Officially Hired Quotes

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I mean what they and their hired psychiatrists call delusional systems. Needless to say, ‘delusions’ are always officially defined. We do not have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It’s the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart.
Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)
What makes anyone think that government officials are even trying to protect us? A government is not analogous to a hired security guard. Governments do not come into existence as social service organizations or as private firms seeking to please consumers in a competitive market. Instead, they are born in conquest and nourished by plunder. They are, in short, well-armed gangs intent on organized crime. Yes, rulers have sometimes come to recognize the prudence of protecting the herd they are milking and even of improving its ‘infrastructure’ until the day they decide to slaughter the young bulls, but the idea that government officials seek to promote my interests or yours is little more than propaganda—unless, of course, you happen to belong to the class of privileged tax eaters who give significant support to the government and therefore receive in return a share of the loot.
Robert Higgs
And then came, perhaps, the biggest offseason move in franchise history … and no, we’re not talking about inviting Carlos Peña to camp or hiring Joe Maddon or appointing Andrew Friedman as Executive Vice President of Baseball Operations—those moves had already transpired. No, we’re talking about the really big move. After 2007 the Tampa Bay Devil Rays officially released the 'Devil' and emerged in 2008 as the Tampa Bay Rays.
Tucker Elliot (Tampa Bay Rays IQ: The Ultimate Test of True Fandom)
hiring outside lawyers seemed to provoke Monroe County officials even more.
Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption)
For one hit he’d done a version of Victor/Victoria, pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man when he’d been hired to kill a paranoid and heavily guarded government official.
Pauline Baird Jones (Lonesome Lawmen: The Complete Bundle (1-4) (The Lonesome Lawmen))
New Rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word "liberal," they also have to take back the word "elite." By now you've heard the constant right-wing attacks on the "elite media," and the "liberal elite." Who may or may not be part of the "Washington elite." A subset of the "East Coast elite." Which is overly influenced by the "Hollywood elite." So basically, unless you're a shit-kicker from Kansas, you're with the terrorists. If you played a drinking game where you did a shot every time Rush Limbaugh attacked someone for being "elite," you'd be almost as wasted as Rush Limbaugh. I don't get it: In other fields--outside of government--elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I'd like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad--the elite aren't down-to-earth and accessible like you and me and President Shit-for-Brains. Which is fine, except that whenever there's a Bush administration scandal, it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment, and you think to yourself, "Where are they getting these screwups from?" Well, now we know: from Pat Robertson. I'm not kidding. Take Monica Goodling, who before she resigned last week because she's smack in the middle of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She's thirty-three, and though she never even worked as a prosecutor, was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all ninety-three U.S. attorneys. How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College--you know, home of the "Fighting Christies"--and then went on to attend Pat Robertson's law school. Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause "earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor," has a law school. And what kid wouldn't want to attend? It's three years, and you have to read only one book. U.S. News & World Report, which does the definitive ranking of colleges, lists Regent as a tier-four school, which is the lowest score it gives. It's not a hard school to get into. You have to renounce Satan and draw a pirate on a matchbook. This is for the people who couldn't get into the University of Phoenix. Now, would you care to guess how many graduates of this televangelist diploma mill work in the Bush administration? On hundred fifty. And you wonder why things are so messed up? We're talking about a top Justice Department official who went to a college founded by a TV host. Would you send your daughter to Maury Povich U? And if you did, would you expect her to get a job at the White House? In two hundred years, we've gone from "we the people" to "up with people." From the best and brightest to dumb and dumber. And where better to find people dumb enough to believe in George Bush than Pat Robertson's law school? The problem here in America isn't that the country is being run by elites. It's that it's being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And by the way, the lawyer Monica Goodling hired to keep her ass out of jail went to a real law school.
Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
The Atonist nobility knew it was impossible to organize and control a worldwide empire from Britain. The British Isles were geographically too far West for effective management. In order to be closer to the “markets,” the Atonist corporate executives coveted Rome. Additionally, by way of their armed Templar branch and incessant murderous “Crusades,” they succeeded making inroads further east. Their double-headed eagle of control reigned over Eastern and Western hemispheres. The seats of Druidic learning once existed in the majority of lands, and so the Atonist or Christian system spread out in similar fashion. Its agents were sent from Britain and Rome to many a region and for many a dark purpose. To this very day, the nobility of Europe and the east are controlled from London and Rome. Nothing has changed when it comes to the dominion of Aton. As Alan Butler and Stephen Dafoe have proven, the Culdean monks, of whom we write, had been hired for generations as tutors to elite families throughout Europe. In their book The Knights Templar Revealed, the authors highlight the role played by Culdean adepts tutoring the super-wealthy and influential Catholic dynasties of Burgundy, Champagne and Lorraine, France. Research into the Templars and their affiliated “Salt Line” dynasties reveals that the seven great Crusades were not instigated and participated in for the reasons mentioned in most official history books. As we show here, the Templars were the military wing of British and European Atonists. It was their job to conquer lands, slaughter rivals and rebuild the so-called “Temple of Solomon” or, more correctly, Akhenaton’s New World Order. After its creation, the story of Jesus was transplanted from Britain, where it was invented, to Galilee and Judea. This was done so Christianity would not appear to be conspicuously Druidic in complexion. To conceive Christianity in Britain was one thing; to birth it there was another. The Atonists knew their warped religion was based on ancient Amenism and Druidism. They knew their Jesus, Iesus or Yeshua, was based on Druidic Iesa or Iusa, and that a good many educated people throughout the world knew it also. Their difficulty concerned how to come up with a believable king of light sufficiently appealing to the world’s many pagan nations. Their employees, such as St. Paul (Josephus Piso), were allowed to plunder the archive of the pagans. They were instructed to draw from the canon of stellar gnosis and ancient solar theologies of Egypt, Chaldea and Ireland. The archetypal elements would, like ingredients, simply be tossed about and rearranged and, most importantly, the territory of the new godman would be resituated to suit the meta plan.
Michael Tsarion (The Irish Origins of Civilization, Volume One: The Servants of Truth: Druidic Traditions & Influence Explored)
month later, on July 9, 2012, Stevens and the embassy’s security staff, led by DS agent Eric Nordstrom, asked the State Department to extend the presence of a Site Security Team, or SST, that consisted of sixteen active-duty military special operators. The Defense Department’s Africa Command, which oversaw the unit, was willing to extend the team’s stay in Tripoli. But State Department officials decided that DS agents and locally hired guards could do the job, and that the SST operators weren’t needed. In the weeks that followed, General Carter Ham, head of Africa Command, twice asked Stevens if he wanted the SST to remain in Libya. Despite his earlier request to extend the team’s stay, Stevens wouldn’t buck the decision of State Department officials in Washington. He declined Ham’s offers and the SST left Libya, even as Stevens moved forward with plans to visit the restive city of Benghazi.
Mitchell Zuckoff (13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi)
During the Harding administration, in the early 1920s, the Justice Department had been packed with political cronies and unscrupulous officials, among them the head of the bureau: William Burns, the infamous private eye. After being appointed director, in 1921, Burns had bent laws and hired crooked agents, including a confidence man who peddled protection and pardons to members of the underworld. The Department of Justice had become known as the Department of Easy Virtue.
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
In 1973, the CIA, informed that reporters were sniffing around their affairs, had destroyed all the files concerning Project MK-Ultra. But the CIA is, above all, an enormous bureaucracy. Joseph Rauth was convinced that some traces had to remain of such an important project, which had extended over twenty-five years and involved dozens of directors and a staff of thousands. Under the auspices of the Rockefeller Commission, we were authorized access to documents or other materials relating to research into mind control. We hired an ex-CIA operative named Frank Macley to look into it. After several weeks of investigation, he confirmed that most of the files had been destroyed by two high-ranking officials: CIA Director Samuel Neels and one of his close associates, Michael Brown. But through his persistence, Macley unearthed seven huge crates of documents relating to MK-Ultra at the Agency’s records storage facility. Crates that had gotten lost in the administrative labyrinth.
Franck Thilliez (Syndrome E)
October 29th CHARACTER IS FATE “Each person acquires their own character, but their official roles are designated by chance. You should invite some to your table because they are deserving, others because they may come to deserve it.” —SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 47.15b In the hiring process, most employers look at where someone went to school, what jobs they’ve held in the past. This is because past success can be an indicator of future successes. But is it always? There are plenty of people who were successful because of luck. Maybe they got into Oxford or Harvard because of their parents. And what about a young person who hasn’t had time to build a track record? Are they worthless? Of course not. This is why character is a far better measure of a man or woman. Not just for jobs, but for friendships, relationships, for everything. Heraclitus put it as a maxim: “Character is fate.” When you seek to advance your own position in life, character is the best lever—perhaps not in the short term, but certainly over the long term. And the same goes for the people you invite into your life.
Ryan Holiday (The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living)
The fears of militarization Holbrooke had expressed in his final, desperate memos, had come to pass on a scale he could have never anticipated. President Trump had concentrated ever more power in the Pentagon, granting it nearly unilateral authority in areas of policy once orchestrated across multiple agencies, including the State Department. In Iraq and Syria, the White House quietly delegated more decisions on troop deployments to the military. In Yemen and Somalia, field commanders were given authority to launch raids without White House approval. In Afghanistan, Trump granted the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, sweeping authority to set troop levels. In public statements, the White House downplayed the move, saying the Pentagon still had to adhere to the broad strokes of policies set by the White House. But in practice, the fate of thousands of troops in a diplomatic tinderbox of a conflict had, for the first time in recent history, been placed solely in military hands. Diplomats were no longer losing the argument on Afghanistan: they weren’t in it. In early 2018, the military began publicly rolling out a new surge: in the following months, up to a thousand new troops would join the fourteen thousand already in place. Back home, the White House itself was crowded with military voices. A few months into the Trump administration, at least ten of twenty-five senior leadership positions on the president’s National Security Council were held by current or retired military officials. As the churn of firings and hirings continued, that number grew to include the White House chief of staff, a position given to former general John Kelly. At the same time, the White House ended the practice of “detailing” State Department officers to the National Security Council. There would now be fewer diplomatic voices in the policy process, by design.
Ronan Farrow (War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence)
One thing that hasn’t aroused dispute is the exemplary nature of Washington’s religious tolerance. He shuddered at the notion of exploiting religion for partisan purposes or showing favoritism for certain denominations. As president, when writing to Jewish, Baptist, Presbyterian, and other congregations—he officially saluted twenty-two major religious groups—he issued eloquent statements on religious tolerance. He was so devoid of spiritual bias that his tolerance even embraced atheism. When he needed to hire a carpenter and a bricklayer at Mount Vernon, he stated that “if they are good workmen,” they could be “Mahometans, Jews, or Christian of any sect, or they may be atheists.
Ron Chernow (Washington: A Life)
States. It was not easy for Chinese to get into the country. In 1882 Congress had passed a law suspending the entry of Chinese laborers and “all persons of the Chinese race” except officials, teachers, students, tourists, and merchants, at the same time formally prohibiting the naturalization of Chinese. The 1882 Act was the culmination of decades of anti-Chinese propaganda and discrimination. In 1852 California Governor John Bigler described Chinese immigrants as “contract coolies, avaricious, ignorant of moral obligations, incapable of being assimilated and dangerous to the welfare of the state.” In 1854 the California Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a white man for killing a Chinese miner by invoking Section 14 of the California Criminal Act, which specified that “no Black or mulatto person, or Indian shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of, or against a white man.” In support of the decision Chief Justice Hugh Murray declared that “to let Chinese testify in a court of law would admit them to all the equal rights of citizenship. And then we might see them at the polls, in the jury box, upon the bench, and in our legislative halls.” In 1879 the California State constitution prohibited corporations and municipal works from hiring Chinese and authorized cities to remove Chinese from their boundaries.1 My father never told us how he got around the restrictions of the Exclusion Act, and we knew better than to probe because it was generally understood that the distinction between being here legally and illegally was a shadowy one.
Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
Public interference with poetry rests on the popular delusion that an immediate commerce exists between historical truth and poetic truth; that the historical universe is potentially the poetic universe. The historical universe is, however, only a temporary aggregate of ideas. These ideas may direct the structure of the literary universe, which produces the philosophical journalism of a period; the structure of the poetic universe is directed by a person in single-handed conflict with the time-community. Science, the present-day aggregate of tribal ideas, puts on the creative mind a social compulsion to accept these ideas; and criticism acts, as usual, as the nattered instrument of conversion. Official literature is born of a critical rather than of a literary sense; it is the social institution which the [professionalized] poet is hired to serve.
Laura Riding (Contemporaries and Snobs (Modern and Contemporary Poetics))
Was everything suddenly all fixed and perfect? No. Did I get pitying stares in restaurants? Constantly. Did I still have profound moments—hours, days—of hopelessness, anger, bitterness, frustration, despair, self-hatred, and grief? You could say that. And did I one day run into Neil Putnam from Simtex HR, the guy who had hired-me-but-not-officially for my dream job before the accident and then nixed the whole thing afterward? And did he not recognize me at all? And when I finally explained who I was, did he say, “You changed your hair!”? Yes. That happened. But the tone of my life was different now. I had a purpose. I had a reason to take a shower every morning. I had a reason to take care of myself. More than that, I was figuring out how doing something for other people could—in fact—be doing something for yourself. Amazing. It felt good to feel better,
Katherine Center (How to Walk Away)
This view, while understandable, given the sensational media coverage of crack in the 1980s and 1990s, is simply wrong. While it is true that the publicity surrounding crack cocaine led to a dramatic increase in funding for the drug war (as well as to sentencing policies that greatly exacerbated racial disparities in incarceration rates), there is no truth to the notion that the War on Drugs was launched in response to crack cocaine. President Ronald Reagan officially announced the current drug war in 1982, before crack became an issue in the media or a crisis in poor black neighborhoods. A few years after the drug war was declared, crack began to spread rapidly in the poor black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and later emerged in cities across the country.2 The Reagan administration hired staff to publicize the emergence of crack cocaine in 1985 as part of a strategic effort to build public and legislative support for the war.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
What is taking place here should be made very clear: Citizens who are completely innocent of any legal wrongdoing and simply minding their own business--not seeking any litigation and neither convicted nor accused of any legal infraction, criminal or civil--are ordered into court and told to write checks to officials of the court or they will be summarily arrested and jailed, Judges also order citizens to sell their houses and other property and turn the proceeds over to lawyers and other cronies they never hired. Summoning legally unimpeachable citizens to court and forcing them to empty their bank accounts to people they have not hired for services they have neither requested nor received on threat of physical punishment is what most people would call a protection racket. . . Yet family court judges do this as a matter of routine. This is by far the clearest example of what we political scientists term a "kleptocracy," or government by theives.
Stephen Baskerville (Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family)
There are tiny mites living in our eyelashes. Hal Roach was a famous director who used to hire drunk and insane people to generate creative ideas. To attract female goats, Billy goats urinate on their own heads. Jewish people do not eat pork. Khazaria was a medieval Turkic kingdom that adopted Judaism as its official religion; it was the only non-Semitic state to become Jewish after Israel. The largest economy in the United States is California. More deer are killed by drivers than by hunters. The automotive center of the world is in Detroit. If the earth were ever to stop spinning, all the oceans would flow to the north and south poles. Around 16 to 20 percent of the terms searched on Google are said to have been never searched before. Bamboo can grow 35 inches per day making it the fastest growing woody plant in the world. The heaviest insect found on the earth is ‘Giant Weta’. It weighs more than a pound and is found in New Zealand. The CIA is expected to release the JFK assassination records to the public no later than 10/26/2017.
Nazar Shevchenko (Random Facts: 1869 Facts To Make You Want To Learn More)
A common problem plagues people who try to design institutions without accounting for hidden motives. First they identify the key goals that the institution “should” achieve. Then they search for a design that best achieves these goals, given all the constraints that the institution must deal with. This task can be challenging enough, but even when the designers apparently succeed, they’re frequently puzzled and frustrated when others show little interest in adopting their solution. Often this is because they mistook professed motives for real motives, and thus solved the wrong problems. Savvy institution designers must therefore identify both the surface goals to which people give lip service and the hidden goals that people are also trying to achieve. Designers can then search for arrangements that actually achieve the deeper goals while also serving the surface goals—or at least giving the appearance of doing so. Unsurprisingly, this is a much harder design problem. But if we can learn to do it well, our solutions will less often meet the fate of puzzling disinterest. We should take a similar approach when reforming a preexisting institution by first asking ourselves, “What are this institution’s hidden functions, and how important are they?” Take education, for example. We may wish for schools that focus more on teaching than on testing. And yet, some amount of testing is vital to the economy, since employers need to know which workers to hire. So if we tried to cut too much from school’s testing function, we could be blindsided by resistance we don’t understand—because those who resist may not tell us the real reasons for their opposition. It’s only by understanding where the resistance is coming from that we have any hope of overcoming it. Not all hidden institutional functions are worth facilitating, however. Some involve quite wasteful signaling expenditures, and we might be better off if these institutions performed only their official, stated functions. Take medicine, for example. To the extent that we use medical spending to show how much we care (and are cared for), there are very few positive externalities. The caring function is mostly competitive and zero-sum, and—perhaps surprisingly—we could therefore improve collective welfare by taxing extraneous medical spending, or at least refusing to subsidize it. Don’t expect any politician to start pushing for healthcare taxes or cutbacks, of course, because for lawmakers, as for laypeople, the caring signals are what makes medicine so attractive. These kinds of hidden incentives, alongside traditional vested interests, are what often make large institutions so hard to reform. Thus there’s an element of hubris in any reform effort, but at least by taking accurate stock of an institution’s purposes, both overt and covert, we can hope to avoid common mistakes. “The curious task of economics,” wrote Friedrich Hayek, “is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”8
Kevin Simler (The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life)
Thakur’s findings were not news to Ranbaxy’s top executives. Just ten months earlier, in October 2003, outside auditors started investigating Ranbaxy facilities worldwide. In this case, the audits had been ordered up by Ranbaxy itself. This was a common industry practice: drug companies often hired consultants to audit their facilities as a dry run to see how visible their problems were. If the consultants could find it, they reasoned, then most likely regulators could too. The fact-finding mission by Lachman Consultant Services left Ranbaxy officials under no illusion as to the extent of the company’s failings. At Ranbaxy’s Princeton, New Jersey, facility, auditors found that the company’s Patient Safety Department barely functioned and training was essentially “non-existent.” The staff had no written protocols for investigating patient complaints, which piled up in boxes, uncategorized and unreported. They had no clerical help for basic tasks like mailing out the patients’ samples for testing. “I don’t think there’s the same medicine in this medicine,” was a common refrain from patients. Even when there were investigations, they were so perfunctory and half-hearted that expiration dates were listed as “unknown,” even when they could easily have been found from a product’s lot number. An audit of Ranbaxy’s main U.S. manufacturing plant, Ohm Laboratories in New Jersey, found that the company, though required to report adverse events to the FDA, rarely did so. There was no system to capture patient complaints after hours, and no global medical officer to ensure that any potential negative consequences for patients were being monitored. The consultants from Lachman urged Ranbaxy to address these problems globally. Ranbaxy’s initial reaction to the findings was to question the number of hours, and the resulting invoice, that Lachman had sent for its work.
Katherine Eban (Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom)
ahead of ICAO audit By Tarun Shukla | 527 words New Delhi: India's civil aviation regulator has decided to restructure its safety board and hire airline safety professionals ahead of an audit by the UN's aviation watchdog ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization). The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) announced its intent, and advertised the positions on its website. ICAO told the Indian regulator recently that it would come down to India to conduct an audit, its third in just over a decade, Mint reported on 12 February. Previous ICAO audits had highlighted the paucity of safety inspectors in DGCA. After its 2006 and 2012 audits, ICAO had placed the country in its list of 13 worst-performing nations. US regulator Federal Aviation Authority followed ICAO's 2012 audit with its own and downgraded India, effectively barring new flights to the US by Indian airlines. FAA is expected to visit India in the summer to review its downgrade. The result of the ICAO and FAA audits will have a bearing on the ability of existing Indian airlines to operate more flights to the US and some international destinations and on new airlines' ability to start flights to these destinations. The regulator plans to hire three directors of safety on short-term contracts to be part of the accident investigation board, according to the information on DGCA's website. This is first time the DGCA is hiring external staff for this board, which is critical to ascertain the reasoning for any crashes, misses or other safety related events in the country. These officers, the DGCA said on its website, must have at least 12 years of experience in aviation, specifically on the technical aspects, and have a degree in aeronautical engineering. DGCA has been asked by international regulators to hire at least 75 flight inspectors. It has only 51. India's private airlines offer better pay and perks to inspectors compared with DGCA. The aviation ministry told DGCA in January to speed up the recruitment and do whatever was necessary to get more inspectors on board, a government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. DGCA has also announced it will hire flight operations inspectors as consultants on a short-term basis for a period of one year with a fixed remuneration of `1.25 lakh per month. "There will be a review after six months and subsequent continuation will be decided on the basis of outcome of the review," DGCA said in its advertisement. The remuneration of `1.25 lakh is higher than the salary of many existing DGCA officers. In its 2006 audit, ICAO said it found that "a number of final reports of accident and serious incident investigations carried out by the DGCA were not sent to the (member) states concerned or to ICAO when it was applicable". DGCA had also "not established a voluntary incident reporting system to facilitate the collection of safety information that may not otherwise be captured by the state's mandatory incident reporting system". In response, DGCA "submitted a corrective action plan which was never implemented", said Mohan Ranganthan, an aviation safety analyst and former member of government appointed safety council, said of DGCA. He added that the regulator will be caught out this time. Restructuring DGCA is the key to better air safety, said former director general of civil aviation M.R. Sivaraman. Hotel industry growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16: Icra By P.R. Sanjai | 304 words Mumbai: Rating agency Icra Ltd on Monday said Indian hotel industry revenue growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16, driven by a modest increase in occupancy and small increase in rates. "Industry wide revenues are expected to grow by 5-8% in 2014-15. Over the next 12 months, Icra expects RevPAR (revenue per available room) to improve by 7-8% driven by up to 5% pickup in occupancies and 2-3% growth in average room rates (ARR)," Icra said. Further, margins are expected to remain largely flat for 2014-15 while
Anonymous
Everything was nationalized, everything became the property of the state. Thus the new administration was every citizen's landlord. They hired "house administrators" to run the houses and collect the rent. About every ten houses had one administrator, overseer. These officials were responsible to the local "militia" or police. They were spying on everybody. They provided a dossier on every family, on each individual within each family.
Pearl Fichman (Before Memories Fade)
If Bryant knew, it was something of a secret to those hoping otherwise. The college recruiting letters arrived by the boatload—from Duke and North Carolina, from UCLA and USC, from Delaware and Drexel and Villanova and Temple. This was the fall of 1995, and at the time Joe Bryant was in his second year as an assistant at nearby La Salle University, his alma mater. He had been hired in 1993 by Speedy Morris, the head coach, and while the official reasoning was that the program needed a replacement for the recently departed Randy Monroe, the reality was different. “Did I think it’d help us get Kobe?” Morris said decades later. “Yes. Of course. Joe was not a good assistant coach. He didn’t work hard, he didn’t actually know that much. Nice guy. But he was there so we’d get his son.
Jeff Pearlman (Three-Ring Circus: Kobe, Shaq, Phil, and the Crazy Years of the Lakers Dynasty)
Actually, I called the town supervisor and got an okay to hire you, officially, as a consultant. A hundred bucks a day.” “Wow. Sounds like the kind of job I have to save up for.
Nelson DeMille (Plum Island (John Corey, #1))
This was an elaborate ruse to get S K Srivastava, off the investigation of NDTV for its tax evasion. After some time, P Chidambaram, much against his wishes, became the Home Minister and got Delhi Police under him. Srivastava says that Chidambaram promptly got false and mischievous criminal cases lodged against him, to get him removed from service. Not only that, Chidambaram got him arrested on the premises of the Court [Patiala House Court, Delhi, Jan 8, 2010]. A few illustrative but not exhaustive instances of such monumental persecution of a member of the Indian Revenue Service S K Srivastava are being listed below: Srivastava had found that his junior Income Tax official Shumana Sen IRS was conniving with NDTV in fudging their accounts[10]. In this, she was also supported by her batch mate and partner-in-crime, Ashima Neb, claims Srivastava. Shumana Sen was Assessing Officer of NDTV’s Income Tax circle and her husband Abhisar Sharma was a news presenter of NDTV being a serious violation of Govt. rules and law governing the conduct of employees of Govt. [MHA OM No.F.3/12/(S)/64-Ests.(B), dated 12.10.1965) and Rule 4 of the CCS (Conduct) Rules, 1965] and despite there being mandatory requirement of serving IRS officers to declare pecuniary interest like employment of spouse, etc., by a Company or Firm to the Govt. and failure of which is to be visited with severest punishment including dismissal from service; Shumana Sen never declared to Govt. that her husband was a staffer of the company which she was assessing to all the Direct Taxes, a serious breach which invites dismissal from service without any benefits. The vicious and criminal vilification of an IRS officer for nothing but doing his duty and protecting the public revenue and public interest which were being prejudiced by NDTV, Minister P Chidambaram and hired mercenaries Shumana Sen and Ashima Neb is something that would send shivers down the spine of any right thinking person. Srivastava was forced to face the allegations and court cases as Minister P Chidambaram was desperate to protect NDTV and hush up its crime, criminality and criminal acts – acts that caused defrauding of public revenue of India running into thousands of crores of rupees.
Sree Iyer (NDTV Frauds V2.0 - The Real Culprit: A completely revamped version that shows the extent to which NDTV and a Cabal will stoop to hide a saga of Money Laundering, Tax Evasion and Stock Manipulation.)
The Most Widely Known Path If you're like most people, you believe landing an interview is limited to these three steps: 1.) Applying online, 2.) HR reviewing your application, and 3.) If your application is selected, the hiring manager reviewing it. You believe this because almost everything you’ve read comes from current or former HR folks. This process has significant flaws. Because the Internet made applying for positions easy, HR was drowning in applications. As a result, the HR Elimination system was born. That’s not its official name, but the name fits. The official name is Applicant Tracking System or ATS. ATS systems reject, on average, 75% of all applicants. Sometimes the rejection rate can be as high as 90%. J. P. Medved, content director at Capterra, a firm that helps companies find the right software for their business, said, Reducing the number of candidates might seem good if we're weeding out irrelevant resumes...In reality, many of these rejected candidates were knocked out of the running for bad reasons. An automated system, like an ATS, will sometimes reject people for very minor reasons, like incorrect resume formatting. Bersin & Associates, an Oakland-based firm specializing in talent management, tested an ATS system. They created the perfect resume for an ideal candidate for a clinical scientist position. Matching the resume to the job description from a leading manufacturer, they submitted the resume to an applicant tracking system. The ATS lost one of the candidate's work experiences. It also failed to read several educational degrees. As a result, the perfect resume for a clinical scientist position earned a score of 43, because the applicant tracking system misread it. Similarly, a Vice-President of Human Resources decided to test his company's ATS system. He applied for a job at his own company and received an automated rejection letter from the ATS.
Clark Finnical (Job Hunting Secrets: (from someone who's been there))
I’m not a conspiracy theory kind of guy, but when city officials close down on you, when Princeton University won’t provide any answers, and when the media says what you’ve got is all a hoax, then where am I? So here is the true story of the Peter Armstrong Papers. You think you know all about them. Such eminent publications as The New York Times and The New Yorker have already said they were a forgery. (The New Yorker went so far as to say that I created a hoax to scare an already virus-nervous public.) Experts I hired examined the papers and verified that they are authentic documents from the period, and that some elements of the stories were undeniably true. Newsweek examined the documents with an open mind and a battery of forensic experts and historians of the era, but would not go as far to say that they described actual events. The women on The View had a rare moment of agreement when they said I was “a menace.” Rolling Stone, ever classy, said I was “full of shit.
Bob Madison (The Lucifer Stone)
The only advice I have to offer our friend Wiley is to hire a professional tree-removal company to dig out the clump, or, if you're on a budget, detonate a do-it-yourself thermonuclear device.
Bonnie Thomas Abbott (Radical Prunings: A Novel of Officious Advice from the Contessa of Compost)
The producers were like, “You fucking hired him, you teach him!” So I had to teach a Bulgarian how to speak Dothraki when he doesn’t speak English. And he did great. I still have that tongue on my desk.
James Hibberd (Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon: Game of Thrones and the Official Untold Story of the Epic Series)
The year 423 was a turbulent one for politics. Court intrigue began shortly after the mid-winter death of King Atraxerxes. The eldest son, Xerxes II, seized the throne, only to be murdered 45 days later by his half-brother Sogdianus, who, with one treacherous act suddenly held in his grasp the entire Persian Empire, from the Zagros Mountains to the Mediterranean Sea. While Sogdianus may have had the throne, another son of Atraxerxes had the support and sponsorship of some of Persia’s most powerful landowners. Ochus, son of the Babylonian concubine Costmartidus and satrap of lower Mesopotamia, was living in a spacious rented residence in Babylon when his half-brother ascended the throne. One of Sogdianus’s first imperial acts was to summon his powerful half-brother to the imperial city of Susa—perhaps to put him under the sword and consolidate his own power. When the summons came in the form of an official cuneiform tablet delivered by royal messenger, Ochus had to work fast. His supporters urged him to fight, but they could not immediately provide the means for him to do so—they were land rich but cash poor, and the mercenaries and supplies to fight Sogdianus could only be obtained with silver. With Sogdianus pressing for a reply, they turned to the Murašu family for help. Ochus’s backers mortgaged their vast property holdings in the Euphrates valley to the Murašu and used the proceeds to hire an army. Deserters from the disaffected Persian regulars soon joined them, and when Ochus rode into the city of Susa, it was not as Sogdianus’s prisoner but as his successor. The usurper was usurped. Ochus took the royal title of Darius II.
William N. Goetzmann (Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible)
Oxford and Cambridge had offered degrees with music since the mid-fifteenth century which mostly focused on musical theory. Music was perceived as a gentlemanly pastime rather than as a serious part of a student’s studies. The best secular opportunity for employment for a musician other than court was as a city wait. Waits were essentially watchmen who patrolled cities and played instruments to assure people all was well. By the mid-sixteenth century they were officially municipal musicians who played at civic occasions and were available for private hire. London owned six waits who, from 1548, were allowed two apprentices each. Waits possessed summer and winter livery of blue gowns and red caps. They wore silver chains and a silver badge displaying the arms of the city. The musicians were in great demand for weddings and an important citizen might employ them when impressing
Carol McGrath (Sex and Sexuality in Tudor England)
President Ronald Reagan officially announced the current drug war in 1982, before crack became an issue in the media or a crisis in poor black neighborhoods. A few years after the drug war was declared, crack began to spread rapidly in the poor black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and later emerged in cities across the country.2 The Reagan administration hired staff to publicize the emergence of crack cocaine in 1985 as part of a strategic effort to build public and legislative support for the war.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
As David Hull writes, “officially we are all supposed to value interdisciplinary research, but in reality just about every feature of academia frustrates genuinely interdisciplinary work. Those of us who are engaged in it are the last hired and the first fired.”24
Dennis P. Waters (Behavior and Culture in One Dimension: Sequences, Affordances, and the Evolution of Complexity (Resources for Ecological Psychology Series))
Agent Briggs had led that team. Shortly thereafter, he’d started using Dean—the son of a notorious serial killer—to get inside the head of other killers. Eventually, the FBI had discovered what Briggs was doing and, instead of firing him, they’d made it official. Dean had been moved into an old house in the town outside of Marine Corps Base Quantico. Briggs had hired a man named Judd to act as Dean’s guardian. Over time, Briggs had begun recruiting other teenagers with savant-like skills. First Lia, with her uncanny ability to lie and to spot lies when they exited the mouths of others. Then Sloane and Michael, and finally me.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes (Killer Instinct (The Naturals, #2))
The Greek GDP spiked 25% when statisticians dove into the country’s black market in 2006, for instance, thereby enabling the government to take out several hefty loans shortly before the European debt crisis broke out. Italy started including its black market back in 1987, which swelled its economy by 20% overnight. “A wave of euphoria swept over Italians,” reported the New York Times, “after economists recalibrated their statistics taking into account for the first time the country’s formidable underground economy of tax evaders and illegal workers.”4 And that’s to say nothing of all the unpaid labor that doesn’t even qualify as part of the black market, from volunteering to childcare to cooking, which together represents more than half of all our work. Of course, we can hire cleaners or nannies to do some of these chores, in which case they count toward the GDP, but we still do most ourselves. Adding all this unpaid work would expand the economy by anywhere from 37% (in Hungary) to 74% (in the UK).5 However, as the economist Diane Coyle notes, “generally official statistical agencies have never bothered – perhaps because it has been carried out mainly by women.”6 While we’re on the subject, only Denmark has ever attempted to quantify the value of breastfeeding in its GDP. And it’s no paltry sum: In the U.S., the potential contribution of breast milk has been estimated at an incredible $110 billion a year7 – about the size of China’s military budget.
Rutger Bregman (Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There)
As Henry Nevinson also pointed out, the rule of law, such as it was, functioned in a system in which Indians were ‘compelled to live permanently under a system of official surveillance which reads their private letters, detains their telegrams, and hires men to watch their actions’. This, then, was the rule of law the British taught us. We have much to unlearn.
Shashi Tharoor (An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India)
can right here,” Marge replied and looked inside. “The thing is empty.” Celeste smiled at the sight of Marge finally trapping a paper between her oversized colorful mitts. “Thank you, Suzy Homemaker. All you need is an apron.” While we hurried to search the room, the doorbell rang. Drat. The three of us froze. We had every right to be here and I was getting tired of explaining that to Alex. I was hoping we’d be gone before he showed up at the door. We headed to the landing to see Deborah peeking out the window. She nodded when she saw us. “Yes, I’m afraid it’s him,” she whispered. I knew what was coming next: a mournful look from Alex, along with a little speech about interference with an important police investigation. Could we get in trouble? What were exactly the rules when we were working in a private home and hired by the homeowner? I’d promised him I’d be careful. But surely we had every right to be here, working for our client. The gig was up in any case. Alex had surely seen Marge’s car out front. “Let’s hurry to the couch,” I said, keeping my voice very low. “Then he might think that we’re only here to talk and to consult with Deborah.” “Quick, let’s go,” Celeste said. “Deborah, could you hold off for just a second before you let him in?” Deborah scowled. “I don’t really want to let him in at all. He’s a looker, but obnoxious. You take your time. He can cool his heels and wait.” Celeste wasn’t taking any chances. “Go!” she said, touching me on the back since I was closest to the stairs. Things moved quickly from that point. As I tended to do at the most important times, I tripped and fell flat on my face. Thankfully, my glasses stayed on. I’d nearly made it safely down the stairs when my foot got caught on the carpet. Marge and Celeste were right behind me, almost flying in their haste. We ended up in one big pile in front of a frowning Deborah. “And you’re sure that you’re detectives?” she asked doubtfully. “The real official thing,” Marge squeaked, rubbing her shoulder with the bright orange oven mitt. We limped to the couch as Deborah headed to the door. I heard a familiar voice as she let him in, and we arranged ourselves oh so casually on the couch, as if we’d been there all along. Alex wasn’t pleased at all. He and Deborah were both scowling as they walked into the room. And for all the unpleasantness, we hadn’t found a thing. Operation Search the Office Before Alex had not been a success. Chapter Seven Despite the pain in my left knee (and the tight quarters on the loveseat), I tried to look the part of an innocent working woman who’d come to talk – and only talk – to a client in distress. “What are you three up to?” Alex gave us a
Deany Ray (Diced (A Charlie Cooper Mystery, Volume 3))
To solve the inability of middle-class renters to purchase single-family homes for the first time, Congress and President Roosevelt created the Federal Housing Administration in 1934. The FHA insured bank mortgages that covered 80 percent of purchase prices, had terms of twenty years, and were fully amortized. To be eligible for such insurance, the FHA insisted on doing its own appraisal of the property to make certain that the loan had a low risk of default. Because the FHA's appraisal standards included a whites-only requirement, racial segregation now became an official requirement of the federal mortgage insurance program. The FHA judged that properties would probably be too risky for insurance if they were in racially mixed neighborhoods or even in white neighborhoods near black ones that might possibly integrate in the future. When a bank applied to the FHA for insurance on a prospective loan, the agency conducted a property appraisal, which was also likely performed by a local real estate agent hired by the agency. as the volume of applications increased, the agency hired its own appraisers, usually from the ranks of the private real estate agents who had previously been working as contractors for the FHA. To guide their work, the FHA provided them with an Underwriting Manual. The first, issued in 1935, gave this instruction: 'If a neighborhood is to retain stability it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy generally leads to instability and a reduction in values.' Appraisers were told to give higher ratings where '[p]rotection against some adverse influences is obtained,' and that '[i]mportant among adverse influences . . . are infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups.' The manual concluded that '[a]ll mortgages on properties protected against [such] unfavorable influences, to the extent such protection is possible, will obtain a high rating.' The FHA discouraged banks from making any loans at all in urban neighborhoods rather than newly built suburbs; according to the Underwriting Manual, 'older properties . . . have a tendency to accelerate the rate of transition to lower class occupancy.' The FHA favored mortgages in areas where boulevards or highways served to separate African American families from whites, stating that '[n]atural or artificially established barriers will prove effective in protecting a neighborhood and the locations within it from adverse influences, . . . includ[ing] prevention of the infiltration of . . . lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups.
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
escaped from a Russian prison camp?” “Yes. I know cement from this time.” “Then you’re hired.” Chapter Forty The Martels rented a small house in Baker within walking distance of Emil’s work site. Adeline found a job cleaning rooms at the only motel in town for fifty cents an hour. Walt officially changed his formal name from Waldemar to Walter and found work after school at the butcher shop and at the movie theater as a projectionist. Will changed his name from Wilhelm to William and called himself “Bill.” He bagged groceries at the local store and swept the theater floors. They pooled their money, saving until they could afford to buy a small lot across from the high school and pay to have a basement foundation dug and poured. Emil worked at the hospital site and other projects during the day and, with Bill, put down a subfloor on top of the foundation in the evenings. They also installed plumbing, electrical lines, and a woodstove in the basement.
Mark T. Sullivan (The Last Green Valley)
In the second year of the Trump presidency, I attended a dinner of American hedge funders in Hong Kong. I was there as a guest speaker, to survey the usual assortment of global hot spots. A thematic question emerged from the group—was the “Pax Americana” over? There was a period of familiar cross-talk about whether Trump was a calamitous force unraveling the international order or merely an impolitic Republican politician advancing a conventional agenda. I kept interjecting that Trump was ushering in a new era—one of rising nationalist competition that could lead to war and unchecked climate change, to the implosion of American democracy and the accelerated rise of a China that would impose its own rules on the world. Finally, one of the men at the table interrupted with some frustration. He demanded a show of hands—how many around the table had voted for Trump, attracted by the promise of tax cuts and deregulation? After some hesitation, hand after hand went up, until I was looking at a majority of raised hands. The tally surprised me. Sure, I understood the allure of tax cuts and deregulation to a group like that. But these were also people who clearly understood the dangers that Trump posed to American democracy and international order. The experience suggested that even that ambiguous term “Pax Americana” was subordinate to the profit motive that informed seemingly every aspect of the American machinery. I’d come to know the term as a shorthand for America’s sprawling global influence, and how—on balance—the Pax Americana offered some stability amid political upheavals, some scaffolding around the private dramas of billions of individual lives. From the vantage point of these bankers, the Pax Americana protected their stake in international capital markets while allowing for enough risk—wars, coups, shifting energy markets, new technologies—so that they could place profitable bets on the direction of events. Trump was a bet. He’d make it easier for them to do their business and allow them to keep more of their winnings, but he was erratic and hired incompetent people—so much so that he might put the whole enterprise at risk. But it was a bet that enough Americans were willing to make, including those who knew better. From the perspective of financial markets, I had just finished eight years in middle management, as a security official doing his small part to keep the profit-generating ocean liner moving. The debates of seemingly enormous consequence—about the conduct of wars, the nature of national identity, and the fates of many millions of human beings—were incidental to the broader enterprise of wealth being created.
Ben Rhodes (After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made)
To help burnish its image in the face of so many legal, financial, and public-relations problems, Purdue hired former New York mayor and Republican insider Rudy Giuliani and his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners. Just a few months after his lauded response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Giuliani’s job was to convince “public officials they could trust Purdue because they could trust him,
Beth Macy (Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America)
In hiring black teachers for segregated schools during Jim Crow, a leading southern official, Hoke Smith, made a deliberate decision: “When two Negro teachers applied to a school, to ‘take the less competent.’ ” It was a nakedly creative way to cripple black prospects for achievement. It put black children under the instruction of the least qualified teachers. It passed over the brightest, most accomplished applicants—in fact, punished excellence—while elevating the mediocre in a purposeful distortion of meritocracy. All of this created dissension in the lowest caste over the patent unfairness and worked to crush the ambitions of those with the most talent. In these and other ways, the caste system trained the people in the lowest caste that the only way to survive was to play the comforting role of servile incompetent. The caste system all but ensured black failure by preempting success.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
Government-subsidized private sector job creation is one way forward. Recently, the federal government sponsored a promising short-term subsidized jobs program through something called the TANF Emergency Fund. States that chose to participate were allowed to use TANF dollars to provide employers (mostly in the private sector) with incentives to hire unemployed workers, targeting those on TANF or those who were in a spell of extended unemployment. Each state was given considerable leeway to design the program however it saw fit, often in close collaboration with employers. Across the District of Columbia and the thirty-nine states that took part in the program, employers created more than 260,000 jobs with an investment of only $1.3 billion dollars. Roughly two-thirds of participating employers said they created positions that would not have existed otherwise, and the businesses that took part expressed, on the whole, eagerness to participate in such a program in the future. Further, many participants remained employed after the subsidy ended, and those who had experienced significant trouble finding work especially made gains. Researchers who studied the program noted that it garnered “strong support from employers, workers, and state and local officials from across the political spectrum.” Creating a subsidized jobs program modeled on the TANF Emergency Fund would be one way to improve the circumstances of America’s $2-a-day poor.
Kathryn J. Edin ($2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America)
His time aboard the Argo had been good to him. He’d put on healthy weight and gained a sense of confidence. He no longer looked as if he feared to wake up one day and find that his freedom was only a dream. “I’ll see what I can find, then,” he said. “There were plenty of amphorae in the crew’s sleeping chambers this morning, wine and water both.” “Do you think there’s any left?” “Water or wine?” He grinned. “By the way, where are all the men?” I asked. “The ones who aren’t busy bothering the serving girls are practicing their battle skills with Lord Aetes’ guards. There’s a training ground, but it’s a fair distance from the citadel. I think the palace weapons bearers get more exercise than the men, carrying their gear there and back.” “Except for one lazybones who’s hiding in the queen’s garden instead of doing his proper work. Poor Iolaus! This is the thanks he gets for hiring you.” I was teasing, and Milo knew it. “And what about a weapons bearer so lazy that he’d rather turn into a girl than do his job?” Milo countered, laughing. I stood up. “A girl who can carry two amphorae of wine to your one,” I said. “One to my three, you mean!” Milo declared, getting into the spirit. “But you’ll have to find them first.” He made a taunting face at me and darted into the palace. I raced after him gladly, our laughter echoing through the halls. We had a few near collisions with Lord Aetes’ slaves and servants, and drew our fair share of outraged curses from stuffy palace officials, but it felt so good to run! Milo soon forgot all about going back to the crew’s chambers to search for those amphorae. He ran right past the doorway and didn’t give it a glance. Though my dress hindered me and my sword slapped against my left leg at every stride, I was enjoying myself.
Esther M. Friesner (Nobody's Prize (Nobody's Princess, #2))
There’s an official hierarchy. And an operational hierarchy. The official hierarchy decides on personnel, strategic initiatives and resources. The official hierarchy decides which case officers to hire. Where to place them. Who to promote into management. The operational hierarchy decides on operational issues. Which sources to trust. How to work with them. Which moment-by-moment risks make sense. At the top of the official hierarchy is who you would think it would be: the agency director. At the top of the operational hierarchy are the guys on the street: the case officers. Different hierarchies for different decisions. Different hierarchies for organizational decisions and operational decisions.22 Sometimes, there’s a conflict.
John Braddock (A Spy's Guide to Strategy)
THERE IS A TOUCH of comedy in the tyrant’s rise to power, catastrophe though it is. The people he has pushed aside and trampled on are for the most part themselves compromised, cynical, or corrupt. Even if their fates are ghastly, it is satisfying to see them get their comeuppance, and as we watch the schemer bluster and connive and betray his way to the top, we are invited to take a kind of moral vacation. But once Richard reaches his lifelong goal—at the end of the third act of Shakespeare’s play—the laughter quickly begins to curdle. Much of the pleasure of his winning derived from its wild improbability. Now the prospect of endless winning proves to be a grotesque delusion. Though he has seemed a miracle of dark efficiency, Richard is quite unprepared to unite and run a whole country. The tyrant’s triumph is based on lies and fraudulent promises braided around the violent elimination of rivals. The cunning strategy that brings him to the throne hardly constitutes a vision for the realm; nor has he assembled counselors who can help him formulate one. He can count—for the moment, at least—on the acquiescence of such suggestible officials as the London mayor and frightened clerks like the scribe. But the new ruler possesses neither administrative ability nor diplomatic skill, and no one in his entourage can supply what he manifestly lacks. His own mother despises him. His wife, Anne, fears and hates him. Cynical operators like Catesby and Ratcliffe are hardly suited to be statesmen. Though higher in social station, they differ little from the hoodlums Richard hires to do his bidding. Lord Stanley cuts a more plausible figure as a prudent adviser—and the play depicts him reluctantly conveying the king’s wishes—but, as his early nightmare suggests, he has long been afraid of “the boar” and can hardly be expected to serve as a linchpin of the upstart regime. Secretly he is already in contact with the regime’s mortal enemies.
Stephen Greenblatt (Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics)
In May 2003, a bill aimed at requiring the Alabama Historical Commission to provide a current inventory of landmarks in the site eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places could thus state: The history of Africatown, USA originated in Ghana, West Africa, near the present city of Tamale in 1859. The tribes of Africa were engaged in civil war, and the prevailing tribes sold the members of the conquered tribes into slavery. The village of the Tarkbar tribe near the city of Tamale was raided by Dahomey warriors, and the survivors of the raid were taken to Whydah, now the People’s Republic of Benin, and put up for sale. The captured tribesmen were sold for $100 each at Whydah. They were taken to the United States on board the schooner Clotilde, under the command of Maine Capt. William Foster who had been hired by Capt. Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Mobile shipper and shipyard owner who had built the schooner Clotilde in Mobile in 1856.15 This is the official version of the story, also found in a piece emanating from the office of former representative Herbert “Sonny” Callahan, created in 2000 for the Local Legacies Project of the Library of Congress.16 The Africatown Community Mobilization Project uses it on its brochure. In addition to the offensive misuse of “tribe,” almost everything in this text is historically inaccurate and unwittingly derogatory. The project’s brochure contains further mistakes that come from a 1993 article produced by the Alabama State Council on the Arts.17
Sylviane A. Diouf (Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America)
Change your name to Miles, Dean, Serge, and /or Leonard, baby, she advised her reflection in the hall; light of that afternoon's vanity mirror. Either way, they'll call it paranoia. They. Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie. Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate, involving items like the forging of stamps and ancient books, constant surveillance of your movements, planting of post horn images all over San Francisco, bribing of librarians, hiring of professional actors and Pierce Inverarity only knows what-all besides, all financed out of the estate in a way either too secret or too involved for your non-legal mind to know about even though you are co-executor, so labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke. Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull. Those, now that she was looking at them, she saw to be the alternatives. Those symmetrical four. She didn't like any of them, but hoped she was mentally ill; that that's all it was. That night she sat for hours, too numb even to drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum. For this, oh God, was the void. There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead. Old fillings in her teeth began to bother her. She would spend nights staring at a ceiling lit by the pink glow of San Narciso's sky. Other nights she could sleep for eighteen drugged hours and wake, enervated, hardly able to stand. In conferences with the keen, fast-talking old man who was new counsel for the estate, her attention span could often be measured in seconds, and she laughed nervously more than she spoke. Waves of nausea, lasting five to ten minutes, would strike her at random, cause her deep misery, then vanish as if they had never been. There were headaches, nightmares, menstrual pains. One day she drove into L.A., picked a doctor at random from the phone book, went to her, told her she thought she was pregnant. They arranged for tests. Oedipa gave her name as Grace Bortz and didn't show up for her next appointment.
Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)
Onward Christian Lawyers KELLY SHACKELFORD, LIBERTY LEGAL INSTITUTE, PLANO, TEXAS Kelly Shackelford founded Liberty Legal Institute in 1997 to fight for the protection of religious freedoms and First Amendment rights for individuals, groups, and churches. Shackelford clerked for a federal judge after law school. "When their freedoms are taken away, the average person isn't 0. J. Simpson and can't just go out and hire the dream team. My heart has always been to make sure that those people have the best representation possible so that the government can't erode all of our freedoms by picking on the people who don't have the money to fight. "Religion is the new pornography. If somebody says something religious, the average government official feels like he or she has to run from the room, screaming with their hair on fire. Religion is treated like pornography would be treated if you brought it into the school. I mean, there's a fear. There's a shame, almost, directed toward it. "The ACLU is mainly operating on remote control. They've injected this chilling atmosphere that's antireligious in the schools and they don't even have to do anything in most instances to effectuate a religious cleansing in the schools. They've managed to scare and intimidate and the lore in school districts is religion is bad, religion will get you in trouble. ''I'd say a decent percentage of the time, the person who engages in the violation of our clients' rights is somebody who later will tell us, Tm a religious person.' They just didn't know any better, and what they're doing is reacting. They go to the kneejerk, shut-it-down action. 'Oh, it's religion? We must shut it down .' That is the general approach. "These are young kids. They're in third grade or fourth grade or fifth grade. And the lesson they learn is there are words you can't say. You can't say these curse words, and then you can't say your religion. You can't talk about your religion. And it's a very powerful message. "We had a case where the kids could could draw a tracing of their foot, then put a message on the drawing of their foot, and then put it up on the board in class. And all these kids had all these very innocuous messages, 'Jenny loves Johnny' and 'Peace' and such. A girl very innocently wrote 'Jesus Loves Me.' And the teacher ripped it down, and said to her, 'Don't you ever do this again.' The girl went home crying and wondering what she'd done wrong. "The father was just infuriated. We called the school. And that time, the school had already realized they were in big trouble. And so they went back to this little girl and they told her, unbeknownst to any of us, 'Go ahead and do another - go ahead and do another one and put it up.' She redrew her foot. And instead of writing 'Jesus Loves Me' in the innocent and pure way she did before, she put a little tiny cross up in the very top corner that you could just barely see. ''And I thought, 'There's the picture of what happens inside to these little kids.' She's learned the lesson. Don't be open about your faith. Don't be honest about your faith. Hide it. You can still be whoever you are as long as you'll hide it. They taught her selfoppression and self-censorship through this hysterical reaction to her. They robbed her of that innocence and of that purity of being open about her faith. "That's the sort of thing I decided to fight.
John Gibson (The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought)
In addition, the people close to Clinton didn’t know politics, and the political pros she’d hired didn’t know her very well. That compelled her most trusted aides to try to prove themselves in the political arena and the campaign-trail veterans to jockey to get closer to her. Everyone was throwing elbows. And it was happening before she’d even made the campaign official.
Jonathan Allen (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign)
The hiring of Nellie Ohr made perfect sense for Project Bangor, but it would later help fuel an elaborate right-wing conspiracy theory. In this version of events, the effort to research and understand Trump’s curious interactions with the Russian underworld was actually a nefarious liberal plot—reaching from the Clinton campaign to career officials and Nellie’s husband at the Justice Department—to undermine the future Trump presidency. A presidency not even Donald Trump himself thought would happen.
Glenn Simpson (Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump)
Painting the numbers on a watch face was not easy. The 2, 3, 6, and 8 were particularly difficult. You had to have paint mixed to the right viscosity, a steady hand capable of precise movement, and good eyesight. One woman did about 250 dials per day, sitting at a specially built desk with a lamp over the work surface, wearing a blue smock with a Peter Pan collar. The brush was very fine and stiff, having only three or four hairs, but it would quickly foul up and have to be re-formed. All sorts of methods were tried for putting a point on the brush. Just rubbing it on a sponge didn’t really work. You needed the fine feedback from twirling the thing on your lips. Some factory supervisors insisted on it, showing new hires how it is done, and some factories officially discouraged it while looking the other way. Everybody did it, sticking the brush in the mouth twice during the completion of one watch dial. The radium-infused paint was thinned with glycerin and sugar or with amyl-acetate (pear oil), so it didn’t even taste bad.
James Mahaffey (Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima)
On December 1, 1930, as the Great Depression was raging, the cornflake magnate W. K. Kellogg decided to introduce a six-hour workday at his factory in Battle Creek, Michigan. It was an unmitigated success: Kellogg was able to hire an additional 300 employees and slashed the accident rate by 41%. Moreover, his employees became noticeably more productive. “This isn’t just a theory with us,” Kellogg proudly told a local newspaper. “The unit cost of production is so lowered that we can afford to pay as much for six hours as we formerly paid for eight.”30 For Kellogg, like Ford, a shorter workweek was simply a matter of good business.31 But for the residents of Battle Creek, it was much more than that. For the first time ever, a local paper reported, they had “real leisure.”32 Parents had time to spare for their children. They had more time to read, garden, and play sports. Suddenly, churches and community centers were bursting at the seams with citizens who now had time to spend on civic life.33 Nearly half a century later, British Prime Minister Edward Heath also discovered the benefits of cornflake capitalism, albeit inadvertently. It was late 1973 and he was at his wits’ end. Inflation was reaching record highs and government expenditures were skyrocketing, and labor unions were dead set against compromise of any kind. As if that weren’t enough, the miners decided to go on strike. With energy consequently in short supply, the Brits turned down their thermostats and donned their heaviest sweaters. December came, and even the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square remained unlit. Heath decided on a radical course of action. On January 1, 1974, he imposed a three-day workweek. Employers were not permitted to use more than three days’ electricity until energy reserves had recovered. Steel magnates predicted that industrial production would plunge 50%. Government ministers feared a catastrophe. When the five-day workweek was reinstated in March 1974, officials set about calculating the total extent of production losses. They had trouble believing their eyes: The grand total was 6%.34
Rutger Bregman (Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World)
The sad truth is, DoD regards presidents, elected officials, and political appointees as temporary hires. They do not need to know since they will not be in their position for very long. Unless something happens or they really push for it, US presidents do not get briefed, and those who have been briefed have only been given the most basic information.
Luis Elizondo (Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs)
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Steven DeFino (Official Certified Ethical Hacker Review Guide (EC-Council Press))