gone. Rich runs of salmon, gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. The oceans are filled with plastic. Every stream in the United States is contaminated with carcinogens. The world is being killed, and this is the respond? Not only am I angry, not only am I disgusted, I am also deeply, deeply sorrowful. And I am deeply ashamed. We need to act differently.

Every once in a while, however, the subordinates of this world contest their fates. They protest their conditions, write letters and petitions, join movements, and make demands. Their goals may be minimal and discrete — better safety guards on factory machines, an end to marital rape—but in voicing them, they raise the specter of a more fundamental change in power. They cease to be servants or supplicants and become agents, speaking and acting on their own behalf. More than the reforms themselves, it is this assertion of agency by the subject class—the appearance of an insistent and independent voice of demand — that vexes their superiors. Guatemala’s Agrarian Reform of 1952 redistributed a million and a half acres of land to 100,000 peasant families. That was nothing, in the minds of the country’s ruling classes, compared to the riot of political talk the bill seemed to unleash. Progressive reformers, Guatemala’s arch-bishop complained, sent local peasants “gifted with facility with words” to the capital, where they were given opportunities “to speak in public.” That was the great evil of the Agrarian Reform.

The reality is that most consumers in the developed world would rather not know where their phones and gas come from as long as the prices are low. If you know, you must act, so it is better not to know. The occasional scandal over inhuman working conditions in Chinese factories (or women’s rights in Saudi Arabia) allows some liberals to feel better when a Nike or Apple announces an investigation that is quickly forgotten by the time the next shoe or gadget comes out.

The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.

The machine itself receives some of the same feelings. With over 27,000 on it it's getting to be something of a high-miler, and old-timer, although there are plenty of older ones running. But over the miles, and I think most cyclists will agree with this, you pick up certain feelings about an individual machine that are unique for that one individual machine and no other. A friend who owns a cycle of the same make, model and even same year brought it over for a repair, and when I test rode it afterward it was hard to believe it had come from the same factory years ago. You could see that long ago it had settled into its own kind of feel and ride and sound, completely different from mine. No worse, but different. I suppose you could call that a personality. Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is the personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance. The new ones start out as good-looking strangers, and depending on how they are treated, degenerate rapidly into bad-acting grouches or even cripples, or else turn into healthy, good-natured, long-lasting friends.

Von Pein’s family was a little known, but highly influential entity within American banking circles. Banking Royalty, some called it. His grandfather had been one of the chief orchestrators of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which effectively took ownership of the bank from the American people.

Ordinary clay, it seems, has two basic properties essential to life. It can store energy and also transmit it. So, the scientists reason, clay could have acted as a "chemical factory" for turning inorganic raw materials into more complex molecules. Out of those complex molecules arose life—and, one

I reprimanded my brother for mimicking you. I told him not to act like a fool.

He was vast, and beautiful, and more present in the gift of baby formula to a young mother than in any day he’d spent at the paper factory. He was his acts of kindness,

So long as small children could work in factories, they remained a source of livelihood to their parents until they died of overwork; but the Factory Acts put an end to this form of exploitation, in spite of the protests of those who lived on it. From being a means of livelihood, children came to be a financial burden. At this stage, contraceptives became known, and the fall in the birth-rate began. There

Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless —it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another.

Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might b e in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that h as now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual co st to life. Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes actively disobedient servomechanisms, still human enough to harbor purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system. Like the earliest form of authoritarian technics, this new technology is marvellously dynamic and productive: its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientific knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex conditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves. As with the earliest forms of authoritarian technics, the weight of effort, if one is to judge by national budgets, is toward absolute instruments of destruction, designed for absolutely irrational purposes whose chief by-product would be the mutilation or extermination of the human race. Even Ashurbanipal and Genghis Khan performed their gory operations under normal human limits. The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. Like the Pharoahs of the Pyramid Age, these servants of the system identify its goods with their own kind of well-being: as with the divine king, their praise of the system is an act of self-worship; and again like the king, they are in the grip of an irrational compulsion to extend their means of control and expand the scope of their authority. In this new systems-centered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike job's God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.

..I began speaking.. First, I took issue with the media's characterization of the post-Katrina New Orleans as resembling the third world as its poor citizens clamored for a way out. I suggested that my experience in New Orleans working with the city's poorest people in the years before the storm had reflected the reality of third-world conditions in New Orleans, and that Katrina had not turned New Orleans into a third-world city but had only revealed it to the world as such. I explained that my work, running Reprieve, a charity that brought lawyers and volunteers to the Deep South from abroad to work on death penalty issues, had made it clear to me that much of the world had perceived this third-world reality, even if it was unnoticed by our own citizens. To try answer Ryan's question, I attempted to use my own experience to explain that for many people in New Orleans, and in poor communities across the country, the government was merely an antagonist, a terrible landlord, a jailer, and a prosecutor. As a lawyer assigned to indigent people under sentence of death and paid with tax dollars, I explained the difficulty of working with clients who stand to be executed and who are provided my services by the state, not because they deserve them, but because the Constitution requires that certain appeals to be filed before these people can be killed. The state is providing my clients with my assistance, maybe the first real assistance they have ever received from the state, so that the state can kill them. I explained my view that the country had grown complacent before Hurricane Katrina, believing that the civil rights struggle had been fought and won, as though having a national holiday for Martin Luther King, or an annual march by politicians over the bridge in Selma, Alabama, or a prosecution - forty years too late - of Edgar Ray Killen for the murder of civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, were any more than gestures. Even though President Bush celebrates his birthday, wouldn't Dr. King cry if he could see how little things have changed since his death? If politicians or journalists went to Selma any other day of the year, they would see that it is a crumbling city suffering from all of the woes of the era before civil rights were won as well as new woes that have come about since. And does anyone really think that the Mississippi criminal justice system could possibly be a vessel of social change when it incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than almost any place in the world, other than Louisiana and Texas, and then compels these prisoners, most of whom are black, to work prison farms that their ancestors worked as chattel of other men? ... I hoped, out loud, that the post-Katrina experience could be a similar moment [to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fiasco], in which the American people could act like the children in the story and declare that the emperor has no clothes, and hasn't for a long time. That, in light of Katrina, we could be visionary and bold about what people deserve. We could say straight out that there are people in this country who are racist, that minorities are still not getting a fair shake, and that Republican policies heartlessly disregard the needs of individual citizens and betray the common good. As I stood there, exhausted, in front of the thinning audience of New Yorkers, it seemed possible that New Orleans's destruction and the suffering of its citizens hadn't been in vain.

Methods like this act as “factories” in that they take raw materials (such as row data, for example, or configuration information) and use them to produce objects. The term factory is applied to code designed to generate object instances.

How, then, can terrorists hope to achieve much? Following an act of terrorism, the enemy continues to have the same number of soldiers, tanks and ships as before. The enemy’s communication network, roads and railways are largely intact. His factories, ports and bases are hardly touched. However, the terrorists hope that even though they can barely dent the enemy’s material power, fear and confusion will cause the enemy to misuse his intact strength and overreact. Terrorists calculate that when the enraged enemy uses his massive power against them, he will raise a much more violent military and political storm than the terrorists themselves could ever create. During every storm, many unforeseen things happen. Mistakes are made, atrocities are committed, public opinion wavers, neutrals change their stance, and the balance of power shifts.

I have a peculiar affection for McCarthy; nothing serious or personal, but I recall standing next to him in the snow outside the “exit” door of a shoe factory in Manchester, New Hampshire, in February of 1968 when the five o’clock whistle blew and he had to stand there in the midst of those workers rushing out to the parking lot. I will never forget the pain in McCarthy’s face as he stood there with his hand out, saying over and over again: “Shake hands with Senator McCarthy… shake hands with Senator McCarthy… shake hands with Senator McCarthy…,” a tense plastic smile on his face, stepping nervously toward anything friendly, “Shake hands with Senator McCarthy”… but most of the crowd ignored him, refusing to even acknowledge his outstretched hand, staring straight ahead as they hurried out to their cars. There was at least one network TV camera on hand that afternoon, but the scene was never aired. It was painful enough, just being there, but to have put that scene on national TV would have been an act of genuine cruelty.

We are told that small-scale farming is inefficient— this is true—and that because our factory farms feed the masses, and do so cheaply, we should be satisfied. And that's a deal that makes sense to nearly all of us: just keep the stuff showing up in produce bins and under cellophane in the supermarket cooler, and keep it relatively cheap, and we'll ask no questions. But in striking that devil's bargain, we sign away our responsibility for what's in that food, how it got there, and what was done to human communities to close the deal. To participate in a system and a way of thinking in which the act of eating is merely a commercial transaction is to sell out our spiritual and cultural patrimony. I understand the free-market reasons why Americans do this. But I don't understand why it is called conservative.

My husband and I were people they’d failed to brainwash, and anyone who remained unbrainwashed had to keep up an act in order to avoid being eliminated by the Factory.

However, one intriguing shift that suggests there are limits to automation was the recent decision by Toyota to systematically put working humans back into the manufacturing process. In quality and manufacturing on a mass scale, Toyota has been a global leader in automation technologies based on the corporate philosophy of kaizen (Japanese for “good change”) or continuous improvement. After pushing its automation processes toward lights-out manufacturing, the company realized that automated factories do not improve themselves. Once Toyota had extraordinary craftsmen that were known as Kami-sama, or “gods” who had the ability to make anything, according to Toyota president Akio Toyoda.49 The craftsmen also had the human ability to act creatively and thus improve the manufacturing process. Now, to add flexibility and creativity back into their factories, Toyota chose to restore a hundred “manual-intensive” workspaces.

We should reinforce modern machining facilities with high performance in line with the global trend of machine industry development, press the production of products, high-speed drawings, and unmanned automation," he said. "We should set up test sites for comprehensive measurement in the factory and allow various load, interlock tests and impact tests depending on the characteristics of the products." 정품구입문의하는곳~☎위커메신저:PP444☎라인:PPPK44↔☎텔레:ppt89[☎?카톡↔rrs9] 정품구입문의하는곳~☎위커메신저:PP444☎라인:PPPK44↔☎텔레:ppt89[☎?카톡↔rrs9] 정품구입문의하는곳~☎위커메신저:PP444☎라인:PPPK44↔☎텔레:ppt89[☎?카톡↔rrs9] On the first day, Kim conducted field guidance on plants in Jagang Province, including the Kanggye Tracker General Factory, the Kanggye Precision Machinery General Factory, the Jangja Steel Manufacturing Machinery Plant and the February 8 Machine Complex. All of these factories are North Korea's leading munitions factories with decades of history. Defense ministers of South Korea, the U.S. and Japan gathered together to discuss ways to cooperate on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and strengthen defense cooperation among the three countries. South Korean Defense Minister Chung Kyung-doo was acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shannahan and Japanese Defense Minister Takeshi Iwaya at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore, where the 18th Asia Security Conference was held from 9 a.m. on Sunday.

To-day the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilisation. Limitations of the hours of labour, the nationalisation of mines, railways, factories, and the soil, the equal distribution of all products, the elimination of all the upper classes for the benefit of the popular classes, &c., such are these claims. Little adapted to reasoning, crowds, on the contrary, are quick to act. As the result of their present organisation their strength has become immense. The dogmas whose birth we are witnessing will soon have the force of the old dogmas; that is to say, the tyrannical and sovereign force of being above discussion. The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings.

One instance of this failure is the case of smoke, as well as air pollution generally. In so far as the outpouring of smoke by factories pollutes the air and damages the persons and property of others, it is an invasive act. It is equivalent to an act of vandalism and in a truly free society would have been punished after court action brought by the victims. Air pollution, then, is not an example of a defect in a system of absolute property rights, but of failure on the part of the government to preserve property rights. Note that the remedy, in a free society, is not the creation of an administrative State bureau to prescribe regulations for smoke control. The remedy is judicial action to punish and proscribe pollution damage to the person and property of others.48 In

There's nothing wrong with this. Other than sentimentality, the typewriter offers nothing special to the act of writing. What an author uses to write with is a topic of interest only to children and amatuers, but does not matter in the end. It is quite simply irrelevant; the final product is all that is important. Good riddance to them, I say. However, I do wish I still had mine, if only to use as a wonderful percussion device. --on the Poets and Writers Facebook page, regarding the last typewriter factory closing in India

Today, reality is created mainly by television and movies. The media producers have become a priest-caste who guide, direct, and manage reality. "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more . . . " "Don't follow leaders! Watch your parking meters!" When Bob Dylan sang these lines in the 1960s, he was performing philosophy, transmitting powerful new ideas for which his mass audience was ready. Dylan thus triggered off heretical, sinful acts of resistance to authority, rejection of militarism, refusal to join the mechanical factory culture.

When I heard about the ease with which the Four had been removed, I felt a wave of sadness. How could such a small group of second-rate tyrants ravage 900 million people for so long? But my main feeling was joy. The last tyrants of the Cultural Revolution were finally gone. My rapture was widely shared. Like many of my countrymen, I went out to buy the best liquors for a celebration with my family and friends, only to find the shops out of stock there was so much spontaneous rejoicing. There were official celebrations as well exactly the same kinds of rallies as during the Cultural Revolution, which infuriated me. I was particularly angered by the fact that in my department, the political supervisors and the student officials were now arranging the whole show, with unperturbed self-righteousness. The new leadership was headed by Mao's chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, whose only qualification, I believed, was his mediocrity. One of his first acts was to announce the construction of a huge mausoleum for Mao on Tiananmen Square. I was outraged: hundreds of thousands of people were still homeless after the earthquake in Tangshan, living in temporary shacks on the pavements. With her experience, my mother had immediately seen that a new era was beginning. On the day after Mao's death she had reported for work at her depas'uuent. She had been at home for five years, and now she wanted to put her energy to use again. She was given a job as the number seven deputy director in her department, of which she had been the director before the Cultural Revolution. But she did not mind. To me in my impatient mood, things seemed to go on as before. In January 1977, my university course came to an end. We were given neither examinations nor degrees. Although Mao and the Gang of Four were gone, Mao's rule that we had to return to where we had come from still applied. For me, this meant the machinery factory. The idea that a university education should make a difference to one's job had been condemned by Mao as 'training spiritual aristocrats.

What I hate is when consumers act as if farmers want these things, when it’s consumers who tell farmers what to grow. They’ve wanted cheap food. We’ve grown it. If they want cage-free eggs, they have to pay a lot more money for them. Period. It’s cheaper to produce an egg in a massive laying barn with caged hens. It’s more efficient and that means it’s more sustainable. Yes, I’m saying that factory farming can be more sustainable, though I know that word is often used against the industry. From China to India to Brazil, the demand for animal products is growing — and fast. Do you think family farms are going to sustain a world of ten billion?

No one is alone in this world. No act is without consequences for others. It is a tenet of chaos theory that, in dynamical systems, the outcome of any process is sensitive to its starting point-or, in the famous cliche, the flap of a butterfly's wings in the Amazon can cause a tornado in Texas. I do not assert markets are chaotic, though my fractal geometry is one of the primary mathematical tools of "chaology." But clearly, the global economy is an unfathomably complicated machine. To all the complexity of the physical world of weather, crops, ores, and factories, you add the psychological complexity of men acting on their fleeting expectations of what may or may not happen-sheer phantasms. Companies and stock prices, trade flows and currency rates, crop yields and commodity futures-all are inter-related to one degree or another, in ways we have barely begun to understand. In such a world, it is common sense that events in the distant past continue to echo in the present.

But what if I don't believe in God? It's like they've sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can't will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this. Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball shape about midchest, saying, Let go. Surrender, Dorothy, the witch wrote in the sky. Surrender, Mary. I want to surrender but have no idea what that means. He goes on with a level gaze and a steady tone: Yield up what scares you. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry. Enter into that quiet. It's a cathedral. It's an empty football stadium with all the lights on. And pray to be an instrument of peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is conflict, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair hope... What if I get no answer there? If God hasn't spoken, do nothing. Fulfill the contract you entered into at the box factory, amen. Make the containers you promised to tape and staple. Go quietly and shine. Wait. Those not impelled to act must remain in the cathedral. Don't be lonely. I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger ...

We liberals and progressives need to do a better job at verbalizing what we are for, and not just what we are against. If we want a public option, we must make the case for it. Every time the Republicans start talking about the corruption, waste, and negligence of “Big Government,” we should talk about those same qualities in Big Corporations. If we want to end factory farming, decrease income inequality, and end discrimination in all its insidious forms, we must fight for those things and so much more. It is a subtle but important difference to stand for equality rather than to merely stand against inequality, and I believe that within this positive framework, more transformative arguments can be made.

For us, the possibility of kindly use is weighted with problems. In the first place, this is not ultimately an organization or institutional solution. Institutional solutions tend to narrow and simplify as they approach action. A large number of people can act together only by defining the point or the line on which their various interests converge. Organizations tend to move toward single objectives -- a ruling, a vote, a law -- and they find it relatively simple to cohere under acronyms and slogans. But kindly use is a concept that of necessity broadens, becoming more complex and diverse, as it approaches action. The land is too various in its kinds, climates, conditions, declivities, aspects, and histories to conform to any generalized understanding or to prosper under generalized treatment. The use of land cannot be both general and kindly -- just as the forms of good manners, generally applied (applied, that is, without consideration of differences), are experienced as indifference, bad manners. To treat every field, or every part of every field, with the same consideration is not farming but industry. Kindly use depends upon intimate knowledge, the most sensitive responsiveness and responsibility. As knowledge (hence, use) is generalized, essential values are destroyed. As the householder evolves into a consumer, the farm evolves into a factory -- with results that are potentially calamitous for both.

Telegraph Road A long time ago came a man on a track Walking thirty miles with a pack on his back And he put down his load where he thought it was the best Made a home in the wilderness He built a cabin and a winter store And he ploughed up the ground by the cold lake shore And the other travellers came riding down the track And they never went further, no, they never went back Then came the churches, then came the schools Then came the lawyers, then came the rules Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads And the dirty old track was the telegraph road Then came the mines - then came the ore Then there was the hard times, then there was a war Telegraph sang a song about the world outside Telegraph road got so deep and so wide Like a rolling river ... And my radio says tonight it's gonna freeze People driving home from the factories There's six lanes of traffic Three lanes moving slow ... I used to like to go to work but they shut it down I got a right to go to work but there's no work here to be found Yes and they say we're gonna have to pay what's owed We're gonna have to reap from some seed that's been sowed And the birds up on the wires and the telegraph poles They can always fly away from this rain and this cold You can hear them singing out their telegraph code All the way down the telegraph road You know I'd sooner forget but I remember those nights When life was just a bet on a race between the lights You had your head on my shoulder, you had your hand in my hair Now you act a little colder like you don't seem to care But believe in me baby and I'll take you away From out of this darkness and into the day From these rivers of headlights, these rivers of rain From the anger that lives on the streets with these names 'Cos I've run every red light on memory lane I've seen desperation explode into flames And I don't want to see it again ... From all of these signs saying sorry but we're closed All the way down the telegraph road

If a young girl sent into the fields to get a few ears of grain took along two friends for company (“an organized gang”) or some twelve-year-old youngsters went after cucumbers or apples, they were liable to get twenty years in camp. In factories, the maximum sentence was raised to twenty-five years. (This sentence, called the quarter, had been introduced a few days earlier to replace the death penalty, which had been abolished as a humane act.)47

Language as communication has three aspects or elements. There first what Karl Marx once called the language of real life, the element basic to the whole notion of language, its origins and development: that is, the relations people enter into with one another in the labour process, the links they necessarily establish among themselves in the act of a people, a community of human beings, producing wealth or means of life like food, clothing, houses. A human community really starts its historical being as a community of co-operation in production through the division of labour; the simplest is between man, woman and child within a household; the more complex divisions are between branches of production such as those who are sole hunters, sole gatherers of fruits or sole workers in metal. Then there are the most complex divisions such as those in modern factories where a single product, say a shirt or a shoe, is the result of many hands and minds. Production is co-operation, is communication, is language, is expression of a relation between human beings and it is specifically human.

This is the apotheosis of capitalism, the divine sanction of the free market, of unhindered profit and the most rapacious cruelties of globalization. Corporations, rapidly turning America into an oligarchy, have little interest in Christian ethics, or anybody’s ethics. They know what they have to do, as the titans of the industry remind us, for their stockholders. They are content to increase profit at the expense of those who demand fair wages, health benefits, safe working conditions and pensions. This new oligarchic class is creating a global marketplace where all workers, to compete, will have to become like workers in dictatorships such as China: denied rights, their wages dictated to them by the state, and forbidden from organizing or striking. America once attempted to pull workers abroad up to American levels, to foster the building of foreign labor unions, to challenge the abuse of workers in factories that flood the American market with cheap goods. But this new class seeks to reduce the American working class to the levels of this global serfdom. After all, anything that drains corporate coffers is a loss of freedom—the God-given American freedom to exploit other human beings to make money. The marriage of this gospel of prosperity with raw, global capitalism, and the flaunting of the wealth and privilege it brings, are supposedly blessed and championed by Jesus Christ. Compassion is relegated to private, individual acts of charity or left to churches. The callousness of the ideology, the notion that it in any way reflects the message of the gospels, which were preoccupied with the poor and the outcasts, illustrates how the new class has twisted Christian scripture to serve America’s god of capitalism and discredited the Enlightenment values we once prized. The

Of course, every state must act and every action of the state interferes with something or other. But that is not the point. The important question is whether the individual can foresee the action of the state and make use of this knowledge as a datum in forming his own plans, with the result that the state cannot control the use made of its machinery and that the individual knows precisely how far he will be protected against interference from others, or whether the state is in a position to frustrate individual efforts. The state controlling weights and measures (or preventing fraud and deception in any other way) is certainly acting, while the state permitting the use of violence, for example, by strike pickets, is inactive. Yet it is in the first case that the state observes liberal principles and in the second that it does not. Similarly with respect to most of the general and permanent rules which the state may establish with regard to production, such as building regulations or factory laws: these may be wise or unwise in the particular instance, but they do not conflict with liberal principles so long as they are intended to be permanent and are not used to favor or harm particular people.

had read a description of this ability to act so well in public in Czeslaw Milosz’s book The Captive Mind, in which he describes life in 1950s Poland under the authoritarian influences of Nazism and Stalinism. He writes that in such circumstances people must, of necessity, become actors and actresses. ‘One does not perform on a theatre stage,’ says Milosz, ‘but in the street, office, factory, meeting hall, or even the room one lives in. Such acting is a highly-developed craft that places a premium upon mental alertness. Before it leaves the lips every word must be evaluated as to its consequences. A smile that appears at the wrong moment, a glance that is not all it should be can occasion dangerous suspicions and accusations.

It happens that the stage-sets collapse. Rising, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, tram, four hours of work, mean, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. ‘Begins’—this is important. Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery.

Of course, every state must act and every action of the state interferes with something or other. But that is not the point. The important question is whether the individual can foresee the action of the state and make use of this knowledge as a datum in forming his own plans, with the result that the state cannot control the use made of its machinery and that the individual knows precisely how far he will be protected against interference from others, or whether the state is in a position to frustrate individual efforts. The state controlling weights and measures (or preventing fraud and deception in any other way) is certainly acting, while the state permitting the use of violence, for example, by strike pickets, is inactive. Yet it is in the first case that the state observes liberal principles and in the second that it does not. Similarly with respect to most of the general and permanent rules which the state may establish with regard to production, such as building regulations or factory laws: these may be wise or unwise in the particular instance, but they do not conflict with liberal principles so long as they are intended to be permanent and are not used to favor or harm particular people. It is true that in these instances there will, apart from the long-run effects which cannot be predicted, also be short-run effects on particular people which may be clearly known. But with this kind of laws the short-run effects are in general not (or at least ought not to be) the guiding consideration. As these immediate and predictable effects become more important compared with the long-run effects, we approach the border line where the distinction, however clear in principle, becomes blurred in practice.

Once upon a time, there was a man named Jack Gilbert, who was not related to me—unfortunately for me. Jack Gilbert was a great poet, but if you’ve never heard of him, don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault. He never much cared about being known. But I knew about him, and I loved him dearly from a respectful distance, so let me tell you about him. Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh in 1925 and grew up in the midst of that city’s smoke, noise, and industry. He worked in factories and steel mills as a young man, but was called from an early age to write poetry. He answered the call without hesitation. He became a poet the way other men become monks: as a devotional practice, as an act of love, and as a lifelong commitment to the search for grace and transcendence. I think this is probably a very good way to become a poet. Or to become anything, really, that calls to your heart and brings you to life.

In addition, of course, they would be taken to a bath and in the bath vestibule they would be ordered to leave their leather coats, their Romanov sheepskin coats, their woolen sweaters, their suits of fine wool, their felt cloaks, their leather boots, their felt boots (for, after all, these were no illiterate peasants this time, but the Party elite—editors of newspapers, directors of trusts and factories, responsible officials in the provincial Party committees, professors of political economy, and, by the beginning of the thirties, all of them understood what good merchandise was). "And who is going to guard them?" the newcomers asked skeptically. "Oh, come on now, who needs your things?" The bath personnel acted offended. "Go on in and don't worry." And they did go in. And the exit was through a different door, and after passing through it, they received back cotton breeches, field shirts, camp quilted jackets without pockets, and pigskin shoes. (Oh, this was no small thing! This was farewell to your former life—to your titles, your positions, and your arrogance!) "Where are our things?" they cried. "Your things you left at home!" some chief or other bellowed at them. "In camp nothing belongs to you. Here in camp, we have communism! Forward march, leader!" And if it was "communism," then what was there for them to object to? That is what they had dedicated their lives to.

‌* When the coughing stopped, there was nothing but the nothingness of life moving on with a shuffle, or a near-silent twitch. ‌* Mistakes, mistakes, it’s all I seem capable of at times ‌*No matter how many times she was told that she was loved, there was no recognition that the proof was in the abandonment. ‌*It’s much easier, she realized, to be on the verge of something than to actually be it ‌*When death captures me,” the boy vowed, “he will feel my fist on his face.”. ‌*he’d turned for one last look at his family as he left the apartment. Perhaps then the guilt would not have been so heavy. No final goodbye. No final grip of the eyes. Nothing but goneness. ‌ *Wrecked, but somehow not torn into pieces. ‌*Life had altered in the wildest possible way, but it was imperative that they act as if nothing at all had happened. ‌*“If we gamble on a Jew,” said Papa soon after, “I would prefer to gamble on a live one,” and from that moment, a new routine was born. *‌you should know it yourself—a young man is still a boy, and a boy sometimes has the right to be stubborn.” ‌*The fire was nothing now but a funeral of smoke, dead and dying, simultaneously. ‌*Even death has a heart.. ‌* In truth, I think he was afraid. Rudy Steiner was scared of the book thief’s kiss. He must have longed for it so much. He must have loved her so incredibly hard. So hard that he would never ask for her lips again and would go to his grave without them. ‌*There is death. Making his way through all of it. On the surface: unflappable, unwavering. Below: unnerved, untied, and undone. *‌That damn snowman,” she whispered. “I bet it started with the snowman—fooling around with ice and snow in the cold down there.” Papa was more philosophical. “Rosa, it started with Adolf.” *‌There were broken bodies and dead, sweet hearts. Still, it was better than the gas ‌*They were French, they were Jews, and they were you. ‌*Sometimes she sat against the wall, longing for the warm finger of paint to wander just once more down the side of her nose, or to watch the sandpaper texture of her papa’s hands. If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter and bread with only the scent of jam spread out on top of it. *‌Himmel Street was a trail of people, and again, Papa left his accordion. Rosa reminded him to take it, but he refused. “I didn’t take it last time,” he explained, “and we lived.” War clearly blurred the distinction between logic and superstition. ‌*Silence was not quiet or calm, and it was not peace. ‌*“I should have known not to give the man some bread. I just didn’t think.” “Papa, you did nothing wrong.” “I don’t believe you. ‌ * I’m an idiot.” No, Papa. You’re just a man.. ‌*What someone says and what happened are usually two different things ‌* despised by his homeland, even though he was born in it ‌ *“Of course I told him about you,” Liesel said. She was saying goodbye and she didn’t even know it. ‌*Say something enough times and you never forget it ‌*robbery of his life? ‌*Those kinds of souls always do—the best ones. The ones who rise up and say, “I know who you are and I am ready. Not that I want to go, of course, but I will come.” Those souls are always light because more of them have been put out. More of them have already found their way to other places ‌*One could not exist without the other, because for Liesel, both were home. Yes, that’s what Hans Hubermann was for Liesel Meminger ‌*DEATH AND LIESEL It has been many years since all of that, but there is still plenty of work to do. I can promise you that the world is a factory. The sun stirs it, the humans rule it. And I remain. I carry them away.

Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions. We probably adopt this strategy not so much because of any lack of interest or power but because of a longstanding conviction that for much of human behavior there are no relevant antecedents. The function of the inner man is to provide an explanation which will not be explained in turn. Explanation stops with him. He is not a mediator between past history and current behavior, he is a center from which behavior emanates. He initiates, originates, and creates, and in doing so he remains, as he was for the Greeks, divine. We say that he is autonomous—and, so far as a science of behavior is concerned, that means miraculous. The position is, of course, vulnerable. Autonomous man serves to explain only the things we are not yet able to explain in other ways. His existence depends upon our ignorance, and he naturally loses status as we come to know more about behavior. The task of a scientific analysis is to explain how the behavior of a person as a physical system is related to the conditions under which the human species evolved and the conditions under which the individual lives. Unless there is indeed some capricious or creative intervention, these events must be related, and no intervention is in fact needed. The contingencies of survival responsible for man’s genetic endowment would produce tendencies to act aggressively, not feelings of aggression. The punishment of sexual behavior changes sexual behavior, and any feelings which may arise are at best by-products. Our age is not suffering from anxiety but from the accidents, crimes, wars, and other dangerous and painful things to which people are so often exposed. Young people drop out of school, refuse to get jobs, and associate only with others of their own age not because they feel alienated but because of defective social environments in homes, schools, factories, and elsewhere. We can follow the path taken by physics and biology by turning directly to the relation between behavior and the environment and neglecting supposed mediating states of mind. Physics did not advance by looking more closely at the jubilance of a falling body, or biology by looking at the nature of vital spirits, and we do not need to try to discover what personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plans, purposes, intentions, or the other perquisites of autonomous man really are in order to get on with a scientific analysis of behavior.

Even today, only a small part of the total energies of the community go into education and expression: we sacrifice far more to the arts of destruction and extermination than to the arts of creation. But it is through the performance of creative acts, in art, in thought, in personal relationships, that the city can be identified as something more than a purely functional organization of factories and warehouses, barracks, courts, prisons, and control centers. The towers and domes of the historic city are reminders of that still unfulfilled promise.

The uterus, then, is like a deciduous tree, an oak or a maple, and the endometrium acts like the leaves. When the weather is warm, when sunlight sings, the tree awakes and invests in leaves. The branching pattern of the tree—its trunk, its branches, its twigs—is like the branching of the body’s vascularization, parceling out water rather than blood. The homology of the pattern is no coincidence. Holy water, sacred blood, they are one and the same, and branching is the most hydraulically efficient means of pumping the fluid from a central source—the heart, the trunk—out to all extremities. Thus nourished, the leaves bud, unfurl, thicken, and darken. The leaves are photosynthetic factories, transforming sunlight into usable energy. That energy allows the tree to create seeds and nuts, the acorns that are embryonic trees. The leaves are expensive to maintain—the tree must deliver them water, nitrogen, potassium, the nutrients from the soil—but they repay the tree by spinning sunlight into gold.

You must make everything that is yours saleable, i.e., useful. If I ask the political economist: Do I obey economic laws if I extract money by offering my body for sale, by surrendering it to another's lust? (The factory workers in France call the prostitution of their wives and daughters the nth working hour, which is literally correct.) — Or am I not acting in keeping with political economy if I sell my friend to the Moroccans? (And the direct sale of men in the form of a trade in conscripts, etc., takes place in all civilized countries.) — Then the political economist replies to me: You do not transgress my laws; but see what Cousin Ethics and Cousin Religion have to say about it. My political economic ethics and religion have nothing to reproach you with, but — But whom am I now to believe, political economy or ethics? — The ethics of political economy is acquisition, work, thrift, sobriety — but political economy promises to satisfy my needs. — The political economy of ethics is the opulence of a good conscience, of virtue, etc.; but how can I live virtuously if I do not live? And how can I have a good conscience if I do not know anything? It stems from the very nature of estrangement that each sphere applies to me a different and opposite yardstick — ethics one and political economy another; for each is a specific estrangement of man and focuses attention on a particular field of estranged essential activity, and each stands in an estranged relation to the other.

But what about the consumer? She isn’t harming animals; she’s just eating the products of factory farming. Well, imagine someone who says, ‘I’m not kicking dogs to death. I’m just paying someone else to do it.’ We would judge this person to act wrongly for encouraging and commissioning acts of cruelty. Similarly, while meat-eaters may typically feel distant from meat production, and may never even think about what goes on in factory farms and slaughterhouses, the purchase of factory-farmed meat directly encourages and makes possible the associated cruelties –so the consumer is significantly responsible.

We are born with a natural delight in the music of language. As infants we coo and babble and let consonants roll around in our mouths like mother’s milk. As young children, we invent words, mash syllables together, and delight in nonsensical lines. We let ourselves be lulled to sleep by the playful rhymes of Mem Fox (“It’s time for bed, little goose, little goose, / The stars are out and on the loose”). We seek out stories with fanciful sounds (“Quickberry / Quackberry / Pick me a blackberry”). We begin to sense the link between what’s on the surface, and what’s under it (“I meant no harm. I most truly did not. / But I had to grow bigger. So bigger I got. / I biggered my factory. I biggered my roads. / I biggered my wagons. I biggered the loads”). As we mature, our delight in the music of words goes a bit underground, but it’s still there. We repeat not just Chaucer’s prologue, but also advertising jingles. We let brand names like Chunky Monkey and SurveyMonkey tumble off our tongues. We appreciate the curt sentences of Hemingway as well as those that are long and loose and lyrical. We let ourselves be moved by the moral authority of Nelson Mandela. We follow the Dalai Lama on Facebook. We let Chris Christie voice our outrage after a hurricane, Barack Obama our sorrow after a massacre of children. Language remains an adventure, if sometimes a somewhat mysterious one: We are drawn to reliable narrators and find that metaphors lift us. We are transported by soaring vowels. The cadence of sentences acts on us like the rhythm of an ancient drum. The music of language leads us to meaning, to our own humanity.

The System The denunciation of a dictatorship’s crimes doesn’t end with a list of the tortured, murdered, and disappeared. The machine gives you lessons in egoism and lies. Solidarity is a crime. To save yourself, the machine teaches, you have to be a hypocrite and a louse. The person who kisses you tonight will sell you tomorrow. Every favor breeds an act of revenge. If you say what you think, they smash you, and nobody deserves the risk. Doesn’t the unemployed worker secretly wish the factory will fire the other guy in order to take his place? Isn’t your neighbor your competition and enemy? Not long ago, in Montevideo, a little boy asked his mother to take him back to the hospital, because he wanted to be unborn. Without a drop of blood, without even a tear, the daily massacre of the best in every person is carried out. Victory for the machine: people are afraid of talking and looking at one another. May nobody meet anybody else. When someone looks at you and keeps looking, you think, “He’s going to screw me.” The manager tells the employee, who was once his friend, “I had to denounce you. They asked for the lists. Some name had to be given. If you can, forgive me.” Out of every thirty Uruguayans, one has the job of watching, hunting down, and punishing others. There is no work outside the garrisons and the police stations, and in any case to keep your job you need a certificate of democratic faith given by the police. Students are required to denounce their fellow students, children are urged to denounce their teachers. In Argentina, television asks, “Do you know what your child is doing right now?” Why isn’t the murder of souls through poisoning written up on the crime page?

The 1833 Factory Act illustrates how bad things had become. It was considered highly controversial to ban children under the age of nine from working in textile factories and to restrict children aged between nine and 13 to working 12 hours a day. Those aged 13–18 could legally work a 69-hour week. As well as running sweatshops, industry owners also portioned out work to unregulated, starving homeworkers in order to undercut factory wages.

A corrupt and dynastic political party is antithetical to the rule of law and to carefully crafted constitutional checks and balances to prevent abuse of power. A tendency towards autocracy and consequent institutional subversion is inevitable with a party thus configured. The result is a prime minister bereft of real power, subservient to the dynastic head and a mute spectator to the loot and plunder of the nation’s resources; a president who is a loyal camp follower and will faithfully rubber stamp the decisions ordained by the dynasty: witness how unhesitatingly President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signed the Proclamation of Emergency at Mrs. Gandhi’s bidding in 1975 and ponder whether Mrs. Pratibha Patil, (besieged as she was by her co-operative sugar factory in liquidation, her co-operative bank bankrupt, and her family embroiled in the murder case of a popular intra-party rival in Jalgaon at the time of her nomination by Mrs. Sonia Gandhi), would have done otherwise; or for that matter whether President Pranab Mukherjee, whose many acts of subversion of the Constitution during the Emergency have been documented by the Shah Commission, is so radically transformed that he would now protect it; a judiciary accused of judicial overreach when it censures the government or brings its ministers to book while its inconvenient judgments are subjected to review or Presidential Reference; a CAG whose findings against the government’s decisions are vilified as being patently erroneous, in excess of jurisdiction and even motivated, although that august body, the Constituent Assembly had opined that as the guardian of the nation’s finances, the CAG was as important a Constitutional functionary as the justices of the Supreme Court; a CVC appointed despite the taint of corruption and over the protest of the leader of the Opposition, whose appointment was finally quashed by the Supreme Court; and a CBI whose only role on empirical evidence is to falsely implicate political opponents and wrongly exonerate the regime’s members and cronies.

their responsibility.” “Isn’t it the military’s job to protect us?” “In theory, yes, a nation’s military is supposed to protect its citizens and industry from other nations—establish a border and then protect it—but that doesn’t work anymore. Borders are difficult to define in cyberspace.” Rory took a deep breath. “Where the government and military used to be responsible for protecting a factory from attack by foreign national governments, now they’re asking private industry to take over that responsibility in cyberspace.” He shrugged. “But who’s going to pay for it? And can a private company really protect itself from a hostile nation? Can we as private citizens act as our own armed forces? And what happens when corporations are as powerful as nations?

Think of the last 150 years as a three-act drama. In Act I, the Industrial Age, massive factories and efficient assembly lines powered the economy. The lead character in this act was the mass production worker, whose cardinal traits were physical strength and personal fortitude. In Act II, the Information Age, the United States and other nations began to evolve. Mass production faded into the background, while information and knowledge fueled the economies of the developed world. The central figure in this act was the knowledge worker, whose defining characteristic was proficiency in L-Directed Thinking. Now, as the forces of Abundance, Asia, and Automation deepen and intensify, the curtain is rising on Act III. Call this act the Conceptual Age. The main characters now are the creator and the empathizer, whose distinctive ability is mastery of R-Directed Thinking.

wondering if Allah really got personally involved in the butchering of children to secure a heroin production factory. When the day came, who would God be more angry with: men like him who acted with no regard to His will, or men like these who used Him to justify their own brutality and ambition?

In the years following the Revolution it was able to step into this commanding position almost unopposed, because the whole process was represented as an act of collectivization. It had always been assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated, Socialism must follow: and unquestionably the capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport — everything had been taken away from them: and since these things were no longer private property, it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist programme; with the result, foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.

Where Jolson conquered, Bing Crosby convinced and charmed, and like Astaire, Jolson too for that matter, he did not possess the physical gifts of a standard leading man (angles and ears and hair, yet again). Also like Astaire, he made it all seem easy, with the laid-back acting and the unforced way that devastating baritone could pour out and swing out. In one crucial sense he was more beholden to Jolson than Astaire, being primarily a solo performer who sang to people more than he sang with them. Recall: who was Crosby’s only steady partner on film? Bob Hope, in a partnership based in jokey rivalry. Other singers in Crosby films, besides Hope and Dorothy Lamour, seldom counted. Nor did most of Crosby’s films. Paramount, his home studio, was a formula-bound factory for most of the 1930s and ’40s, and the golden goose of the Crosby films did not countenance feather-ruffling. One after another, they were amiable time-passers, relaxed escapism that made a mint and sold tons of records and sheet music. For many then and some now, these vehicles offered unthreatening comfort—few chances taken, little deviation from formula, a likable guy ambling through some minor plot and singing mostly great songs. On occasion there was something as glaring as the ridiculous Dixie: as composer Dan Emmett, Crosby speeds up the title song into an uptempo hit only because the theater’s caught on fire. Generally, his films lacked even that cuckoo invigoration, which is why posterity dotes on Holiday Inn and its splashy, inferior semi-remake, White Christmas, and few of the others. While it would not be accurate to view Crosby as another megalomaniacal Jolson type, he lacked Astaire’s forceful imagination. Greater professional curiosity might have made his films—not simply his singing—transcend time and circumstance.

It happens that the stage-sets collapse. Rising, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. ‘Begins’—this is important. Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery.

There’s still a problem here: we need to know that the device itself hasn’t been compromised at some point, that the machine’s own “identity,” going back to its origins as a pile of unassembled parts in the factory, can be trusted. It’s a hard nut to crack. Device manufacturers use the phrase “trusted computing” to describe their efforts to resolve it. It’s a concept that chipmakers AMD and Intel Corp. have worked on in concert with IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, and others within a consortium known as the Trusted Computing Group. As it is currently designed, trusted computing is intended to confirm that a computer will act as intended—for example, that it will communicate the very string of text that the user types in, and nothing else, when certain keystrokes are hit—that is, that it has not been compromised by malicious code.

Lucky Thirteen had done me a last favor. The fuse for the self-destruct charge had delayed until the ship had Russians crawling all over and inside her—until the explosion would do the most good. I’m not one of the superstitious pilots. My rational side knows it was a technical fluke, a delay in the trigger mechanism, a circuit that didn’t close in time, a fortunate defect. But part of me wants to believe that the ship saved my life that day—that this collection of parts bolted together thirty years ago in a factory back on Earth, a Wasp-C like a thousand others and yet like no other ship I’ve ever flown, knew our peril and immolated itself at just the right moment, in a final act of service to its pilot.

You have reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when you agreed that you had no right to exist. Once, you believed it was ‘only a compromise’: you conceded it was evil to live for yourself, but moral to live for the sake of your children. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your children, but moral to live for your community. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your community, but moral to live for your country. Now, you are letting this greatest of countries be devoured by any scum from any corner of the earth, while you concede that it is selfish to live for your country and that your moral duty is to live for the globe. A man who has no right to life, has no right to values and will not keep them. “At the end of your road of successive betrayals, stripped of weapons, of certainty, of honor, you commit your final act of treason and sign your petition of intellectual bankruptcy: while the muscle-mystics of the People’s States proclaim that they’re the champions of reason and science, you agree and hasten to proclaim that faith is your cardinal principle, that reason is on the side of your destroyers, but yours is the side of faith. To the struggling remnants of rational honesty in the twisted, bewildered minds of your children, you declare that you can offer no rational argument to support the ideas that created this country, that there is no rational justification for freedom, for property, for justice, for rights, that they rest on a mystical insight and can be accepted only on faith, that in reason and logic the enemy is right, but faith is superior to reason. You declare to your children that it is rational to loot, to torture, to enslave, to expropriate, to murder, but that they must resist the temptations of logic and stick to the discipline of remaining irrational—that skyscrapers, factories, radios, airplanes were the products of faith and mystic intuition, while famines, concentration camps, and firing squads are the products of a reasonable manner of existence—that the industrial revolution was the revolt of the men of faith against that era of reason and logic which is known as the Middle Ages.

If you doubt that such is their purpose, observe with what passionate consistency the mystics of muscle are striving to make you forget that a concept such as ‘mind’ has ever existed. Observe the twists of undefined verbiage, the words with rubber meanings, the terms left floating in midstream, by means of which they try to get around the recognition of the concept of ‘thinking.’ Your consciousness, they tell you, consists of ‘reflexes,’ ‘reactions,’ ‘experiences,’ ‘urges,’ and ‘drives’—and refuse to identify the means by which they acquired that knowledge, to identify the act they are performing when they tell it or the act you are performing when you listen. Words have the power to ‘condition’ you, they say and refuse to identify the reason why words have the power to change your—blank-out. A student reading a book understands it through a process of—blank-out. A scientist working on an invention is engaged in the activity of—blank-out. A psychologist helping a neurotic to solve a problem and untangle a conflict, does it by means of—blank-out. An industrialist—blank-out—there is no such person. A factory is a ‘natural resource,’ like a tree, a rock or a mud puddle.

It’s a miracle, she tells her students, photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation’s entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act. The secret of life: plants eat light and air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things. She leads her charges into the inner sanctum of the mystery: Hundreds of chlorophyll molecules assemble into antennae complexes. Countless such antennae arrays form up into thylakoid discs. Stacks of these discs align in a single chloroplast. Up to a hundred such solar power factories power a single plant cell. Millions of cells may shape a single leaf. A million leaves rustle in a single glorious ginkgo.

Farm-state politicians and activists were berating the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton to take action. The urgency of the issue was stoked by the upcoming presidential election. The Democratic candidate, Vice President Al Gore, faced a growing challenge from the longtime consumer advocate Ralph Nader. Nader was unequivocal in his opposition to industrial meat production and the rise of factory farms. Clinton’s administration needed to look like it was doing something about it. In this increasingly tense environment, Eric Tabor was given a rare public chance to be the good guy. Iowa had gone further than any other state in combating the rise of corporate agribusiness, and Tabor was invited to the Kansas City forum to outline what Iowa regulators were doing. Tom Miller was attacking corporate meat production from two angles: through litigation and the creation of new laws. The lawsuit against Smithfield, filed just a few months earlier, threatened to upend the creeping vertical integration of the hog industry. At the same time, Miller was pressing for the passage of the Producer Protection Act in sixteen states, which would limit how much power companies like Tyson and Smithfield could wield over farmers.

Everybody in those days was a foreigner, no matter where they were born; as industrial modernization had its way with people and places, no one was native to the transformation of the United States from an agricultural economy to the foremost industrial power in the world--the factory being both the cause and the effect of an act of becoming, the likes of which nobody had ever seen before.

The Manchester Act was a significant victory for the nascent cotton manufacturers. But its historical and economic significance was in fact much greater. First, it demonstrated the limits of entry barriers that the pluralistic political institutions of parliamentary England would permit. Second, over the next half century, technological innovations in the manufacture of cotton cloth would play a central role in the Industrial Revolution and fundamentally transform society by introducing the factory system. After

Now, if faith is the gaze of the heart at God, and if this gaze is but the raising of the inward eyes to meet the all-seeing eyes of God, then it follows that it is one of the easiest things possible to do. It would be like God to make the most vital thing easy and place it within the range of possibility for the weakest and poorest of us. Several conclusions may fairly be drawn from all this. The simplicity of it, for instance. Since believing is looking, it can be done without special equipment or religious paraphernalia. God has seen to it that the one life-and-death essential can never be subject to the caprice of accident. Equipment can break down or get lost, water can leak away, records can be destroyed by fire, the minister can be delayed or the church burn down. All these are external to the soul and are subject to accident or mechanical failure: but looking is of the heart and can be done successfully by any man standing up or kneeling down or lying in his last agony a thousand miles from any church. Since believing is looking it can be done any time. No season is superior to another season for this sweetest of all acts. God never made salvation depend upon new moons nor holy days or sabbaths. A man is not nearer to Christ on Easter Sunday than he is, say, on Saturday, August 3, or Monday, October 4. As long as Christ sits on the mediatorial throne every day is a good day and all days are days of salvation. Neither does place matter in this blessed work of believing God. Lift your heart and let it rest upon Jesus and you are instantly in a sanctuary though it be a Pullman berth or a factory or a kitchen. You can see God from anywhere if your mind is set to love and obey Him.

But what if I don’t believe in God? It’s like they’ve sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can’t will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this: Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball about midchest, saying, Let go. Surrender, Dorothy, the witch wrote in the sky. Surrender, Mary. I want to surrender but have no idea what that means. He goes on with a level gaze and a steady tone: Yield up what scares you. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry. Enter into that quiet. It’s a cathedral. It’s an empty football stadium with all the lights on. And pray to be an instrument of peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is conflict, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope… What if I get no answer there? If god hasn’t spoken, do nothing. Fulfill the contract you entered into at the box factory, amen. Make the containers you promised to tape and staple. Go quietly and shine. Wait. Those not impelled to act must remain in the cathedral. Don’t be lonely. I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger. But I have to go to a meeting and make the chairs circle perfect. He kisses his index finger and plants it in the middle of my forehead, and I swear it burns like it had eucalyptus on it. Like a coal from the archangel onto the mouth of Isaiah.

The Pen Made for the White House Presidents come and go, but one thing remains constant in the West Wing BY DAN LEWIS FROM NOW I KNOW PHOTOGRAPH BY ADAM VOORHES The pens read “Skilcraft U.S. Government.” And if you have worked for an American government institution, chances are you’ve used one. About $5 million worth of these pens are sold every year (with 60 percent going to the military), and they have quite the story behind them. To start, they’re assembled by the blind. In 1938, in the midst of the Great Depression, the government stepped in to help blind workers, who were already at a competitive disadvantage. Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the Wagner-O’Day Act, which required that the federal government purchase specific goods manufactured by blind Americans. The law soon included pens. The Skilcraft brand came to be a decade or so later, in 1952. Today, the company employs over 5,500 blind workers in 37 states, producing an arsenal of office supplies, with the pens made in factories in Wisconsin and North Carolina. The pens must be built to the specifications outlined in a 16-page document that was first promulgated more than 50 years ago. Among the requirements? The pens must be able to write continuously for no less than 5,000 feet and in temperatures up to 160 degrees and down to 40 degrees below zero. You know, just in case. Copyright © 2011 by Dan Lewis.

Nevertheless, Chinese drivers haven't grasped the subtleties of headlight use. Most people keep their lights off until it's pitch-dark, and then they flip on the brights. Almost nobody uses headlights in rain, fog, snow, or twilight conditions - in fact, this is one of the few acts guaranteed to annoy a Chinese driver. They don't mind if you tailgate, or pass on the right, or drive on the the sidewalk. You can back down a highway entrance ramp without anybody batting an eyelash. But if you switch on your lights during a rainstorm, approaching drivers will invariably flash their brights in annoyance.

The Guildhall was in the middle of Plano, Texas. Plano Texas, is brown and not much else. They have a Frito-Lay factory, parking lots, and a videogame school. At the time, I kept a strict vegan diet and didn’t drive. There was nothing to eat and nowhere to go. But the latter didn’t matter; when you were at the Guildhall you had no life outside the Guildhall. I remember the first day of orientation, sitting in a lecture hall with my future classmates and the spouses they’d brought with them to this wasted brown land. One of the other level design students had his wife and their year-old child with him. “Give her a kiss and say good-bye,” the director of the school told him in front of the assembly. “You’re not going to see her for two years.” I was in Plano, Texas, for six months. You’re at school from nine to five. You stay after and do your work with the teams they’ve assigned you to. Late at night you drag yourself home and do your actual homework. Maybe you get a few hours of sleep. The idea behind the school is that you’re always in what the Big Games Industry calls “crunch time”: unpaid overtime. Your masters want the game done by Christmas, so you don’t leave the office until it’s done. This is why people in the industry aren’t healthy; this is why they burn out and quit games within a few years. This is why you miss the second year of your daughter’s life. This is their scheme: you put up with crunch time all the time while you’re in school, so when you work for a big publisher—or, rather, a studio contracted by a big publisher—you won’t complain about being told you can’t see your daughter until the game’s done. The Guildhall boasts an over 90 percent employment rate, and it’s true: they will get you a job in the games industry. That’s because they will make you into exactly the kind of worker the games industry wants. It’s that kind of school. And it works; that’s the horrifying thing. My classmates were all self-identified gamers and game fans and were willing to put up with anything in order to live their dream of making videogames. That’s the carrot the industry dangles, and it’s what we take away from the industry when we create a form to which anyone can contribute. As long as the industry is allowed to continue acting as the gatekeeper to game creation, people will continue to accept the ways in which the industry tramples the lives and well-being of the creative people who make games, rather than challenging the insane level of control that publishers ask over developers’ lives.

They said that no French-Catholic women had been deported to concentration camps in Germany during the occupation. There were some French girls who belonged to Nazi groups, who volunteered to go to Germany during the occupation as supervisors in concentration camps and factories. They smiled bitterly and asserted that my brother, with the best intentions, had probably eased the way for a French collaborator, in service to Germany, to escape scot-free. I felt very awkward and disappointed about how people use other people; about how good and evil can interchange; how good intentions can be used by shrewd people to cover up bad acts or even crimes. I was wondering what to tell my brother when I would eventually see him, talk to him, on my arrival in the States. I never told him about my friends' intimations.

in their hearts, Jackson and Wray thought this was the company’s final act. One person in the room never seemed to consider the possibility that the company would go under. Don Tyson went around the room and made each of his lieutenants report his week’s performance and plan for the week to come. Don wasn’t in denial. He made them recount the losses each unit had suffered, and he asked them for an unvarnished prediction of how bad things might be in the future. But against all available evidence, he was making plans for the future and laying out the company’s strategy for a market recovery that he was convinced would eventually come. — We will weather this storm, Don said. He stood there and talked to them as if it was the high point of the market. He wanted their ideas, and he brainstormed along with them. Don’s confidence somehow fooled the men around him into being confident too. They began to buy into his idea that there might be a tomorrow for which to plan. The company began slowing its factory lines. It placed fewer birds in its network of farms. It tried to deliver just enough meat to stay in the good graces of its customers and keep a spot on their shelves without selling too much product at a loss. Don lined up a loan of $500,000 from Mercantile Bank in St. Louis to keep operations afloat. What unfolded that summer was the first cycle in a long pattern that would define business for Tyson Foods. Don Tyson saw that the chicken business would never change. It clung stubbornly to cycles

Time is the dominant factor in gambling. Risk and time are opposite sides of the same coin, for if there were no tomorrow there would be no risk. Time transforms risk, and the nature of risk is shaped by the time horizon: the future is the playing field. Time matters most when decisions are irreversible. And yet many irreversible decisions must be made on the basis of incomplete information. Irreversibility dominates decisions ranging all the way from taking the subway instead of a taxi, to building an automobile factory in Brazil, to changing jobs, to declaring war. If we buy a stock today, we can always sell it tomorrow. But what do we do after the croupier at the roulette table cries, “No more bets!” or after a poker bet is doubled? There is no going back. Should we refrain from acting in the hope that the passage of time will make luck or the probabilities turn in our favor? Hamlet complained that too much hesitation in the face of uncertain outcomes is bad because “the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought . . . and enterprises of great pith and moment . . . lose the name of action.” Yet once we act, we forfeit the option of waiting until new information comes along. As a result, not-acting has value.

Recently deceased 26-year-old investigative journalist Bre Payton reported at The Federalist on December 13, 2018 that a newly-released DOJ Office of the Inspector General report reveals that Mueller’s Special Counsel Investigation (SCI) Records Officer deleted text messages that Strzok and Page exchanged while working on the Russian Collusion investigation. Deleting government records is a violation of the Federal Records Act. Destruction of evidence is also considered a crime. “The 11-page report reveals that almost a month after Strzok was removed from Mueller’s team, his government-issued iPhone was wiped clean and restored to factory settings by another individual working in Mueller’s office” Payton reported.

Morton would eventually think more deeply about the innovative process than any Bell Labs scientist, with the possible exception of Kelly. In his view, innovation was not a simple action but “a total process” of interrelated parts. “It is not just the discovery of new phenomena, nor the development of a new product or manufacturing technique, nor the creation of a new market,” he later wrote. “Rather, the process is all these things acting together in an integrated way toward a common industrial goal.

Essentially Kelly was creating interdisciplinary groups—combining chemists, physicists, metallurgists, and engineers; combining theoreticians with experimentalists—to work on new electronic technologies. But putting young men like Shockley in a management position devastated some of the older Labs scientists. Addison White, a younger member of the technical staff who before the war had taken part in Shockley’s weekly study group, told Hoddeson he nevertheless considered it “a stroke of enormously good management on Kelly’s part.” He even thought it an act of managerial bravery to strip the titles from men Kelly had worked with for decades. “One of these men wept in my office after this happened,” White said. “I’m sure it was an essential part of what by this time had become a revolution.

Regeneration: What’s better than having cells act younger? Having them actually be younger. This is what we mean by cellular regeneration. What if scientists could actually change cells, change mitochondria, and change the switches that control your DNA so that you have your original factory settings back again—and they are set to “younger”? That’s what’s happening right now in mice and dog models, where a manipulation can change aging cells to youthful ones.

Undoing their objectivization as goods to be bought and sold, therefore, required not only that captives escape the physical hold exerted on them by the forts, factories, and other coastal facilities used to incarcerate them but, more difficult still, that they reverse their own transformation into commodities, by returning to a web of social bonds that would tether them safely to the African landscape, within the fold of kinship and community. For most, as we have seen, distance made return to their home communities impossible. The market, they learned, made return to any form of social belonging impossible as well. If they managed to escape from the waterside forts and factories, their value resided not in their potential to join communities as slave laborers, wives, soldiers, or in some other capacity, but rather in their market price. For most, the power of the market made it impossible to return to their previous state, that of belonging to (being ‘owned’ by) a community—to being possessed, that is, of an identity as a subject. Rather, the strangers the runaways encountered shared the vision of the officials at Cape Coast Castle: the laws of the market made fellow human beings see it as their primary interest to own as commodities these escaped captives, rather than to connection them as social subjects. More often than not, then, captives escaped only to be sold again. As Snelgrave’s language articulates so clearly, the logic of the market meant that enslavement was a misfortune for which no buyer needed to feel the burden of accountability. Indeed, according to the mercantile logic in force, buyers (of whatever nationality) could not bear the weight of political accountability. Buying people who had no evidence social value was not a violation or an act of questionable morality but rather a keen and appropriate response to opportunity; for this was precisely what one was supposed to do in the market: create value by exchange, recycle someone else’s castoffs into objects of worth. Thus, then, did the market exert its power—through its language, its categories, its logic. The alchemy of the market derived from its effectiveness in producing a counterfeit representation; it had become plausible that human beings could be so completely drained of social value, so severed from the community, that their lives were no longer beyond price: they could be made freely available in exchange for currency. The market painted in colors sufficiently believable as to seem true the appalling notion that ‘a human being could fail to be a person.

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible. At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales. Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day. We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.[431]

If you look back, you can easily recall how parents, friends, relatives, teachers, and associates contributed in a campaign of negative suggestions. Study the things said to you, and you will discover much of it was in the form of propaganda. The purpose of much of what was said was to control you or instill fear into you. This heterosuggestion process goes on in every home, office, factory, and club. You will find that many of these suggestions are for the purpose of making you think, feel, and act, as others want you to and in ways that are to their advantage. How

Here is where the individual answer matters. Structural forces are suggestive, but not decisive. Personal commitment and company-level ingenuity still count. That’s not to say that structural explanations aren’t valid, but instead to acknowledge that even the best of conditions require individuals willing to bet their livelihoods that they can make it work. Progress results when individuals meet a context, act to change it, and are changed in the process.

of climate change. What was needed was a massive nudge in the right direction. In the past, the stick of regulation and the rod of taxation were the methods that environmentalists believed could break the fossil fuel economy. But the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t rely on such punitive tactics, because Manchin culled them from the bill. Instead, it imagined that the United States could become the global leader of a booming climate economy, if the government provided tax credits and subsidies, a lucrative set of incentives. There was a cost associated with the bill. By the Congressional Budget Office’s score, it offered $386 billion in tax credits to encourage the production of wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal plants, and battery storage. Tax credits would reduce the cost of electric vehicles so that they would become the car of choice for Middle America. But $386 billion was an estimate, not a price tag, since the legislation didn’t cap the amount of money available in tax credits. If utilities wanted to build more wind turbines or if demand for electric vehicles surged, the government would keep spending. When Credit Suisse studied the program, it estimated that so many businesses and consumers will avail themselves of the tax credits that the government could spend nearly $800 billion. If Credit Suisse is correct, then the tax credits will unleash $1.7 trillion in private sector spending on green technologies. Within six years, solar and wind energy produced by the US will be the cheapest in the world. Alternative energies will cross a threshold: it will become financially irresponsible not to use them. Even though Joe Biden played a negligible role in the final negotiations, the Inflation Reduction Act exudes his preferences. He romanticizes the idea of factories building stuff. It is a vision of the Goliath of American manufacturing, seemingly moribund, sprung back to life. At the same time that the legislation helps to stall climate change, it allows the United States to dominate the industries of the future. This was a bill that, in the end, climate activists and a broad swath of industry could love. Indeed, strikingly few business lobbies, other than finance and pharma, tried to stymie the bill in its final stages. It was a far cry from the death struggles over energy legislation in the Clinton and Obama administrations, when industry scuppered transformational legislation. The Inflation Reduction Act will allow the United States to prevent its own decline. And not just economic decline. Without such a meaningful program, the United States would have had no standing to prod other countries to respond more aggressively to climate change. It would have been a marginal player in shaping the response to the planet’s greatest challenge. The bill was an investment in moral authority.

Hodge admired Wilder’s performance but didn't want to reproduce it - for practical as well as artistic reasons. ‘I'm working in a different medium,’ he says. ‘I really admire Gene Wilder's version, but his energy - that druggy, transcendental, gently enigmatic thing - is different from what I require to sing huge songs and fill a theatre full of children. There's a different engine powering a big West End musical.

Wilder's Wonka is, as in the book, the embellishment and excitement round the edges - his batty, barmy, nutty, screwy, dippy, dotty, daffy, goofy, beany, buggy, wacky, loony nature dazzling and drawing our attention but, narratively speaking, remaining decoration.

Suetonius recounts how the wife of Rome’s first man, the princeps, and her sister-in-law, Octavia, provided Augustus with homespun and woven clothing (Suet. Aug. 73) and pleased the people with acts of generosity. Both women were given sacrosanctitas (sacrosanctity), the same inviolability a tribune of the people possessed,64 and free control of their finances. Livia, for example, the major shareholder in tile factories in Italy, which included exports, was a generous patroness to her friends and to the Roman state.

Both American and British law had long given special protection to shipowners whose vessels, through negligent handling, caused damage to others. The risks of sending ships to sea were so great that some special incentive was needed, if maritime nations were to grow and prosper. Moreover, on land the factory owner could at least theoretically oversee the acts of his employees, but the shipowner had no such control over his captain and crew. By the very nature of the business he was usually out of touch, and it seemed unfair to hold him to the same degree of responsibility when something went wrong. Therefore, as long as he did not have “privity or knowledge” of the negligence, his liability would be limited.

The strike of 1931 revolved around readers in the factory. The workers themselves used to pay twenty-five to fifty cents a week and would hire a man to read to them during work. A cigar factory is one enormous open area, with tables at which people work. A platform would be erected, so that he’d look down at the cigar makers as he read to them some four hours a day. He would read from newspapers and magazines and a book would be read as a serial. The choice of the book was democratically decided. Some of the readers were marvelous natural actors. They wouldn’t just read a book. They’d act out the scenes. Consequently, many cigar makers, who were illiterate, knew the novels of Zola and Dickens and Cervantes and Tolstoy. And the works of the anarchist, Kropotkin. Among the newspapers read were The Daily Worker and the Socialist Call.

Leadership Wisdom refers to authenticity, compassion, insight, discernment, selflessness, purpose-driven behavior, and making decisions for the greater good over the advancement of the self. We can only develop wisdom as we learn to let go of our defenses and act out of choice rather than defensiveness. Robertson, Susan . Real Leadership: Waken To Wisdom . The Books Factory. Kindle Edition.