“
Ngo Diem was heard to say, “I want a repressive machine controlling the whole of the country of South Vietnam from Saigon to the remotest villages. You shall apply massacres, torture, deportations, and mass imprisonment while conducting constant raids. You shall make the population so fearful of this government that no-one shall ever dare to become a revolutionary or any other kind of outlaw!”
(A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume Two)
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Michael G. Kramer
“
There’s a lot of things wrong with this country, but one of the few things still right with it is that a man can steer clear of the organized bullshit if he really wants to. It’s a goddamned luxury, and if I were you, I’d take advantage of it while you can.
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Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, 1968-1976)
“
I feel that God made my body perfect the way I was born. Then man robbed me, took away my power, and left me a cripple. My womanhood was stolen. If God had wanted those body parts missing, why did he create them?
I just pray that one day no woman will have to experience this pain. It will become a thing of the past. People will say "Did you hear, female genital mutilation has been outlawed in Somalia?" Then the next country, and the next, and so on, until the world is safe for all women. What a happy day that will be, and that's what I'm working toward. In'shallah, if God is willing, it will happen.
”
”
Waris Dirie (Desert Flower)
“
Don’t you know that slavery was outlawed?”
“No,” the guard said, “you’re wrong. Slavery was outlawed with the exception of prisons. Slavery is legal in prisons.”
I looked it up and sure enough, she was right. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution says:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Well, that explained a lot of things. That explained why jails and prisons all over the country are filled to the brim with Black and Third World people, why so many Black people can’t find a job on the streets and are forced to survive the best way they know how. Once you’re in prison, there are plenty of jobs, and, if you don’t want to work, they beat you up and throw you in a hole. If every state had to pay workers to do the jobs prisoners are forced to do, the salaries would amount to billions… Prisons are a profitable business. They are a way of legally perpetuating slavery. In every state more and more prisons are being built and even more are on the drawing board. Who are they for? They certainly aren’t planning to put white people in them. Prisons are part of this government’s genocidal war against Black and Third World people.
”
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Assata Shakur (Assata: An Autobiography)
“
She’d done things to him he thought only happened to characters in country-western songs, laying waste to his car, his dogs, driving him from his home, and making an outlaw of him. It was almost funny.
”
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Joe Hill (Heart-Shaped Box)
“
General Maza, the survivor of two grotesque assassination attempts, put it bluntly: 'This country won't be put right as long as Escobar is alive.
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Mark Bowden (Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw)
“
How about this? Hong Kong had been appropriated by British drug pushers in the 1840s. We wanted Chinese silk, porcelain, and spices. The Chinese didn't want our clothes, tools, or salted herring, and who can blame them? They had no demand. Our solution was to make a demand, by getting large sections of the populace addicted to opium, a drug which the Chinese government had outlawed. When the Chinese understandably objected to this arrangement, we kicked the fuck out of them, set up a puppet government in Peking that hung signs on parks saying NO DOGS OR CHINESE, and occupied this corner of their country as an import base. Fucking godawful behavior, when you think about it. And we accuse them of xenophobia. It would be like the Colombians invading Washington in the early twenty-first century and forcing the White House to legalize heroin. And saying, "Don't worry, we'll show ourselves out, and take Florida while we're at it, okay? Thanks very much.
”
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David Mitchell (Ghostwritten)
“
In the world's most dangerous country, the job of going after Pablo was the most dangerous position of all.
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Mark Bowden (Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw)
“
We are a race of tradition-lovers in a new land, of king-reverers in a Republic, of hero-worshipers in a society of mundane get-and-spend. It is a Country and a Time where any bank clerk or common laborer can become a famous outlaw, where an outlaw can in a very short time be sainted in song and story into a Robin Hood, where a Frontier Model Excalibur can be drawn from the block at any gunshop for twenty dollars.
”
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Oakley Hall (Warlock (Legends West, #1))
“
The Hell's Angels are very definitely a lower-class phenomenon, but their backgrounds are not necessarily poverty-stricken. Despite some grim moments, their parents seem to have had credit. Most of the outlaws are the sons of people who came to California either just before or during World War II. Many have lost contact with their families, and I have never met an Angel who claimed to have a hometown in any sense that people who use that term might understand it. Terry the Tramp, for instance, is "from" Detroit, Norfolk, Long Island, Los Angeles, Fresno and Sacramento. As a child, he lived all over the country, not in poverty but in total mobility. Like most of the others, he has no roots. He relates entirely to the present, the moment, the action.
”
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Hunter S. Thompson (Hell's Angels)
“
Throughout the 1950s, the government was reluctant to recognise that the country had a problem with racism. But there was some movement. In 1960, backbench Labour MP Archibald Fenner Brockway repeatedly tried to bring forward a Race Discrimination Bill with the aim of outlawing ‘discrimination to the detriment of any person on the grounds of colour, race and religion in the United Kingdom’.28 Every single one of the nine times he tabled the Bill, it was defeated.
”
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Reni Eddo-Lodge (Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race)
“
How many cats you got? Several. Depends on what you mean by got. Some of em are half wild and the rest are just outlaws. They run out the door when they heard your truck.
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Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)
“
TO MY MIND, THOUGH, there is a third development that has altered our parenting experience above all others, and that is the wholesale transformation of the child’s role, both in the home and in society. Since the end of World War II, childhood has been completely redefined. Today, we work hard to shield children from life’s hardships. But throughout most of our country’s history, we did not. Rather, kids worked. In the earliest days of our nation, they cared for their siblings or spent time in the fields; as the country industrialized, they worked in mines and textile mills, in factories and canneries, in street trades. Over time, reformers managed to outlaw child labor practices. Yet change was slow. It wasn’t until our soldiers returned from World War II that childhood, as we now know it, began. The family economy was no longer built on a system of reciprocity, with parents sheltering and feeding their children, and children, in return, kicking something back into the family till. The relationship became asymmetrical. Children stopped working, and parents worked twice as hard. Children went from being our employees to our bosses. The way most historians describe this transformation is to say that the child went from “useful” to “protected.” But the sociologist Viviana Zelizer came up with a far more pungent phrase. She characterized the modern child as “economically worthless but emotionally priceless.” Today parents pour more capital—both emotional and literal—into their children than ever before, and they’re spending longer, more concentrated hours with their children than they did when the workday ended at five o’clock and the majority of women still stayed home. Yet parents don’t know what it is they’re supposed to do, precisely, in their new jobs. “Parenting” may have become its own activity (its own profession, so to speak), but its goals are far from clear.
”
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Jennifer Senior (All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood)
“
In 2010, Iceland—with a lesbian prime minister and a parliament that is 50 percent female—became the first country in the world to outlaw strip clubs for feminist, rather than religious, reasons. “I
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Caitlin Moran (How To Be A Woman)
“
But make no mistake about it, the moral arguments that undermined slavery were not enough to bring about the abolition of it; many people and countries had to be dragged kicking and screaming up the moral ladder, as evidenced by the fact that after it outlawed slavery in 1807, the British Royal Navy had to patrol the African coast in search of illegal slave trade for more than sixty years, until 1870, seizing nearly 1,600 ships and liberating more than 150,000 slaves in the process.32 And, as previously noted, in the United States it took the deaths of more than 650,000 Americans in the Civil War to finally bring about slavery’s end there.
”
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Michael Shermer (The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom)
“
Slavery is a harsh reality thatmour better angels would like to think ended two centuries ago, when many countries passed laws against such bondage withing their borders. But this sort of bondage is a global blind spot, because governments, companies, and consumers either don't know it occurs or, when they do, prefer to look the other way
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Ian Urbina (The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier)
“
And when the governor kept saying how 'we' wanted you to do this; and 'we' wanted you to do that, I kept looking round for the other blokes, wondering how many of them there was. Of course, I knew there were thousands of them, but as far as I knew only one was in the room. And there are thousands of them, all over the poxeaten country, in shops, offices, railway stations, cars, houses, pubs—In-law blokes like you and them, all on the watch for Out-law blokes like me and us—and waiting to phone for the coppers as soon as we make a false move. And it'll always be there, I'll tell you that now, because I haven't finished making all my false moves yet, and I dare say I won't until I kick the bucket.
”
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Alan Sillitoe (The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner)
“
From 1976 to 1983, Washington supported a devastating military dictatorship in Argentina that ran all branches of government, outlawed elections, and encouraged school and business leaders to provide information on subversive people. The administration took control of the police, banned political and union organizations, and tried to eliminate all oppositional elements in the country through harassment, torture, and murder. Journalists, students, and union members faced a particularly large amount of bloody repression, thus ridding the nation of a whole generation of social movement leaders. As was the case in other Latin American countries, the threat of communism and armed guerrilla movements was used as an excuse for Argentina's dictatorial crackdowns. Hundreds of torture camps and prisons were created. Many of the dead were put into mass graves or thrown out of places into the ocean. Five hundred babies of the murdered were given to torturers' families and the assets of the dead totaling in the tens of millions of dollars, were all divided up among the perpetrators of the nightmare. Thirty thousand people were killed in Argentina's repression.
”
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Benjamin Dangl
“
I loved this man and everything-
I was about to write “and everything about him”, but I’ve stopped myself this time. In the aftermath of meeting waylon, I might well have said those words. I was blissed out, starry eyed in love. I realized that this would not be a conventional relationship because he was not a conventional man. I knew I was in for a wild ride. There could be no doubt that Waylon was a wild man.
”
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Jessi Colter (An Outlaw and a Lady: A Memoir of Music, Life with Waylon, and the Faith that Brought me Home)
“
Slavery has been outlawed in most arab countries for years now but there are villages in jordan made up entirely of descendants of runaway Saudi slaves. Abdulrahman knows he might be free, but hes still an arab. No one ever wants to be the arab - its too old and too tragic, too mysterious and too exasperating, and too lonely for anyone but an actual arab to put up with for very long. Essentially, its an image problem. Ask anyone, Persian, Turks, even Lebanese and Egyptians - none of them want to be the arab. They say things like, well, really we're indo-russian-asian european- chaldeans, so in the end the only one who gets to be the arab is the same little old bedouin with his goats and his sheep and his poetry about his goats and his sheep, because he doesnt know that he's the arab, and what he doesnt know wont hurt him.
”
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Diana Abu-Jaber (Crescent)
“
I cannot return," she said, sadness weighing down each word.
"I am sorry."
"We need you, Isabelle," Adam said, his voice rough. "We need your clever brain and your wicked shot and your passion for helping people."
"You are talking about Robin," she whispered.
"No, I'm not," he said forcefully. "I'm talking about you. The girl that stood up to a camp of outlaws and challenged for her place among them. The girl who took on the most powerful man in the country and beat him. The girl who stared down a soldier of the king to protect innocent people. We've got our hands full helping the rebel barons and protecting the people of Sherwood. No one knows about Robin's death besides the Men, and we can't let anyone find out. The people need something to believe in now more then ever. We need Robin Hood to live on, even if the man himself is gone. But I'm too tall and Little's a terrible shot. Helena's the only one with a bow arm good enough to pretend to be Robin, and she won't let any of us hear the end of it. We need you." He cleared his throat. "I need you.
”
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Jenny Elder Moke (Hood)
“
Soon enough, the government that silences a media outlet finds muffling a second easier. The parliament that outlaws one political party has a precedent for banning the next. The majority that strips a particular minority of its rights doesn’t stop there. The security force that beats protesters and gets away with it doesn’t hesitate before doing so again, and when repression helps a dictator in country A to extend his hold on power, the rulers in country B embark on a parallel road. Before too long, Mussolini’s prescription has been followed and once again, feather by feather, the chicken is plucked.
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Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
“
Among those troops that I had joined were plenty of regular units with reliable officers, crowds of restless adventurers on the lookout for a fight and with it the chances of loot and relaxation of ordinary rules of conduct. Patriots could not bear the idea of break down of law and order at home and wish to guard the frontiers from the incursion of the Red Flood. There was the Baltic Landswehr, recruited from the local gentry who were determined at all cost to save their 700 year old traditions, their noble and vigorous yet fastidious culture, the Eastern bulwark of German civilization. And there were German battalions consisting of men who wanted to settle in the country who were hungering for land. Of troops desiring to fight for the existing government there were none. The like-minded ones were soon dissociated from general mass which was swept eastwards by crash of Western front. We seemed suddenly to have collected as if a secret signal. We found ourselves apart from the crowd. Knowing neither what we are we sought not gold. The blood suddenly ran hotly through our veins and called us to adventure and hazard. Drove us to wandering and danger. And herded together those of us who realized our profound kinship with one another. We were a band of warriors, extravagant in our demands, triumphantly definite in our decisions. What we wanted we did not know, but what we knew we did not want. To force our way through the prisoning walls of the world. To march over burning field, to stamp over ruins and scattered ashes, to dash recklessly through wild forests, over blasted heaps to push, conquer, eat our way towards the East, to the white hot dark cold land that stretched between ourselves and Asia. Was that what we wanted? I do not know if that was our desire and they was what we did. And the search for reasons why was lost in the tumult of the continuous fighting.
”
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Ernst von Salomon (The Outlaws)
“
On the labour front in 1919 there was an unprecedented number of strikes involving many millions of workers. One of the lager strikes was mounted by the AF of L against the United States Steel Corporation. At that time workers in the steel industry put in an average sixty-eight-hour week for bare subsistence wages. The strike spread to other plants, resulting in considerable violence -- the death of eighteen striking workers, the calling out of troops to disperse picket lines, and so forth. By branding the strikers Bolsheviks and thereby separating them from their public support, the Corporation broke the strike. In Boston, the Police Department went on strike and governor Calvin Coolidge replaced them. In Seattle there was a general strike which precipitated a nationwide 'red scare'. this was the first red scare. Sixteen bombs were found in the New York Post Office just before May Day. The bombs were addressed to men prominent in American life, including John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. It is not clear today who was responsible for those bombs -- Red terrorists, Black anarchists, or their enemies -- but the effect was the same. Other bombs pooped off all spring, damaging property, killing and maiming innocent people, and the nation responded with an alarm against Reds. It was feared that at in Russia, they were about to take over the country and shove large cocks into everyone's mother. Strike that. The Press exacerbated public feeling. May Day parades in the big cities were attacked by policemen, and soldiers and sailors. The American Legion, just founded, raided IWW headquarters in the State of Washington. Laws against seditious speech were passed in State Legislatures across the country and thousands of people were jailed, including a Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee who was sentenced to twenty years in prison. To say nothing of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 which took care of thousands more. To say nothing of Eugene V. Debs. On the evening of 2 January 1920, Attorney General Palmer, who had his eye on the White House, organized a Federal raid on Communist Party offices throughout the nation. With his right-hand assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, at his right hand, Palmer effected the arrest of over six thousand people, some Communist aliens, some just aliens, some just Communists, and some neither Communists nor aliens but persons visiting those who had been arrested. Property was confiscated, people chained together, handcuffed, and paraded through the streets (in Boston), or kept in corridors of Federal buildings for eight days without food or proper sanitation (in Detroit). Many historians have noted this phenomenon. The raids made an undoubted contribution to the wave of vigilantism winch broke over the country. The Ku Klux Klan blossomed throughout the South and West. There were night raidings, floggings, public hangings, and burnings. Over seventy Negroes were lynched in 1919, not a few of them war veterans. There were speeches against 'foreign ideologies' and much talk about 'one hundred per cent Americanism'. The teaching of evolution in the schools of Tennessee was outlawed. Elsewhere textbooks were repudiated that were not sufficiently patriotic. New immigration laws made racial distinctions and set stringent quotas. Jews were charged with international conspiracy and Catholics with trying to bring the Pope to America. The country would soon go dry, thus creating large-scale, organized crime in the US. The White Sox threw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. And the stage was set for the trial of two Italian-born anarchists, N. Sacco and B. Vanzetti, for the alleged murder of a paymaster in South Braintree, Mass. The story of the trial is well known and often noted by historians and need not be recounted here. To nothing of World War II--
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E.L. Doctorow (The Book of Daniel)
“
Ellison, Gates, and the other members of this government/industry collaboration used the lockdown to accelerate construction of their 5G network54 of satellites, antennae, biometric facial recognition, and “track and trace” infrastructure that they, and their government and intelligence agency partners, can use to mine and monetize our data, further suppress dissent, to compel obedience to arbitrary dictates, and to manage the rage that comes as Americans finally wake up to the fact that this outlaw gang has stolen our democracy, our civil rights, our country, and our way of life—while we huddled in orchestrated fear from a flu-like virus.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
It strikes me you might place your gifts better. Why should you send powder to a ruffian who will use it to commit crimes? But for the deplorable weakness every one here seems to have for the bandits, they would have disappeared out of Corsica long ago."
"The worst men in our country are not those who are 'in the country.'"
"Give them bread, if it so please you. But I will not have you supply them with ammunition."
"Brother," said Colomba, in a serious voice, "you are master here, and everything in this house belongs to you. But I warn you that I will give this little girl my mezzaro, so that she may sell it; rather than refuse powder to a bandit.
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Prosper Mérimée (Colomba)
“
One of Palau’s biggest draws for tourist divers is its shark population. When I asked for Remengesau’s reaction to the hundreds of shark fins found in the hold of the Shin Jyi, he immediately launched into an explanation of the economic impact of killing sharks. Alive, an individual shark is worth over $170,000 annually in tourism dollars, or nearly $2 million over its lifetime, he said. Dead, each sells for $100, and usually that money goes to a foreign poacher. Even if his numbers seemed a bit overstated, there was no doubting the financial consequences of killing the sharks. More than a dozen countries, including Palau and Taiwan, had banned shark finning. But demand for the fins, especially in Asia, remained high. Served at Chinese weddings and other official banquets, shark-fin soup, which can sell for over $100 per bowl, has for centuries signified wealth.
”
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Ian Urbina (The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier)
“
The boat driver reminded me that just because it was sunk didn’t mean someone couldn’t still steal it. After all, this is why there are “sea scrappers,” he said. Of course he was quite right, I admitted. I’d learned about these underworld characters when I was reporting in Indonesia. In that country, sea scrappers came mostly from the Madurese ethnic group and were renowned for their efficiency in stripping sunken ships of their valuable metals. They paddled their wooden boats out a couple miles from shore, equipped with crowbars, hammers, hatchets, and a diesel-powered air compressor tethered to what looked like a garden hose for breathing. Diving sometimes deeper than fifty feet, the men chopped away huge chunks of metal from the wreck, attaching them to cables for hoisting. In boom times, the metal and parts from a bigger ship, though rusty and barnacled, could sell for $1 million.
”
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Ian Urbina (The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier)
“
Texas Rangers are men who cannot be stampeded. We walk into any situation and handle it without instruction from our commander. Sometimes we work as a unit, sometimes we work alone.” He turned his attention to the jurors. “We preserve the law. We track down train and bank robbers. We subdue riots. We guard our borders. We’ll follow an outlaw clear across the country if we need to. In my four years of service, I’ve traveled eighty-six thousand miles on horse, nineteen hundred on train, gone on two hundred thirty scouts, made two hundred seventeen arrests, returned five hundred six head of stolen cattle, assisted forty-three local sheriffs, guarded a half dozen jails, and spent more time on the trail than I have in my own bed. We’ve been around since before the Alamo, and”—he turned to Hood, impaling him with his stare—“we’re touchy as a teased snake when riled, so I wouldn’t recommend it.
”
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Deeanne Gist (Fair Play)
“
KNEE SURGERY I’D FIRST HURT MY KNEES IN FALLUJAH WHEN THE WALL FELL on me. Cortisone shots helped for a while, but the pain kept coming back and getting worse. The docs told me I needed to have my legs operated on, but doing that would have meant I would have to take time off and miss the war. So I kept putting it off. I settled into a routine where I’d go to the doc, get a shot, go back to work. The time between shots became shorter and shorter. It got down to every two months, then every month. I made it through Ramadi, but just barely. My knees started locking and it was difficult to get down the stairs. I no longer had a choice, so, soon after I got home in 2007, I went under the knife. The surgeons cut my tendons to relieve pressure so my kneecaps would slide back over. They had to shave down my kneecaps because I had worn grooves in them. They injected synthetic cartilage material and shaved the meniscus. Somewhere along the way they also repaired an ACL. I was like a racing car, being repaired from the ground up. When they were done, they sent me to see Jason, a physical therapist who specializes in working with SEALs. He’d been a trainer for the Pittsburgh Pirates. After 9/11, he decided to devote himself to helping the country. He chose to do that by working with the military. He took a massive pay cut to help put us back together. I DIDN’T KNOW ALL THAT THE FIRST DAY WE MET. ALL I WANTED to hear was how long it was going to take to rehab. He gave me a pensive look. “This surgery—civilians need a year to get back,” he said finally. “Football players, they’re out eight months. SEALs—it’s hard to say. You hate being out of action and will punish yourselves to get back.” He finally predicted six months. I think we did it in five. But I thought I would surely die along the way. JASON PUT ME INTO A MACHINE THAT WOULD STRETCH MY knee. Every day I had to see how much further I could adjust it. I would sweat up a storm as it bent my knee. I finally got it to ninety degrees. “That’s outstanding,” he told me. “Now get more.” “More?” “More!” He also had a machine that sent a shock to my muscle through electrodes. Depending on the muscle, I would have to stretch and point my toes up and down. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is clearly a form of torture that should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention, even for use on SEALs. Naturally, Jason kept upping the voltage. But the worst of all was the simplest: the exercise. I had to do more, more, more. I remember calling Taya many times and telling her I was sure I was going to puke if not die before the day was out. She seemed sympathetic but, come to think of it in retrospect, she and Jason may have been in on it together. There was a stretch where Jason had me doing crazy amounts of ab exercises and other things to my core muscles. “Do you understand it’s my knees that were operated on?” I asked him one day when I thought I’d reached my limit. He just laughed. He had a scientific explanation about how everything in the body depends on strong core muscles, but I think he just liked kicking my ass around the gym. I swear I heard a bullwhip crack over my head any time I started to slack. I always thought the best shape I was ever in was straight out of BUD/S. But I was in far better shape after spending five months with him. Not only were my knees okay, the rest of me was in top condition. When I came back to my platoon, they all asked if I had been taking steroids.
”
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Chris Kyle (American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History)
“
Just so surely as we tend to disintegrate these nuclei of nationalistic culture do we tend to create hordes of men and women without a spiritual country, cultural outlaws, without taste, without standards but those of the mob. We sentence them to live on the most rudimentary planes of American life. The influences at the centre of the nuclei are centripetal. They make for the intelligence and the social values which mean an enhancement of life. And just because the foreign-born retains this expressiveness is he likely to be a better citizen of the American community. The influences at the fringe, however, are centrifugal, anarchical. They make for detached fragments of peoples. Those who came to find liberty achieve only license. They become the flotsam and jetsam of American life, the downward undertow of our civilization with its leering cheapness and falseness of taste and spiritual outlook, the absence of mind and sincere feeling which we see in our slovenly towns, our vapid moving pictures, our popular novels, and in the vacuous faces of the crowds on the city street. This is the cultural wreckage of our time, and it is from the fringes of the Anglo-Saxon as well as the other stocks that it falls. America has as yet no impelling integrating force. It makes too easily for this detritus of cultures. In our loose, free country, no constraining national purpose, no tenacious folk-tradition and folk-style hold the people to a line.
”
”
Randolph Bourne
“
That's all well and good,but my concern is for Willow. I think she's beginning to realize that she both needs and wants the respect and companionship of the women in this town. And frankly, a man with your reputation can only hurt her. Not that I think you'd deliberately cause her harm. I don't. But the girl already has several black marks against her and your attentions could very well add to her problems.Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you?"
Rider plowed his fingers through his jet hair. "Yes, you'd like me to stay clear of her. I understand,but I'm afraid I can't do that. Look, I know it's asking a lot,but you'll have to trust me where Willow Vaughn is concerned. I promise you that she'll come to no harm from me."
"Trust,Mr. Sinclair,is something to be earned."
"I know,and I hope you'll give me time to earn yours. But if you want me to pack up and find another place to stay, I'll understand."
She considered that a moment. "No," she finally answered. "It would serve no purpose. This town has become a haven for every outlaw in the country and if every boarding house and hotel in Tombstone emptied out the disreputables, they'd soon go broke. I doubt I'll be held accountable for housing one more. Besides, at least this way,I can keep an eye on you."
Rider smiled and stood, politely helping her to her feet. "Thanks. And by the way, for what it's worth, I'm not an outlaw."
"If I truly believed you were, young man, you'd know it."
"I'm very sorry for any trouble I might have caused you, Mrs. Brigham. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to change my clothes and saddle the horses."
Rider walked to the parlor doors, glancing back over his shoulder as Miriam added, "You've asked me to trust you,Mr. Sinclair. Don't disappoint me or I guarantee you'll be sorry. I may be a woman, and not a young one at that, but I still have a few good tricks up my sleeve. If Willow suffers so much as a broken fingernail on your account, you'll have me to answer to."
Rider inclined his head and opened the door to leave. "I'll do my best, ma'am, but much depends on the young lady." Knowing he'd already said more than he should, he turned and left.
”
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Charlotte McPherren (Song of the Willow)
“
Her body encouraged his to release its potent payload sooner rather than later.
”
”
Ellen Graves (Outlaw Country)
“
Taking quick looks behind him on the trail, Lew Basnight was apt to see things that weren’t necessarily there. Mounted figure in a black duster and hat, always still, turned sidewise in the hard, sunlit distance, horse bent to the barren ground. No real beam of attention, if anything a withdrawal into its own lopsided star-shaped silhouette, as if that were all it had ever aspired to. It did not take long to convince himself that the presence behind him now, always just out of eyeball range, belonged to one and the same subject, the notorious dynamiter of the San Juans known as the Kieselguhr Kid. The Kid happened to be of prime interest to White City Investigations. Just around the time Lew was stepping off the train at the Union Station in Denver, and the troubles up in the Coeur d’Alene were starting to bleed over everywhere in the mining country, where already hardly a day passed without an unscheduled dynamite blast in it someplace, the philosophy among larger, city-based detective agencies like Pinkerton’s and Thiel’s began to change, being as they now found themselves with far too much work on their hands. On the theory that they could look at their unsolved cases the way a banker might at instruments of debt, they began selling off to less-established and accordingly hungrier outfits like White City their higher-risk tickets, including that of the long-sought Kieselguhr Kid. It was the only name anybody seemed to know him by, “Kieselguhr” being a kind of fine clay, used to soak up nitroglycerine and stabilize it into dynamite. The Kid’s family had supposedly come over as refugees from Germany shortly after the reaction of 1849, settling at first near San Antonio, which the Kid-to-be, having developed a restlessness for higher ground, soon left, and then after a spell in the Sangre de Cristos, so it went, heading west again, the San Juans his dream, though not for the silver-mine money, nor the trouble he could get into, both of those, he was old enough by then to appreciate, easy enough to come by. No, it was for something else. Different tellers of the tale had different thoughts on what. “Don’t carry pistols, don’t own a shotgun nor a rifle—no, his trade-mark, what you’ll find him packing in those tooled holsters, is always these twin sticks of dynamite, with a dozen more—” “Couple dozen, in big bandoliers across his chest.” “Easy fellow to recognize, then.” “You’d think so, but no two eyewitnesses have ever agreed. It’s like all that blasting rattles it loose from everybody’s memory.” “But say, couldn’t even a slow hand just gun him before he could get a fuse lit?” “Wouldn’t bet on it. Got this clever wind-proof kind of striker rig on to each holster, like a safety match, so all’s he has to do’s draw, and the ‘sucker’s all lit and ready to throw.” “Fast fuses, too. Some boys down the Uncompahgre found out about that just last August, nothin left to bury but spurs and belt buckles. Even old Butch Cassidy and them’ll begin to coo like a barn full of pigeons whenever the Kid’s in the county.” Of course, nobody ever’d been sure about who was in Butch Cassidy’s gang either. No shortage of legendary deeds up here, but eyewitnesses could never swear beyond a doubt who in each case, exactly, had done which, and, more than fear of retaliation—it was as if physical appearance actually shifted, causing not only aliases to be inconsistently assigned but identity itself to change. Did something, something essential, happen to human personality above a certain removal from sea level? Many quoted Dr. Lombroso’s observation about how lowland folks tended to be placid and law-abiding while mountain country bred revolutionaries and outlaws. That was over in Italy, of course. Theorizers about the recently discovered subconscious mind, reluctant to leave out any variable that might seem helpful, couldn’t avoid the altitude, and the barometric pressure that went with it. This was spirit, after all.
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day)
“
A banker’s wife with two children, Woodman undertook the story-gathering pilgrimage and was soon writing one of the most respected dramas of early radio. One of the sponsor’s employees in California, a self-styled “desert rat” named W. W. “Wash” Cahill, was lined up as her guide. Her trips into the desert became annual events, and soon she was well versed in the ways of prospectors, outlaws, and saloon girls. She spent up to two months a year prowling through ghost towns, interviewing oldtimers, sifting through museums, and poring over yellowing newsprint. She packed into the back country, scaled the mountains west of Death Valley, talked with small-town newspaper editors, old men who ran gas stations, lonely wives on the fringes of nowhere, and—when she could get into the saloons—bartenders. Then she returned to New York to write the stories she had gathered, and the next year she did it all again.
”
”
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
“
It was difficult to define an outlaw in a country where there was no law.
”
”
Zane Grey (Robbers' Roost)
“
While men like Garfield strolled the aisles of Machinery Hall in Philadelphia, marveling at the greatest inventions of the industrial age, George Armstrong Custer and his entire regiment were being slaughtered in Montana by the Northern Plains Indians they had tried to force back onto reservations. As fairgoers stared in amazement at Remington’s typewriter and Thomas Edison’s automatic telegraph system, Wild Bill Hickok was shot to death in a saloon in Deadwood, leaving outlaws like Jesse James and Billy the Kid to terrorize the West. As middle-class families waited patiently in line for their chance to marvel at the Statue of Liberty’s hand, freed slaves throughout the country still faced each day in fear and abject poverty.
”
”
Candice Millard (Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President)
“
This is our country, too, and we can goddam well control it if
we learn to use the tools.
—HST, 1969
”
”
William McKeen (Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson)
“
Try as he did at such times, his thoughts would inevitably turn to the pretty girl named Annie. Tony was always able to sense when the cowboy's deep longing for the girl was at its worst, and nudged him with his nose. He reached up and stroked the horse's mane absently, his thoughts further away than those stars above him. A pretty girl like that was probably at some dance, courted by a long list of admirers. A mere cowboy stood nary a chance, and one with a reputation like Wyn's even less. Even being seen with a man like Wyn should give Annie pause. With this sad realization he dozed, his gun always within reach. Even the quickest and most accurate of men could take nothing for granted in a land whose beauty often masked its danger. Wyn knew the biggest danger, however, was the men who rode these untamed lands, which were often a haven for outlaws and bad men, as well as men like himself who simply loved the land. A wanted man could disappear completely in the wild country.
”
”
Bobby Underwood (The Wild Country (The Wild Country #1))
“
The book presents a broad world of women coming from all eras, countries, backgrounds, races, and ethnicities. They’re rabble-rousers from all sorts of disciplines: artists, activists, astronauts, daredevils, outlaws, scientists, warriors, writers, and everything in between.
”
”
Ann Shen (Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World (Ann Shen Legendary Ladies Collection))
Johnny Gunn (Jack Slater: A Long Year In Outlaw Country: (A Traditional Western Series))
“
Of course I adopted a positive outlook. When in Rome. Besides, pessimism made one a pariah. Sarcasm was outlawed, irony unknown. If one couldn’t afford two cars, a pool, three bathrooms, and a television in every room, at least one could have an indefatigably positive outlook. It was a free country, after all. But somehow my optimism always struck the
wrong note.
”
”
John Purcell (The Lessons)
“
Britain was the last developed country where beating schoolchildren was respectable. This was outlawed last year [1988] - by one vote in Parliament. Parents are now almost the last people left who can hit children without fear of penalty, as long as it's moderate and fitting punishment...the language of authority still derives from violence, mistakenly, tragically.
”
”
Marina Warner (Into the Dangerous World: Some Reflections on Childhood and Its Costs (Counterblasts No. 5))
“
My love hadn’t diminished - it never would - but at times my patience was wearing thin. Waylon’s wandering ways hadn’t completely stopped and yet I remained resolute. I stayed.
”
”
Jessi Colter (An Outlaw and a Lady: A Memoir of Music, Life with Waylon, and the Faith that Brought me Home)
“
I feel that God made my body perfect the way I was born. Then man robbed me, took away my power, and left me a cripple. My womanhood was stolen. If God had wanted those body parts missing, why did he create them?
I just pray that one day no woman will have to experience this pain. It will become a thing of the past. People will say "Did you hear, female genital mutilation has been outlawed in Somalia?" Then the next country, and the next, and so on, until the world is safe for all women. What a happy day that will be, and that's what I'm working toward. In'shallah, if God is willing, it will happen.
”
”
Waris Dirie (Desert Flower)
“
outlaw country politicians lining their pockets while the poor get poorer. starving the American people with the high price food and rent while the rich get richer and the underclass people starve
”
”
James Hilton-Cowboy
“
Outlaw Nation
[Verse]
There's a storm in D.C. now, can't see the light,
Biden's dropped the reins, runnin' from the fight,
Kamala's in the spotlight, dancin' on a stage,
Trump's rollin' back in, full of fury and rage.
[Verse 2]
Folks down in the heartland, feelin' all the strain,
Politicians playin' games, drivin' us insane,
Farmers in the fields, can't catch a break,
Factories closin' down, livelihoods at stake.
[Chorus]
Outlaw nation, we're fightin' to survive,
Caught in the crossfire, just tryin' to stay alive,
The rich gettin' richer, while we pay the price,
Outlaw nation, it's time to stand and rise.
[Verse 3]
Main street's empty now, dreams turned to dust,
Kids askin' questions, who can we trust?
Grandpa's on the porch, with a tear in his eye,
Reminiscin' 'bout the days, when the flag flew high.
[Bridge]
It's a tangled web they weave, in them fancy suits,
But out in the country, we're stickin' to our roots,
With a six-string guitar and a bottle of truth,
Outlaw nation, we're fightin' for the youth.
[Chorus]
Outlaw nation, we're fightin' to survive,
Caught in the crossfire, just tryin' to stay alive,
The rich gettin' richer, while we pay the price,
Outlaw nation, it's time to stand and rise.
”
”
James Hilton-Cowboy
“
defiant rugged Outlaw Country this country must stop selling our land to foreigners Be hell to pay take back America Tell it like it is this is America we stand up for God and our rights
”
”
James Hilton-Cowboy
“
Outlaw Prairie Thunder
[Verse]
This old town's got nothing left, storefronts boarded tight,
Once was a place of hope and pride, now lost to endless night.
Biden's bowed out gracefully, Kamala's on parade,
Trump's stirring up the winds of change, on a roaring train of rage.
[Verse 2]
Folks around these parts are weary, they’re standing in the sun,
Fighting for the scraps they get, wondering if help will come.
Saw old man Jenkins cry today, says he can't stand the weight,
Bank just took his family farm, he's cursing his cruel fate.
[Chorus]
Oh, where’s the heart of this country, when our leaders just play the game?
Trading blows on TV screens, while we live with loss and pain.
Oh, America’s torn at the seams, can’t find trust or grace,
In this outlaw prairie thunder, we’re all part of the race.
[Verse 3]
Mama's working double shifts, just to pay the rent,
Daddy's out there driving trucks, all his money's spent.
Kids are dreaming 'bout a life, where they ain't gotta fight,
These backroads tell a story, of a million restless nights.
[Bridge]
Brother's in the army now, they sent him overseas,
Fighting for a notion, that he barely believes.
Sister’s waiting tables, barely getting by,
As the politicians holler, and the flags of freedom fly.
[Chorus]
Oh, where’s the heart of this country, when our leaders just play the game?
Trading blows on TV screens, while we live with loss and pain.
Oh, America’s torn at the seams, can’t find trust or grace,
In this outlaw prairie thunder, we’re all part of the race.
”
”
James Hilton-Cowboy
“
It happened in Chicago in 1886.
On the first of May, strikes paralyzed cities across the country. The Philadelphia Tribune offered a diagnosis: 'The labor element has been bitten by a kind of universal tarantula - it has gone dancing mad.'
Dancing mad were the workers who fought for the eight-hour day and for the right to form unions
...
On every May first, the entire world remembers them. With the passing of time, constitutions, laws, and international accords have proved them right.
But some of the most powerful corporations have yet to find out. They outlaw unions and keep track of the workday with those melting clocks painted by Salvador Dali.
”
”
Eduardo Galeano (Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone)
“
In 2010, Iceland – with a lesbian prime minister, and a parliament which is 50 per cent female – became the first country in the world to outlaw strip clubs for feminist, rather than religious, reasons.
”
”
Caitlin Moran (How to Be a Woman)
“
Coleman also states: “A One World Government and one-unit monetary system, under permanent non-elected hereditary oligarchs who self-select from among their numbers in the form of a feudal system as it was in the Middle Ages. In this One World entity, population will be limited by restrictions on the number of children per family, diseases, wars, famines, until one billion people who are useful to the ruling class, in areas which will be strictly and clearly defined, remain as the total world population. There will be no middle class, only rulers and the servants. All laws will be uniform under a legal system of world courts practicing the same unified code of laws, backed up by a One World Government police force and a One World unified military to enforce laws in all former countries where no national boundaries shall exist. The system will be on the basis of a welfare state; those who are obedient and subservient to the One World Government will be rewarded with the means to live; those who are rebellious will simple be starved to death or be declared outlaws, thus a target for anyone who wishes to kill them.”[12]
”
”
Robin de Ruiter (Worldwide Evil and Misery - The Legacy of the 13 Satanic Bloodlines)
“
I’ll bet you want to know how a person like Stocky can be thrown into a debtors’ prison, something this country outlawed about two hundred years ago. Right?” Samantha slowly nodded. Mattie continued, “More than likely, you’re also certain that throwing someone in jail because he cannot pay a fine or a fee violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. And, you are no doubt familiar with the 1983 Supreme Court decision, the name escapes me right now, in which the Court ruled that before a person can be thrown in jail for not paying a fine it must be proven that he or she was willfully not paying. In other words, he could pay but he refused. All this and more, right?
”
”
John Grisham (Gray Mountain)
“
Honey, this has to end. We’re traveling to a rough part of the country. Things happen. Indians, rain storms, animals, outlaws.” He gestured with his arm in the general direction of the river. “And river crossings. I can’t have you falling apart every time something frightens you. You’re a grown woman. Carrying a child. It’s time to face your fears.
”
”
Callie Hutton (Emma's Journey)
“
Despite being officially outlawed, the Muslim Brotherhood had over the years captured seventeen seats in the Egyptian Parliament through members standing as independents. They also held important offices in banks, local government, and professional organizations throughout the country. Today, explained Bairstow, an extremely complex financial network connected the operations of over seventy branches worldwide.
”
”
Dan Eaton (The Secret Gospel)
“
I feel that the government should uphold the concept that it is there for us, “We the People.” That it does what we alone cannot do. By standing unified and proud, we have strength because of our numbers and the power to do what is right. That we always remain on the right side of history and care for and respect our less fortunate. Now, you may think that I’m just spouting out a lot of patriotic nonsense, which you are entitled to do, however I did serve my country actively in both the Navy and Army for a total of forty years, six months and seven days as a reservist and feel that I have an equal vested interest in these United States.
If we don’t like what is happening we have responsible ways and means to change things. We have Constitutional, “First Amendment Rights to Freedom of Speech.” There are many things I would like to see change and there are ways that we can do this. To start with we have to protect our First Amendment Rights and protect the media from government interference…. I also believe in protecting our individual freedom…. I believe in one person, one vote…. Corporations are not people, for one they have no human feelings…. That although our government may be misdirected it is not the enemy…. I want reasonable regulations to protect us from harm…. That we not privatize everything in sight such as prisons, schools, roads, social security, Medicare, libraries etc.….. Entitlements that have been earned should not be tampered with…. That college education should be free or at least reasonable…. That health care becomes free or very reasonable priced for all…. That lobbyist be limited in how they can manipulate our lawmakers…. That people, not corporations or political action committees (PAC’s), can only give limited amounts of money to candidates…. That our taxes be simplified, fair and on a graduated scale without loop holes….That government stays out of our personal lives, unless our actions affect others…. That our government stays out of women’s issues, other than to insure equal rights…. That the law (police) respects all people and treats them with the dignity they deserve…. That we no longer have a death penalty…. That our military observe the Geneva Conventions and never resort to any form of torture…. That the Police, FBI, CIA or other government entities be limited in their actions, and that they never bully or disrespect people that are in their charge or care…. That we never harbor prisoners overseas to avoid their protection by American law…. That everyone, without exception, is equal…. And, in a general way, that we constantly strive for a more perfect Union and consider ourselves members of a greater American family, or at the very least, as guests in our country.
As Americans we are better than what we have witnessed lately. The idea that we will go beyond our rights is insane and should be discouraged and outlawed. As a country let us look forward to a bright and productive future, and let us find common ground, pulling in the same direction. We all deserve to feel safe from persecution and/or our enemies. We should also be open minded enough to see what works in other countries. If we are going to “Make America Great Again” we should start by being more civil and kinder to each other. Now this is all just a thought, but it’s a start…. “We’re Still Here!
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
I have no naive notions of good and evil. While Kentucky is not the deep south, there is enough of that type of outlaw mentality in the rural areas that Hollywood movies based on corrupt backwoods cops have some credibility. Making someone disappear in the country is actually far easier to do than in a place like New Jersey. Lots of heavily wooded areas and farms to dispose of a body, should one happen to need to. The look in his eyes had scared me. There was clearly something behind them, something I didn’t want to ever see in the full light of day. Things of nightmares. There are places, dark damp hidden places, where things like that dwell, and to look upon them would drive a person mad with fear.
”
”
John (ronin) Evans (Midnight Falls)
“
To Mac and Jonnie, telling stories like this was more important than ever. As the outside world shouted louder and louder, it had become nearly impossible for one voice to rise above the fray—until it did. To them, the world had room for plenty of stories. Trickster thieves, noble outlaws, curious writers, conflicted lawmen, alligators, and gator poachers—they could all fit. The secret was in the telling. So they had to let the right people in. 15 BACKUP
”
”
Rebecca Renner (Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades)
“
Down That Road
soulful acoustic outlaw country
[Verse]
Son, I've been down that road, it's a lonely, dark trail,
Battlin' the demons, chasin' whiskey and the ale,
Lost in the night, where the stars don't gleam,
Drownin' in the bottle, haunted by the dream.
[Verse 2]
I let the drugs and booze take control of my soul,
Livin' in the shadows, fallin' in a hole,
Days turned to nights, in a blurry haze,
Each step I took was just another daze.
[Chorus]
But I fought long and hard to break those chains,
To rise from the ashes, to soothe the pains,
Found my way back to where I need to be,
Son, you can too, just take it from me.
[Verse 3]
I've seen the bottom, where the cold winds blow,
A life of regrets, where the sorrow flows,
But there's a light that shines, if you reach for the sky,
A reason each day to give it one more try.
[Chorus]
I fought long and hard to break those chains,
To rise from the ashes, to soothe the pains,
Found my way back to where I need to be,
Son, you can too, just take it from me.
[Bridge]
It's a hard-worn path, with lessons learned,
But there's hope in the struggle, and peace to be earned,
Look to the future, let the past be gone,
Keep movin' forward, and keep pressin' on.
”
”
James Hilton-Cowboy
“
Son, I've Been Down That Road
soulful acoustic outlaw country
[Verse]
Son, I've been down that road, it's a lonely, dark trail,
Battlin' the demons, chasin' whiskey and the ale,
Lost in the night, where the stars don't gleam,
Drownin' in the bottle, haunted by the dream.
[Verse 2]
I let the drugs and booze take control of my soul,
Livin' in the shadows, fallin' in a hole,
Days turned to nights, in a blurry haze,
Each step I took was just another daze.
[Chorus]
But I fought long and hard to break those chains,
To rise from the ashes, to soothe the pains,
Found my way back to where I need to be,
Son, you can too, just take it from me.
[Verse 3]
I've seen the bottom, where the cold winds blow,
A life of regrets, where the sorrow flows,
But there's a light that shines, if you reach for the sky,
A reason each day to give it one more try.
[Chorus]
I fought long and hard to break those chains,
To rise from the ashes, to soothe the pains,
Found my way back to where I need to be,
Son, you can too, just take it from me.
[Bridge]
It's a hard-worn path, with lessons learned,
But there's hope in the struggle, and peace to be earned,
Look to the future, let the past be gone,
Keep movin' forward, and keep pressin' on.
”
”
James Hilton-Cowboy
“
One Nation Under God
rebellious gritty outlaw country
[Verse]
In the heart of these small-town roads, where the story's old but true,
We used to bow our heads in prayer, we’d pledge allegiance too.
Now the lights are flickering, the signs all point to fall,
Where’d that spirit go that used to stand so tall?
[Verse 2]
Factory stands are empty, schools don’t teach no more,
Folks drive by the church, like it's something to ignore.
We used to hold our ground, with hands together tight,
But the unity we had has vanished in the night.
[Chorus]
This country’s going to hell, can’t you hear the warning bell?
What once was one nation under God has disappeared.
We the people will soon be no more if we don’t take a stand,
It’s time to raise that flag and put God back in this land.
[Verse 3]
We got preachers out on Main Street, shouting at the skies,
But nobody’s listening, too busy with the lies.
The family dinners cold now, faith broke at the seams,
It’s high time to awake and chase those old dreams.
[Verse 4]
The fields are overgrown, tractors left to rust,
Where’s the honor and the pride, the values that we trust?
Cemeteries filled with souls who knew the way it was,
We need to reawaken and fix this just because.
[Chorus]
This country’s going to hell, can’t you hear the warning bell?
What once was one nation under God has disappeared.
We the people will soon be no more if we don’t take a stand,
It’s time to raise that flag and put God back in this land.
”
”
James Hilton-Cowboy
“
One Nation Under God
rebellious gritty outlaw country
Profile avatar
ProgressiveEncoder337
July 27, 2024 at 10:39 AM
[Verse]
In the heart of these small-town roads, where the story's old but true,
We used to bow our heads in prayer, we’d pledge allegiance too.
Now the lights are flickering, the signs all point to fall,
Where’d that spirit go that used to stand so tall?
[Verse 2]
Factory stands are empty, schools don’t teach no more,
Folks drive by the church, like it's something to ignore.
We used to hold our ground, with hands together tight,
But the unity we had has vanished in the night.
[Chorus]
This country’s going to hell, can’t you hear the warning bell?
What once was one nation under God has disappeared.
We the people will soon be no more if we don’t take a stand,
It’s time to raise that flag and put God back in this land.
[Verse 3]
We got preachers out on Main Street, shouting at the skies,
But nobody’s listening, too busy with the lies.
The family dinners cold now, faith broke at the seams,
It’s high time to awake and chase those old dreams.
[Verse 4]
The fields are overgrown, tractors left to rust,
Where’s the honor and the pride, the values that we trust?
Cemeteries filled with souls who knew the way it was,
We need to reawaken and fix this just because.
[Chorus]
This country’s going to hell, can’t you hear the warning bell?
What once was one nation under God has disappeared.
We the people will soon be no more if we don’t take a stand,
It’s time to raise that flag and put God back in this land.
”
”
James Hilton-Cowboy
“
Proud Americans
outlaw country gritty defiant
[Verse]
Stompin' boots on dusty trails, where the thunder rolls,
Stars and stripes hang high, in the heartland of our souls,
Old-time whiskey in our veins, and the spirit of the free,
Riding through the winds of change, it's where we wanna be.
[Chorus]
We're proud Americans, our hearts beat as one,
The time has come, to heal and embrace,
So let's stand united, let our voices be heard,
Proud Americans, leading the way.
[Verse 2]
Front porches and pickup trucks, where stories still unfold,
From sea to shining sea, we've got so much untold,
Mending fences, crossing lines, together we are strong,
In the land of milk and honey, where we all belong.
[Chorus]
We're proud Americans, our hearts beat as one,
The time has come, to heal and embrace,
So let's stand united, let our voices be heard,
Proud Americans, leading the way.
[Bridge]
Through the trials and pain, we’ve always pulled through,
In every small town and city, under skies of blue,
With grit and love, in each verse we say,
We're fighting for a brighter day.
[Verse 3]
Guitars strum like battle cries, in the twilight’s golden hue,
From the shadows to the spotlight, we sing a country tune,
Bonfires light the night, with hope and memories,
Echoes of freedom, carried by the breeze.
”
”
James Hilton-Cowboy
“
This Country's Going to Hell
gritty acoustic outlaw country
[Verse]
Once we had a land, wide and proud,
Where freedom's song rang out loud.
One nation under a heavenly light,
But now it’s fading, lost in the night.
[Verse 2]
Factories closed, fields go bare,
Main Street’s dying in the evening air.
God was once our guiding hand,
Now it's time we take a stand.
[Chorus]
This country’s going to hell,
Where did we go wrong, who can tell?
Let’s put God back in this land,
We, the people, must take a stand.
[Verse 3]
Empty churches, echoing halls,
The rise begins when a nation falls.
Lest we forget what once made us great,
Let’s pray before it’s too late.
[Bridge]
Bring back the days of honor and trust,
When faith in the Lord was more than just dust.
We’ve strayed too far, lost our way,
Together we can reclaim that day.
[Verse 4]
Heroes fought, gave their lives,
For freedom that’s now on the edge of knives.
We need more than slogans and deals,
It's soul and spirit that heals.
”
”
James Hilton-Cowboy
“
Unbeknown to them, secret negotiations had already been taking place, as early as 1947, before the British Mandate in Palestine ended. These were between King Abdullah and the Zionist leaders, who were united in their goal of preventing the birth of a Palestinian state under their common enemy, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian head of the Arab Higher Committee, which was established on April 25, 1936, and outlawed by the British Mandatory administration in September 1937 after the assassination of a British official. The British government was continuing with its determined efforts to deprive the Palestinians of their country, exploring the possibility that the Arab parts of Palestine, which it believed would be unviable as an Arab Palestine on their own, could be fused with the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, established in 1946. At a secret meeting in London in February 1948, Ernest Bevin, the UK foreign secretary, gave King Abdullah the green light to snatch part of Palestine provided that the king’s forces stayed out of those areas allotted by the UN partition plan to the Jews.
”
”
Raja Shehadeh (We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir)
“
Having said thus much in preparation, I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them. I see no reason why all this should not apply to yellow as well as to white countries, and I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples.
All these beliefs of mine put me firmly into the anti-military party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built -- unless, indeed, we which for dangerous reactions against commonwealths, fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood.
The war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues, although originally gain by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a more general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its last form.
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William James (The Moral Equivalent of War)
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She ran away from home at age seventeen and hooked up with three outlaw bikers who gang-raped her on the way to Sturgis. She had an abortion in Memphis and spent three months in jail for soliciting at a truck stop on I-40. The next two stops were Big D and New Orleans and runway gigs with a G-string and pasties, then Acapulco and Vegas with oilmen who could buy Third World countries with their credit cards. Miami was even more lucrative. She went to work for a former CIA agent turned political operative who set up cameras in hotel rooms and blackmailed corporate executives and Washington insiders. She helped destroy careers and lives and woke up one morning next to the corpse of a married man who died from an overdose in his sleep and whose family she had to face at the police station. One week later, she swallowed half a bottle of downers, turned on the gas in the oven, and stuck her head in. Three weeks later, she slashed her wrists. One month after that, she helped a pimp roll a blind man. It’s not the kind of personal history you forget.
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James Lee Burke (A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23))
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Ngo Diem was heard to say, “I want a repressive machine controlling the whole of the country of South Vietnam from Saigon to the remotest villages. You shall apply massacres, torture, deportations, and mass imprisonment while conducting constant raids. You shall make the population so fearful of this government that no-one shall ever dare to become a revolutionary or any other kind of outlaw!
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Michael G Kramer Omieaust (A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume Two)
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When his mentor spoke of the old days, the knights were heroes, not outlaws, and knowing right from wrong, good from evil seemed as natural as breathing. Nowadays, the once clear waters of morality had grown brackish. The country was fractured, one man’s admiration was liable to garner you another man’s animosity.
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J.R. Potts (Gathering of the Crimson Cloaks (Book of The Burned Man 4))
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When the flight of wealth gets bad enough, the country outlaws it. Those seeking to get out begin to panic.
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Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail)
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In December 1776, when Washington’s war-weary troops ground to a halt on the wrong side of the frozen Delaware, the general ordered his officers to read Paine’s words aloud to the exhausted soldiers: These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
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Charlotte Gordon (Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley)
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skinned outsiders who wanted to buy them. They themselves had slaves. And captives were secured precisely to be sold, a market that made many of the local kingdoms rich and underlay their power. Slavery in Africa, again, had no correlation to skin color—except in Arab countries, where the lighter-skinned Arabs had Negro slaves. De facto and even legal slavery existed in Africa until the modern era; Mauritania only outlawed it in the 1980s. The fact that the Arabs were some of the biggest slave traders in the continent makes it grimly amusing that during the civil rights era in America, some black people converted to Islam and learned rudimentary Swahili, the patois of the Arab east coast, apparently believing that Islam was more pro-black than Christianity. Some African kingdoms were bigger slavers than others: two of the most active were the Buganda kingdom that borders Rwanda in what is now Uganda
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Bruce Fleming (Saving Our Service Academies: My Battle with, and for, the US Naval Academy to Make Thinking Officers)
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The Soviet Union, of all places, was the first country to outlaw the lobotomy. The Soviets declared the procedure “contrary to human principles” and claimed that it “turned an insane person into an idiot.”7 This was sort of a wake-up call to the rest of the world, because let’s face it, when Joseph Stalin is lecturing you about ethics and human decency, you know you’ve fucked up.
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Mark Manson (Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope)
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Even in countries where it was legally possible to pass laws outlawing Holocaust denial, I opposed such efforts. Those laws would render denial “forbidden fruit,” making it more—not less—alluring. In addition, I did not believe that courtrooms were the proper venue for historical inquiry. Deniers, I argued, should be stopped with reasoned inquiry, not with the blunt edge of the law. Courts, it seemed to me, dispensed justice by having parties present what they consider compelling evidence, such as physical proof and hard facts, to convince a jury or judge beyond a high standard of proof. Historians try to establish historical “truth” by objectively determining what happened.
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Deborah E. Lipstadt (Denial: Holocaust History on Trial)
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To recover his citizen’s rights and acquire still more new, exclusive prerogatives that would render to Laurence’s authority soul and body not just the wennies, but also the entire country, he lacked just one thing—a word. … This is the marvelous word: bandit.
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Iliazd (Rapture: A Novel (Russian Library))
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American bikers are the last of a breed. Free thinkers all, and proud defenders of free thought, bikers are the last Vikings, the last frontiersmen and mountain men, the last pirates and outlaws, the final breed of the wild ones who made this country. Woe to the world when the last biker rides into Valhalla, for the world we all were born to will be long gone. The wolves will have gone and the sheep will inherit the earth in a bleating, vacant-minded void of dreamless, meaningless sleep.
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Bill Hayes (The Original Wild Ones: Tales of the Boozefighters Motorcycle Club)
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Essentially a big part of why homosexuality was outlawed in these countries was because we were worried we might like it.
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James Felton (52 Times Britain was a Bellend: The History You Didn’t Get Taught At School)
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Ironically, the only drug that has been shown to stimulate violent behavior, through its psychopharmacological effects on brain and behavior, is one that is legal — alcohol. And the most dangerous drug of all, without any close competitors — the drug whose very use is an act of violence, since it kills both those who use it and those whom they expose to it, and kills incomparably more people than are killed in the gang wars precipitated by the illegal drugs — is another legal drug, tobacco.
So the net effect of the drug laws has been to outlaw the drugs that prevent violence, legalize the one that causes violence, legalize the other one whose use is an act of violence, precipitate violence over the sale of the illegal (but violence-preventing) drugs, subsidize an illegal drug industry which as a result is powerful enough to destabilize several fragile Third World countries, exacerbate the AIDS epidemic, and so on. Clearly, repealing these laws and providing treatment rather than punishment would be one of the most important and effective steps we could take in the secondary prevention of violence.
The RAND Corporation (Caulkins, et al., Mandatory Minimum Drug Sentences, 1997), for example, found that treatment of heavy users of drugs reduced serious crimes against both persons and property ten times as much as conventional law enforcement did, and fifteen times as much as mandatory minimum sentences. And, not surprisingly, treatment was also vastly more effective in reducing cocaine consumption than either conventional law enforcement or mandatory minimum sentences.
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James Gilligan (Preventing Violence (Prospects for Tomorrow))
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It’s apparently okay in several places for a guy to marry two or more women, but a woman getting together with more than one guy is basically outlawed everywhere. There are a few regions where it’s accepted, but I don’t think our Tibetan union would be recognized by any jail house in this country.
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Ella Goode (Three of Us (Love Notes, #1))
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He spoke through an interpreter, but the discussion flowed easily. He acknowledged concerns I raised about the situation in Tripoli. He smiled but offered no assurances when I said I hoped he would make the transition from rebel commander to politician. Libya would need more talented politicians than soldiers, I argued, in what would surely be a difficult transition from a family-run kleptocracy to a nascent democracy. His commitment and the commitment of other devout Muslims to peaceful political change would be essential to building a functioning and lasting democratic polity. “We might have disagreements between us,” I acknowledged, “about political issues and the future of the region. But as long as you’re committed to the democratic process, we can have a good relationship.” At the end of the meeting, in a quieter voice, I mentioned I had recently learned that Americans had detained and interrogated him using tactics that should not have been allowed and were not allowed any longer. I knew about his rendition to Libya, and the years of torture he had suffered in prison. I assumed someone had briefed him on my military background and service in Vietnam, and I tried to relate to him as a former military officer who had entered politics and as one torture victim to another. I told him it had always been important to me that my country act honorably in war and peace, even when our enemies did not. “Some of us in the delegation have worked to outlaw mistreatment of our prisoners because it doesn’t befit a great nation.” He looked me in the eyes the entire time I was speaking, but I don’t remember him nodding his head or in any other way acknowledging my words. But when I added that I knew his wife had been mistreated, his eyes welled with tears. “I’m sorry,” I told him, “and as an elected representative of my country, I apologize for what happened, for the way you and especially your wife were treated, and for all you suffered because of it.” He leaned toward me and expressed through the interpreter his appreciation for the apology. “We regret all that happened,” he said, “but we don’t think of revenge. We will behave responsibly in Libya. Our actions will be governed by law and we will live up to universal standards.” I thanked him for that assurance, and the meeting ended. I never saw him again after our meeting. He did, in fact, become a leading Islamist politician in Libya, and, I’ve heard, quite a wealthy man. I don’t for a moment assume his views and career decisions were influenced by my brief conversation with him. He’ll have had his own reasons, political, religious, and personal, for the course he has chosen to follow. I do believe, though, that he genuinely appreciated the apology I offered him.
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John McCain (The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations)
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Fascism rarely makes a dramatic entrance. Typically, it begins with a seemingly minor character—Mussolini in a crowded cellar, Hitler on a street corner—who steps forward only as dramatic events unfold. The story advances when the opportunity to act comes and Fascists alone are prepared to strike. That is when small aggressions, if unopposed, grow into larger ones, when what was objectionable is accepted, and when contrarian voices are drowned out. Soon enough, the government that silences a media outlet finds muffling a second easier. The parliament that outlaws one political party has a precedent for banning the next. The majority that strips a particular minority of its rights doesn’t stop there. The security force that beats protesters and gets away with it doesn’t hesitate before doing so again, and when repression helps a dictator in country A to extend his hold on power, the rulers in country B embark on a parallel road. Before too long, Mussolini’s prescription has been followed and once again, feather by feather, the chicken is plucked.
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Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
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With World War I over, the decade prior to my birth was universally recognized as the “Roaring Twenties.” Many rejoiced, with mostly young, wealthy people indulging in wine, women and song. Promiscuous sexual behavior and the social use of alcohol became normal to the liberal thinkers who gathered in the bohemian sections of the world’s leading cities. Although political unrest still existed, most people enjoyed the peaceful years that followed the horror of World War I.
The United States, however, has always been a more structured, puritanical and religious country. From the time of the Pilgrims, spirituality and moderation has prevailed. In the United States, the concept of abstinence was advanced by the American Temperance Society, also known as the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance.
This activist group was established on February 13, 1826, in Boston, Massachusetts, and considered the concept of outlawing alcohol to be progressive. The United States Senate first proposed the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, with the intent of banning the use of alcohol. After passage by the House and Senate, on December 18, 1917, the proposed amendment was submitted to the states for ratification. On January 16, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, with an effective date one year later on January 17, 1920. The Volstead Act, passed on October 28, 1919, specified the details for the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment. A total of 1,520 Federal Prohibition agents, having police powers, were assigned to enforce this unpopular law.
Many people, ignoring this new law, partied at the many renowned illegal speakeasies, many of which were run by the Mafia. This ban on alcohol proved to be contentious, difficult to enforce, and an infringement on people’s personal rights. Still, due to political pressure, it continued until March 22, 1933, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed an amendment to the Constitution, known as the Cullen-Harrison Act, which allowed for the manufacture and sale of watery 3.2% beer. It took over a decade from its inception before the Eighteenth Amendment was finally repealed on December 5, 1933, when the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution was adopted.
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Hank Bracker
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Things like the Sundogs shaking the foundations of our original beliefs, turning us to the ways of the Indians we search out to do battle with. Although we saw a number of places along the trail where the Comanche raiding parties have crossed from the north here in Texas to Mexico, carrying out their raids south of the border we saw no actual Indians. For the Comanche, there is no border. Just the land that they have freely ridden for hundreds of years. The divide we white men and Mexicans have made between two countries having little importance to the Comanche as they consider the white men and the Mexicans as all hostile men encroaching on their lands. We rode nearly to Fort Leaton near the Juntas before we turned back now having taken the patrol much farther than we had planned. The Comanche activity, encouraging us to ride on hoping to encounter at least one of the raiding parties, although we saw no more signs of Comanche not meaning that they have not seen us. Maybe we are too large an enemy for the small raiding parties to approach. Most Comanche shy away from skirmishes that result in more than a death or two of their Warrior Braves. Since the death of the two men by the hands of Lopez all of my men staying sharp, if in fact Lopez try's to capture another Ranger. The torture and death of Dan Skaggs shaking my men up considerably. "If a man like Lopez catches you make sure that you save one bullet in your revolver to shoot yourself before you get captured and have to face such heinous torture as Dan did," Bill Vents said. Mostly for the benefit of our new Texas Ranger Bear Wallace, who was new to the ways of the Comanche and outlaws like Lopez. "Make sure you shoot yourself in the eyeball to assure the bullet kills you dead and don't bounce around in your mouth or off your skull. Eventually leaving you just alive enough to be left to the hands of Lopez to be tormented till death comes." "That is about enough of the horror tales, Bill," I said noting that the men are more nervous than usual with Bills story no matter how unbelievable the tale seemed. Out here in the wild country, many things seem to be twisted from reality, some often making the impossible seem possible. Not only because of Bill's stories but also due to a large amount of Indian gossip not far from being as wild as Vents lies. Especially the Tonkawa as they believe the way to assure that spirits of the men they kill will be captured and rendered harmless, is to eat the men they slaughter
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Ash Lingam (West to Ranger Creek)
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A system of laws is judged good to the extent it protects those who cannot protect themselves. When an entire class of innocent people is made outlaws just because they are not wanted, the country can no longer be relied upon to protect anyone from a violent end.
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Francis E. George
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The Arab slave trade was most active in West Asia, North Africa, and Southeast Africa. In the early 20th century (post World War I), slavery was gradually outlawed and suppressed in Muslim lands, largely due to pressure exerted by Western nations such as Britain and France.[6] For example, Saudi Arabia and Yemen only abolished slavery in 1962 under pressure from Britain; Oman followed suit in 1970, and Mauritania in 1905, 1981, and again in August 2007.[13] However, slavery claiming the sanction of Islam is documented presently in the predominantly Islamic countries of Chad, Mauritania, Niger, Mali, and Sudan.
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Wikipedia
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The Pacific Northwest gained a reputation for its tolerance of people of color. Upon arrival many would learn such a reputation was mostly unfounded. Like the rest of the country, the region was deeply divided over slavery. The exception was Oregon's black exclusion laws. In 1844, the provisional government outlawed slavery as a tactic to preclude settlers from bringing their slaves into the territory. Later the exclusion law was written into the state constitution, which was to be submitted to the U.S. Congress in 1857.
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David J Jepsen (Contested Boundaries: A New Pacific Northwest History)
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Kristofferson’s songs, particularly, explored sensual love and desperate negotiations with personal devils in a rambling ballad style that sharply contrasted with the strictly tempered verse that had dominated country music for decades. He engendered a freedom of expression in Nashville’s music business, and, in his wake, other freedoms emerged.
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Michael Streissguth (Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville)
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Once again they had laid waste the lone worker's farm; they are always the same from century to century, for the simple reason that the lone worker remains the same from century to century. A war on the Continent may bring some relief, for a year or so, but it is only a seeming help, and illusion. The lone worker will never escape from his life of poverty for ever and ever; he will go on existing in affliction as long as man is not man's protector, but his worst enemy. The life of the lone worker, the life of the independent man, is in its nature a flight from other men, who seek to kill him. From one night-lodging into another even worse. A peasant family flits, four generations of the thirty that have maintained life and death in this country for a thousand years - for whom? Not for themselves anyway, nor for anyone of theirs. They resembled nothing so much as fugitives in a land devastated by year after year of furious warfare; hunted outlaws - in whose land? Not in their own at least.
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Halldór Laxness (Independent People)
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Cash’s reputation as a maverick who’d done jail time, and the El Paso drug bust, too, strengthened his link to rock ’n’ roll; it was his music as well as his image that paved the way for the country-rock coalition that Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings would tap into with their outlaw movement in the late 1970s.
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Robert Hilburn (Johnny Cash: The Life)
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Well, as I see it, the only way to win is to play the game and beat everyone at it. And I mean, who’s to say you can’t make your own rules?” I say.
“Spoken like a true outlaw,” Nicholas retorts.
I smirk, a little guiltily. “I suppose. Thank goodness you went along with it. Anyone else would have refused to register me or left me to Master Douglas.” Shivers go up my spine.
“Partners in crime.”
I laugh at first, but then think about it. “That’s kind of sad.”
“Or exciting.” He stares at me for a moment. “Well, speaking as your registrar, you need to get some rest.”
“Are you ever going to let me have any fun?” I ask.
“Not until the sun stops shining.”
“Well, technically it goes down every night…” I say.
“Not in this country.
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E.J. Squires (Savage Run: Book I)
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Broadly speaking, there seem to be two methods for developing combat forces-for successfully cajoling or coercing collections of men into engaging in the violent, profane, sacrificial, uncertain, masochistic, and essentially absurd enterprise known as war. The two methods lead to two kinds of warfare, and the distinction can be an important one.
Intuitively, it might seem that the easiest (and cheapest) method for recruiting combatants would be to...enlist those who revel in violence and routinely seek it our or who regularly employ it to enrich themselves, or both. We have in civilian life a name for such people-criminals...Violent conflicts in which people like that dominate can be called criminal warfare, a form in which combatants are induced to wreak violence primarily for the fun and material profit they derive from the experience.
Criminal armies seem to arise from a couple of processes. Sometimes criminals-robbers, brigands, freebooters, highwaymen, hooligans, thugs, bandits, pirates, gangsters, outlaws-organize or join together in gangs or bands or mafias. When such organizations become big enough, they can look and act a lot like full-blown armies.
Or criminal armies can be formed when a ruler needs combatants to prosecute a war and concludes that the employment or impressment of criminals and thugs is the most sensible and direct method for accomplishing this. In this case, criminals and thugs essentially act as mercenaries.
It happens, however, that criminals and thugs tend to be undesirable warriors....To begin with, they are often difficult to control. They can be troublemakers: unruly, disobedient, and mutinous, often committing unauthorized crimes while on (or off) duty that can be detrimental or even destructive of military enterprise....
Most importantly, criminals can be disinclined to stand and fight when things become dangerous, and they often simply desert when whim and opportunity coincide. Ordinary crime, after all, preys on the weak-on little old ladies rather than on husky athletes-and criminals often make willing and able executioners of defenseless people. However, if the cops show up they are given to flight. The motto for the criminal, after all, is not a variation of "Semper fi," "All for one and one for all," "Duty, honor, country," "Banzai," or "Remember Pearl Harbor," but "Take the money and run."...
These problems with the employment of criminals as combatants have historically led to efforts to recruit ordinary men as combatants-people who, unlike criminals and thugs, commit violence at no other time in their lives....
The result has been the development of disciplined warfare in which men primarily inflict violence not for fun and profit but because their training and indoctrination have instilled in them a need to follow orders; to observe a carefully contrived and tendentious code of honer; to seek glory and reputation in combat; to love, honor, or fear their officers; to believe in a cause; to fear the shame, humiliation, or costs of surrender; or, in particular, to be loyal to, and to deserve the loyalty of, their fellow combatants.
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John Mueller