Famous Police Quotes

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And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (A Man Without a Country)
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream was a manifestation of hope that humanity might one day get out of its own way by finding the courage to realize that love and nonviolence are not indicators of weakness but gifts of significant strength.
Aberjhani (Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.)
The job facing American voters… in the days and years to come is to determine which hearts, minds and souls command those qualities best suited to unify a country rather than further divide it, to heal the wounds of a nation as opposed to aggravate its injuries, and to secure for the next generation a legacy of choices based on informed awareness rather than one of reactions based on unknowing fear.
Aberjhani (Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.)
Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it’s written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe. Hear me say, devoid of trickery, Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, Exiles, similes, and reviles; Scholar, vicar, and cigar, Solar, mica, war and far; One, anemone, Balmoral, Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Gertrude, German, wind and mind, Scene, Melpomene, mankind. Billet does not rhyme with ballet, Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. Blood and flood are not like food, Nor is mould like should and would. Viscous, viscount, load and broad, Toward, to forward, to reward. And your pronunciation’s OK When you correctly say croquet, Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live. Ivy, privy, famous; clamour And enamour rhyme with hammer. River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, Doll and roll and some and home. Stranger does not rhyme with anger, Neither does devour with clangour. Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, And then singer, ginger, linger, Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age. Query does not rhyme with very, Nor does fury sound like bury. Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. Though the differences seem little, We say actual but victual. Refer does not rhyme with deafer. Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer. Mint, pint, senate and sedate; Dull, bull, and George ate late. Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, Science, conscience, scientific. Liberty, library, heave and heaven, Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. We say hallowed, but allowed, People, leopard, towed, but vowed. Mark the differences, moreover, Between mover, cover, clover; Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, Chalice, but police and lice; Camel, constable, unstable, Principle, disciple, label. Petal, panel, and canal, Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, Senator, spectator, mayor. Tour, but our and succour, four. Gas, alas, and Arkansas. Sea, idea, Korea, area, Psalm, Maria, but malaria. Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. Doctrine, turpentine, marine. Compare alien with Italian, Dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. Say aver, but ever, fever, Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. Heron, granary, canary. Crevice and device and aerie. Face, but preface, not efface. Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Large, but target, gin, give, verging, Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. Ear, but earn and wear and tear Do not rhyme with here but ere. Seven is right, but so is even, Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work. Pronunciation (think of Psyche!) Is a paling stout and spikey? Won’t it make you lose your wits, Writing groats and saying grits? It’s a dark abyss or tunnel: Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, Islington and Isle of Wight, Housewife, verdict and indict. Finally, which rhymes with enough, Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is to give up!!!
Gerard Nolst Trenité (Drop your Foreign Accent)
As I've already mentioned, 1984 and I were getting on famously. A no-frills setup, run without sentiment, snobbery or cultural favouritism, Airstrip One seemed like my kind of town. (I saw myself as an idealistic young corporal in the Thought Police.)
Martin Amis (Money)
Despite Langdon’s six-foot frame and athletic build, Anderson saw none of the cold, hardened edge he expected from a man famous for surviving an explosion at the Vatican and a manhunt in Paris. This guy eluded the French police…in loafers? He looked more like someone Anderson would expect to find hearthside in some Ivy League library reading Dostoyevsky.
Dan Brown (The Lost Symbol (Robert Langdon, #3))
In the 17th century, the French statesman Cardinal Richelieu famously said, “Show me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough therein to hang him.” Lavrentiy Beria, head of Joseph Stalin’s secret police in the old Soviet Union, declared, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Both were saying the same thing: if you have enough data about someone, you can find sufficient evidence to find him guilty of something.
Bruce Schneier (Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World)
Is it the part of the police department to harass me when this city is a flagrant vice capital of the civilized world?" Ignatius bellowed over the crowd in front of the store. "This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians, all of whom are only too well protected by graft. If you have a moment, I shall endeavor to discuss the crime problems with you, but don't make the mistake of bothering me.
John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)
A police officer pulls over Werner Heisenberg for speeding. “Do you know how fast you were going?” asks the cop. “No,” Heisenberg replies, “but I know exactly where I am!” I think we can all agree that physics jokes are the funniest jokes there are. They are less good at accurately conveying physics. This particular chestnut rests on familiarity with the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle, often explained as saying that we cannot simultaneously know both the position and the velocity of any object. But the reality is deeper than that.
Sean Carroll (Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime)
So your only hope is among the PACIFISTS or PEACEFUL ANARCHISTS. They say we can only improve the world by improving ourselves and hoping others copy us. This means not fighting anyone, giving away money and either living on the free gifts of others or on the work of our own hands. Buddha, Jesus, and Saint Francis took this path and in this century Prince Kropotkin, Count Leo Tolstoï and an American bachelor farmer-author called Thoreau. The movement attracts a lot of harmless aristocrats and writers. They annoy governments by refusing to pay taxes they think evil—which is most of them, since armies and weapons are what taxes mainly pay for. However, the police only imprison and flog ordinary Pacifists. The admirers of the famous ones keep them out of serious trouble. When you go into politics, Bell, be sure to become a Pacifist Anarchist. People will love you.
Alasdair Gray (Poor Things)
In one city, a famous gangster robbed a bank of a thousand pounds and spent the whole lot on Wonka bars that same afternoon. And when the police entered his house to arrest him, they found him sitting on the floor amidst mountains of chocolate, ripping off the wrappers with the blade of a long dagger.
Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)
Miranda v. Arizona, the most famous of all self-incrimination cases, the Supreme Court imposed procedural safeguards to protect the rights of the accused. A suspect has a constitutional right not to be compelled to talk, and any statement made during an interrogation cannot be used in court unless the police and the prosecutor can prove that the suspect clearly understood that (1) he had the right to remain silent, (2) anything said could be used against him in court, and (3) he had a right to an attorney, whether or not he could afford one. If, during an interrogation, the accused requests an attorney, then the questioning stops immediately.
John Grisham (The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town)
But what I would like to know," says Albert, "is whether there would not have been a war if the Kaiser had said No." "I'm sure there would," I interject, "he was against it from the first." "Well, if not him alone, then perhaps if twenty or thirty people in the world had said No." "That's probable," I agree, "but they damned well said Yes." "It's queer, when one thinks about it," goes on Kropp, "we are here to protect our fatherland. And the French are over there to protect their fatherland. Now who's in the right?" "Perhaps both," say I without believing it. "Yes, well now," pursues Albert, and I see that he means to drive me into a corner, "but our professors and parsons and newspapers say that we are the only ones that are right, and let's hope so;--but the French professors and parsons and newspapers say that the right is on their side, now what about that?" "That I don't know," I say, "but whichever way it is there's war all the same and every month more countries coming in." Tjaden reappears. He is still quite excited and again joins the conversation, wondering just how a war gets started. "Mostly by one country badly offending another," answers Albert with a slight air of superiority. Then Tjaden pretends to be obtuse. "A country? I don't follow. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat." "Are you really as stupid as that, or are you just pulling my leg?" growls Kropp, "I don't mean that at all. One people offends the other--" "Then I haven't any business here at all," replies Tjaden, "I don't feel myself offended." "Well, let me tell you," says Albert sourly, "it doesn't apply to tramps like you." "Then I can be going home right away," retorts Tjaden, and we all laugh, "Ach, man! he means the people as a whole, the State--" exclaims Mller. "State, State"--Tjaden snaps his fingers contemptuously, "Gendarmes, police, taxes, that's your State;--if that's what you are talking about, no, thank you." "That's right," says Kat, "you've said something for once, Tjaden. State and home-country, there's a big difference." "But they go together," insists Kropp, "without the State there wouldn't be any home-country." "True, but just you consider, almost all of us are simple folk. And in France, too, the majority of men are labourers, workmen, or poor clerks. Now just why would a French blacksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us? No, it is merely the rulers. I had never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and it will be just the same with the majority of Frenchmen as regards us. They weren't asked about it any more than we were." "Then what exactly is the war for?" asks Tjaden. Kat shrugs his shoulders. "There must be some people to whom the war is useful." "Well, I'm not one of them," grins Tjaden. "Not you, nor anybody else here." "Who are they then?" persists Tjaden. "It isn't any use to the Kaiser either. He has everything he can want already." "I'm not so sure about that," contradicts Kat, "he has not had a war up till now. And every full-grown emperor requires at least one war, otherwise he would not become famous. You look in your school books." "And generals too," adds Detering, "they become famous through war." "Even more famous than emperors," adds Kat. "There are other people back behind there who profit by the war, that's certain," growls Detering. "I think it is more of a kind of fever," says Albert. "No one in particular wants it, and then all at once there it is. We didn't want the war, the others say the same thing--and yet half the world is in it all the same.
Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front)
He devoured morning shows, daytime shows, late-night talk shows, soaps, situation comedies, Lifetime Movies, hospital dramas, police series, vampire and zombie serials, the dramas of housewives from Atlanta, New Jersey, Beverly Hills and New York, the romances and quarrels of hotel-fortune princesses and self-styled shahs, the cavortings of individuals made famous by happy nudities, the fifteen minutes of fame accorded to young persons with large social media followings on account of their plastic-surgery acquisition of a third breast or their post-rib-removal figures that mimicked the impossible shape of the Mattel company’s Barbie doll, or even, more simply, their ability to catch giant carp in picturesque settings while wearing only the tiniest of string bikinis; as well as singing competitions, cooking competitions, competitions for business propositions, competitions for business apprenticeships, competitions between remote-controlled monster vehicles, fashion competitions, competitions for the affections of both bachelors and bachelorettes, baseball games, basketball games, football games, wrestling bouts, kickboxing bouts, extreme sports programming and, of course, beauty contests.
Salman Rushdie (Quichotte)
In 1977 Justice William Brennan wrote a famous article, published in the Harvard Law Review, that encouraged the use of state constitutions to protect constitutional rights.52 State constitutions, he argued, “are a font of individual liberties.
Erwin Chemerinsky (Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights)
Where else could the most famous female dacoit, Phoolan Devi, surrender to police with ten thousand onlookers cheering as she placed her rifle down before a picture of Gandhi? (After serving her prison sentence, the “Bandit Queen of India” was elected to Parliament, only to be gunned down in front of her house in New Delhi before she turned forty.
Deepak Chopra (Brotherhood: Dharma, Destiny, and the American Dream)
Vice President Gore, Richard Clarke, and Madeleine Albright were “strong support[ers]” of the program, joining in President Clinton’s “intense” interest in it.5 Egypt’s most famous terrorist, Talaat Fouad Qassem, was “seized in Croatia, flown to the USS Adriatic, a navy warship, interrogated, then flown to Egypt for [torture and] execution.”6 Egypt’s secret police, the Gihaz al-Mukhabarat al-Amma, is widely known for its brutal torture regime, “real Macho interrogation . . . enhanced interrogation techniques on steroids” and was used by both Presidents Bush and Clinton.7 Congress attempted to end this program in 1998. The Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act slipped in a passage making it the policy of the United States not to “expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.”8 Clinton vetoed the bill in late October,
Andrew P. Napolitano (Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty)
Max Weber famously pointed out that a sovereign state's institutional representatives maintain a monopoly on the right of violence within the state's territory. Normally, this violence can only be exercised by certain duly authorized officials (soldiers, police, jailers), or those authorized by such officials (airport security, private guards…), and only in a manne explicitly designated by law. But ultimately, sovereign power really is, still, the right to brush such legalities aside, or to make them up as one goes along. The United States might call itself "a country of laws, not men", but as we have learned in recent years, American presidents can order torture, assassinations, domestic surveillance programs, even set up extra-legal zones like Guantanamo where they can treat prisoners pretty much any way they choose to. Even on the lowest levels, those who enforce the law are not really subject to it. It's extraordinary difficult, for instance, for a police officer to do *anything* to an American citizen that would lead to that officer being convicted of a crime. (p. 195)
David Graeber (The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy)
The famous speech Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, included the sentence: "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character". Today's left-wing, through identity politics, affirmative-action policies, and hiring quotas, has shattered that dream.
Tammy Bruce (The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds)
Call the police! “I’ll do it,” I said. “I know Inspector Hewitt’s number off by heart.” “Very good,” Dogger said. “But before you do, let’s have a quick dekko at the place. This lady isn’t going anywhere.” It was a moment right out of Philip Odell, the famous wireless detective, and I’m afraid I clasped my hands together under my chin. Such moments of bliss were few in my life and I needed to savor them the moment they occurred.
Alan Bradley (The Golden Tresses of the Dead (Flavia de Luce, #10))
The four had rented a riverside cottage and lived together there as two couples. Their vice was public, official and perfectly obvious to all. It was referred to quite naturally as something entirely normal. There were rumours about jealous scenes that took place there and about the various actresses and other famous women who frequented the little cottage near the water’s edge. One neighbour, scandalized by the goings-on, alerted the police at one stage and an inspector accompanied by one of his men came to make enquiries. It was a delicate mission: there was nothing the women could be prosecuted for, least of all prostitution. The inspector was deeply puzzled and could not understand what these alleged misdemeanours could possibly be. He asked a whole lot of pointless questions, compiled a lengthy report and dismissed the charges out of hand. The joke spread as far as Saint-Germain.
Guy de Maupassant (Femme Fatale)
soldiers serving in the Military Police and those serving in the Air Corps (the forerunner of the Air Force) about how good a job they thought their service did in recognizing and promoting people of ability. The answer was clear. Military Policemen had a far more positive view of their organization than did enlisted men in the Air Corps. On the face of it, that made no sense. The Military Police had one of the worst rates of promotion in all of the armed forces. The Air Corps had one of the best. The chance of an enlisted man rising to officer status in the Air Corps was twice that of a soldier in the Military Police. So, why on earth would the Military Policemen be more satisfied? The answer, Stouffer famously explained, is that Military Policemen compared themselves only to other Military Policemen. And if you got a promotion in the Military Police, that was such a rare event that you were very happy. And if you didn’t get promoted, you were in the same boat as most of your peers—so
Malcolm Gladwell (David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants)
and he prepared his elite professional household regiments: the infantry – the famous Janissaries – the cavalry regiments, and all the other attendant corps of gunners, armorers, bodyguards, and military police. These crack troops, paid regularly every three months and armed at the sultan’s expense, were all Christians largely from the Balkans, taken as children and converted to Islam. They owed their total loyalty to the sultan. Although few in number – probably no more than 5,000 infantry – they comprised the durable core of the Ottoman army.
Roger Crowley (1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West)
While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, their powerful political connections or great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (A Man Without a Country)
The member of the Nazi hierarchy most gifted at solving problems of conscience was Himmler. He coined slogans, like the famous watchword of the S.S., taken from a Hitler speech before the S.S. in 1931, “My Honor is my Loyalty”—catch phrases which Eichmann called “winged words” and the judges “empty talk”—and issued them, as Eichmann recalled, “around the turn of the year,” presumably along with a Christmas bonus. Eichmann remembered only one of them and kept repeating it: “These are battles which future generations will not have to fight again,” alluding to the “battles” against women, children, old people, and other “useless mouths.” Other such phrases, taken from speeches Himmler made to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen and the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders, were: “To have stuck it out and, apart from exceptions caused by human weakness, to have remained decent, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.” Or: “The order to solve the Jewish question, this was the most frightening order an organization could ever receive.” Or: We realize that what we are expecting from you is “superhuman,” to be “superhumanly inhuman.” All one can say is that their expectations were not disappointed. It is noteworthy, however, that Himmler hardly ever attempted to justify in ideological terms, and if he did, it was apparently quickly forgotten. What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique (“a great task that occurs once in two thousand years”), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did. The troops of the Einsatzgruppen had been drafted
Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil)
But Hans Beimler survived Dachau, escaping certain death just hours before the SS ultimatum expired. With the help of two rogue SS men, apparently, he squeezed through the small window high up in his cell, passed the barbed wire and electric fence around the camp, and disappeared into the night.7 After Private Steinbrenner unlocked Beimler’s cell early the next morning, on May 9, 1933, and found it empty, the SS went wild. Sirens sounded across the grounds as all available SS men turned the camp upside down. Steinbrenner battered two Communist inmates who had spent the night in the cells adjacent to Beimler, shouting: “Just you wait, you wretched dogs, you’ll tell me [where Beimler is].” One of them was executed soon after.8 Outside, a huge manhunt got under way. Planes circled near the camp, “Wanted” posters went up at railway stations, police raids hit Munich, and the newspapers, which had earlier crowed about Beimler’s arrest, announced a reward for recapturing the “famous Communist leader,” who was described as clean-shaven, with short-cropped hair and unusually large jug ears.9 Despite all their efforts, Beimler evaded his hunters. After recuperating in a safe house in Munich, he was spirited away in June 1933 by the Communist underground to Berlin and then, in the following month, escaped over the border to Czechoslovakia, from where he sent a postcard to Dachau telling the SS men to “kiss my ass.
Nikolaus Wachsmann (KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps)
The historian Pieter Spierenburg has provocatively suggested that “democracy came too early” to America.85 In Europe, first the state disarmed the people and claimed a monopoly on violence, then the people took over the apparatus of the state. In America, the people took over the state before it had forced them to lay down their arms – which, as the Second Amendment famously affirms, they reserve the right to keep and bear. In other words Americans, and especially Americans in the South and West, never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In much of American history, legitimate force was also wielded by posses, vigilantes, lynch mobs, company police, detective agencies, and Pinker-tons, and even more often kept as a prerogative of the individual.
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity)
Ponyboy, Well I guess you got into some trouble, huh? Darry and me nearly went nuts when you ran out like that. Darry is awful sorry he hit you. You know he didn’t mean it. And then you and Johnny turned up mising and what with that dead kid in the park and Dally getting hauled into the station, well it scared us something awful. The police came by to question us and we told them as much as we could. I can’t believe little old Johnny could kill somebody. I know Dally knows where you are, but you know him. He keeps his trap shut and won’t tell me nothing. Darry hasn’t got the slightest notion where you’re at and it is nearly killing him. I wish you’d come back and turn your selfves in but I guess you can’t since Johnny might get hurt. You sure are famous. You got a paragraph in the newspaper even. Take care and say hi to Johnny for us. Sodapop Curtis
S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders)
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,’ he declared, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow . . . The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.
Andrew Roberts (Churchill: Walking with Destiny)
There is only one historical development that has real significance. Today, when we finally realise that the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system, we can stop wasting our time on politics and social reforms, putsches and ideologies, and focus instead on the only thing that can make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry. If we invest billions in understanding our brain chemistry and developing appropriate treatments, we can make people far happier than ever before, without any need of revolutions. Prozac, for example, does not change regimes, but by raising serotonin levels it lifts people out of their depression. Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: ‘Happiness begins within.’ Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.1 In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World, published in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression, happiness is the supreme value and psychiatric drugs replace the police and the ballot as the foundation of politics. Every day, each person takes a dose of ‘soma’, a synthetic drug which makes people happy without harming their productivity and efficiency. The World State that governs the entire globe is never threatened by wars, revolutions, strikes or demonstrations, because all people are supremely content with their current conditions, whatever they may be. Huxley’s vision of the future is far more troubling than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley’s world seems monstrous to most readers, but it is hard to explain why. Everybody is happy all the time – what could be wrong with that?
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
What few knew at the beginning, but many of us know now, is that this was a typical response on the part of this intensely individualistic man, who had attended Waseda in the late 1960s, at the height of the student riots in Tokyo, and joined in the violence but strictly as an independent; he refused to join any political group or faction but hurled stones at the police in his own right. Today we know Murakami as the man who went to Jerusalem to accept the Jerusalem Prize from the Israeli government and in his acceptance speech criticized the Israeli state for its military actions against civilians in Gaza, declaring to his hosts, in effect, that if they chose to bring their massive military and political power against the individuals protesting in the Gaza Strip, then, right or wrong, he would stand against them. This was his now famous declaration of the “wall and eggs” metaphor, in which powerful political systems are seen as a great stone wall, and individuals as eggs, hopelessly and rather suicidally hurling themselves against its implacable strength.
Matthew Strecher (The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami)
The former South African archbishop Desmond Tutu used to famously say, “We are prisoners of hope.” Such a statement might be taken as merely rhetorical or even eccentric if you hadn’t seen Bishop Tutu stare down the notorious South African Security Police when they broke into the Cathedral of St. George’s during his sermon at an ecumenical service. I was there and have preached about the dramatic story of his response more times than I can count. The incident taught me more about the power of hope than any other moment of my life. Desmond Tutu stopped preaching and just looked at the intruders as they lined the walls of his cathedral, wielding writing pads and tape recorders to record whatever he said and thereby threatening him with consequences for any bold prophetic utterances. They had already arrested Tutu and other church leaders just a few weeks before and kept them in jail for several days to make both a statement and a point: Religious leaders who take on leadership roles in the struggle against apartheid will be treated like any other opponents of the Pretoria regime. After meeting their eyes with his in a steely gaze, the church leader acknowledged their power (“You are powerful, very powerful”) but reminded them that he served a higher power greater than their political authority (“But I serve a God who cannot be mocked!”). Then, in the most extraordinary challenge to political tyranny I have ever witnessed, Archbishop Desmond Tutu told the representatives of South African apartheid, “Since you have already lost, I invite you today to come and join the winning side!” He said it with a smile on his face and enticing warmth in his invitation, but with a clarity and a boldness that took everyone’s breath away. The congregation’s response was electric. The crowd was literally transformed by the bishop’s challenge to power. From a cowering fear of the heavily armed security forces that surrounded the cathedral and greatly outnumbered the band of worshipers, we literally leaped to our feet, shouted the praises of God and began…dancing. (What is it about dancing that enacts and embodies the spirit of hope?) We danced out of the cathedral to meet the awaiting police and military forces of apartheid who hardly expected a confrontation with dancing worshipers. Not knowing what else to do, they backed up to provide the space for the people of faith to dance for freedom in the streets of South Africa.
Jim Wallis (God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It)
If anything, the LAPD had long and famously been guilty of overreaction, as they had shown, for example, during the infamous 1988 raid on two small, adjacent apartment buildings on South Central’s Dalton Avenue. There, eighty LAPD officers had stormed the buildings looking for drugs on a bullshit tip. After handcuffing the terrorized residents—including small children and their grandparents—they then spent the next several hours tearing all the toilets from the floors; smashing in walls, stairwells, bedroom sets, and televisions with sledgehammers; slashing open furniture; and then sending it all crashing through windows into the front yard and arresting anyone who happened by to watch. As they were leaving, the officers spray-painted a large board located down the street with some graffiti. “LAPD Rules,” read one message; “Rolling 30s Die” read another. So completely uninhabitable were the apartments rendered that the Red Cross had to provide the occupants with temporary shelter, as if some kind of natural disaster had occurred. No gang members lived there, no charges were ever filed. In the end, the city paid $3.8 million to the victims of the destruction. A report later written by LAPD assistant chief Robert Vernon called it “a poorly planned and executed field operation [that] involved . . . an improperly focused and supervised aggressive attitude of police officers, supervisors and managers toward being ‘at war’ with gang members.” The
Joe Domanick (Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing)
While the overall systems of heterosexism and ableism are still with us, they have adapted in limited ways. These adaptations are held up as reassurance to those who fought long and hard for a particular change that equality has now been achieved. These milestones—such as the recognition of same-sex marriage, the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Title 9, the election of Barack Obama—are, of course, significant and worthy of celebration. But systems of oppression are deeply rooted and not overcome with the simple passage of legislation. Advances are also tenuous, as we can see in recent challenges to the rights of LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and intersex) people. Systems of oppression are not completely inflexible. But they are far less flexible than popular ideology would acknowledge, and the collective impact of the inequitable distribution of resources continues across history. COLOR-BLIND RACISM What is termed color-blind racism is an example of racism’s ability to adapt to cultural changes.3 According to this ideology, if we pretend not to notice race, then there can be no racism. The idea is based on a line from the famous “I Have a Dream” speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963 during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. At the time of King’s speech, it was much more socially acceptable for white people to admit to their racial prejudices and belief in white racial superiority. But many white people had never witnessed the kind of violence to which blacks were subjected. Because the struggle for civil rights was televised, whites across the nation watched in horror as black men, women, and children were attacked by police dogs and fire hoses during peaceful protests and beaten and dragged away from lunch counters.
Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
The story of Cassius Clay’s lost bicycle would later be told as an indication of the boxer’s determination and the wonders of accidental encounters, but it carries broader meaning, too. If Cassius Clay had been a white boy, the theft of his bicycle and an introduction to Joe Martin might have led as easily to an interest in a career in law enforcement as boxing. But Cassius, who had already developed a keen understanding of America’s racial striation, knew that law enforcement wasn’t a promising option. This subject—what white America allowed and expected of black people—would intrigue him all his life. “At twelve years old I wanted to be a big celebrity,” he said years later. “I wanted to be world famous.” The interviewer pushed him: Why did he want to be famous? Upon reflection he answered from a more adult perspective: “So that I could rebel and be different from all the rest of them and show everyone behind me that you don’t have to Uncle Tom, you don’t have to kiss you-know-what to make it . . . I wanted to be free. I wanted to say what I wanna say . . . Go where I wanna go. Do what I wanna do.” For young Cassius, what mattered was that boxing was permitted, even encouraged, and that it gave him more or less equal status to the white boys who trained with him. Every day, on his way to the gym, Cassius passed a Cadillac dealership. Boxing wasn’t the only way for him to acquire one of those big, beautiful cars in the showroom window, but it might have seemed that way at the time. Boxing suggested a path to prosperity that did not require reading and writing. It came with the authorization of a white man in Joe Martin. It offered respect, visibility, power, and money. Boxing transcended race in ways that were highly unusual in the 1950s, when black Americans had limited control of their economic and political lives. Boxing more than most other sports allowed black athletes to compete on level ground with white athletes, to openly display their strength and even superiority, and to earn money on a relatively equal scale. As James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time, many black people of Clay’s generation believed that getting an education and saving money would never be enough to earn respect. “One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear,” Baldwin wrote. “It was absolutely clear the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else—housewives, taxi
Jonathan Eig (Ali: A Life)
On the afternoon of August 9, hearing the news that Nagasaki had been bombed, Emperor Hirohito called an imperial conference at which his ministers debated the wisdom of surrender. After hours of talk, at 2 a.m. Hirohito stated that he felt Japan should accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, terms of surrender proposed in late July by Truman (who had only become president on Roosevelt’s death in April). But Potsdam called for the emperor to step down; and his ministers insisted that their acceptance depended on Hirohito being allowed to remain as sovereign—an astute demand that would ensure a sense of national exoneration. James F. Byrnes, the U.S. secretary of state, did not deal directly with this, and on August 14 Japan surrendered at Hirohito’s command. The next day, the entire country heard with astonishment the first radio broadcast from a supreme ruler, now telling them squeakily, in the antiquated argot of the imperial court, that he was surrendering to save all mankind “from total extinction.” Until then, Japan’s goal had been full, all-out war, as a country wholly committed; any Japanese famously preferred to die for the emperor rather than to surrender. (One hundred million die together! was the slogan.) Today the goal was surrender: all-out peace. It was the emperor’s new will. Later that day a member of his cabinet, over the radio, formally denounced the United States for ignoring international law by dropping the atomic bombs. In 1988, on the forty-seventh anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when the mayor of Nagasaki accused Hirohito of responsibility for the war and its numerous atrocities, he inadvertently stirred up petitions for his own impeachment, and nationwide protests and riots calling for his assassination. A month afterward, in January 1989, Hirohito died at age eighty-seven, still emperor of Japan. Eleven days later the mayor, whom the Nagasaki police were no longer protecting, was shot in the back. He barely survived.
George Weller (First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War)
In the Buck v. Bell case that legalized involuntary sterilization, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote, “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”11 Though the practice fell out of favor in light of Nazi atrocities during World War II, eugenics resulted in more than 60,000 compulsory sterilizations of poor and working-class people in the United States.
Virginia Eubanks (Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor)
son of the old woman. They may have had a prearranged plan.’ ‘How do you mean?’ asked Dick, looking puzzled. ‘Well – the old woman’s son, Dirty Dick, may have known that when the bells rang out, this fellow was making a run for it – and would come to bring him a message. He was to wait in the barn at night if the bells rang, just in case it was Nailer’s friend who had escaped.’ ‘Yes, I see,’ said Dick. ‘I think you’re right. Yes, I’m sure you are. My word, I’m glad I didn’t know that fellow at the window was an escaped convict!’ ‘And you’ve got the message from Nailer!’ said Anne. ‘What a peculiar thing! Just because we lost our way and went to the wrong place, you get a message from a prisoner given you by one who’s escaped! It’s a pity we don’t know what the message means – or the paper either.’ ‘Had we better tell the police?’ said George. ‘I mean – it may be important. It might help them to catch that man.’ ‘Yes,’ said Julian. ‘I think we should tell the police. Let’s have a look at
Enid Blyton (10: Five On A Hike Together (Famous Five series))
There is a party of 100 high-powered politicians. All of them are either honest or liars. You walk in knowing two things: - At least one of them is honest. - If you take any two politicians, at least one of them is a liar. From this information, can you know how many are liars and how many are honest? Answer 243.     A very famous chemist was found murdered in his kitchen today. The police have narrowed it down to six suspects. They know it was a two man job. Their names: Felice, Maxwell, Archibald, Nicolas, Jordan, and Xavier. A note was also found with the body: '26-3-58/28-27-57-16'. Who are the killers? Answer 244.     A smooth dance, a ball sport, a place to stay, an Asian country, and a girl's name. What's her name? Answer 245.     To give me to someone I don't belong to is cowardly, but to take me is noble. I can be a game, but there are no winners. What am I? Answer 246.     There are several books on a bookshelf. If one book is the 4th from the left and 6th from the right, how many books are on the shelf? Answer 247.     How many letters are in the answer to this riddle? Answer
M. Prefontaine (Difficult Riddles For Smart Kids: 300 Difficult Riddles And Brain Teasers Families Will Love (Thinking Books for Kids Book 1))
awkward televised hug from the new president of the United States. My curtain call worked. Until it didn’t. Still speaking in his usual stream-of-consciousness and free-association cadence, the president moved his eyes again, sweeping from left to right, toward me and my protective curtain. This time, I was not so lucky. The small eyes with the white shadows stopped on me. “Jim!” Trump exclaimed. The president called me forward. “He’s more famous than me.” Awesome. My wife Patrice has known me since I was nineteen. In the endless TV coverage of what felt to me like a thousand-yard walk across the Blue Room, back at our home she was watching TV and pointing at the screen: “That’s Jim’s ‘oh shit’ face.” Yes, it was. My inner voice was screaming: “How could he think this is a good idea? Isn’t he supposed to be the master of television? This is a complete disaster. And there is no fricking way I’m going to hug him.” The FBI and its director are not on anyone’s political team. The entire nightmare of the Clinton email investigation had been about protecting the integrity and independence of the FBI and the Department of Justice, about safeguarding the reservoir of trust and credibility. That Trump would appear to publicly thank me on his second day in office was a threat to the reservoir. Near the end of my thousand-yard walk, I extended my right hand to President Trump. This was going to be a handshake, nothing more. The president gripped my hand. Then he pulled it forward and down. There it was. He was going for the hug on national TV. I tightened the right side of my body, calling on years of side planks and dumbbell rows. He was not going to get a hug without being a whole lot stronger than he looked. He wasn’t. I thwarted the hug, but I got something worse in exchange. The president leaned in and put his mouth near my right ear. “I’m really looking forward to working with you,” he said. Unfortunately, because of the vantage point of the TV cameras, what many in the world, including my children, thought they saw was a kiss. The whole world “saw” Donald Trump kiss the man who some believed got him elected. Surely this couldn’t get any worse. President Trump made a motion as if to invite me to stand with him and the vice president and Joe Clancy. Backing away, I waved it off with a smile. “I’m not worthy,” my expression tried to say. “I’m not suicidal,” my inner voice said. Defeated and depressed, I retreated back to the far side of the room. The press was excused, and the police chiefs and directors started lining up for pictures with the president. They were very quiet. I made like I was getting in the back of the line and slipped out the side door, through the Green Room, into the hall, and down the stairs. On the way, I heard someone say the score from the Packers-Falcons game. Perfect. It is possible that I was reading too much into the usual Trump theatrics, but the episode left me worried. It was no surprise that President Trump behaved in a manner that was completely different from his predecessors—I couldn’t imagine Barack Obama or George W. Bush asking someone to come onstage like a contestant on The Price Is Right. What was distressing was what Trump symbolically seemed to be asking leaders of the law enforcement and national security agencies to do—to come forward and kiss the great man’s ring. To show their deference and loyalty. It was tremendously important that these leaders not do that—or be seen to even look like they were doing that. Trump either didn’t know that or didn’t care, though I’d spend the next several weeks quite memorably, and disastrously, trying to make this point to him and his staff.
James Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
The listener was absorbed by the sounds of Broadway: the car horns, police whistles, the people milling about. Up Broadway to 42nd Street, where an attendant shouted, “Have your tickets ready, please! have your tickets ready, please! … Good evening, Mr. First Nighter, the usher will show you to your box.” Then, in the “fourth-row center” seats, the First Nighter gave a quick reading of the program—title, cast, author—and the “famous First Nighter orchestra” played a few bars of music. An usher came down the aisle, shouting “Curtain! Curtain!” Buzzers sounded. Ushers reminded people that smoking was permitted in the lobby only. Then, listeners were told, the lights were dimmed and the play began. Afterward, the effect was reversed, with Mr. First Nighter weaving his way through the still-humming crowd and melting away into the street.
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
Telephone calls began coming from private citizens reporting fresh outbreaks of fire and the looting of Jewish businesses all over Munich. Hitler angrily sent for SS General Friedrich Karl von Eberstein, the city's police chief, and told him to restore order at once. He telephoned Goebbels and furiously demanded: ‘What's the game?’ He sent out Schaub and other members of his staff to stop the looting and arson. He ordered special protection for the famous antique dealers, Bernheimer's. At 2:56 A.M. a telex was issued by Rudolf Hess's staff as deputy of the Führer – and was repeated to all gauleiters as Party Ordinance No. 174 – forbidding all such demonstrations: ‘On express orders issued at the highest level of all there is to be no arson or the like, whatever, under any circumstances, against Jewish businesses.’ The Gestapo followed suit – thus at 3:45 A.M. the Berlin Gestapo repeated this prohibition.
David Irving (The War Path)
Ten things you should never do when you form a group 1.​Work with your friends (they won’t be for long if you do) 2.​Let the singer do his own backing vocals (this is a great opportunity for the band to pull together – ignore it at your peril; see also ‘narcissism’) 3.​Have a couple in the band (they will always conspire against you) 4.​Listen to an A&R man (apart from Pete Tong, everyone I have ever met has been an idiot) 5.​Let your manager open a club/bar (see The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club) 6.​Let the publishing/performance split go unspoken (sort it out as soon as the recording is finished and put it in writing; this is the worst thing you will ever have to do, but the most important, and usually splits most bands before they even start) 7.​Get off the bus (Fatty Molloy did this once and has regretted it ever since) 8.​Think one member is bigger than the group (courtesy Gene Simmons again) 9.​Sign anything that says ‘in perpetuity’ (that means forever, even you won’t live that long) 10.​Let your record company owe you money (see Factory Records) 11.​Ship your gear – always hire (a very famous sub-dance sub-indie outfit once phoned their manager after they’d split and said, ‘Hey, where did all the money go?’ See above!) 12.​Interfere with another group member’s sleep (they will turn very nasty and may call the police) 13.​Interfere with another group member’s girlfriend/wife (this will always end in violence) 14.​Never have a party in your own hotel room (always go to someone else’s) . . . Oh shit, way too many. I’ll stop now.
Peter Hook (Substance: Inside New Order)
Before the 1940’s, if one woman in an audience stood up and shrieked at the top of her lungs throughout an entire show she’d have been carted off to an asylum. By the mid-forties, however, entire audiences behaved like that, screaming, tearing at their clothes and hair, leaving their seats to board the stage. On December 30th, 1942, while Frank Sinatra sang at the Paramount Theater in New York, the behavior of the audience changed, and a part of our relationship to well-known people changed forever. Psychiatrists and psychologists of the day struggled to explain the phenomenon. They recalled medieval dance crazes, spoke of “mass frustrated love” and “mass hypnosis.” The media age did bring a type of mass hypnosis into American life. It affects all of us to some degree, and some of us to a great degree. Before the advent of mass-media, a young girl might have admired a performer from afar, and it would have been acceptable to have a passing crush. It would not have been acceptable if she pursued the performer to his home, or if she had to be restrained by police. It would not have been acceptable to skip school in order to wait for hours outside a hotel and then try to tear pieces of clothing from the passing star. Yet that unhealthy behavior became “normal” in the Sinatra days. In fact, audience behavior that surprised everyone in 1942 was expected two years later when Sinatra appeared again at the Paramount Theater. This time, the 30,000 screaming, bobby-soxed fans were joined by a troop of reporters. The media were learning to manipulate this new behavior to their advantage. Having predicted a commotion, 450 police officers were assigned to that one theater, and it appeared that society had learned to deal with this phenomenon. It had not. During the engagement, an 18-year old named Alexander Ivanovich Dorogokupetz stood up in the theater and threw an egg that hit Sinatra in the face. The show stopped, and for a moment, a brief moment, Sinatra was not the star. Now it was Dorogokupetz mobbed by audience members and Dorogokupetz who had to be escorted out by police. Society had not learned to deal with this, and still hasn’t. Dorogokupetz told police: “I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning. It felt good.” Saddled with the least American of names, he had tried to make one for himself in the most American way, and but for his choice of a weapon, he would probably be as famous today as Frank Sinatra. Elements in society were pioneering the skills of manipulating emotion and behavior in ways that had never been possible before: electronic ways. The media were institutionalizing idolatry. Around
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
Before the 1940’s, if one woman in an audience stood up and shrieked at the top of her lungs throughout an entire show she’d have been carted off to an asylum. By the mid-forties, however, entire audiences behaved like that, screaming, tearing at their clothes and hair, leaving their seats to board the stage. On December 30th, 1942, while Frank Sinatra sang at the Paramount Theater in New York, the behavior of the audience changed, and a part of our relationship to well-known people changed forever. Psychiatrists and psychologists of the day struggled to explain the phenomenon. They recalled medieval dance crazes, spoke of “mass frustrated love” and “mass hypnosis.” The media age did bring a type of mass hypnosis into American life. It affects all of us to some degree, and some of us to a great degree. Before the advent of mass-media, a young girl might have admired a performer from afar, and it would have been acceptable to have a passing crush. It would not have been acceptable if she pursued the performer to his home, or if she had to be restrained by police. It would not have been acceptable to skip school in order to wait for hours outside a hotel and then try to tear pieces of clothing from the passing star. Yet that unhealthy behavior became “normal” in the Sinatra days. In fact, audience behavior that surprised everyone in 1942 was expected two years later when Sinatra appeared again at the Paramount Theater. This time, the 30,000 screaming, bobby-soxed fans were joined by a troop of reporters. The media were learning to manipulate this new behavior to their advantage. Having predicted a commotion, 450 police officers were assigned to that one theater, and it appeared that society had learned to deal with this phenomenon. It had not. During the engagement, an 18-year old named Alexander Ivanovich Dorogokupetz stood up in the theater and threw an egg that hit Sinatra in the face. The show stopped, and for a moment, a brief moment, Sinatra was not the star. Now it was Dorogokupetz mobbed by audience members and Dorogokupetz who had to be escorted out by police. Society had not learned to deal with this, and still hasn’t. Dorogokupetz told police: “I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning. It felt good.” Saddled with the least American of names, he had tried to make one for himself in the most American way, and but for his choice of a weapon, he would probably be as famous today as Frank Sinatra. Elements in society were pioneering the skills of manipulating emotion and behavior in ways that had never been possible before: electronic ways. The media were institutionalizing idolatry.
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
It's hard here not to recall Ursula Le Guin's famous short story 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas', about the imaginary city of Omelas, a city which also made do without kings, wars, slaves or secret police. We have a tendency, Le Guin notes, to write off such a community as 'simple', but in fact these citizens of Omelas were 'not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us.' The trouble is just that 'we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.' [...] Omelas had some problems too. But the point remains: why do we assume that people who have figured out a way for a large population to govern and support itself without temples, palaces and military fortifications - that is, without overt displays of arrogance, self-abasement and cruelty - are somehow less complex than those who have not? Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with he name of 'city'?
David Graeber (The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity)
What some may not know is that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t originally arrested for killing the president. He was first arrested for shooting and killing Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. Oswald’s arrest came about on November 22, 1963, when a shoe store manager named John Brewer noticed him loitering suspiciously outside his store. Brewer noted that Oswald fit the description of the suspect in the shooting of Officer Tippit. When Oswald continued up the street and slipped inside the Texas Theater without paying for a ticket, Brewer called a theater worker, who alerted authorities. Fifteen Dallas police officers arrived at the scene. When they turned on the movie house lights, they found Lee Harvey Oswald sitting towards the back of the theater. The movie that had been airing at the time was War is Hell. When Lee Harvey Oswald was questioned by authorities about Tippit’s homicide, Captain J. W. Fritz recognized his name as one of the workers from the book depository who had been reported missing and was already being considered a suspect in JFK’s assassination. The day after he was formally arraigned for murdering Officer Tippit, he was also charged with assassinating John F. Kennedy. Today, the Texas Theater is a historical landmark that is commonly visited by tourists. It still airs movies and hosts special events. There’s also a bar and lounge.    The Texas Theater was the first theater in Texas to have air conditioning. It was briefly owned by famous aviator and film producer, Howard Hughes. Texas’s Capitol
Bill O'Neill (The Great Book of Texas: The Crazy History of Texas with Amazing Random Facts & Trivia (A Trivia Nerds Guide to the History of the United States 1))
In 2012, the conviction of two of Stephen Lawrence’s murderers could have sparked a national conversation about race. We could have had a conversation about the police’s failure of Stephen’s family as they fought for justice (in 2016, the results from an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission found that while the police were bungling the investigation, an undercover officer was spying on the Lawrence family).7 We could have asked ourselves honestly, as a country, if taking two decades to convict just two of the gang who murdered an innocent teenager was acceptable. We could have asked ourselves if we were ashamed of that. Maybe we could have spoken about the fact that racism had only been a political priority for less than half a century. We could have had a conversation about riots and race, about accountability, about how to move forward from Britain’s most famous race case. We could have had a conversation about how to start eliminating racism. We could have started asking each other about the best way to heal. It could have been pivotal. Instead, the conversation we had was about racism against white people.
Reni Eddo-Lodge (Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race)
In 1926, after she discovered her husband was having an affair, Christie disappeared. The police dredged the local lake, believing she might have drowned. Thousands of volunteers searched for her in the countryside. Meanwhile, a woman claiming to be a grieving mother from Cape Town checked in at a health spa under a name very similar to the name of the mistress of Agatha Christie’s unfaithful husband. Eventually, one of the guests recognized her as the famous crime writer and alerted the authorities. Christie regained her memory, but she never remembered anything that happened to her during her time at the health spa.
Megan Goldin (Stay Awake)
The police truncheon is precisely the point where the state’s bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema and its monopoly on coercive force come together. It only makes sense then that bureaucratic violence should consist first and foremost of attacks on those who insist on alternative schemas or interpretations. At the same time, if one accepts Jean Piaget’s famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucratic power, at the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity.
David Graeber (The Utopia of Rules)
Interstate 290 cuts past Chicago’s Rush University hospital and then through the city’s near Southwest Side. Adjacent to the expressway, homeless people and others suffering from opioid-use disorders do deals and shoot up, and the highway also provides quick access for affluent people from the suburbs. “They serve you in your car, quick-out in under a minute, and you’re back home in Hinsdale before the kids wake,” Jack Riley, ex–special agent in charge of the DEA’s Chicago office, told Rolling Stone. “That’s why gangsters kill for those corners. They’re the Park Place and Boardwalk of the drug game.” To Chicago residents, 290 is better known as the Eisenhower Expressway or, to many, the Heroin Highway. Chicago’s famously high murder rate, which police say is driven by drug dealing on the West Side, all comes to a head near the Heroin Highway, in drug markets on streets like Independence Boulevard.
Ben Westhoff (Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic)
Newspapers had different sections you didn’t want to read, like sport or overseas news, and stuff you did, like the word “jumble” and Fred Basset. You “scrolled” to the bit you wanted by putting the bits you didn’t want in the bin, which is bad for the planet. Luckily now we can get exactly the parts of a newspaper that we want delivered straight to our phone, though it has made painting a shelf harder because you can’t put the Daily Mail Sidebar Of Shame underneath to stop your table getting painty like you could with the family supplement. And it’s impossible to start a fire using the Guardian app. Which is good for the planet too. Some of the most famous newspapers such as The Times and TV Quick started in coffee shops in the 1800th century and by Victorian times they could be seen everywhere. Holding that day’s newspaper was a sign that you were keeping up with events. Either that or you were helping your kidnapper prove to the police that you weren’t dead yet. Newspapers made ordinary people feel part of big events, whether it was the sinking of the Titanic, men pretending to land on the Moon, the death of Lady Diana or Kinga off Big Brother sticking a wine bottle up her growler. Without newspapers we would never have heard of Piers Morgan, Rupert Murdoch or Jeremy Clarkson, so it’s understandable that in the 21st century the average person no longer buys a daily paper, in an attempt to stop it happening again.
Philomena Cunk (Cunk on Everything: The Encyclopedia Philomena)
5th Street between First and Second Avenue is often used as a backdrop for films. Very close to the red house is New York’s most famous police station, Precinct 9, which has been filmed very often. “Our façade is often in the camera’s view, or camera people climb up the fire ladder in order to shoot from up above. Then I get 200 dollars.
Susann Bosshard (Westward: Encounters with Swiss American Women)
hat was then Now Johannes Cabal and Joey Granite stood before Billy Butler and said nothing. The smell of smoke said it all for them. Butler smiled nastily. “Oh. It’s—” As famous last words go, they lacked a certain something. “Uppercut, Joey,” said Cabal. Joey Granite delivered an uppercut of surpassing science and pugilistic artistry. It was a thing of beauty and kinetic poetry that might be long admired among people who enjoy watching other people beat the living daylights out of one another. It was also powerful enough to lift a small building off its foundations. Anything up to a branch library would have tottered and fallen. Billy Butler, despite a bit of a gut, simply wasn’t in the same league weight-wise. By some miracle, his head stayed on his body, but there was little doubt that the police would be making enquiries long before he hit the ground again. “Let us leave, Joey,” said Cabal as Butler vanished through the cloud base.
Jonathan L. Howard (The Necromancer (Johannes Cabal, #1))
old diner on Main Street, six blocks west of the courthouse and three blocks south of the police station. It claimed to serve pecan waffles that were famous around the world, but Theo had often doubted this. Did people in Japan and Greece really know about Gertrude and her waffles? He wasn’t so sure. He had friends at school who’d never heard of Gertrude’s right there in Strattenburg. A few miles west of town, on the main highway, there was an ancient log cabin with a gas pump out front and a large sign advertising Dudley’s World-Famous Mint Fudge. When Theo was younger, he naturally had assumed that everybody in town not only craved the mint fudge but talked about it nonstop. How else could it achieve the status of being world famous? Then one day in class the discussion took an odd turn and found its way to
John Grisham (Theodore Boone: The Abduction: Theodore Boone 2)
Gertrude’s was an old diner on Main Street, six blocks west of the courthouse and three blocks south of the police station. It claimed to serve pecan waffles that were famous around the world, but Theo had often doubted this. Did people in Japan and Greece really know about Gertrude and her waffles? He wasn’t so sure. He had friends at school who’d never heard of Gertrude’s right there in Strattenburg. A few miles west of town, on the main highway, there was an ancient log cabin with a gas pump out front and a large sign advertising DUDLEY’S WORLD-FAMOUS MINT FUDGE. When Theo was younger, he naturally had assumed that everybody in town not only craved the mint fudge but talked about it nonstop. How else could it achieve the status of being world famous? Then one day in class the discussion took an odd turn and found its way to the topic of imports and exports.
John Grisham (Theodore Boone: The Abduction)
Liz Gorman, a fiery redhead, had been one of the founding members of the Raven Brigade. During their first “mission”—a failed attempt to burn down a university chemistry lab—the police had picked up a code name on the scanner: CD. It was later revealed that the male members of the Brigade called her CD, short for Carpenter’s Dream, because she was “flat as a board and easy to screw.” Sixties radicals, for all their so-called progressive thoughts, were some of the world’s biggest sexists. Now the implants made sense. Everyone Myron had interviewed remembered one thing about “Carla”—her cup size. Liz Gorman had been famous for her flat chest—what better disguise than oversized breast implants? “The feds and cops are cooperating on this one,” Higgins said. “They’re trying to keep this quiet for a while.
Harlan Coben (Fade Away (Myron Bolitar, #3))
People can say that I became famous because of 911. I became America's top cop, cultivated a political profile, wrote books, became a security consultant. But I'd give anything for that day not to have happened. I wish it hadn't. But it did. And I happen to be there at the time. I was there, and I did the best I could do under the circumstances. It's all any of us did.
Bernard B. Kerik (From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054)
George Mumford, a Newton-based mindfulness teacher, one such moment took place in 1993, at the Omega Institute, a holistic learning center in Rhinebeck, New York. The center was hosting a retreat devoted to mindfulness meditation, the clear-your-head habit in which participants sit quietly and focus on their breathing. Leading the session: meditation megastar Jon Kabat-Zinn. Originally trained as a molecular biologist at MIT, Kabat-Zinn had gone on to revolutionize the meditation world in the 1970s by creating a more secularized version of the practice, one focused less on Buddhism and more on stress reduction and other health benefits. After dinner one night, Kabat-Zinn was giving a talk about his work, clicking through a slide show to give the audience something to look at. At one point he displayed a slide of Mumford. Mumford had been a star high school basketball player who’d subsequently hit hard times as a heroin addict, Kabat-Zinn explained. By the early 1980s, however, he’d embraced meditation and gotten sober. Now Mumford taught meditation to prison inmates and other unlikely students. Kabat-Zinn explained how they were able to relate to Mumford because of his tough upbringing, his openness about his addiction — and because, like many inmates, he’s African-American. Kabat-Zinn’s description of Mumford didn’t seem to affect most Omega visitors, but one participant immediately took notice: June Jackson, whose husband had just coached the Chicago Bulls to their third consecutive NBA championship. Phil Jackson had spent years studying Buddhism and Native American spirituality and was a devoted meditator. Yet his efforts to get Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and their teammates to embrace mindfulness was meeting with only limited success. “June took one look at George and said, ‘He could totally connect with Phil’s players,’ ’’ Kabat-Zinn recalls. So he provided an introduction. Soon Mumford was in Chicago, gathering some of the world’s most famous athletes in a darkened room and telling them to focus on their breathing. Mumford spent the next five years working with the Bulls, frequently sitting behind the bench, as they won three more championships. In 1999 Mumford followed Phil Jackson to the Los Angeles Lakers, where he helped turn Kobe Bryant into an outspoken adherent of meditation. Last year, as Jackson began rebuilding the moribund New York Knicks as president, Mumford signed on for a third tour of duty. He won’t speak about the specific work he’s doing in New York, but it surely involves helping a new team adjust to Jackson’s sensibilities, his controversial triangle offense, and the particular stress that comes with compiling the worst record in the NBA. Late one April afternoon just as the NBA playoffs are beginning, Mumford is sitting at a table in O’Hara’s, a Newton pub. Sober for more than 30 years, he sips Perrier. It’s Marathon Monday, and as police begin allowing traffic back onto Commonwealth Avenue, early finishers surround us, un-showered and drinking beer. No one recognizes Mumford, but that’s hardly unusual. While most NBA fans are aware that Jackson is serious about meditation — his nickname is the Zen Master — few outside his locker rooms can name the consultant he employs. And Mumford hasn’t done much to change that. He has no office and does no marketing, and his recently launched website, mindfulathlete.org, is mired deep in search-engine results. Mumford has worked with teams that have won six championships, but, one friend jokes, he remains the world’s most famous completely unknown meditation teacher. That may soon change. This month, Mumford published his first book, The Mindful Athlete, which is part memoir and part instruction guide, and he has agreed to give a series of talks and book signings
Anonymous
Thanks to a skewed court system, the offender gets more sympathy than the victim of his crime. Police officers are put on trial for doing their duty against a criminal with a rap sheet that reaches to the floor. Who’s the one who broke the law—the criminal or the policeman? Police officers are investigated while criminals write books that make them rich, famous, and features them on television talk shows.
John Hagee (Four Blood Moons: Something Is About to Change)
the people who are best at telling jokes tend to have more health problems than the people laughing at them. A study of Finnish police officers found that those who were seen as funniest smoked more, weighed more, and were at greater risk of cardiovascular disease than their peers [10]. Entertainers typically die earlier than other famous people [11], and comedians exhibit more “psychotic traits” than others [12]. So just as there’s research to back up the conventional wisdom on laughter’s curative powers, there also seems to be truth to the stereotype that funny people aren’t always having much fun. It might feel good to crack others up now and then, but apparently the audience gets the last laugh.
Anonymous
Diablos: the name given to the igniting of, and ignited, farts. Trevor Hickey is the undisputed master of this arcane and perilous art. The stakes could not be higher. Get the timing even slightly wrong and there will be consequences far more serious than singed trousers; the word backdraught clamours unspoken at the back of every spectator’s mind. Total silence now as, with an almost imperceptible tremble (entirely artificial, ‘just part of the show’ as Trevor puts it) his hand brings the match between his legs and – foom! a sound like the fabric of the universe being ripped in two, counterpointed by its opposite, a collective intake of breath, as from Trevor’s bottom proceeds a magnificent plume of flame – jetting out it’s got to be nearly three feet, they tell each other afterwards, a cold and beautiful purple-blue enchantment that for an instant bathes the locker room in unearthly light. No one knows quite what Trevor Hickey’s diet is, or his exercise regime; if you ask him about it, he will simply say that he has a gift, and having witnessed it, you would be hard-pressed to argue, although why God should have given him this gift in particular is less easy to say. But then, strange talents abound in the fourteen-year-old confraternity. As well as Trevor Hickey, ‘The Duke of Diablos’, you have people like Rory ‘Pins’ Moran, who on one occasion had fifty-eight pins piercing the epidermis of his left hand; GP O’Sullivan, able to simulate the noises of cans opening, mobile phones bleeping, pneumatic doors, etc., at least as well as the guy in Police Academy; Henry Lafayette, who is double-jointed and famously escaped from a box of jockstraps after being locked inside it by Lionel. These boys’ abilities are regarded quite as highly by their peers as the more conventional athletic and sporting kinds, as is any claim to physical freakishness, such as waggling ears (Mitchell Gogan), unusually high mucous production (Hector ‘Hectoplasm’ O’Looney), notable ugliness (Damien Lawlor) and inexplicably slimy, greenish hair (Vince Bailey). Fame in the second year is a surprisingly broad church; among the two-hundred-plus boys, there is scarcely anyone who does not have some ability or idiosyncrasy or weird body condition for which he is celebrated. As with so many things at this particular point in their lives, though, that situation is changing by the day. School, with its endless emphasis on conformity, careers, the Future, may be partly to blame, but the key to the shift in attitudes is, without a doubt, girls. Until recently the opinion of girls was of little consequence; now – overnight, almost – it is paramount; and girls have quite different, some would go so far as to say deeply conservative, criteria with regard to what constitutes a gift. They do not care how many golf balls you can fit in your mouth; they are unmoved by third nipples; they do not, most of them, consider mastery of Diablos to be a feather in your cap – even when you explain to them how dangerous it is, even when you offer to teach them how to do it themselves, an offer you have never extended to any of your classmates, who would actually pay big money for this expertise, or you could even call it lore – wait, come back!
Paul Murray (Skippy Dies)
At Tolimundarni, on the fringe of the war zone itself, they’d been thrown off the train by military police who weren’t falling for Y’sul’s pre-emptively outrage-fuelled arguments regarding the summit-like priority and blatant extreme officiality of an expedition - nay, a quest! - he was undertaking with these - yes, these, two - famous, well-connected, honoured alien guests of immeasurably high intrinsic pan-systemic cross-species reputation, concerning a matter of the utmost import the exact details of which he was sadly not at liberty to divulge even to such patently important and obviously discreet members of the armed forces as themselves, but who would, nevertheless, he was sure, entirely understand the significance of their mission and thus their clear right to be accorded unhindered passage due to simple good taste and a fine appreciation of natural justice and would in no way be swayed by the fact that their cooperation would be repaid in levels of subsequent kudos almost beyond crediting…
Anonymous
With the advent of mass media, the famous intrude themselves into our homes, often creating a pseudo-intimacy which, for individuals whose lives are otherwise bereft of intimacy, can fill a void and foster stalking behaviours. It is also not surprising, given that these victims often epitomise success, that they would also become targets of resentful individuals whose stalking is motivated more by revenge.
Julian Boon (Stalking and Psychosexual Obsession: Psychological Perspectives on Prevention, Policing and Treatment)
Methamphetamines were sold in patent medicines and nasal decongestants, recommended for heroin addiction, and mass disseminated to troops to improve their performance. The police and prohibitionists hailed the drop in cocaine use as a success, demanded even more severe punishments and cited the large number of addicts in prison as proof that drugs made people commit crimes; after all, only criminals ended up in jail. With cocaine users scarce in the face of an expanding anti-drugs bureaucracy, the authorities moved onto potheads, where their focus remained for decades, which allowed Escobar to get cocaine into America unnoticed. In the following decades, the most famous cocaine abuser was Adolf Hitler.
Shaun Attwood (Clinton Bush and CIA Conspiracies: From The Boys on the Tracks to Jeffrey Epstein (War On Drugs Book 4))
There was a wonderful example of gaming a human system in the career of Victor Niederhoffer in the Economics Department of Harvard. Victor Niederhoffer was the son of a police lieutenant, and he needed to get A's at Harvard. But he didn't want to do any serious work at Harvard because what he really liked doing was, one, playing world-class checkers; two, gambling in high-stakes card games, at which he was very good, all hours of the day and night; three, being the squash champion of the United States, which he was for years; and, four, being about as good a tennis player as a part-time tennis player could be. This did not leave much time for getting A's at Harvard. So he went into the Economics Department. You'd think he would have chosen French poetry. But remember, this was a guy who could play championship checkers. He thought he was up to outsmarting the Harvard Economics Department. And he was. He noticed that the graduate students did most of the boring work that would otherwise go to the professors, and he noticed that because it was so hard to get to be a graduate student at Harvard, they were all very brilliant and organized and hardworking, as well as much needed by grateful professors. And, therefore, by custom, and as would be predicted from the psychological force called "reciprocity tendency," in a really advanced graduate course, the professors always gave an A. So Victor Niederhoffer signed up for nothing but the most advanced graduate courses in the Harvard Economics Department, and, of course, he got A, after A, after A, after A, and was hardly ever near a class. And, for a while. Some people at Harvard may have thought it had a new prodigy on its hands. That's a ridiculous story, but the scheme will work still. And Niederhoffer is famous: They call his style "Niederhoffering the curriculum.
Peter D. Kaufman (Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, Expanded Third Edition)
In August of 1993, Frank Salerno, the famous bulldog of Sheriffs Homicide, retired from police work for good.
Philip Carlo (The Night Stalker: The Disturbing Life and Chilling Crimes of Richard Ramirez)
George had in the inherent goodness of people. Here we were, a group of virtual strangers, running the famous Shakespeare and Company. Personally, I’d known the man for forty-eight hours and yet I had the keys to both his bookstore and his bedroom in my pocket. Coming from a life of police bulletins and home security systems, such trust seemed almost folly.
Jeremy Mercer (Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.)
It will always be a pity that the title of this great formation [the 4th Infantry Division] was given to the scattered troops, deployed on policing duty. The matchless, professional excellence of this formation was greatly admired by the Germans - no mean professionals themselves. It is said that General Von Arnim, Commander of the German Forces in Tunis in 1943, insisted on surrendering to the 4th. His caravan is today used by the GOC of 4 Division. No wonder the Chinese were aghast at the poor “performance” of this famous formation. It is ironic that the fame of this formation is more widely known and respected by foreigners than by the Indian people. Perhaps this is the price of segregating the Army from the public, except for the annual pat on the back during the debate on defence appropriations.
J.P. Dalvi (Himalayan Blunder: The Angry Truth About India's Most Crushing Military Disaster)
Work matters. Quality work matters. It matters to God. Luther famously said that the angels smile when a father changes a dirty diaper. God wants clean rear ends! Of course he does. Why does God care about such small details? Because he loves, that's why. He wants children taught, and he uses principals, teachers, and parents to do it. Not to mention all the staff it takes to run a school. God wants people protected, and he uses firefighters, police officers, and a host of government officials to get the job done. God wants diseases controlled, and he uses doctors, nurses, and researchers to take on this monumental task. He cares deeply about the janitor's work, too, for the very same reason. God wants it all, and he wants it done well. He uses people to do it. He frees Christians from working for him so that they can work for their neighbors.
Michael Berg (Vocation: The Setting of Human Flourishing)
Nadine’s photo had been on the national news and in all the newspapers. She was the famous daughter of the infamous killer. The girl who had turned her own mother in to the police.
Jenna Kernan (A Killer's Daughter (Agent Nadine Finch, #1))
JFK Assassination The general premise of the situation is that President John F. Kennedy rode through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Shots rang out, and the resulting barrage of bullets ended with the President being fatally shot in the head. An event that was caught on tape by the famous film shot by Abraham Zapruder. [1] The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was caught the same day after shooting a Dallas police officer. Two days later, he was killed, again on camera, by Jack Ruby with one shot to the abdomen. The new President, former Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, put together the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination. They concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and closed the book on the case. This conclusion meant that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine with questionable marksman skills using an archaic bolt-action rifle, would have to fire 3 shots within 8 to 11 seconds. It required that he aim and fire at a moving target, pull back the bolt to release the shell, and then aim and fire again. He would aim and fire one more time before it was over, but was he the only one firing? This wasn't good enough for the American people, and the case was revisited with a new investigation in 1978. The House Select Committee on Assassinations simply concluded that the killing was the result of a conspiracy, and that was it. For 50+ years, we have been left to theorize and hypothesize about what happened in Dealey Plaza that day. A new idea was presented to the public on the 50th anniversary of the event in November 2013 that theorized the final shot that exploded Kennedy's head was accidental. This idea theorized that the shot came from a Secret Service agent in the follow-up vehicle. The agent had retrieved an assault rifle from the floorboard of the limo, and when the vehicle lunged, he fired the fatal shot. This action was followed by an extensive cover-up to save the agency from public embarrassment. I don't think we will ever know what really happened that day. [2]
Ava Fails (Conspiracy Theory 101: A Researcher's Starting Point)
There once lived, at a series of temporary addresses across the United States of America, a travelling man of Indian origin, advancing years and retreating mental powers, who, on account of his love for mindless television, had spent far too much of his life in the yellow light of tawdry motel rooms watching an excess of it, and had suffered a peculiar form of brain damage as a result. He devoured morning shows, daytime shows, late-night talk shows, soaps, situation comedies, Lifetime Movies, hospital dramas, police series, vampire and zombie serials, the dramas of housewives from Atlanta, New Jersey, Beverly Hills and New York, the romances and quarrels of hotel-fortune princesses and self-styled shahs, the cavortings of individuals made famous by happy nudities, the fifteen minutes of fame accorded to young persons with large social media followings on account of their plastic-surgery acquisition of a third breast or their post-rib-removal figures that mimicked the impossible shape of the Mattel company’s Barbie doll, or even, more simply, their ability to catch giant carp in picturesque settings while wearing only the tiniest of string bikinis; as well as singing competitions, cooking competitions, competitions for business propositions, competitions for business apprenticeships, competitions between remote-controlled monster vehicles, fashion competitions, competitions for the affections of both bachelors and bachelorettes, baseball games, basketball games, football games, wrestling bouts, kickboxing bouts, extreme sports programming and, of course, beauty contests.
Salman Rushdie (Quichotte)
The desk is covered with paper, which irritates Nelson whose desk at King’s Lynn Police Station is famously clear apart from his ever-present To Do List.
Elly Griffiths (A Room Full of Bones (Ruth Galloway, #4))
Don’t mind him, he’s a joker,” I said. “Yes, these are the Piglin Brutes from the Triad Bastion. Now, we need to take them to the station for everyone’s safety.” “Yes, of course. Good job, detective.” Aaron said. “Farewell, sailors. Thanks once again for your help,” I said. “Goodbye. We’ll be here if you need us.” Henry replied. We took the prisoners to the police station. One by one, we put them in their individual cells and locked them up. The Piglin Brutes, as expected, didn’t say a word and obeyed our orders with no resistance. “I wish all prisoners acted like that,” Officer Barry said. “Don’t wish that. We still need them to talk,” I corrected him. Officers Zimmer and Sal were waiting for us at the main hall. “There they are, the travelling officers and detectives,” Officer Zimmer said. “Welcome back. We took care of the station while you guys were away,” Sal said. “Hello officers, I believe we haven’t been introduced yet because you were on your day off when I arrived. I’m CalvinPignes, nice to meet you.” “No need to introduce yourself, Detective. You’re too famous for that! It’s an honor to meet you. Officer Zimmer at your disposal.” “Officer Sal, I’m a huge fan of your work,” Sal said.
Mark Mulle (Diary of a Piglin Book 4: The Secret Scientist)
I had occasion to talk to Erica Jong, one of the most famous sex-positive feminists—“one of the most interviewed people in the world,” as she’s put it—on the thirtieth anniversary of her novel Fear of Flying. “I was standing in the shower the other day, picking up my shampoo,” she said. “It’s called ‘Dumb Blonde.’ I thought, thirty years ago you could not have sold this. I think we have lost consciousness of the way our culture demeans women.” She was quick to tell me that she “wouldn’t pass a law against the product or call the PC police.” But, she said, “let’s not kid ourselves that this is liberation. The women who buy the idea that flaunting your breasts in sequins is power—I mean, I’m for all that stuff—but let’s not get so into the tits and ass that we don’t notice how far we haven’t come. Let’s not confuse that with real power. I don’t like to see women fooled.
Ariel Levy (Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture)
Even though Hercule Poirot rapidly became as famous as Sherlock Holmes, his creator grew tired of him after a while. Christie called him an “ego-centric creep,” who was more concerned with the trim of his mustache than the feelings of the human beings caught up in murder cases, and who made a point of making fun of the police officers who couldn’t keep up with his rapid-fire investigations. Tapping his forehead, Poirot was fond of saying: “These little gray
Robert Wernick (The Writers)
the “power of three”?’ she asked. She cast her eyes around the room and everybody stared back, but nobody spoke. ‘It’s a concept that some people believe in: that the number three stands for that which is solid, real, substantial, complete – for example the three dimensions of length, breadth and height which are necessary to form a solid. There are three great divisions that complete time: the past, the present and the future. Thought, word and deed complete the sum of human capability; animal, vegetable, mineral – the three kingdoms of the natural world. I could go on. For some people, three is such a powerful number that everything has to be finished in threes for them to feel safe. A famous physicist, Nicola Tesla, was so obsessed with the number that he used to walk round the block three times before he would enter a building.’ She paused and again looked around the room, taking them all in, but her gaze settled on Tom, who instantly felt guilty about his scepticism. ‘If this is his driver, he will try to kill one more girl to replace the failed attempt. She will look like the other three, but this time he will be sure to finish the job. I’m using “he” throughout this presentation because, as we know, the chances are that the killer is a man. However, “he” could just as easily be more than one man.’ She paused and every eye was on her. ‘But there’s another theory that fits the profile. I would like to suggest to you that there was only one victim that mattered to the killer. Only one person who had to die. The others were decoys, added to confuse us. Three may have been chosen as the best number to ensure the police were chasing their tails trying to find a link between the victims when there isn’t one. And
Rachel Abbott (Kill Me Again (DCI Tom Douglas, #5))
He devoured morning shows, daytime shows, late-night talk shows, soaps, situation comedies, Lifetime Movies, hospital dramas, police series, vampire and zombie serials, the dramas of housewives from Atlanta, New Jersey, Beverly Hills and New York, the romances and quarrels of hotel-fortune princesses and self-styled shahs, the cavortings of individuals made famous by happy nudities, the fifteen minutes of fame accorded to young persons with large social media followings on account of their plastic-surgery acquisition of a third breast or their post-rib-removal figures that mimicked the impossible shape of the Mattel company’s Barbie doll, or even, more simply, their ability to catch giant carp in picturesque settings while wearing only the tiniest of string bikinis; as well as singing competitions, cooking competitions, competitions for business propositions, competitions for business apprenticeships, competitions between remote-controlled monster vehicles, fashion competitions, competitions for the affections of both bachelors and bachelorettes, baseball games, basketball games, football games, wrestling bouts, kickboxing bouts, extreme sports programming and, of course, beauty contests. (He
Salman Rushdie (Quichotte)
one thing I know for certain is that there’s a big difference between good versus evil, and beauty versus ugliness. For example, you people tend to despise tattoos, as if they were an affront to your puritanical eyes. You seem to see anyone who happens to have a tattoo as a thief or a murderer or some sort of lowlife scum, and that simply isn’t the case at all. In the so-called civilized countries of the West, even among royalty, aristocracy, and members of the upper classes, getting tattooed was a widespread fashion at the turn of the century. And all those people agreed that the Japanese tattoo was the absolute zenith of the art form, on a par with our famous ukiyo-e woodblock prints. If you people in the police department could just learn to look at tattoos with a slightly more artistic eye, I think you might be surprised to discover the strange beauty there. I don’t mean to climb on my soapbox, but I really think Japan should use our defeat in that stupid war as a time for national rebirth. We need to repeal the senseless ban on tattoos, once and for all.
Akimitsu Takagi (Tattoo Murder Case (Soho crime))
In 2018, a 32-year-old US woman, Lauren Cutshaw, was arrested after speeding through a stop sign. She became famous for having asked the police to let her off because she is “a clean, thoroughbred white girl”.
Nayden Kostov (323 Disturbing Facts about Our World)
In another dissent, which became famous and influential, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes asserted an almost unlimited government police power flowing from “the right of a majority to embody their opinions in law.” Notice that Holmes’ majoritarianism led him to assert an essentially unlimited right.
George F. Will (The Conservative Sensibility)
Another example is diabetes mellitus, a disease characterized by excess blood sugar due to insufficient insulin production. Over time, it can cause damage to blood vessels, kidneys, and nerves and lead to blindness. Type 1 diabetes, also known as juvenile-onset or insulin-dependent diabetes, is typically caused by autoimmune damage to the pancreas. Type 2 diabetes, a less serious disease, is linked to genetic and dietary factors. Some animal studies have indicated that CBD can reduce the incidence of diabetes, lower inflammatory proteins in the blood, and protect against retinal degeneration that leads to blindness [Armentano53]. As we have seen, patients have also found marijuana effective in treating the pain of diabetic neuropathy.   A famous example is Myron Mower, a gravely ill diabetic who grew his own marijuana under California’s medical marijuana law, Prop. 215, to help relieve severe nausea, appetite loss, and pain. Mower was arrested and charged with illegal cultivation after being interrogated by police in his hospital bed. In a landmark ruling, People v. Mower (2002), the California Supreme Court overturned his conviction, affirming that Prop. 215 gave him the same legal right to use marijuana as other prescription drugs.   While marijuana clearly provides symptomatic relief to many diabetics with appetite loss and neuropathy, scientific studies have yet to show whether it can also halt disease progression.
Dale Gieringer (Marijuana Medical Handbook: Practical Guide to Therapeutic Uses of Marijuana)