Oklahoma State Quotes

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Where were they from originally? The Seabolts?" "I don't know, Idaho, Oklahoma, Iowa. One of those red-neck states with vowels on both ends." "You mean like Alaska?
Dana Stabenow (Play With Fire (Kate Shugak, #5))
The Western States nervous under the beginning change. Texas and Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. A single family moved from the land. Pa borrowed money from the bank, and now the bank wants the land. The land company--that's the bank when it has land --wants tractors, not families on the land. Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor were ours it would be good--not mine, but ours. If our tractor turned the long furrows of our land, it would be good. Not my land, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But the tractor does two things--it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this. One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlarge of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate--"We lost our land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first "we" there grows a still more dangerous thing: "I have a little food" plus "I have none." If from this problem the sum is "We have a little food," the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side- meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's blanket--take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning--from "I" to "we." If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we." The Western States are nervous under the begining change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action. A half-million people moving over the country; a million more restive, ready to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness. And tractors turning the multiple furrows in the vacant land.
John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)
Hey, fellas! How about this for a headline for tomorrow’s paper? ‘French Fries!'" Convicted murderer James French to members of the press who were witnesses at his execution by the State of Oklahoma in the electric chair in 1966.
James French
Sometimes I think the city is naturally conducive to coincidences in the same way that Plains states like Nebraska and Oklahoma are conducive to twisters, in the same way that mountain lakes are conducive to lightning.
Robert Sullivan (Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants)
How Smart Is a Rock? To appreciate the feasibility of computing with no energy and no heat, consider the computation that takes place in an ordinary rock. Although it may appear that nothing much is going on inside a rock, the approximately 1025 (ten trillion trillion) atoms in a kilogram of matter are actually extremely active. Despite the apparent solidity of the object, the atoms are all in motion, sharing electrons back and forth, changing particle spins, and generating rapidly moving electromagnetic fields. All of this activity represents computation, even if not very meaningfully organized. We’ve already shown that atoms can store information at a density of greater than one bit per atom, such as in computing systems built from nuclear magnetic-resonance devices. University of Oklahoma researchers stored 1,024 bits in the magnetic interactions of the protons of a single molecule containing nineteen hydrogen atoms.51 Thus, the state of the rock at any one moment represents at least 1027 bits of memory.
Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology)
Since 1990, Oklahoma has executed more convicts on a per capita basis than any other state. No place, not even Texas, comes close.
John Grisham (The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town)
The U.S. government planned to break up Indian Territory and make it a part of what would be a new state called Oklahoma. (In the Choctaw language, “Oklahoma” means “red people.”)
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
This is not a problem peculiar to Oklahoma, far from it. Wrongful convictions occur every month in every state in this country, and the reasons are all varied and all the same—bad police work, junk science, faulty eyewitness identifications, bad defense lawyers, lazy prosecutors, arrogant prosecutors.
John Grisham (The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town)
I sometimes find myself lost in the paradoxes of place, race, and religion. Oklahoma seems to embody Walt Whitman's famous lines: 'Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.
Russell Cobb (The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America's Weirdest State)
I came to the state twenty years ago from the South, the gothic South. I’ve heard it called that, haven’t you, Mister Morgan? ‘Thought I was gettin’ away from all that. You know, the Tennessee Williams’ decadence, the Huey Long corruption, the brewin’ and simmerin’ violence. I actually found that I kind of missed it. Then, I found out it was all here, too, but without the charm.
Jackson Burnett (The Past Never Ends)
In Ake v. Oklahoma, the Court said: “When a State brings its judicial power to bear on an indigent defendant in a criminal proceeding, it must take steps to assure that the defendant has a fair opportunity to present his defense…. Justice cannot be equal where, simply as a result of his poverty, a defendant is denied the opportunity to participate meaningfully in a judicial proceeding in which his liberty is at stake.
John Grisham (The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town)
They throw cash at programs and expect results. And if they don’t get them, the money stops. There’s a real question as to who is actually running these programs: the school’s athletic director or the wealthy few writing the checks. All you need to do is google “T. Boone Pickens” and “Oklahoma State University” to get the general idea.
Ashley Elston (First Lie Wins)
April 1923, Governor Jack C. Walton of Oklahoma dispatched his top state investigator, Herman Fox Davis, to Osage County.
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
When, the following year, Oklahoma entered the Union as the forty-sixth state, members of the tribe were able to sell their surface land in what was now Osage County. But to keep the mineral trust under tribal control, no one could buy or sell headrights. These could only be inherited. Mollie and her family had become part of the first underground reservation.
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
White mobs killed African Americans across the United States. Some of these events, like the 1919 Chicago riot, are well-known. Others, such as the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which whites dropped dynamite from airplanes onto a black ghetto, killing more than seventy-five people and destroying more than eleven hundred homes, have completely vanished from our history books.
James W. Loewen (Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong)
Even a man accused of the worst act of terrorism ever committed in this country - especially such a man - is entitled to the best possible defense. This concept is a cornerstone of our justice system.
Stephen Jones (Others Unknown: Timothy Mcveigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing Conspiracy)
The statement of Mr. Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Oklahoma Bank case, is significant: “We cannot say that the public interests to which we have adverted, and others, are not sufficient to warrant the State in taking the whole business of banking under its control. On the contrary we are of opinion that it may go on from regulation to prohibition except upon such conditions as it may prescribe.
Louis D. Brandeis (Other People's Money And How the Bankers Use It)
In the 1830s, the forced removal of Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles from the fertile lands of the southeastern United States, under the direction of President Andrew Jackson, amassed even more land for cotton cultivation and expansion of the wealth of white people. As Native Americans made the involuntary treks to what would become Indian Country or Oklahoma, white Americans dislocated approximately one million African Americans through the domestic slave trade, moving them from the Upper South to the Lower South and westward, destroying families, and severing community ties in order to create plantations and cultivate cotton.
Heather Andrea Williams (American Slavery: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
The blackest chapter in the history of this State will be the Indian guardianship over these estates,” an Osage leader said, adding, “There has been millions—not thousands—but millions of dollars of many of the Osages dissipated and spent by the guardians themselves.” This so-called Indian business, as White discovered, was an elaborate criminal operation, in which various sectors of society were complicit. The crooked guardians and administrators of Osage estates were typically among the most prominent white citizens: businessmen and ranchers and lawyers and politicians. So were the lawmen and prosecutors and judges who facilitated and concealed the swindling (and, sometimes, acted as guardians and administrators themselves). In 1924, the Indian Rights Association, which defended the interests of indigenous communities, conducted an investigation into what it described as “an orgy of graft and exploitation.” The group documented how rich Indians in Oklahoma were being “shamelessly and openly robbed in a scientific and ruthless manner” and how guardianships were “the plums to be distributed to the faithful friends of the judges as a reward for their support at the polls.” Judges were known to say to citizens, “You vote for me, and I will see that you get a good guardianship.” A white woman married to an Osage man described to a reporter how the locals would plot: “A group of traders and lawyers sprung up who selected certain Indians as their prey. They owned all the officials…. These men had an understanding with each other. They cold-bloodedly said, ‘You take So-and-So, So-and-So and So-and-So and I’ll take these.’ They selected Indians who had full headrights and large farms.
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie (1912–67) was born in Okemah, a small town in Oklahoma, and was named for the Democratic presidential candidate by his father, a businessman involved in real estate, newspaper writing, and local and state politics.
Richard Kurin (The Smithsonian's History of America in 101 Objects)
They suspected that children learned best through undirected free play—and that a child’s psyche was sensitive and fragile. During the 1980s and 1990s, American parents and teachers had been bombarded by claims that children’s self-esteem needed to be protected from competition (and reality) in order for them to succeed. Despite a lack of evidence, the self-esteem movement took hold in the United States in a way that it did not in most of the world. So, it was understandable that PTA parents focused their energies on the nonacademic side of their children’s school. They dutifully sold cupcakes at the bake sales and helped coach the soccer teams. They doled out praise and trophies at a rate unmatched in other countries. They were their kids’ boosters, their number-one fans. These were the parents that Kim’s principal in Oklahoma praised as highly involved. And PTA parents certainly contributed to the school’s culture, budget, and sense of community. However, there was not much evidence that PTA parents helped their children become critical thinkers. In most of the countries where parents took the PISA survey, parents who participated in a PTA had teenagers who performed worse in reading. Korean parenting, by contrast, were coaches. Coach parents cared deeply about their children, too. Yet they spent less time attending school events and more time training their children at home: reading to them, quizzing them on their multiplication tables while they were cooking dinner, and pushing them to try harder. They saw education as one of their jobs.
Amanda Ripley (The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way)
I feel like Oklahoma is one big Dementiatown, suffering from some cerebral disease that is impeding blood flow to the brain. The steeper the declines in education spending, healthcare outcomes, and criminal justice, the more blame is placed on immigrants and the liberal media. The worse things get, the worse we sabotage ourselves.
Russell Cobb (The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America's Weirdest State)
My time at Parklife got me thinking about drug users who do not have access to such drug-related services and education. The amount of money required to attend a festival, especially when entrance ticket, travel, and food costs are included, is prohibitive for most. Consequently, it is not surprising that the highest drug-related mortality rates in the United States are found in regions, including Appalachia and Oklahoma, with lower rates of university completion and greater economic distress.12 Attention-grabbing headlines claiming that opioids (or any other drug) are killing people are wrong. Ignorance and poverty are killing people, just as they have for centuries.
Carl L. Hart (Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear)
Big and little they went on together to Molalla, to Tuska, to Roswell, Guthrie, Kaycee, to Baker and Bend. After a few weeks Pake said that if Diamond wanted a permanent traveling partner he was up for it. Diamond said yeah, although only a few states still allowed steer roping and Pake had to cover long, empty ground, his main territory in the livestock country of Oklahoma, Wyoming, Oregon and New Mexico. Their schedules did not fit into the same box without patient adjustment. But Pake knew a hundred dirt road shortcuts, steering them through scabland and slope country, in and out of the tiger shits, over the tawny plain still grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts, into early darkness and the first storm laying down black ice, hard orange-dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat boiling out of the sun until the paint on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry rain that never hit the ground, through small-town traffic and stock on the road, band of horses in morning fog, two redheaded cowboys moving a house that filled the roadway and Pake busting around and into the ditch to get past, leaving junkyards and Mexican cafes behind, turning into midnight motel entrances with RING OFFICE BELL signs or steering onto the black prairie for a stunned hour of sleep.
Annie Proulx (Close Range: Wyoming Stories)
In August 1917, white, Black, and Muskogee tenant farmers and sharecroppers in several eastern and southern Oklahoma counties took up arms to stop conscription, with a larger stated goal of overthrowing the US government to establish a socialist commonwealth. These more radically minded grassroots socialists had organized their own Working Class Union (WCU), with Anglo-American, African American, and Indigenous Muskogee farmers forming a kind of rainbow alliance. Their plan was to march to Washington, DC, motivating millions of working people to arm themselves and to join them along the way. After a day of dynamiting oil pipelines and bridges in southeastern Oklahoma, the men and their families created a liberated zone where they ate, sang hymns, and rested. By the following day, heavily armed posses supported by police and militias stopped the revolt, which became known as the Green Corn Rebellion.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History, #3))
Like others on the Osage tribal roll, Mollie and her family members each received a headright—essentially, a share in the tribe’s mineral trust. When, the following year, Oklahoma entered the Union as the forty-sixth state, members of the tribe were able to sell their surface land in what was now Osage County. But to keep the mineral trust under tribal control, no one could buy or sell headrights. These could only be inherited. Mollie and her family had become part of the first underground reservation.
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
Even the United States owed its great-power status to military action rather than economic enterprise alone. In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US annexation of Texas. About 13,000 American soldiers died in the war, which added 2.3 million square kilometres to the United States (more than the combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy). (page 109)
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
Wolf was taken aback. This was the 1950s, years before the advent of cholesterol-lowering drugs and aggressive measures to prevent heart disease. Heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States. They were the leading cause of death in men under the age of sixty-five. It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart disease. Wolf decided to investigate. He enlisted the support of some of his students and colleagues from Oklahoma. They gathered together the death certificates from residents of the
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
The evidence abounds that not only do the self-righteous not have the market cornered on “clean living,” but they often lead secret, self-destructive lives. In my part of the world (Oklahoma is the reddest state in the union), there is actually a positive correlation between high church attendance and negative social statistics like teen pregnancy, divorce, physical and sexual abuse, and chemical dependency. Where there is denial there is dysfunction, and the more one’s faith resembles a fairy tale the sooner the clock strikes midnight.
Robin Meyers (Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus)
Even the United States owed its great-power status to military action rather than economic enterprise alone. In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US annexation of Texas. About 13,000 American soldiers died in the war, which added 2.3 million square kilometres to the United States (more than the combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy).4 It was the bargain of the millennium.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
Algren’s book opens with one of the best historical descriptions of American white trash ever written.* He traces the Linkhorn ancestry back to the first wave of bonded servants to arrive on these shores. These were the dregs of society from all over the British Isles—misfits, criminals, debtors, social bankrupts of every type and description—all of them willing to sign oppressive work contracts with future employers in exchange for ocean passage to the New World. Once here, they endured a form of slavery for a year or two—during which they were fed and sheltered by the boss—and when their time of bondage ended, they were turned loose to make their own way. In theory and in the context of history the setup was mutually advantageous. Any man desperate enough to sell himself into bondage in the first place had pretty well shot his wad in the old country, so a chance for a foothold on a new continent was not to be taken lightly. After a period of hard labor and wretchedness he would then be free to seize whatever he might in a land of seemingly infinite natural wealth. Thousands of bonded servants came over, but by the time they earned their freedom the coastal strip was already settled. The unclaimed land was west, across the Alleghenies. So they drifted into the new states—Kentucky and Tennessee; their sons drifted on to Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Drifting became a habit; with dead roots in the Old World and none in the New, the Linkhorns were not of a mind to dig in and cultivate things. Bondage too became a habit, but it was only the temporary kind. They were not pioneers, but sleazy rearguard camp followers of the original westward movement. By the time the Linkhorns arrived anywhere the land was already taken—so they worked for a while and moved on. Their world was a violent, boozing limbo between the pits of despair and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. They kept drifting west, chasing jobs, rumors, homestead grabs or the luck of some front-running kin. They lived off the surface of the land, like army worms, stripping it of whatever they could before moving on. It was a day-to-day existence, and there was always more land to the west. Some stayed behind and their lineal descendants are still there—in the Carolinas, Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee. There were dropouts along the way: hillbillies, Okies, Arkies—they’re all the same people. Texas is a living monument to the breed. So is southern California. Algren called them “fierce craving boys” with “a feeling of having been cheated.” Freebooters, armed and drunk—a legion of gamblers, brawlers and whorehoppers. Blowing into town in a junk Model-A with bald tires, no muffler and one headlight … looking for quick work, with no questions asked and preferably no tax deductions. Just get the cash, fill up at a cut-rate gas station and hit the road, with a pint on the seat and Eddy Arnold on the radio moaning good back-country tunes about home sweet home, that Bluegrass sweetheart still waitin, and roses on Mama’s grave. Algren left the Linkhorns in Texas, but anyone who drives the Western highways knows they didn’t stay there either. They kept moving until one day in the late 1930s they stood on the spine of a scrub-oak California hill and looked down on the Pacific Ocean—the end of the road.
Hunter S. Thompson (The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers Series Book 1))
I recently had dinner with George. We did not eat fish. Instead we ate at a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant. I had lemon-grass chicken with chile, and George had stir-fried vegetables. Both meals were excellent, and both consisted of foods originating far from Spokane. Although we didn’t ask the cook where the chicken and other foodstuffs came from, it isn’t difficult to construct an entirely plausible scenario. Here it is: the chicken was raised on a factory farm in Arkansas. The factory is owned by Tyson Foods, which supplies one-quarter of this nation’s chickens and sends them as far away as Japan, The chicken was fed corn from Nebraska and grain from Kansas. One of seventeen million chickens processed by Tyson that week, this bird was frozen and put onto a truck made by PACCAR. The truck was made from plastics manufactured in Texas, steel milled in Japan from ore mined in Australia and chromium from South Africa, and aluminum processed in the United States from bauxite mined in Jamaica. The parts were assembled in Mexico. As this truck, with its cargo of frozen chickens, made its way toward Spokane, it burned fuel refined in Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Washington from oil originating beneath Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Mexico, Texas, and Alaska. All this, and I have chickens outside my door.
Derrick Jensen (A Language Older Than Words)
From the days of the Assyrians and the Qin, great empires were usually built through violent conquest. In 1914 too, all the major powers owed their status to successful wars. For instance, Imperial Japan became a regional power thanks to its victories over China and Russia; Germany became Europe’s top dog after its triumphs over Austria-Hungary and France; and Britain created the world’s largest and most prosperous empire through a series of splendid little wars all over the planet. Thus in 1882 Britain invaded and occupied Egypt, losing a mere fifty-seven soldiers in the decisive Battle of Tel el-Kebir. Whereas in our days occupying a Muslim country is the stuff of Western nightmares, following Tel el-Kebir the British faced little armed resistance, and for more than six decades controlled the Nile Valley and the vital Suez Canal. Other European powers emulated the British, and whenever governments in Paris, Rome or Brussels contemplated putting boots on the ground in Vietnam, Libya or Congo, their only fear was that somebody else might get there first. Even the United States owed its great-power status to military action rather than economic enterprise alone. In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US annexation of Texas. About 13,000 American soldiers died in the war, which added 2.3 million square kilometres to the “United States (more than the combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy). It was the bargain of the millennium.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
The victims of right-wing violence are typically immigrants, Muslims, and people of color, while the targets of environmental and animal rights activism are among “the most powerful corporations on the planet” — hence the state’s relative indifference to the one and obsession with the other. The broader pattern helps to explain one partial exception to the left/right gap in official scrutiny—namely, the domestic aspects of the “War on Terror.” Al Qaeda is clearly a reactionary organization. Like much of the American far right, it is theocratic, anti-Semitic, and patriarchal. Like Timothy McVeigh, the 9/11 hijackers attacked symbols of institutional power, killing a great many innocent people to further their cause. But while the state’s bias favors the right over the left, the Islamists were the wrong kind of right-wing fanatic. These right-wing terrorists were foreigners, they were Muslim, and above all they were not white. And so, in retrospect and by comparison, the state’s response to the Oklahoma City bombing seems relatively restrained—short-lived, focused, selectively targeting unlawful behavior for prosecution. The government’s reaction to the September 11th attacks has been something else entirely — an open-ended war fought at home and abroad, using all variety of legal, illegal, and extra-legal military, police, and intelligence tactics, arbitrarily jailing large numbers of people and spying on entire communities of immigrants, Muslims, and Middle Eastern ethnic groups. At the same time, law enforcement was also obsessively pursuing — and sometimes fabricating—cases against environmentalists, animal rights activists, and anarchists while ignoring or obscuring racist violence against people of color. What that shows, I think, is that the left/right imbalance persists, but sometimes other biases matter more.
Kristian Williams (Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America)
... [t]he air was thinning out, as if from too much wear, not when Scout was killed but two weeks later--even before Scout's body had been shipped--when they were informed that Easter was dead too. Babies. One nineteen, the other twenty-one. How proud she was when they enlisted. She had actively encouraged them to do so. Their father had served in the forties. Uncles too. Jeff Fleetwood was back from Vietnam and none the worse. And although he did seem a little shook up, Menus Jury got back alive. Like a fool, she believed her sons would be safe. Safer than anywhere in Oklahoma outside Ruby. Safer in the army than in Chicago, where Easter wanted to go. Safer than Birmingham, than Montgomery, Selma, than Watts. Safer than Money, Mississippi, in 1955 and Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963. Safer than Newark. She had thought war was safer than any city in the United States. Now she had four unopened letters mailed in 1968 and delivered to the Demby post office four days after she buried the last of her sons. She had never been able to open them. Both had been home on furlough that Thanksgiving, 1968. Seven months after King's murder, and Soane had sobbed like the redeemed to see her boys alive. Her sweet colored boys unshot, unlynched, unmolested, unimprisoned.
Toni Morrison (Paradise (Beloved Trilogy, #3))
The governors of Oklahoma and South Carolina signed bills within the past week repealing the Common Core state standards, guidelines for children’s achievement in reading and math between kindergarten and high school graduation.
Anonymous
Oklahoma has the highest female incarceration rate in the country, and nearly thirty per cent of female inmates in the state have parents who did time.
Anonymous
It is my belief that the sentence "The end justifies the means"—that suppression, repression, and/or murder become somehow acceptable if committed in the name of a "cause" or belief which reduces individuals to expendable pawns—is the vilest of human poisons, and that terrorism, regardless of the terrorist's "cause," is the ultimate act of dehumanization. I did not expect that between the time I wrote this novel and the time it was published a United States citizen in Oklahoma City would demonstrate an even worse contempt for human life and the fundamental values of his own society or prove capable of an act even more despicable than my fictional villains. That some human beings are capable of such atrocities is an inescapable lesson of history. That we cannot allow those acts to go unpunished or extend to those who commit them any shred of respect, whatever the "cause" which motivated them, is a lesson the civilized human community must teach itself.
Anonymous
With the price of US crude below $60 per barrel — down 46 per cent from six months ago — some operators plan to mothball their stripper wells. Widespread closures could help balance the oversupplied global oil market and stabilise prices. Melvin Moran, whose company owns stripper wells in Oklahoma, said it costs thousands of dollars a year to keep one pumping. “A lot of the wells we operate are not going to be viable at this price. I’m not talking about drilling, but just getting the oil from below the ground to the surface of the ground.” Mark Thomas has two companies operating 100 stripper wells in Arkansas state with total production of 300 b/d. “Some of those will be shut in, probably within 90 days,” he said last week.
Anonymous
This could not be accepted. Four of those states – Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas - joined the Confederacy. For good measure, so did the southern Indian tribes now in Oklahoma.
Mark David Ledbetter (America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture)
Alabama was the first state in the United States to officially recognize Christmas, in 1836. Oklahoma was the last, in 1907
Tasnim Essack (223 Amazing Science Facts, Tidbits and Quotes)
Everyone who had worked with the KGB, including Gary, knew of McVeigh. McVeigh was a disgruntled U.S. Army vet, and had tried to join every terrorist organization in the world, prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. McVeigh was considered too unreliable to be taken seriously. When Al Qaeda expanded its operations, McVeigh went to Afghanistan clandestinely, and trained with the terrorists of Al Qaeda, but, didn’t become an actual member of the terrorist group. When he returned, McVeigh decided to blow up one of the federal buildings in one of the Great Plains states, because he thought New York City, Los Angeles, or Chicago was just too obvious of a choice. He decided on the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, because it housed fourteen federal agencies, all of which he wanted to destroy. He had help from a co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, who thought McVeigh was a supporter of the militia movement.
Cliff Ball (The Usurper: A suspense political thriller)
In the last two years, eight Republican-dominated states, most recently Alabama and Oklahoma, have prevented cities from enacting paid sick leave for workers, and a new law in Arkansas forbids municipalities to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination.
Anonymous
By far the hardest-hit state, the report says, is Oklahoma, where earthquakes are hundreds of times more common than they were until a few years ago. ‘‘Oklahoma used to experience one
Anonymous
the Battle of San Juan. Two years later, the regiment held its first reunion, with a grand three-day celebration at Oklahoma City. The young metropolis would show the world that it could do things. There would be visitors from every state. "T. R.," national hero, would attend. A grand display of fireworks, the largest ever seen west of the Mississippi, was ordered. Quanah was besought to bring a troop of Indians for the parade. They would be fed and cared for, paid a small sum, and could see the show. The agent agreed, and there was no difficulty in assembling a troop. The young men gathered their gayest finery and borrowed the carefully saved costumes of their fathers, war bonnets, belts, and beads and feather ornaments.
University of California Berkeley (Novembers Winter, The Indian Cries: The Most Powerful Indian Story in American History)
Perhaps the belief that the Indians were destined to vanish originated in early colonial times as a means of justifying the massacres of Indians by the Puritans. If, as the New England colonists believed, Indians were under a cosmic curse and in a state of rapid decline, killing a few was not really a criminal act and in some instances might actually be doing the Lord’s work. It was not all Thanksgiving dinners in those early days. No one questions that the Indian population in the East did decline precipitiously as whites settled the New England area. Many Ind­ians were killed, others hid in obscure places, and still other Indians moved west before the American Revolution. Many eastern Indians were allies of Great Britain in both the Revolution and the War of 1812. Believing they should not stay behind in the United States when their English friends fled to Canada after the Revolution, they left with the departing British troops, vanishing from the United States but remaining very much a part of things north of the border. The virtual disappearance of Indians east of the Mississippi can be traced directly to Andrew Jackson’s policy of removing the tribes of that region to Oklahoma and Kansas, not to some cosmic decree commanding their inevitable extinction. Even then only the largest and most threatening tribes were removed. Smaller tribal groups simply remained in the backwaters of the eastern United States where they had always lived.
Vine Deloria Jr. (Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria Jr. Reader)
Our attitude is a result of our perception of reality, which is as much a reflection of time as anything else: what we have encountered in the past, our present situation, and how we see the future unfolding. People of faith can put their past behind them; all has been forgiven. We can also be buoyed in the present by the realization that all things must pass. That leaves the greatest source of optimism for the Christian: the certain future that lies ahead. Christ has replaced death with immortality. With our souls entrusted to God through faith in our Savior, a glorious future with God is ours. - Ed McMinn, Daily Devotions for Die-Hard Fans: Oklahoma State Cowboy
Ed McMinn (Daily Devotions for Die-Hard Fans Oklahoma State Cowboys)
Our attitude is a result of our perception of reality, which is as much a reflection of time as anything else: what we have encountered in the past, our present situation, and how we see the future unfolding. People of faith can put their past behind them; all has been forgiven. We can also be buoyed in the present by the realization that all things must pass. That leaves the greatest source of optimism for the Christian: the certain future that lies ahead. Christ has replaced death with immortality. With our souls entrusted to God through faith in our Savior, a glorious future with God is ours.
Ed McMinn (Daily Devotions for Die-Hard Fans Oklahoma State Cowboys)
The largest United States induced earthquake to date has been the 2011 M5.6 Prague, Oklahoma earthquake (Keranen and others, 2013); however, earthquakes greater than M6 or M7 also have been generated near impounded dams or near sites of gas withdrawal. For example, Gupta (2002) indicates that the 1967 Koyna M6.3 (India) was the largest and most damaging reservoir-triggered earthquake. Simpson and Leith (1985) suggested that the 1984 M7.0 Gazli (Uzbekistan) earthquake may have been induced by gas withdrawal. There is also some debate about whether the 2008 M7.9 Wenchuan (China) earthquake was induced by reservoir impoundment (Kerr and Stone, 2009; Deng and others, 2010; Gahalaut and Gahalaut, 2010). Alternatively, the induced seismicity may trigger tectonic earthquakes on adjacent fault structures, as suggested by Keranen and others (2014). Participants at the workshop felt that the USGS induced seismicity models should consider the possibility of triggering large regional earthquakes and should consider the same maximum magnitude distribution as was used for the tectonic earthquakes in the NSHM model which has a mean of 7.0 but extends from M6.5 to M7.95 with low weights at the ends of the distribution. For the sensitivity study, we also considered a model with maximum magnitude of M6.0, close to that which we have observed. The uniform hazard maps
U.S. Government (2015 Guide to Earthquakes from Fracking, Hydraulic Fracturing, and Shale Gas - Underground Wastewater Disposal, New USGS Report, Incorporating Induced Seismicity in Seismic Hazard Model)
The criticism of the Soetoro administration kept rolling, mixing with a broad criticism of liberalism and federal judges. “I am sick of federal judges deciding that the United States Constitution requires abortion and same-sex marriage,” a state senator from Enid said. “I challenge you to read that document from end to end, and if you can find the word ‘abortion’ in it I will kiss your ass tomorrow at high noon on the capitol steps. Ditto gay marriage. What’s next? Plural marriages? Legalizing infanticide? We’re practically there now. I say it’s time we seized control of our own lives here in Oklahoma. Anyone wanting an abortion or to marry a homosexual partner can move to California or New York. We shouldn’t be forced to put up with it, and my constituents don’t want to. The real problem here is federal judges who enshrine their liberal philosophies in federal decisions instead of letting individual states vote their consciences in open, fair elections.
Stephen Coonts (Liberty's Last Stand (Tommy Carmellini #7))
Abortions, gay marriage, legalized pot, all of that should be decided by the states. Whatever happened to the governmental powers reserved to the states? Let’s declare ourselves independent, give the people of Oklahoma the right to decide which laws they want to live under, and tell Barry Soetoro where to go and what to do to himself when he gets there.
Stephen Coonts (Liberty's Last Stand (Tommy Carmellini #7))
Providing Security Services, Investigations & Equipment for U.S. Government agencies and the private sector since 1983. Headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Jarvis Inc. has conducted business throughout the United States as well as several foreign countries. Jarvis expanded into providing security consulting services, technical surveillance countermeasures services (TSCM), covert/overt camera installations, security guard services, executive protection, investigative services.
Jarvis Inc
On January 1, 1991, a new, 96-page state law goes into effect: H.B. 1750, passed last year [1989]." It requires all Oklahoma residents to declare everything they own to the tax collector, everything: guns, coins, art collections, furniture, business equipment, bank accounts, household furniture, etc. Forms will be distributed through banks. Any taxpayer who refuses to fill out the form and submit it to the tax assessor by March 15—the ides of March—will be visited by an assessor.
Milton William Cooper (Behold! a Pale Horse, by William Cooper: Reprint recomposed, illustrated & annotated for coherence & clarity (Public Cache))
Oklahoma law still declares the Communist Party ‘illegal and not entitled to any rights, privileges or immunities,’ and makes it ‘unlawful for such Party to…exist, function or operate in the state of Oklahoma. And the criminal syndicalism law that ‘justified’ the book trials remains in effect, ever at the ready for the next set of zealots more concerned about imagined threats to social order than to violations of civil liberties.
Shirley A. Wiegand and Wayne A. Wiegand
This effect is called “stage migration” or the Will Rogers phenomenon, named after an American comedian from Oklahoma. He is said to have joked that Oklahomans who pack up and move to California raise both states’ average IQ.
Rolf Dobelli (The Art of Thinking Clearly)
Did he just call me “Oklahoma”? Well if I have to carry the banner for the Sooner State, don’t mind if I do. Whatever, J. Crew! And she propped her boots up so he could not miss them.
Christina Boyd (Elizabeth: Obstinate, Headstrong Girl)
Oklahoma City bombing was the gross destruction of the First Amendment advocated in Senator Charles Schumer’s bill, HR 2580. In this bill, a five-year prison sentence would be given for publicly engaging in unseemly speculation and publishing or transmitting by wire or electronic means baseless conspiracy theories regarding the federal government of the United States. This is clear evidence to me that the proponents of the New World Order are beginning to fear those who are waking up. Looking into Schumer’s other treasonous
J. Micha-el Thomas Hays (Rise of the New World Order: The Culling of Man)
Ted, my husband, asked me to introduce his story because I am the one who heard it first. We had been married for two years when his “gift” was given to us. It was about 4:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. We were both asleep in our home in Tonkawa, Oklahoma, when he sat up in bed and said, “I know how I died!” I awoke to those words, astonished as he began to tell the end of his life in a different-sounding voice and using words and a dialect I had not heard before. After a few moments of an intense outpouring of emotional facts, places, names, and events, I knew I had to write “his story” down on paper. I climbed out of bed in the dark, found a legal-size yellow pad and pencil and began writing as fast as I could. He did not slow down to help me catch up; the tale just kept flowing from his mouth. The hairs on my arms stood on end and chills continued as he told in detail events that happened over one hundred years ago. My fingers began to cramp as I kept trying to keep up with him. The descriptions were so vivid that I could visualize what he was saying like a movie playing before my eyes. Eventually we hurried to the living room after I found a small tape recorder in our dresser drawer. Ted continued to talk in this unusual voice, causing me to laugh and cry as this true-to-life saga of the 1870s began to unravel. He told me how he died at about the age of sixty. Then he went to the beginning, when Tom Summers, who was sixteen years old, left home to join the Union Army. He lied about his age and was able to join the army and fight in the Civil War. The journey takes you into the war, on into Indian Territory and westward. Every day for Tom was an adventure, and Ted will share it with you. Anyone who meets Ted is drawn to him instantly. His manner is one of confidence: of a very genuine, honest, loveable guy. He will win you over with his “Just one more story” or a big bear hug if you are not careful. We met at a teen hop in the 1950s, when I was fifteen and he was seventeen. We dated in rural America for about a year. He was then leaving the farm to go to Oklahoma State University, and he asked me to marry him. We both married other people and raised our children. Forty-one years later, we discovered each other again. This time, I said, “Yes.” Join us on our fascinating journey into the Old West as seen through Tom Summers’s “beautiful blue eyes.
Linda Riddle (A True-To-Life Western Story: No Lookin' Back)
These notoriously destructive White-on-Black race riots started en masse just one year after the end of the Civil War and continued until the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Some historians have claimed that there were anywhere from 250-300 race riots over this period, most of which have been conveniently forgotten about by the American academia and press. Over 25 race riots broke out between April and October 1919 alone, a six-month period poet James Weldon Johnson labeled the "Red Summer." Among the most deadly outbreaks were those in East St. Louis, Illinois (1917); Chester, Pennsylvania (1917); Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1917); Houston, Texas (1917); Washington, D.C. (1919); Chicago, Illinois (1919); Omaha, Nebraska (1919); Charleston, South Carolina (1919), Longview, Texas (1919); Knoxville, Tennessee (1919); Elaine, Arkansas (1919); and Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921). Ward noted,   Although urban race riots in the United States between 1866-1951 were unique episodes rooted in the particular historic situation of each place, they shared certain characteristics. To begin with, the whites always prevailed, and the overwhelming majority of those who died and were wounded in all of these incidents were blacks. They also tended to break out in clusters during times of significant socio-economic, political, and demographic upheaval when racial demographics were altered and existing racial mores and boundaries challenged. Perhaps most importantly, the riots usually provoked defensive stances by members of the black communities who defended themselves and their families under attack. Seldom did the violence spill over into white neighborhoods.
Joseph Gibson (God of the Addicted: A Psychohistorical Analysis of the Origins, Objectives, and Consequences of the Suspicious Association Between Power, Profit, and the Black Preacher in America)
One might even take a speech of President Obama’s two years ago in the oil town of Cushing, Oklahoma, to be an eloquent death-knell for the species. He proclaimed with pride, to ample applause, “Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That’s important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.” The applause also reveals something about government commitment to security. Industry profits are sure to be secured as “producing more oil and gas here at home” will continue to be “a critical part” of energy strategy, as the president promised.
Noam Chomsky (Because We Say So (City Lights Open Media))
•A candidate running for president in 2012 referred to higher education as “mind control” and “indoctrination.” He ran again in 2016.         •A former Governor and 2012 presidential contender blamed the separation of church and state on Satan. He also sought to solve his state’s drought problem by asking its citizens to pray for rain. He ran again in 2016.         •A 2012 presidential contender claimed, “there’s violence in Israel because Jesus is coming soon.”         •A Georgia congressman claimed that evolution and the Big Bang Theory were “lies straight from the pit of Hell,” adding “Earth is about 9,000 years old and was created in six days, per the Bible.” He’s a physician, and a high-ranking member of the House Science Committee.         •From another member of the House Science Committee: “Prehistoric climate change could have been caused by dinosaur flatulence.”         •From the Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee: “Global warming isn’t real, God is in control of the world.”         •A former Speaker of the House -- a born-again Christian, and convicted felon – declared, “One thing Americans seem to forget is that God wrote the Constitution.”         •The Lt. Governor of a southern state claimed that Yoga may result in satanic possession.         •A Southern senator claimed, “video games represent a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people.”         •A California state representative proudly stated: “Guns are used to defend our property and our families and our freedom, and they are absolutely essential to living the way God intended for us to live.”         •Another California representative suggested that abortion was to blame for the state’s drought.         •From a Texas representative: “The great flood is an example of climate change. And that certainly wasn’t because mankind overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”         •An Oklahoma representative said: “Just because the Supreme Court rules on something doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s constitutional.”         •From another Texas representative: “We know Al Qaeda has camps on the Mexican border. We have people that are trained to act Hispanic when they are radical Islamists.”         •A South Carolina State representative, commenting on the Supreme Court’s legalization of gay marriage said, “The devil is taking control of this land and we’re not stopping him!
Ian Gurvitz (WELCOME TO DUMBFUCKISTAN: The Dumbed-Down, Disinformed, Dysfunctional, Disunited States of America)
More and more, I began helping around the homestead. I learned to operate my John Deere mower so I could keep the yard around our house--and our half-remodeled, boarded-up yellow brick house--neatly trimmed. Marlboro Man was working like a dog in the Oklahoma summer, and I wanted to make our homestead a haven for him. The heat was so stifling, though, all I could stand to wear was a loose-fitting maternity tank top and a pair of Marlboro Man’s white Jockey boxers, which I gracefully pulled down below my enormous belly. As I rode on the bouncy green mower in my heavily pregnant state, my mind couldn’t help but travel back to the long country drive I’d taken when I was engaged to Marlboro Man, when we’d stumbled upon the old homestead and found the half-naked woman mowing her yard. And here I was: I had become that woman. And it had happened in less than a year. I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of our bedroom window and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The Playtex bra was all I was missing.
Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels)
A few members of the faculty expressed the views that the [Korean] war was not all of the problem. The attitude of the faculty that was summed up neatly by one member, who said: "The football craze throughout the entire first semester occupied too much of the students time and resulted in low grades and class cuts." I was inclined to agree that football had been a factor. It seemed to me that a winning team had done a great deal for the state of Oklahoma, but not nearly as much for the university. I resolved to do everything that I could to prevent the university from taking part in a postseason game after the 1951 season.
George Lynn Cross (Presidents Can't Punt: The OU Football Tradition)
Finally, we must bear in mind that guns are not the only tools of mass killing. In America, by far the worst mass murder at a school was carried out with dynamite in 1927.68 That attack left forty-five dead and fifty-eight injured. The 1985 Oklahoma City Bombing and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings were other rare exceptions in the United States, but bombs are much more commonly used in countries such as Russia.
John R. Lott Jr. (The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies)
My state’s constitution seems to contain a provision requiring that once every two years we must pass a bill which dazzles the entire country in its glittering, bejeweled stupidity. Not all of them are bad. I rather like the absurd ones. For instance, it is illegal to go whale hunting in Oklahoma. That law is certainly a nice gesture (whales both sing and have giant brains, putting them one point ahead of many legislators). But humpback poaching has never really been problematic in our part of the country, what with it being landlocked and all.
Andrew Heaton (Laughter is Better Than Communism)
I’m not sorry it happened. Now that I really think about it, I’m not sorry at all.” She reached for a tall glass, poured him a sweet tea and set it on a coaster in front of him. “I was at first, but I gotta tell you, this ‘everything-happens-for-a-reason thing’ is starting to make sense to me. I’m starting to feel excited to see what the reason was for this. This whole thing woke me up, Darryl. It showed me I was in the wrong relationship with the wrong guy, and apparently in the wrong city, in the wrong state, working in the wrong job.” She bit her lower lip, then said, “I knew it, too. I knew it way down deep. I’d been feeling restless and grouchy and tense. I just couldn’t put my finger on why. But that was why. I ignored my feelings until the problem got so big I had no choice but to make a change.
Maggie Shayne (Oklahoma Christmas Blues (The McIntyre Men, #1))
the lab’s essential public health functions could be compromised during the move and if the lab had fewer employees. The lab, now at a former Devon Energy Corp. field office building next to a cow pasture in Stillwater, has struggled to keep its top director and other key employees. Delays to get test results for basic public health surveillance for salmonella outbreaks and sexually transmitted infections have shaken the confidence of lab partners and local public health officials. As a new coronavirus emerges going into winter, the lab ranks last in the nation for COVID-19 variant testing. Many employees, who found out about the lab’s move from an October 2020 press conference, didn’t want to relocate to Stillwater. Those who did make the move in the first few months of 2021 found expensive lab equipment in their new workplace but not enough electrical outlets for them. The lab’s internet connection was slower than expected and not part of the ultra-fast fiber network used across town by Oklahoma State University. A fridge containing reagents, among the basic supplies for any lab, had to be thrown out after a power outage. Meanwhile, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services finalized a correction plan after federal inspectors, prompted by an anonymous complaint, showed up unannounced at the lab in late September. “Although some aspects of the original report were not as favorable as we would have liked, the path of correction is clear and more than attainable,” Secretary of Health and Mental Health Kevin Corbett said Tuesday in a statement about the inspection. “We are well on our way to fully implementing our plan. (The Centers For Medicare and Medicaid Services) has confirmed we’ve met the requirements of being in compliance. We are looking forward to their follow-up visit.” In an earlier statement, the health department said the Stillwater lab now “has sufficient power outlets to perform testing with the new equipment, and has fiber connection that exceeds what is necessary to properly run genetic sequencing and other lab functions.” The department denied the lab had to throw out the reagents after a power outage.
Devon Energy
Apart from Cherokee freedpeople, Cherokee citizens also spoke out against the present of African Americans from the United States. In 1894, the editor of the Cherokee Advocate incited his fellow tribesmen to resist both Black and white migration, telling them to ‘Be men, and fight off the barnacles that now infest our country in the shape of non-citizens, free Arkansas ni—ers, and traitors.’ Anti-Black sentiment like this encouraged Native peoples to ignore Indian freedpeople’s shared histories with their nations and to inaccurately associate them with Black interlopers from the United States. Indian freedpeople fought this attitude by attempting to differentiate themselves. When Mary Grayson was interviewed in 1937 as part of the Works Progress Administration Slave Narrative project, she illustrated this dichotomy, saying ‘I am what we colored people call a ‘native.’ That means I didn’t come into the Indian country from somewhere in the Old South, after the War, like so many Negroes did, but I was born here in the Old Creek Nation and my master was a Creek Indian. Mary felt that her experiences of enslavement were better than those of Black Americans, arguing that ‘I have had people who were slaves of white folks tell me that they had to work awfully hard and their masters were cruel to them, but all the Negroes I knew who belonged to Creeks always had plenty of clothes and lots to eat and we all lived in good log cabins we built.’ Mary clearly demarcated her history and circumstances from those of African Americans from the United States. Mary’s assertion of her identity as a ‘native’ rather than a newcomer (like other Blacks in the West) is reflective of a key component of the settler colonial process—strategic differentiation.
Alaina E. Roberts (I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land)
Through their use of the settler colonial process and the use of enslaved labor to build social, economic, and political capital, the Five Tribes have become so synonymous with Oklahoma that, nearly 190 years after they arrived in the region, most Americans think they are indigenous to the state. This is, of course, not the case…In attempting to use the American government as a mediator in their issues with the western tribes, the Five Tribes were not unique; since European contact Native people had used alliances with various colonial powers to wage wars against enemies or to gain protection from them. What was different in this context was the language used by the Five Tribes, which portrayed these other nations as uncivilized by Euro-American measurements that had essentially become their own—or which they, at least, were willing to use for rhetorical effect. This was an essential part of their colonial process… The Five Tribes’ rise and fall as settlers accepted by the American government in Indian Territory was strongly connected to their use of enslaved labor to ‘tame’ the land. Their adoption of the institution of slavery allowed them to cast themselves as civilizers like whites, who had encouraged their acceptance of this institution.
Alaina E. Roberts (I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land)
Or consider how some states, like Kansas and Oklahoma—both of which were relatively affluent in the 1970s, but have now fallen far behind—have gone in for radical tax cuts, and ended up savaging their education systems. External forces have put them in a hole, but they’re digging it deeper.
Paul Krugman (Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future)
It wasn’t hot out here like in Oklahoma, he thought. Not as humid, either. In his home state, it didn’t matter if you were in the sun or the shade, the heat and cloying dampness was the same.
Dan Ames (The Jack Reacher Cases: Complete Books #1, #2 & #3 (The Jack Reacher Cases Boxset))
On average, 75 people are arrested in the United States for having sex with the deceased every year. Don’t believe me? Look it up: 75 people. This is especially concerning considering there are four states, Louisiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and North Carolina, where necrophilia isn’t even against the law.
Mr. Creepy Pasta (The Creepypasta Collection: Modern Urban Legends You Can't Unread)
GreneCo, LLC., located in Edmond, Oklahoma, was co-founded in 2016 by Gene D. Larson and Gregory K. Womack. The real estate project administration and consulting firm seeks to create mutually beneficial scenarios for investors and landowners. They work to preserve the wildlife habitats and undeveloped land for future generations. GreneCo is invested in creating opportunities and maximizing land values as it works with landowners from states throughout the country.
Gren eco
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DeadEye Construction LLC
northwest Arkansas appealed to us for several reasons. First, for Helen it was a whole lot closer to her folks in Claremore than Newport had been. And it was good for me because I wanted to get closer to good quail hunting, and with Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, and Missouri all coming together right there it gave me easy access to four quail seasons in four states.
Sam Walton (Sam Walton: Made In America)
Out of New York came a governor from the moneyed class, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he drove Murray to fits—being from that hated family. (FDR’s cousin, Teddy, had forced Murray to remove a white supremacist plank from the Oklahoma constitution before he would allow it to join the union.) At first, Franklin Roosevelt was dismissed as a man without heft, a dilettante running on one of the nation’s great names. Then he took up the cause of the “forgotten man”—the broken farmer on the plains, the apple vendor in the city, the factory hand now hitting the rails. And though he spoke with an accent that sounded funny to anyone outside the mid-Atlantic states, and he seemed a bit jaunty with that cigarette holder, Roosevelt roused people with a blend of hope and outrage. He knew hardship and the kind of emotional panic that comes when your world collapses. He had been felled by double pneumonia in 1918, which nearly killed him, and polio in 1921, which left him partially paralyzed. He had been told time and again in the prime of his young adulthood that he had no future, that he would not walk again, that he might not live much longer. “If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your toe, after that anything would seem easy,” he said. Hoover believed the cure for the Depression was to prime the pump at the producer end, helping factories and business owners get up and running again. Goods would roll off the lines, prosperity would follow. Roosevelt said it made no sense to gin up the machines of production if people could not afford to buy what came out the factory door. “These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized, the indispensable units of economic powers,” FDR said on April 7, 1932, in a radio speech that defined the central theme of his campaign. He called for faith “in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” That forgotten man was likely to be a person with prairie dirt under the fingernails. “How much do the shallow thinkers realize that approximately one half of our population, fifty or sixty million people, earn their living by farming or in small towns where existence immediately depends on farms?
Timothy Egan (The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl)
In 2019, the most recent year available at the time I was writing this book, CDC numbers showed that Arkansas had the highest number of teen moms per capita, but in most years it competes for this distinction with its neighboring states—Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas—and rates are also high in Appalachia, to Kentucky and West Virginia.
Monica Potts
Because year after year, the war over abortion law consumes vast resources, not only in the United States but in countries worldwide. And year after year, that war does little to alter the concrete factors that shape whether a woman will consider having an abortion.
Michelle Oberman (Her Body, Our Laws: On the Front Lines of the Abortion War, from El Salvador to Oklahoma)
Having a baby in the United States is expensive. And the government is comfortable with the high price point.
Michelle Oberman (Her Body, Our Laws: On the Front Lines of the Abortion War, from El Salvador to Oklahoma)
tensions have escalated throughout the nation. Lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan are continuing, as are race wars and massacres of colored people in cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma; Rosewood, Florida; and even my beloved Washington, DC, as Mama predicted long ago. The most terrifying part of all of this is that the federal and state governments have endorsed these mounting racist sentiments by rejecting anti-lynching bills like the Dyer Act, despite President Harding’s support, and by adopting despicable legislation like Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, which prohibits interracial marriage and defines “white” as one with no trace of blood other than Caucasian. No, in this environment, I can take no unnecessary risks.
Marie Benedict (The Personal Librarian)
The United States will never forget 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. And it better never forget Oklahoma City—Americans killing Americans for the sake of terror.
Jeffrey Siger (Assassins of Athens (Andreas Kaldis, #2))
Socialism moved out of the small circles of city immigrants—Jewish and German socialists speaking their own languages—and became American. The strongest Socialist state organization was in Oklahoma, which in 1914 had twelve thousand dues-paying members (more than New York State), and elected over a hundred Socialists to local office, including six to the Oklahoma state legislature. There were fifty-five weekly Socialist newspapers in Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and summer encampments
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States)
Clusters of destroyers were tied up together at the far end of the East Loch beyond Ford Island, but it was the moorings along the island’s eastern side that commanded the most attention. These were home to the backbone of the Pacific battleship fleet. Numbered F-1, or Fox-1, to F-8 from southwest to northeast, the moorings, or quays, spread out almost three quarters of a mile. With good reason, everyone called it Battleship Row. By the evening of December 5, Battleship Row was home to the following ships: A small seaplane tender, the Avocet (AVP-4), tied up at F-1 for the weekend. F-2, which normally berthed an aircraft carrier was empty, Lexington and Enterprise both being at sea. Northeastward, California, the flagship of the Battle Force, moored at F-3. The oiler Neosho (AO-23), which was unloading a cargo of aviation gas and scheduled to depart for the states Sunday morning, occupied F-4. Then, things got a bit crowded. At F-5 and F-6, moored side by side in pairs, with fenders between them, sat Maryland on the inboard (Ford Island side) with Oklahoma outboard, and Tennessee inboard with West Virginia outboard. Astern of Tennessee lay the Arizona at F-7. All of these battleships were moored with their bows pointed down the channel to facilitate a rapid departure to sea.
Walter R. Borneman (Brothers Down: Pearl Harbor and the Fate of the Many Brothers Aboard the USS Arizona)
Even as this impressive armada returned to Hampton Roads, Virginia, in February 1909, its battleships were being surpassed by increasingly larger and heavier dreadnoughts packing ever more firepower. In 1916 alone, the United States Navy commissioned four newcomers: Nevada (BB-36) and Oklahoma (BB-37), measuring 583 feet in length and carrying ten fourteen-inch guns in two triple and two twin turrets, and Pennsylvania (BB-38) and Arizona (BB-39), 608 feet in length and mounting twelve fourteen-inch guns in four turrets of three each. Ships are usually built in classes of comparable specifications named after the lead ship, even if there are only two ships in the class. Hence, the Arizona was a Pennsylvania-class battleship. While there were small differences among the classes, pre–World War II battleships, beginning with Nevada, were “standard-type,” with generally the same top speed (21 knots), turning radius (700 yards), and armor, to facilitate steaming together. Arizona’s commissioning—its official acceptance into active service—occurred in the Brooklyn Navy Yard on October 17, 1916. Europe had been at war for two years, and it looked as if the United States would soon enter the conflict. The new ship and its sister, Pennsylvania, were, the New York Times reported, the “most powerful fighting craft afloat.” From keel laying to commissioning, Arizona’s construction had taken two and one-half years and cost $16 million (comparable to $369,000,000 in 2017 purchasing power). An initial complement of 1,034 officers and men took up their stations onboard.
Walter R. Borneman (Brothers Down: Pearl Harbor and the Fate of the Many Brothers Aboard the USS Arizona)
Meanwhile, ever more battleships, most laid down amid the fury of World War I, were commissioned into active service. The Tennessee-class of Tennessee (BB-43) and California (BB-44) joined the fleet by the end of 1921, as did the Maryland (BB-46), which managed to be completed before the lead ship of her Colorado-class, the first class to mount sixteen-inch guns. Colorado (BB-45) and West Virginia (BB-48) were commissioned during 1923. Eight of these battleships, Nevada and Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Arizona, Tennessee and California, Maryland and West Virginia—all built within a decade of one another—would forever be linked by the events of December 7, 1941. Colorado escaped the date only because it was undergoing an overhaul in the Bremerton Navy Yard in Washington State.
Walter R. Borneman (Brothers Down: Pearl Harbor and the Fate of the Many Brothers Aboard the USS Arizona)
Pity that not one prediction ever made by Supply Siders ever came even remotely close to coming true. And that is ever. At any level, from the federal budget to states like Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma.
David Brin (Polemical Judo: Memes for our Political Knife-fight)
succeed. Despite a lack of evidence, the self-esteem movement took hold in the United States in a way that it did not in most of the world. So, it was understandable that PTA parents focused their energies on the nonacademic side of their children’s school. They dutifully sold cupcakes at the bake sales and helped coach the soccer teams. They doled out praise and trophies at a rate unmatched in other countries. They were their kids’ boosters, their number-one fans. These were the parents that Kim’s principal in Oklahoma praised as highly involved. And PTA parents certainly contributed to the school’s culture, budget, and sense of community. However, there was not much evidence that PTA parents helped their children become critical thinkers. In
Amanda Ripley (The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way)
The dust blew all over the Great Plains, but the worst and most persistent storms were in parts of five states—southern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles, and northeastern New Mexico.
Timothy Egan (The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl)
Republican state representative Jim Olsen introduced a bill that would prohibit Oklahoma state agencies and public school districts from teaching “that one race is the unique oppressor” during American slavery or “another race is the unique victim in the institution of slavery.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Raise an Antiracist)
Both the Redds and Bleus have pets, since Americans of all political stripes love animals. But it turns out there is a dog/cat divide that breaks down along partisan lines. Euromonitor has tracked pet ownership in the United States and around the world. Its state-by-state map of dog versus cat preferences doesn’t look much different from the electoral college map. Cats outnumber dogs in the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and the Pacific Coast. The South and Southwest are dog country. Including the District of Columbia, of the ten states with the largest cat-to-dog ratios, nine regularly vote Democratic for president—Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, DC, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and New York. Only Ohio fails to fit the pattern. Of the ten states with the largest dog-to-cat ratios, eight regularly vote Republican—Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arizona, Tennessee, and Missouri. New Mexico is the outlier here. Other studies have also revealed a relationship between ideology and pet preferences, with conservatives more dog-friendly and liberals more cat-friendly.
Marc Hetherington (Prius Or Pickup?: How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America's Great Divide)
The Texas Legislature got involved, arguing proration bills all through the summer. Finally, on August 5, a day after the governor of Oklahoma declared martial law and sent in troops to shut down and begin regulating his state’s oil fields, Hunt and thirty-six other large East Texas operators sent a telegram to Governor Sterling urging him to follow suit. Sterling gave in. On August 16, declaring East Texas oilmen to be in open “rebellion” against the state, he declared martial law and sent in the National Guard to shut down the oil field.
Bryan Burrough (The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes)
it is not uncommon for experts in DNA analysis to testify at a criminal trial that a DNA sample taken from a crime scene matches that taken from a suspect. How certain are such matches? When DNA evidence was first introduced, a number of experts testified that false positives are impossible in DNA testing. Today DNA experts regularly testify that the odds of a random person’s matching the crime sample are less than 1 in 1 million or 1 in 1 billion. With those odds one could hardly blame a juror for thinking, throw away the key. But there is another statistic that is often not presented to the jury, one having to do with the fact that labs make errors, for instance, in collecting or handling a sample, by accidentally mixing or swapping samples, or by misinterpreting or incorrectly reporting results. Each of these errors is rare but not nearly as rare as a random match. The Philadelphia City Crime Laboratory, for instance, admitted that it had swapped the reference sample of the defendant and the victim in a rape case, and a testing firm called Cellmark Diagnostics admitted a similar error.20 Unfortunately, the power of statistics relating to DNA presented in court is such that in Oklahoma a court sentenced a man named Timothy Durham to more than 3,100 years in prison even though eleven witnesses had placed him in another state at the time of the crime. It turned out that in the initial analysis the lab had failed to completely separate the DNA of the rapist and that of the victim in the fluid they tested, and the combination of the victim’s and the rapist’s DNA produced a positive result when compared with Durham’s. A later retest turned up the error, and Durham was released after spending nearly four years in prison.21 Estimates of the error rate due to human causes vary, but many experts put it at around 1 percent. However, since the error rate of many labs has never been measured, courts often do not allow testimony on this overall statistic. Even if courts did allow testimony regarding false positives, how would jurors assess it? Most jurors assume that given the two types of error—the 1 in 1 billion accidental match and the 1 in 100 lab-error match—the overall error rate must be somewhere in between, say 1 in 500 million, which is still for most jurors beyond a reasonable doubt. But employing the laws of probability, we find a much different answer. The way to think of it is this: Since both errors are very unlikely, we can ignore the possibility that there is both an accidental match and a lab error. Therefore, we seek the probability that one error or the other occurred. That is given by our sum rule: it is the probability of a lab error (1 in 100) + the probability of an accidental match (1 in 1 billion). Since the latter is 10 million times smaller than the former, to a very good approximation the chance of both errors is the same as the chance of the more probable error—that is, the chances are 1 in 100. Given both possible causes, therefore, we should ignore the fancy expert testimony about the odds of accidental matches and focus instead on the much higher laboratory error rate—the very data courts often do not allow attorneys to present! And so the oft-repeated claims of DNA infallibility are exaggerated.
Leonard Mlodinow (The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives)
Dr. Billi Tiner graduated from Oklahoma State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine in 1999. She has worked in a variety of veterinary fields including small animal practice and shelter animal practice. She currently lives with her husband, two children, three dogs, and three cats in Missouri. Dr. Tiner is the author of four middle-grade fiction novels
Billi Tiner (Dogs Aren't Men)
Upon its passing, the Indian Removal Act effectively kicked out almost 125,000 Native Americans, mostly from the Cherokee nation, from their ancestral homes in Georgia, and sent the people, both young and old, trekking thousands of miles on foot towards their new settlements in Oklahoma. An estimated 4,000 Native Americans died, either through exhaustion, hunger, or exposure, while on the way to Oklahoma. This huge number of casualties is what led to this forced exodus to get the moniker “The Trail of Tears.
William D. Willis (American History: US History: An Overview of the Most Important People & Events. The History of United States: From Indians, to "Contemporary" History ... Native Americans, Indians, New York Book 1))
Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the Western territories in which women staked out land were places in which woman suffrage would precede passage of the nineteenth amendment. Women could vote in Wyoming, Utah, Washington, Montana, Colorado, Idaho, California, Arizona, Kansas, Oregon, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan, and Alaska before 1920, while women in the more urban, established Eastern states (save for New York) had to wait for the Constitution to change.
Rebecca Traister (All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation)
Oklahoma's state government was, by this point, unbelievably dysfunctional, and the state's infrastructure was the worst in the nation, and the roads and bridges were crumbling everywhere.
Sam Anderson (Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis)
Oklahoma’s ultra Conservative government after years of aggressive tax cuts even during the boom years had been corrupted the state. Social services, mental health programs, public transportation and infrastructure were all in various stages of collapse. The public education budget was stripped so bear that teachers had started flooding out to neighbouring states in search of living wages, forcing Oklahoma to patch the gaps by issuing hundreds of emergency teaching licenses and even cutting some of the school back to 4 days a week. It was a radical experiment in ante government governance and it was failing miserably. In 2014, Oklahoma botched an execution so badly that it horrified the entire world. The state was becoming what it used to be: a nowhere place that occasionally erupted with very bad reviews, a kind of grim American joke.
Sam Anderson (Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis)
This was a place whose newspaper published not only a daily prayer on its front page but near-constant caricatures of an idiotic Barack Obama on its editorial page, and where a six-foot-tall granite monument of the Ten Commandments would soon be erected next to the state capitol.
Sam Anderson (Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis)
Gottlieb told the meeting he was convinced that “successful brainwashing” was rooted in the use of drugs: LSD, mescaline, cocaine, or even nicotine. He did not yet know which one — “but it had to be something like that.” He reminded them that all over the United States in research centers — Boston Psychiatric; the University of Illinois Medical School, Mount Sinai and Columbia University in New York, the University of Oklahoma, the Addiction Research Center at Lexington, Kentucky, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester, among others — researchers were running projects funded by the CIA to try to prove his theory.
Gordon Thomas (Secrets & Lies: A History of CIA Mind Control & germ Warfare)
Even after Jason was met by so many defeats, he never said no to any situation. Jason Gesser moved on and on with his determination and willpower. Sticking around the Rose Bowl was something he couldn’t do for a while, but then he rose from all the downtrodden history and made a match for himself. He killed the whole game with his zeal and enthusiasm. Since then, he is known as the golden boy who has played through the cracked and the dislocated ribs with a severely sprained ankle during his Washington State Career. This was in the final and the biggest game. Gesser has been sacked around six times by the blitzing Oklahoma defense and has two passes in the game. Jason Gesser has played and won various games. He once completed 17 completions in 34 attempts for around 23 yards.
Jason Gesser