“
When I’m asleep I’m a politician, and when I’m awake I’m a criminal. Throughout the day and night, my mentality never changes.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book Has No Title)
“
Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can't have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man's worth couldn't be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorneys or politicians, therefore we couldn't cheat. We really were in a bad way before the white men came, and I don't know how we managed to get along without these basic things which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society.
”
”
John Fire Lame Deer (Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions)
“
It does no harm just once in a while to acknowledge that the whole country isn't in flames, that there are people in the country besides politicians, entertainers, and criminals.
”
”
Charles Kuralt
“
But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all -- at all -- at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
”
”
George Carlin
“
Just because you don’t have an arrest record doesn’t mean you’re not a criminal. As proof, note some of the cleanest rap sheets in America belong to politicians.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (The Days of Yay are Here! Wake Me Up When They're Over.)
“
A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.
”
”
Russell Baker
“
The difference between a criminal and an outlaw is that while criminals frequently are victims, outlaws never are. Indeed, the first step toward becoming a true outlaw is the refusal to be victimized. All people who live subject to other people's laws are victims. People who break laws out of greed, frustration, or vengeance are victims. People who overturn laws in order to replace them with their own laws are victims. ( I am speaking here of revolutionaries.) We outlaws, however, live beyond the law. We don't merely live beyond the letter of the law-many businessmen, most politicians, and all cops do that-we live beyond the spirit of the law. In a sense, then, we live beyond society. Have we a common goal, that goal is to turn the tables on the 'nature' of society. When we succeed, we raise the exhilaration content of the universe. We even raise it a little bit when we fail.
When war turns whole populations into sleepwalkers, outlaws don't join forces with alarm clocks. Outlaws, like poets, rearrange the nightmare.
The trite mythos of the outlaw; the self-conscious romanticism of the outlaw; the black wardrobe of the outlaw; the fey smile of the outlaw; the tequila of the outlaw and the beans of the outlaw; respectable men sneer and say 'outlaw'; young women palpitate and say 'outlaw'. The outlaw boat sails against the flow; outlaws toilet where badgers toilet. All outlaws are photogenic. 'When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free.' There are outlaw maps that lead to outlaw treasures. Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here. Outlaws are can openers in the supermarket of life.
”
”
Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)
“
Authoritarian politicians cast their rivals as criminal, subversive, unpatriotic, or a threat to national security or the existing way of life.
”
”
Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future)
“
Finally, don’t put on a Let’s Be Fair tone and say “But black people are racist too.” Because of course we’re all prejudiced (I can’t even stand some of my blood relatives, grasping, selfish folks), but racism is about the power of a group and in America it’s white folks who have that power. How? Well, white folks don’t get treated like shit in upper-class African-American communities and white folks don’t get denied bank loans or mortgages precisely because they are white and black juries don’t give white criminals worse sentences than black criminals for the same crime and black police officers don’t stop white folk for driving while white and black companies don’t choose not to hire somebody because their name sounds white and black teachers don’t tell white kids that they’re not smart enough to be doctors and black politicians don’t try some tricks to reduce the voting power of white folks through gerrymandering and advertising agencies don’t say they can’t use white models to advertise glamorous products because they are not considered “aspirational” by the “mainstream.
”
”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
“
Part of the problem is that our politicians, media, and criminal justice institutions too often equate justice with revenge.
”
”
Alex S. Vitale (The End of Policing)
“
It used to be the role of the Fourth Estate to monitor our politicians and their donators. But the criminals got smart and decided to buy the watchdog, too. Now there is nobody watching the store, and the dog has been hired by the very criminals they are supposed to be watching.
”
”
Jimmy Dore (Your Country Is Just Not That Into You: How the Media, Wall Street, and Both Political Parties Keep on Screwing You - Even After You've Moved On)
“
ACCESS DENIED For Reasons of National Security” is a US federal legal ruling that affects all Americans and her allies from adjudicating against criminal politicians.
”
”
Cathy O'Brien (ACCESS DENIED For Reasons Of National Security: Documented Journey From CIA Mind Control Slave To U.S. Government Whistleblower)
“
What if you create a bunch of people who are just drastically better at what they already were. Soldiers. Criminals. Politicians. Capitalists.
”
”
Blake Crouch (Upgrade)
“
There’s always going to be a criminal element in the population. At least as long as people believe they need politicians.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (Seriously delirious, but not at all serious)
“
it was impossible to get into—unless you were extremely rich, famous, or high up on the criminal chain. Or, of course, a politician, which would make you all of the above.
”
”
James Dashner (The Mortality Doctrine Series: The Complete Trilogy)
“
Unfortunately, we don't have all that many good examples to follow. The people that our cultures label as "successful" are the ones who have become wealthy or famous or celebrities, but the truly successful people--those who have become happy and who are living happy, loving, giving lives--aren't often featured in our newspapers or newscasts. We see the politicians and the criminals and the athletes and the entertainment "stars," but we don't see the people who can truly inspire us to be happy by being just who we are.
”
”
Tom Walsh
“
Your own politicians make our Dr. Goebbels look like a child playing with picture books in a kindergarten. They speak of morality while they douse screaming children and old women in burning napalm. Your draft-resisters are called cowards and ‘peaceniks.’ For refusing to follow orders they are either put in jails or scourged from the country. Those who demonstrate against this country's unfortunate Asian adventure are clubbed down in the streets. The GI soldiers who kill the innocent are decorated by Presidents, welcomed home from the bayoneting of children and the burning of hospitals with parades and bunting. They are given dinners, Keys to the City, free tickets to pro football games.” He toasted his glass in Todd's direction. “Only those who lose are tried as war criminals for following orders and directives.
”
”
Stephen King (Apt Pupil)
“
Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own. The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional do-gooders who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means.
”
”
Henry Grady Weaver (The Mainspring of Human Progress)
“
Who is a bad man and who is a good man? What is the definition? The bad man is one who is inconsiderate of others. The bad man is one who uses others and has no respect for others. The bad man is one who thinks he is the center of the world and everybody is just to be used. Everything exists for him. The bad man is one who thinks that other persons are just means for his gratification.
Keep this definition in mind because you ordinarily think the bad man is the criminal. The bad man may not be the criminal: all bad men are not criminals. All criminals are bad, but all bad men are not criminals. A few of them are judges, a few of them are very respectable people, a few of them are politicians, presidents and prime ministers, a few of them are even parading as saints.
So when we will be talking about this sutra, remember the definition of a bad man - Buddha says a bad man is one who has no consideration for others. He simply thinks about himself only - he thinks he is the center of existence and he feels the whole existence is made for him. He feels authorized to sacrifice everybody for his own self. He may not be bad ordinarily, but if this is the attitude, then he is a bad man.
Who is a good man? Just the opposite of the bad man: one who is considerate of others, who gives as much respect to others as he gives to himself, and who does not pretend in any way that he is the center of the world, and who has come to feel that everybody is the center of the world. The world is one, but millions of centers exist. He is very respectful. He never uses the other as a means. The other is an end in itself. His reverence is tremendous.
Watch, watch your own life.
”
”
Osho (The Buddha Said...: Meeting the Challenge of Life's Difficulties)
“
It’s disturbing to me that criminals are freely roaming the streets of our nation’s capital. I’m not talking about escaped prison inmates—I’m talking about politicians.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (A Zebra is the Piano of the Animal Kingdom)
“
A real criminal mastermind isn’t known as a criminal mastermind, because how good can you be if you’re a known criminal? No, a real criminal mastermind is known by another name: politician.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (Seriously delirious, but not at all serious)
“
If a criminal becomes a politician, it's the fault of the citizens, not the system, and if a system keeps failing to oust the criminals from politics, that too is the fault of the citizens.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar
“
Titanic orator. Drunk. Wit. Patriot. Imperialist. Visionary. Tank designer. Blunderer. Swashbuckler. Aristocrat. Prisoner. War hero. War criminal. Conqueror. Laughing stock. Bricklayer. Racehorse-owner. Soldier. Painter. Politician. Journalist. Nobel Prize-winning author. The list goes on and on, but each label, when taken alone, fails to do him justice; when taken together, they offer a challenge on a par with tossing twenty jigsaw puzzles together and expecting a single unified picture.
”
”
Anthony McCarten (Darkest Hour: How Churchill Brought England Back from the Brink)
“
There's a reason that education sucks.
And it's the same reason
that it will never ever, ever be fixed.
It's never going to get any better,
don't look for it,
be happy with what you got.
Because the owners of this country don't want that.
I'm talking about the real owners now.
The real owners.
The big, wealthy business interests that control things
and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians.
The politicians are put there
to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice.
You don't.
You have no choice.
You have owners.
They own you.
They own everything.
They own all the important land.
They own and control the corporations.
They've long since bought and paid for the Senate,
the Congress, the state houses, and city halls.
They got the judges in their back pocket.
And they own all the big media companies
so they control just about
all of the news and information you get to hear.
They got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying,
lobbying to get what they want.
Well, we know what they want.
They want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I'll tell you what they don't want.
They don't want a population
of citizens capable of critical thinking.
They don't want well-informed, well-educated people,
capable of critical thinking.
They're not interested in that.
That doesn't help them.
That's against their interest.
That's right.
They don't want people who are smart enough
to figure out how badly they're getting fucked
by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
They don't want that.
You know what they want?
They want obedient workers.
Obedient workers.
People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork
and just dumb enough, to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs,
with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits,
the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension
that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
And now, they're coming for your Social Security money.
They want your fucking retirement money.
They want it back,
so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street.
And you know something, they'll get it.
They'll get it all from you, sooner or later,
because they own this fucking place.
It's a big club, and you ain't in it.
You and I are not in the big club.
”
”
George Carlin (Life Is Worth Losing)
“
After the Civil War, Worth drifted, like so many veterans, to New York City, which by the mid-1860s was already one of the most concentratedly criminal places on earth. The politicians were up for sale, the magistrates and the police were corrupt,
”
”
Ben Macintyre (The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief)
“
Some politicians in the United States think that if a mother or father is deported, this will cause the entire family to move back to Mexico. But in fact, the mothers and fathers with the best family values will want their family to stay in the U.S., they will cross the border again and again to be with them. So you see, these same people, the ones with the most dedication to their family, they begin to build up a record of deportation, they have more and more problems with the government, and it becomes harder and harder for them to ever become legal. In this way, the U.S. is making criminals out of those who could become its very best citizens.
”
”
Francisco Cantú (The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border)
“
Therefore, to you, and to the fifty governors, I have a request. Please, do not send me politicians. We do not have the time to do the things that must be done through that process. I need people who do real things in the real world. I need people who do not want to live in Washington. I need people who will not try to work the system. I need people who will come here at great personal sacrifice to do an important job, and then return home to their normal lives. “I want engineers who know how things are built. I want physicians who know how to make sick people well. I want cops who know what it means when your civil rights are violated by a criminal. I want farmers who grow real food on real farms. I want people who know what it’s like to have dirty hands, and pay a mortgage bill, and raise kids, and worry about the future. I want people who know they’re working for you and not themselves. That’s what I want. That’s what I need. I think that’s what a lot of you want, too.
”
”
Tom Clancy (Executive Orders (Jack Ryan, #8; Jack Ryan Universe #9))
“
Everyone. The church, the parish, politicians, people who believed in God, people who didn’t believe in God… she made it her job to defend the weakest: the homeless, migrants, even criminals. Because somewhere in the Bible Jesus says something like: ‘I was hungry and you gave me food, I was homeless and you looked after me, I was sick and you cared for me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ And then He says something like, what we do for the weakest among us, we also do for Him. And she took everything so damn literally, my wife. That’s why she kept causing trouble.
”
”
Fredrik Backman (Anxious People)
“
... everything based on arguments involving the ''is'' of identidy and the older el (elementalistic) 'logic' and 'psychology', such as the prevailing doctrines, laws, institutions, systems. , cannot possibly be in full accordance with the structure of our nervous system. This, in turn, affects the latter and results in the prevailing private and public un-sanity. Hence, the unrest, unhappines, nervous strain, irritability, lack of wisdom and absence of balance, the instability of our instituitions, the wars and revolutions, the increase of ''mental ills, prostitution, criminality, commercialism as a creed, the inadequate standards of education, the low professional standards of lawyers, priests, politicians, physicians, teachers, parents, and even of scientists - which in the last-named field often lead to dogmatic and antisocial attitudes and lack of creativeness.
”
”
Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics)
“
The civil rights movement worked a major change in U.S. society in making open expressions of White supremacy culturally unacceptable. This was a far cry, however, from actually ending White racial mobilization. Instead, this mobilization, often orchestrated by White politicians, has continued over the last several decades in the form of interlinked panics about criminals, welfare cheats, illegal immigrants, and, most recently, terrorists.
”
”
Ian F. Haney-López (White by Law 10th Anniversary Edition: The Legal Construction of Race (Critical America Book 16))
“
This kind of hero worship has been promoted by politicians and their complicit media since the middle of the last century. Once you convince people that a particular public figure is more than human—is a shining beacon and icon of everything that his or her supporters hold sacred, questioning any of their actions or decisions automatically becomes sacrilege.
”
”
Joseph Befumo (The Republicrat Junta: How Two Corrupt Parties, in Collusion with Corporate Criminals, have Subverted Democracy, Deceived the People, and Hijacked Our Constitutional Government)
“
unless you were extremely rich, famous, or high up on the criminal chain. Or, of course, a politician, which would make you all of the above.
”
”
James Dashner (The Eye of Minds (The Mortality Doctrine, #1))
“
One last question: how much personal wealth did our Republican and Democrat politicians lose as a result of the financial meltdown?
”
”
Joseph Befumo (The Republicrat Junta: How Two Corrupt Parties, in Collusion with Corporate Criminals, have Subverted Democracy, Deceived the People, and Hijacked Our Constitutional Government)
“
In essence, anyone who aspires to be a career politician is, by the very fact, unfit to serve.
”
”
Joseph Befumo (The Republicrat Junta: How Two Corrupt Parties, in Collusion with Corporate Criminals, have Subverted Democracy, Deceived the People, and Hijacked Our Constitutional Government)
“
Fear of it? Who could possibly be afraid of the Thunderhead?"
"People who had the most to lose: Criminals. Politicians. Organizations that thrived on the oppression of others.
”
”
Neal Shusterman (Scythe (Arc of a Scythe, #1))
“
If you want to be an impeccable criminal then be a politician
”
”
umang bhatt
“
Just listen to people, be it politicians or seniors. Be polite; no need to be unnecessarily aggressive. These altercations look good only in movies. Finally, be practical. There are certain requests that are genuine, so accede to them. And wherever your conscience pricks you, simply put your foot down. Soon, you will build a reputation. Things will be smooth for you after that.
”
”
Amit Lodha (Bihar Diaries: The True Story of How Bihar's Most Dangerous Criminal Was Caught)
“
Standing behind” a politician just because you voted for him or her does not make you patriotic, or loyal, or even smart—what it does make you is derelict in your responsibilities as a citizen.
”
”
Joseph Befumo (The Republicrat Junta: How Two Corrupt Parties, in Collusion with Corporate Criminals, have Subverted Democracy, Deceived the People, and Hijacked Our Constitutional Government)
“
You are worse than a corrupt politician if you don't vote, because tomorrow. You will be the first to complain about bad service delivery and how bad the country is being run by bad leaders and criminals.
”
”
D.J. Kyos
“
When you hire criminals to be police officers. It is easy for innocent people to be arrested, convicted and jailed, but It is difficult ,close to impossible to have criminals arrested, convicted and jailed.
”
”
D.J. Kyos
“
there are a few still running around that have not been assimilated—Dennis Kucinich, Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, Ron Paul—but nobody listens to them, because the pod politicians have told us that they are crazy.
”
”
Joseph Befumo (The Republicrat Junta: How Two Corrupt Parties, in Collusion with Corporate Criminals, have Subverted Democracy, Deceived the People, and Hijacked Our Constitutional Government)
“
The blackest chapter in the history of this State will be the Indian guardianship over these estates,” an Osage leader said, adding, “There has been millions—not thousands—but millions of dollars of many of the Osages dissipated and spent by the guardians themselves.” This so-called Indian business, as White discovered, was an elaborate criminal operation, in which various sectors of society were complicit. The crooked guardians and administrators of Osage estates were typically among the most prominent white citizens: businessmen and ranchers and lawyers and politicians. So were the lawmen and prosecutors and judges who facilitated and concealed the swindling (and, sometimes, acted as guardians and administrators themselves). In 1924, the Indian Rights Association, which defended the interests of indigenous communities, conducted an investigation into what it described as “an orgy of graft and exploitation.” The group documented how rich Indians in Oklahoma were being “shamelessly and openly robbed in a scientific and ruthless manner” and how guardianships were “the plums to be distributed to the faithful friends of the judges as a reward for their support at the polls.” Judges were known to say to citizens, “You vote for me, and I will see that you get a good guardianship.” A white woman married to an Osage man described to a reporter how the locals would plot: “A group of traders and lawyers sprung up who selected certain Indians as their prey. They owned all the officials…. These men had an understanding with each other. They cold-bloodedly said, ‘You take So-and-So, So-and-So and So-and-So and I’ll take these.’ They selected Indians who had full headrights and large farms.
”
”
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
“
..I began speaking.. First, I took issue with the media's characterization of the post-Katrina New Orleans as resembling the third world as its poor citizens clamored for a way out. I suggested that my experience in New Orleans working with the city's poorest people in the years before the storm had reflected the reality of third-world conditions in New Orleans, and that Katrina had not turned New Orleans into a third-world city but had only revealed it to the world as such. I explained that my work, running Reprieve, a charity that brought lawyers and volunteers to the Deep South from abroad to work on death penalty issues, had made it clear to me that much of the world had perceived this third-world reality, even if it was unnoticed by our own citizens.
To try answer Ryan's question, I attempted to use my own experience to explain that for many people in New Orleans, and in poor communities across the country, the government was merely an antagonist, a terrible landlord, a jailer, and a prosecutor. As a lawyer assigned to indigent people under sentence of death and paid with tax dollars, I explained the difficulty of working with clients who stand to be executed and who are provided my services by the state, not because they deserve them, but because the Constitution requires that certain appeals to be filed before these people can be killed. The state is providing my clients with my assistance, maybe the first real assistance they have ever received from the state, so that the state can kill them.
I explained my view that the country had grown complacent before Hurricane Katrina, believing that the civil rights struggle had been fought and won, as though having a national holiday for Martin Luther King, or an annual march by politicians over the bridge in Selma, Alabama, or a prosecution - forty years too late - of Edgar Ray Killen for the murder of civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, were any more than gestures. Even though President Bush celebrates his birthday, wouldn't Dr. King cry if he could see how little things have changed since his death? If politicians or journalists went to Selma any other day of the year, they would see that it is a crumbling city suffering from all of the woes of the era before civil rights were won as well as new woes that have come about since. And does anyone really think that the Mississippi criminal justice system could possibly be a vessel of social change when it incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than almost any place in the world, other than Louisiana and Texas, and then compels these prisoners, most of whom are black, to work prison farms that their ancestors worked as chattel of other men?
...
I hoped, out loud, that the post-Katrina experience could be a similar moment [to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fiasco], in which the American people could act like the children in the story and declare that the emperor has no clothes, and hasn't for a long time. That, in light of Katrina, we could be visionary and bold about what people deserve. We could say straight out that there are people in this country who are racist, that minorities are still not getting a fair shake, and that Republican policies heartlessly disregard the needs of individual citizens and betray the common good. As I stood there, exhausted, in front of the thinning audience of New Yorkers, it seemed possible that New Orleans's destruction and the suffering of its citizens hadn't been in vain.
”
”
Billy Sothern (Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City)
“
I know there are some heartless, greedy, selfish criminals who call themselves politicians, pastors, prophets or business people, who will steal money that is suppose to help in this corona virus. If you are that politician, pastor, prophet or business person, may you suffer with everything you have and will all your riches & wealth . May you never find happiness, joy & peace in your life, until you pay every cent that you stole from the people.
”
”
D.J. Kyos
“
The second category in our litmus test is the denial of the legitimacy of one’s opponents. Authoritarian politicians cast their rivals as criminal, subversive, unpatriotic, or a threat to national security or the existing way of life.
”
”
Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die)
“
Crime began rising precipitously in the 1960s after the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, started tilting the scales in favor of the criminals. Some 63 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll taken in 1968 judged the Warren Court, in place from 1953 to 1969, too lenient on crime; but Warren’s jurisprudence was supported wholeheartedly by the Michelle Alexanders of that era, as well as by liberal politicians who wanted to shift blame for criminal behavior away from the criminals.
”
”
Jason L. Riley (Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed)
“
She knew from personal experience how crime existed only to the degree that the law cooperated with it. She showed me how, in the country’s entire social, political and economic structure, the criminal, the law, and the politicians were actually inseparable partners.
”
”
Malcolm X (The Autobiography of Malcolm X)
“
An emerging vanguard of copaganda is rebranding repressive policies as compassionate. Politicians around the country are increasingly using the concept of "care" to describe policies of violence that jail unhoused people and criminalize people for their mental illness.
”
”
Alec Karakatsanis (Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News)
“
It was easy to show that criminals sometimes clustered in families. But it was a great leap to claim that the essential traits of criminality or deviance were the products of families—much less that these traits were transmitted from parent to child, as Goddard had tried to show with the Kallikaks. After all, societies differed on the basic definition of what constituted criminal behavior. Criminologists, for example, tended to pay scant attention to rich criminals or well-placed miscreants: the tax cheat, the unscrupulous businessman, the corrupt politician. Their theories of innate criminality seemed to be based exclusively on the poor: the pickpocket, the public drunkard, the street prostitute. That fact was itself evidence of how culturally determined the definition of crime was in the first place.
”
”
Charles King (Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century)
“
There were dozens of politicians who could put a stop to our work. We had to change the narrative from a criminal investigation to one of restorative justice and to help the public understand that this was a human rights issue. Denying justice to some puts us all at risk.
”
”
Erin Kimmerle (We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys)
“
People who are really poor, can't afford to do crime, because they don't have means and resources to commit one. They might have a reason to do it, but wont have strength, capacity, materials or resources to commit one. It is people who are well off who are doing most crimes, because they can afford to.
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D.J. Kyos
“
The hotel, for all its sober state, was no longer fashionable. No one, in my memory, had ever known any one who went there; it was frequented by “politicians” and “Westerners,” two classes of citizens whom my mother’s intonation always seemed to deprive of their vote by ranking them with illiterates and criminals.
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Edith Wharton (Old New York)
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How much did GE contribute to government criminals? Spent on lobbying: $39,290,000 (2010). Number of Lobbyists: 12,982 (2010). Political contributions: $2,696,141 (2010). Contributions to individual politicians: $6,723,281 (2010). Total contributions 1990 to 2010: $19,725,132.00. Party Breakdown: 52% to Democrats, 48% to Republicans
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Joseph Befumo (The Republicrat Junta: How Two Corrupt Parties, in Collusion with Corporate Criminals, have Subverted Democracy, Deceived the People, and Hijacked Our Constitutional Government)
“
Our government says people must not take law in their own hands, But has given the law in the hands of people who in power. That is why people who are in power are always corrupt, arrogant, violent, Aggressive, selfish, and don't care about anyone. They get away with all the bad things they do that Is criminating unlawful and injustice
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D.J. Kyos
“
Under conditions of extreme deprivation people will continue to grow crops that promise economic relief, and they will continue to trade in those crops and their products. The ultimate beneficiaries are neither the impoverished Afghan or Columbian peasant nor the street-corner pusher in the U.S. ghetto or on Vancouver’s skid row. The illegality of mind-altering substances enriches drug cartels, crime syndicates, and their corrupt enablers among politicians, government officials, judges, lawyers, and police officers around the world. If one set out deliberately to fashion a legal system designed to maximize and sustain the wealth of international drug criminals and their abettors, one could never dream up anything to improve upon the present one—except, perhaps, to add tobacco to the list of contraband substances. That way the traffickers and their allies could profit even more, although it’s unimaginable that their legally respectable counterparts—tax-hungry governments and the nicotine pushers in tobacco company boardrooms—would ever allow that to happen.
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Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
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Although distortion of the past is widespread, the most common travesty is one of omission, wherein populist leaders neglect to mention the crimes committed by their own side or recollect them in such a way that evades accepting full responsibility. That politicians are so able to evoke historical arguments in these ways results from a prior failure of the society to engage in a full and frank encounter with past wrongdoings.
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Richard Ashby Wilson (Writing History in International Criminal Trials)
“
So it's 2019. I'm gonna say the right thing to do is for the US to declare bankruptcy (Trump can do it… done it before…), and dismantle the criminal state of Israel as it exists today. Unfortunately, politicians are so full of shit and AIPAC money, and the economy is so addicted to war, and the US population is so fucking stupid... that we’ll probably have to go and try to fuck up another two or three countries before moving on to a decent, honest life.
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Dmitry Dyatlov
“
Ladies and gentlemen, after Columbine, Newtown, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, San Bernardino, Orlando, Vegas, Parkland and now in our own community, one thing should be clear to citizens and politicians alike. Our society needs stricter laws for people who purchase guns for the purpose of perpetrating criminal acts. We need tougher laws for people who buy guns to sell to criminals or kids. These laws should severely punish anyone in these categories—neither suggestion steps on the Second Amendment . . .
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Mark M. Bello (Betrayal High (Zachary Blake Legal Thriller, #5))
“
Even so—think of the declaration of war in 1939! They had no armaments at all—and yet they declared war ! In those days they had, I believe, six divisions. It's quite possible that they will again let themselves be hoodwinked by fairy tales from the emigres. The soldiers, I know, were against war. But there are people over there who don't give a damn if Britain does collapse—yes, I mean the Jews ! There are others who say : "If the Russians are beaten, then we shall be the war criminals —there will be trials, and we shall end up in the Tower." The soldiers will defend themselves by saying that they had given full warning of the danger Britain ran in accepting the risks of undertaking an invasion. But for the politicians who declared war and the Jews who drove them to it there is no defence ! And these latter are quite capable of risking a second attempt. On the other hand, they may say to themselves : we are taking on an opponent who has so far knocked the teeth out of everybody who has opposed him.
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Adolf Hitler (Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944)
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Estimates suggest that $7.6 trillion of wealth is hidden in tax havens all over the world. The international finance sector acts as a 'circulation system for criminal money acquired through drug trafficking, terrorism, piracy, human trafficking, proliferation and tax evasion.'
When we look at the international financial system, we don't find a free-market paradise. Instead, we find incredibly powerful institutions in both the public and private sector shaping the conditions faced by everyone else. Financial institutions 'dress themselves up in liberal trappings of the market, yet capture the old sovereignty of the state all the better to squeeze the social body to feed their own profits.'
Yet all this power is held without any democratic accountability. Politicians, technocrats, and financiers work together to decide everything from the interest rates we pay on our loans to who gets what when a state files for bankruptcy. If everyone had a say in determining how these rules were made and enforced, rather than just a privileged few, we'd live in a very different world.
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Grace Blakeley (Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom)
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sexual orthodoxy and the exercise of power. If a President can’t keep his pants on, does he lose the right to rule us? If a public servant cheats on his wife does this make him more likely to cheat on the electorate? For myself, I’d rather be ruled by an adulterer, by some sexual rogue, than by a prim celibate or zipped-up spouse. As criminals tend to specialize in certain crimes, so corrupt politicians normally specialize in their corruption: the sexual blackguards stick to fucking, the bribe-takers to graft. In which case it would make more sense to elect proven adulterers instead of discouraging them from public life. I
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Julian Barnes (A History of the World in 10½ Chapters)
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This is where racism becomes strategically useful. Whatever the Koch movement operatives (which now include many Republican politicians) believe in their hearts about race, they are comfortable with deploying strategic racism because popular stereotypes can help move unpopular ideas, including limiting democracy. Take for example the widespread unconscious association between people of color and criminals; anti-voting advocates and politicians exploited this connection to win white support for voter suppression measures. They used images of brown and Black people voting in ads decrying “voter fraud,” which has been proven repeatedly to be virtually nonexistent and nonsensical: it’s hard enough to get a majority of people to overcome the bureaucratic hurdles to vote in every election; do we really think that people are risking jail time to cast an extra ballot? Nonetheless, the combination of the first Black president and inculcation through repetition led to a new common sense, particularly among white Republicans, that brown and Black people could be committing a crime by voting. With this idea firmly implanted, the less popular idea—that politicians should change the rules to make it harder for eligible citizens to vote—becomes more tolerable.
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Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World Essentials))
“
Our greatest national resource was once our self-sufficiency. We could forge our own steel, build our own cars, manufacture our own appliances, construct our own furniture, weave our own cloth—with the hands of our own workers—and were dependent on nobody else for our own survival. Can we say the same thing today? And who has benefitted from the pillaging of this greatest resource? Is it the workers who now sit idle, their jobs shipped off to India and China, while the politicians accuse them of deliberate sloth? Or is it those whose profits were maximized by exporting those jobs, and those in government whom they bribed to make doing so the law of the land?
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Joseph Befumo (The Republicrat Junta: How Two Corrupt Parties, in Collusion with Corporate Criminals, have Subverted Democracy, Deceived the People, and Hijacked Our Constitutional Government)
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known psychotic who nevertheless was allowed to move freely, an assassinated leading Negro national politician, endless other assassination attempts, unsuccessful, partly successful, and successful; d) So many casual killings in public streets and public parks and public transports that most lawful citizens avoided going out after dark, especially the elderly; e) Public school teachers and state university professors who taught that patriotism was an obsolete concept, that marriage was an obsolete concept, that sin was an obsolete concept, that politeness was an obsolete concept—that the United States itself was an obsolete concept; f) School teachers who could not speak or write grammatically, could not spell, could not cipher; g) The nation’s leading farm state had as its biggest cash crop: an outlawed plant that was the source of the major outlaw drug; h) Cocaine and heroin called “recreational drugs,” felony theft called “joyriding,” vandalism by gangs called “trashing,” burglary called “ripping off,” felonious assault by gangs called “muggings,” and the reaction to all of these crimes was “boys will be boys,” so scold them and put them on probation but don’t ruin their lives by treating them as criminals; i) Millions of women who found it more rewarding to have babies out of wedlock than it would be to get married or to go to work.
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Robert A. Heinlein (To Sail Beyond the Sunset)
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The media squabble over Shchepotin’s final day at the Cancer Institute, and the doubts it raised over the motivation of all concerned, were appropriate, because the most corrosive aspect of corruption is the way that it undermines trust. When corruption is widespread, it becomes impossible to know whom to believe, since the money infects every aspect of state and society. Every newspaper article can be criticized as paid for, every politician can be called corrupt, every court decision can be called into question. Charities are set up by oligarchs to lobby for their interests, and those then provoke doubts about every other non-governmental organization. If even doctors are on the take, can you trust their diagnoses? Are they claiming a patient needs treatment only because that would be to their profit? If policemen are crooked, and courts are paid for, are criminals really criminals? Or are they honest people who interfered in criminals’ business? Not knowing whom to believe, you retreat into trusting only those closest to you—your oldest friends, and your relatives—and that reinforces the divisions in society that corruption thrives on. It is impossible to build a thriving economy, or a healthy democracy, without a society whose members fundamentally trust each other. If you take that away, you are left with something far darker and more mercenary.
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Oliver Bullough (Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World)
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People Vs Supreme Court (The Sonnet)
When the Supreme Court behaves prehistoric,
Every human must become an activist.
When the gatekeepers of law behave barbarian,
Every civilian must come down to the street.
When people are stripped off their basic rights,
By some bigoted and shortsighted gargoyles.
We the people must take back the reins,
And put the politicians in their rightful place.
We need no guns and grenades, we need no ammo,
Unarmed and unbent we stand against savagery.
Till every woman obtains their right to choice,
None of us will sit quiet in compliant apathy.
Every time the cradle of justice becomes criminal,
It falls upon us civilians to be justice incorruptible.
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Abhijit Naskar (Find A Cause Outside Yourself: Sermon of Sustainability)
“
At a time when the current and two former US presidents have admittedly indulged, as have politicians of all stripes from Al Gore to Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin and over 50% of the adult US population, the credibility tipping point of the War on Drugs propaganda has long been passed. All that appears to be missing is the political courage to admit failure and move on to more realistic and efficient policies. What will it take for decision makers to display the wisdom and garner the courage to end the disastrous War on Drugs and responsibly take charge of drug production and trade instead of leaving it in the hands of extremely dangerous and powerful international criminal organizations?
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Jeffrey Dhywood (World War D. The Case against prohibitionism, roadmap to controlled re-legalization)
“
There are many other escapes from the empirical, external self, which might seem to be, but are not, contemplation. For instance, the experience of being seized and taken out of oneself by collective enthusiasm, in a totalitarian parade: the self-righteous upsurge of party loyalty that blots out conscience and absolves every criminal tendency in the name of Class, Nation, Party, Race or Sect. .. Yet it is precisely these ersatz forms of enthusiasm that are "opium" for the people, deadening their awareness of their deepest and most personal needs, alienating them from their true selves, putting conscience and personality to sleep and turning free, reasonable men into passive instruments of the power politician.
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Thomas Merton
“
The second category in our litmus test is the denial of the legitimacy of one’s opponents. Authoritarian politicians cast their rivals as criminal, subversive, unpatriotic, or a threat to national security or the existing way of life. Trump met this criterion, as well. For one, he had been a “birther,” challenging the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency by suggesting that he was born in Kenya and that he was a Muslim, which many of his supporters equated with being “un-American.” During the 2016 campaign, Trump denied Hillary Clinton’s legitimacy as a rival by branding her a “criminal” and declaring repeatedly that she “has to go to jail.” At campaign rallies he applauded supporters who chanted “Lock her up!
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Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die)
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If our democracy worked as it should, we would elect wise women and men who made laws for the good of the people and enforced those laws.
That, though, is not the way things work. Greedy, power–mad billionaires spend money so that politicians such as George W. Bush can buy elections. Corrupt corporations such as Enron defraud old ladies and commit crimes. And they get away with it. They get away with it because most of us are so afraid of losing the security of our nice, normal lives that we are not willing to risk anything about those lives. We are either afraid to fight or we don’t know how. Or we believe that bad things won’t happen to us.
And so, in the end, too many people lose their lives anyway. In Nazi Germany, millions of men who acquiesced to Hitler’s murderous rise to power wound up marching into Russia’s icy wasteland—into the Soviet Army’s machine guns and cannon—to themselves be murdered. In America after 9–11, trusting teenagers who had joined the National Guard found themselves sent to Iraq on extended and additional tours. Our enemy killed many of them because we, citizens of the richest country in the world, did not provide them with body armor.
Grieving mothers protested the wasting of their sons’ lives. Nadia McCaffrey defied Bush’s shameful ban on the filming of U.S. soldiers’ coffins returning home from Iraq. She knew, as we all did, that this tyrannical dictum of Bush dishonored our soldiers’ sacrifice. And so she invited the press to the Sacramento International Airport to photograph her son’s flag–draped coffin.
Again, I am not comparing George W. Bush to Adolph Hitler, nor America to Germany’s Third Reich. What I do believe is that each of us has the duty to keep the Bushes of the world from becoming anything like Hitler—and to keep America from invading other countries with no just cause.
We will never, though, be able to stop corrupt politicians and corporations from doing criminal things until we stop surrendering our power to them. The more we fear to oppose them—the more we want to retreat into the supposed safety of our nice gated communities or downtown lofts—the more powerful people will conspire to ruin our prosperity and wreck our lives.
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David Zindell (Splendor)
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The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of "We are all writers!"
The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late.
Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.
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Milan Kundera
“
American politicians had done little through the years to stem the flood. Hispanic voters wanted their kinsmen to be able to enter the United States regardless of their ability to contribute to the economy or pay their own bills, yet this wasn’t the decisive factor. Farmers and small-business men wanted a source of cheap labor, and were content to pass the true costs, the social costs, on to the taxpayers. Generous public welfare programs also drew millions of Mexicans, more than small business or agriculture could possibly use. Even draining off an eighth of the population didn’t really help Mexico, which found itself racked by turf wars between vicious criminal gangs that smuggled drugs into the United States to supply the richest narcotics market in the world.
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Stephen Coonts (Liberty's Last Stand (Tommy Carmellini #7))
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First there was Caine’s patently false “confession.” Then there was the fact that the FAYZ Legal Defense Fund racked up three million dollars in its first two weeks. Then there was a judicial panel that took statements from eminent scientists and concluded that the FAYZ was in fact a separate universe and thus not covered under California law.
Finally, there was a shift in public opinion following the involvement of the two popular movie stars, the McDonald’s documentary starring Albert Hillsborough, the likelihood of a major Hollywood feature film, and the kiss seen round the world. Polls now showed 68 percent of Californians wanted no criminal charges brought against the FAYZ survivors.
The kiss alone would have wrecked the career of any prosecutor or politician who had anything bad to say about Astrid Ellison or Sam Temple.
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Michael Grant (Light (Gone, #6))
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racism is about the power of a group and in America it’s white folks who have that power. How? Well, white folks don’t get treated like shit in upper-class African-American communities and white folks don’t get denied bank loans or mortgages precisely because they are white and black juries don’t give white criminals worse sentences than black criminals for the same crime and black police officers don’t stop white folk for driving while white and black companies don’t choose not to hire somebody because their name sounds white and black teachers don’t tell white kids that they’re not smart enough to be doctors and black politicians don’t try some tricks to reduce the voting power of white folks through gerrymandering and advertising agencies don’t say they can’t use white models to advertise glamorous products because they are not considered “aspirational” by the “mainstream.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
“
but racism is about the power of a group and in America it’s white folks who have that power. How? Well, white folks don’t get treated like shit in upper-class African-American communities and white folks don’t get denied bank loans or mortgages precisely because they are white and black juries don’t give white criminals worse sentences than black criminals for the same crime and black police officers don’t stop white folk for driving while white and black companies don’t choose not to hire somebody because their name sounds white and black teachers don’t tell white kids that they’re not smart enough to be doctors and black politicians don’t try some tricks to reduce the voting power of white folks through gerrymandering and advertising agencies don’t say they can’t use white models to advertise glamorous products because they are not considered “aspirational” by the “mainstream.” So
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
“
the experience of being seized and taken out of oneself by collective enthusiasm, in a totalitarian parade: the self-righteous upsurge of party loyalty that blots out conscience and absolves every criminal tendency in the name of Class, Nation, Party, Race or Sect. The danger and the attraction of these false mystiques of Nation and of Class is precisely that they seduce and pretend to satisfy those who are no longer aware of any deep or genuine spiritual need. The false mysticism of the Mass Society captivates men who are so alienated from themselves and from God that they are no longer capable of genuine spiritual experience. Yet it is precisely these ersatz forms of enthusiasm that are “opium” for the people, deadening their awareness of their deepest and most personal needs, alienating them from their true selves, putting conscience and personality to sleep and turning free, reasonable men into passive instruments of the power politician.
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Thomas Merton (New Seeds of Contemplation)
“
Treaty and the reparations Germany was obliged to pay were ‘malignant and silly to an extent that made them obviously futile’. This was the theme of the young economist Maynard Keynes in his philippic The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which began a myth which has never died. In reality, the real disaster wasn’t the way the war had begun or who was responsible, but how it had ended; not the claim that Germany had started the war, but the Germans’ belief that they hadn’t lost it, a belief encouraged by both German generals and politicians. When returning troops marched through Berlin in December, they were told, by Ebert of all people, the Social Democratic leader, ‘No army has overcome you.’ With that belief implanted, when the Treaty was published it was easy for demagogues to offer an answer. If the army had been ‘im Feld unbesiegt’, undefeated in battle, it must have been betrayed by the ‘November criminals’, the treacherous politicians who had taken over, and then betrayed Germany, and then ‘stabbed in the back’ by civilians, and Jews. Thus was the seed planted that would bring forth a frightful blossom.
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Geoffrey Wheatcroft (Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill)
“
The illiberal left does not share this commitment. Their burgeoning philosophy in favor of government power to curtail freedom of thought, speech, and conscience is troubling. Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a graduate of one of the nation’s most elite law schools, the University of Virginia—said in a September 2014 interview of those who deny climate change, “I wish that there were a law you could punish them under.”36 Accusing the libertarian Koch brothers of “treason” for disagreeing with his view of climate change, he said they should be “at the Hague with all the other war criminals.” He asked rhetorically, “Do I think the Koch brothers should be tried for reckless endangerment? Absolutely, that is a criminal offense and they ought to be serving time for it.” Kennedy’s penchant for arguing for state action against those who do not share his view of climate change is not new. In 2007, he said in a speech at Live Earth that politicians who are “corporate toadies for companies like Exxon and Southern Company” had committed treason and needed to be treated as traitors.37 In 2009, he deemed certain coal companies “criminal enterprises” and declared that one company’s CEO “should be in jail . . . for all of eternity.”38
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Kirsten Powers (The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech)
“
Why? Why do the authorities allow the criminal gangs that terrorize neighborhoods and entire cities to thrive as they do? Politicians, attorneys general, district attorneys, and the FBI have the power to destroy the gangs and prevent most of the crimes they commit, the murdering and raping and human trafficking and the endless flood of drugs across the border, the hateful murdering murdering murdering of faithful husbands and little girls in their Sunday dresses. Yet the people with the power to stop men like Hamal and Lupo and Parker often facilitate their activities. Maybe the majority of politicians and their appointees are corrupt, but not all. Are those uncorrupted individuals so often ineffective because they are cowards or lazy or stupid? Does loyalty to party, class, club, or ideology matter to them more than doing what is right? Why? Why can’t such people see that the crime and anarchy they permit to flourish in poor and middle-class neighborhoods will eventually metastasize into the enclaves of the elite where they live their privileged lives? Why do they have contempt for those not in their circle? Why can’t they see that being of the people rather than ruling over them is the only way that they themselves will survive?
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Dean Koontz (The House at the End of the World)
“
The Republican Roosevelt wanted to fight plutocrats as well as anarchists. Their plunder of oil, coal, minerals, and timber on federal lands appalled him, in his role as the founder of America’s national parks. Corporate criminals, carving up public property for their private profit, paid bribes to politicians to protect their land rackets. Using thousand-dollar bills as weapons, they ransacked millions of acres of the last American frontiers. In 1905, a federal investigation, led in part by a scurrilous Secret Service agent named William J. Burns, had led to the indictment and conviction of Senator John H. Mitchell and Representative John H. Williamson of Oregon, both Republicans, for their roles in the pillage of the great forests of the Cascade Range. An Oregon newspaper editorial correctly asserted that Burns and his government investigators had used “the methods of Russian spies and detectives.” The senator died while his case was on appeal; the congressman’s conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court on grounds of “outrageous conduct,” including Burns’s brazen tampering with jurors and witnesses. Burns left the government and became a famous private eye; his skills at tapping telephones and bugging hotel rooms eventually won him a job as J. Edgar Hoover’s
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Tim Weiner (Enemies: A History of the FBI)
“
Fascist politicians justify their ideas by breaking down a common sense of history in creating a mythic past to support their vision for the present. They rewrite the population’s shared understanding of reality by twisting the language of ideals through propaganda and promoting anti-intellectualism, attacking universities and educational systems that might challenge their ideas. Eventually, with these techniques, fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate. As the common understanding of reality crumbles, fascist politics makes room for dangerous and false beliefs to take root. First, fascist ideology seeks to naturalize group difference, thereby giving the appearance of natural, scientific support for a hierarchy of human worth. When social rankings and divisions solidify, fear fills in for understanding between groups. Any progress for a minority group stokes feelings of victimhood among the dominant population. Law and order politics has mass appeal, casting “us” as lawful citizens and “them,” by contrast, as lawless criminals whose behavior poses an existential threat to the manhood of the nation. Sexual anxiety is also typical of fascist politics as the patriarchal hierarchy is threatened by growing gender equity. As the fear of “them” grows, “we” come to represent everything virtuous.
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Jason F. Stanley (How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them)
“
Each generation identifies with a small group of people said to have lived lives exemplifying the vices and virtues of that generation. If one were to choose a trial lawyer whose life reflected the unique characteristics of America’s “Wild West” of a criminal justice system in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, that person likely would be my father.
New York City of the 1960s until the turn of the 21st century was the world’s epicenter of organized and white-collar crime. During those four decades, the most feared mafia chiefs, assassins, counterfeiters, Orthodox Jewish money launderers, defrocked politicians of every stripe, and Arab bankers arriving in the dead of night in their private jets, sought the counsel of one man: my father, Jimmy La Rossa.
Once a Kennedy-era prosecutor, Brooklyn-born Jimmy La Rossa became one of the greatest criminal trial lawyers of his day. He was the one man who knew where all of the bodies were buried, and everyone knew it. It seemed incomprehensible that Jimmy would one day just disappear from New York. Forever.
After stealing my dying father from New York Presbyterian Hospital to a waiting Medevac jet, the La Rossa Boys, as we became known, spent the next five years in a place where few would look for two diehard New Yorkers: a coastal town in the South Bay of Los Angeles, aptly named Manhattan Beach.
While I cooked him his favorite Italian dishes and kept him alive using the most advanced medical equipment and drugs, my father and I documented our notorious and cinematic life together as equal parts biography and memoir.
This is our story.
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James M. LaRossa Jr. (Last of the Gladiators: A Memoir of Love, Redemption, and the Mob)
“
Information or allegations reflecting negatively on individuals or groups seen less sympathetically by the intelligentsia pass rapidly into the public domain with little scrutiny and much publicity. Two of the biggest proven hoaxes of our time have involved allegations of white men gang-raping a black woman-- first the Tawana Brawley hoax of 1987 and later the false rape charges against three Duke University students in 2006. In both cases, editorial indignation rang out across the land, without a speck of evidence to substantiate either of these charges. Moreover, the denunciations were not limited to the particular men accused, but were often extended to society at large, of whom these men were deemed to be symptoms or 'the tip of the iceberg.' In both cases, the charges fit a pre-existing vision, and that apparently made mundane facts unnecessary.
Another widely publicized hoax-- one to which the President of the United States added his sub-hoax-- was a 1996 story appearing in USA Today under the headline, 'Arson at Black Churches Echoes Bigotry of the Past.' There was, according to USA Today, 'an epidemic of church burning,' targeting black churches. Like the gang-rape hoaxes, this story spread rapidly through the media. The Chicago Tribune referred to 'an epidemic of criminal and cowardly arson' leaving black churches in ruins.
As with the gang-rape hoaxes, comments on the church fire stories went beyond those who were supposed to have set these fires to blame forces at work in society at large. Jesse Jackson was quoted was quoted in the New York Times as calling these arsons part of a 'cultural conspiracy' against blacks, which 'reflected the heightened racial tensions in the south that have been exacerbated by the assault on affirmative action and the populist oratory of Republican politicians like Pat Buchanan.' Time magazine writer Jack White likewise blamed 'the coded phrases' of Republican leaders for 'encouraging the arsonists.' Columnist Barbara Reynolds of USA Today said that the fires were 'an attempt to murder the spirit of black America.' New York Times columnist Bob Herbert said, "The fuel for these fires can be traced to a carefully crafted environment of bigotry and hatred that was developed over the last century.'
As with the gang-rape hoaxes, the charges publicized were taken as reflecting on the whole society, not just those supposedly involved in what was widely presumed to be arson, rather than fires that break out for a variety of other reasons. Washington Post columnist Dorothy Gilliam said that society in effect was 'giving these arsonists permission to commit these horrible crimes.' The climax of these comments came when President Bill Clinton, in his weekly radio address, said that these church burnings recalled similar burnings of black churches in Arkansas when he was a boy. There were more that 2,000 media stories done on the subject after the President's address.
This story began to unravel when factual research showed that (1) no black churches were burned in Arkansas when Bill Clinton was growing up, (2) there had been no increase in fires at black churches, but an actual decrease over the previous 15 years, (3) the incidence of fires at white churches was similar to the incidence of fires at black churches, and (4) where there was arson, one-third of the suspects were black. However, retractions of the original story-- where there were retractions at all-- typically were given far less prominence than the original banner headlines and heated editorial comments.
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Thomas Sowell (Intellectuals and Society)
“
The more that injustice, exploitation, inequality, unemployment, poverty, hunger, and misery prevail in human society, the more Che's stature will grow.
The more that the power of imperialism, hegemonism, domination, and interventionism grow, to the detriment of the most sacred rights of the peoples-especially the weak, backward, and poor peoples who for centuries were colonies of the West and sources of slave labor-the more the values Che defended will be upheld.
The more that abuses, selfishness, and alienation exist; the more that Indians, ethnic minorities, women, and immigrants suffer dis crimination; the more that children are bought and sold for sex or forced into the workforce in their hundreds of millions; the more that ignorance, unsanitary conditions, insecurity, and homelessness prevail-the more Che's deeply humanistic message will stand out.
The more that corrupt, demagogic, and hypocritical politicians exist anywhere, the more Che's example of a pure, revolutionary, and consistent human being will come through.
The more cowards, opportunists, and traitors there are on the face of the earth, the more Che's personal courage and revolutionary integrity will be admired.
The more that others lack the ability to fulfill their duty, the more Che's iron willpower will be admired.
The more that some individuals lack the most basic self-respect, the more Che's sense of honor and dignity will be admired.
The more that skeptics abound, the more Che's faith in man will be admired.
The more pessimists there are, the more Che's optimism will be admired.
The more vacillators there are, the more Che's audacity will be admired.
The more that loafers squander the product of the labor of others, the more Che's austerity, his spirit of study and work, will be admired.
”
”
Fidel Castro
“
The fascist leaders were outsiders of a new type. New people had forced their way into national leadership before. There had long been hard-bitten soldiers who fought better than aristocratic officers and became indispensable to kings. A later form of political recruitment came from young men of modest background who made good when electoral politics broadened in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the aforementioned French politician Léon Gambetta, the grocer’s son, or the beer wholesaler’s son Gustav Stresemann, who became the preeminent statesman of Weimar Germany. A third kind of successful outsider in modern times has been clever mechanics in new industries (consider those entrepreneurial bicycle makers Henry Ford, William Morris, and the Wrights).
But many of the fascist leaders were marginal in a new way. They did not resemble the interlopers of earlier eras: the soldiers of fortune, the first upwardly mobile parliamentary politicians, or the clever mechanics. Some were bohemians, lumpen-intellectuals, dilettantes, experts in nothing except the
manipulation of crowds and the fanning of resentments: Hitler, the failed art student; Mussolini, a schoolteacher by trade but mostly a restless revolutionary, expelled for subversion from Switzerland and the Trentino; Joseph Goebbels, the jobless college graduate with literary ambitions; Hermann Goering, the drifting World War I fighter ace; Heinrich Himmler, the agronomy student who failed at selling fertilizer and raising chickens.
Yet the early fascist cadres were far too diverse in social origins and education to fit the common label of marginal outsiders. Alongside street-brawlers with criminal records like Amerigo Dumini or Martin Bormann one could find a professor of philosophy like Giovanni Gentile or even, briefly, a musician like Arturo Toscanini. What united them was, after all, values rather than a social profile: scorn for tired bourgeois politics, opposition to the Left, fervent nationalism, a tolerance for violence when needed.
”
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Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
“
Power is seeping away from autocrats and single-party systems whether they embrace reform or not. It is spreading from large and long-established political parties to small ones with narrow agendas or niche constituencies. Even within parties, party bosses who make decisions, pick candidates, and hammer out platforms behind closed doors are giving way to insurgents and outsiders—to new politicians who haven’t risen up in the party machine, who never bothered to kiss the ring. People entirely outside the party structure—charismatic individuals, some with wealthy backers from outside the political class, others simply catching a wave of support thanks to new messaging and mobilization tools that don’t require parties—are blazing a new path to political power. Whatever path they followed to get there, politicians in government are finding that their tenure is getting shorter and their power to shape policy is decaying. Politics was always the art of the compromise, but now politics is downright frustrating—sometimes it feels like the art of nothing at all. Gridlock is more common at every level of decision-making in the political system, in all areas of government, and in most countries. Coalitions collapse, elections take place more often, and “mandates” prove ever more elusive. Decentralization and devolution are creating new legislative and executive bodies. In turn, more politicians and elected or appointed officials are emerging from these stronger municipalities and regional assemblies, eating into the power of top politicians in national capitals. Even the judicial branch is contributing: judges are getting friskier and more likely to investigate political leaders, block or reverse their actions, or drag them into corruption inquiries that divert them from passing laws and making policy. Winning an election may still be one of life’s great thrills, but the afterglow is diminishing. Even being at the top of an authoritarian government is no longer as safe and powerful a perch as it once was. As Professor Minxin Pei, one of the world’s most respected experts on China, told me: “The members of the politburo now openly talk about the old good times when their predecessors at the top of the Chinese Communist Party did not have to worry about bloggers, hackers, transnational criminals, rogue provincial leaders or activists that stage 180,000 public protests each year. When challengers appeared, the old leaders had more power to deal with them. Today’s leaders are still very powerful but not as much as those of a few decades back and their powers are constantly declining.”3
”
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Moisés Naím (The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be)
“
Rising levels of violent crime engulfed impoverished neighborhoods. Black residents bombarbed their politicians and crime fighters with their racist fears of Black criminals as opposed to criminals. Neither the residents nor the politicians nor the crime fighters wholly saw the heroin and crack problem as a public-health crisis or the violent-crime problem in poor neighborhoods where Black people lived as a poverty problem.
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Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials))
“
I have heard politicians like John Major in the U.K. and his counterparts in the U.S. say that what we need to do to solve the problem of crime and violence is to teach criminals to learn the different between right and wrong. In other words, we need to teach them to recognize the difference between justice and injustice, and to pursue the former and eschew the latter. But what the politicians who mouth these sentiments do not realize is that the violent criminals are perfectly aware of the difference between right and wrong.
They realize that they have been victims of injustice (most of all, from those who preach to them most loudly about it), and they commit their crimes in order to achieve some measure of justice, by taking something back from a society that has subjected them to a degree of deprivation to which it does not subject others. For example, how can we, as a society, say that we have something to teach about justice, when we permit the perpetuation of an economic system in which some people inherit millions of pounds while most people inherit nothing? How can we speak of equality of opportunity under those conditions?
Violent criminals are not violent because they are dumb, out of touch with reality, or unable to recognize hypocrisy, dishonesty, and injustice when they see it. They are violent precisely because they are aware of the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and injustice that surrounds them and of which they have been the victims. That does not mean that they respond to those conditions in a rational or just way, or that we should tolerate and permit their violence — which affects their fellow victims much more often than it does their oppressors.
But it does mean that we cannot expect to stop the kind of violence that we call crime until we stop the kind of violence that I have called structural in "Structural Violence" (1999). By this I mean the deaths and disabilities that are caused by the economic structure of our society, its division into rich and poor. Structural violence is not only the main form of violence, in the sense that poverty kills far more people (almost all of them very poor) than all the behavioral violence put together, it is also the main cause of violent behavior. Eliminating structural violence means eliminating relative poverty.
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James Gilligan (Preventing Violence (Prospects for Tomorrow))
“
The fact that depriving prisoners of the opportunity to acquire an education increases the rates of crime and violence in our society, and that there is no reason a society as wealthy as ours cannot afford to provide free higher education for everyone, are points that tend to get lost in discussions of this issue. But there are two even bigger points that also tend to get lost, so I will emphasize them here.
The first is that it is in the interests of the extremely wealthy upper class for the government to pursue policies whose effect is to raise the rates of crime and violence in our society. It is in their economic interest to increase the gap between rich and the poor to the highest level possible because they are the rich, and the greater the gap, the more they get. But the larger that gap becomes, the higher the rate of crime and violence. There is a clear conflict of interest between their economic interest in becoming wealthier, and the public's interest in preventing violence.
There is also a political dimension: namely, how to persuade the public to vote for politicians who will write the laws that keep diverting more money into the hands of the upper class and out of the hands of the middle and lower classes. A high rate of crime and violence pits the middle class against the lower class. Most of the categories of violence that the laws define as criminal are committed by lower-class people, and this makes the middle classes angry at the poor and afraid of them. But it also divides the lower class against itself — most poor people do not commit violent crimes, but most of the victims of violent crime are poor.
The higher the rates of crime and violence, then, the more the middle and lower classes are distracted from noticing that they are in most danger of being robbed by the very wealthy and their political agents. As the old saying goes, the poor man robs you with a gun, the rich man with a pen.
In this analysis, I am not assuming that there are many individual members of any class who are consciously aware of the role they are playing in this conflict. Some are, and of those, some work consciously to support this system, and some work consciously to oppose it. But the beauty of the system, from the standpoint of the rich, is that the vast majority of people whose lives are affected by it, whether for good or for ill, do not have to understand the system or consciously support it in order for it to work. The socio-economic and criminal justice systems do that job for them.
”
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James Gilligan (Preventing Violence (Prospects for Tomorrow))
“
The unscrupulous political movers, dishonest political beggars or financial political parasites used by politicians and political organisations or political parties, the unscrupulous financial political propagandists used by current or former politicians, the lobbyists and power hungry politicians with impaired conscience, the Machiavellian manipulators and manipulations of current or former politicians should never politicise international legal and judicial institutions which uphold justice, fight against criminality, and end impunity.
~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from my book, "Sfidatopia"
Book 2, Stronzta Trilogy
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Angelica Hopes
“
The unscrupulous political movers, dishonest political beggars or financial political parasites used by politicians, political organisations, political coalitions, or political parties, the unscrupulous political black propagandists used by current or former politicians, the lobbyists and power hungry politicians with impaired conscience, the Machiavellian manipulators and manipulations of current or former politicians: should never politicise international legal and judicial institutions which uphold justice, fight against criminality and end impunity.
~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from “Sfidatopia”
Book 2, Stronzata Trilogy
Genre: inspirational, political, literary novel
© Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn
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Angelica Hopes
“
It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
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Carol Shaben (Into the Abyss: How a Deadly Plane Crash Changed the Lives of a Pilot, a Politician, a Criminal and a Cop)
“
kilometres of tundra. Summer days north of the 60th parallel—the “land of the midnight sun”—were almost endless.
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Carol Shaben (Into the Abyss: How a Deadly Plane Crash Changed the Lives of a Pilot, a Politician, a Criminal and a Cop)
“
Political parties listen to their funders not to their voters. Those who fund political parties control the political party. Those who vote for the political party are controlled by the political party. Those who funds political parties are buying a right to use or power to use. They can say or do whatever they like and the political party won't oppose but will be in support of them. The sadness is when those funders are criminals , greedy corporates or pharmacies.
Then people wills suffer and die , while they make profit.
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D.J. Kyos
“
As Aristotle said, long before Christ, a people who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. It is obvious that we are repeating it today. Solomon said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” The Roman empire was declining in the days of Saul of Tarshish as the American Republic is declining today—and for the very same reasons: Permissiveness in society, immorality, the Welfare State, endless wars, confiscatory taxation, the brutal destruction of the middleclass, cynical disregard of the established human virtues and principles and ethics, the pursuit of materialistic wealth, the abandonment of religion, venal politicians who cater to the masses for votes, inflation, deterioration of the monetary system, bribes, criminality, riots, incendiarisms, street demonstrations, the release of criminals on the public in order to create chaos and terror, leading to a dictatorship “in the name of emergency,” the loss of masculine sturdiness and the feminization of the people, scandals in public office, plundering of the treasury, debt, the attitude that “anything goes,” the toleration of injustice and exploitation, bureaucracies and bureaucrats issuing evil “regulations” almost every week, the centralization of government, the public contempt for good and honorable men, and, above all, the philosophy that “God is dead,” and that man is supreme.
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Taylor Caldwell (Great Lion of God: A Novel About Saint Paul)
“
If we are all good people with good hearts and intensions. If we are all disciplined. We all respect and obey the law and authority. Genuinely love and care for each other. Wishing well and the best for each other. See each other as one big family than strangers. Then we are ready for one Africa, and we can do away with the borders, But if not.
What will open borders do is to allow worse and evil things to happen to good people in a bigger scale.
It will be easy to start a war. People won’t be reliable. The society and the system keeping things in place will fail.
More crimes and treason will be committed. It will be hard close to impossible to catch criminals and to sentence them. Criminals will have bigger market to steal and to commit their crimes. It will be easily for them to move around, to do money, diamond, gold laundering . Easy to smuggle people, stolen items, drugs, cars, cigarette. Fugitives, murders and rapist, pedophiles, serial killers. Opportunists , scammers or con man or women. Will fool and take advantage of lot of people. It will be easy for them to start cult and to manipulate people.
Corporates will get more cheap labor employes that they will enslaves and to extort.
Open borders is good business for criminals not for loyal honest citizens.
Ask yourself. How many things illegal things were caught at the border or customs ?
How many criminals and dangerous people were caught at the border or customs?
Ask yourself what would have happen If there were no borders ?
Open borders would have been a good idea if we were all good people and your unfortunately, we are not.
We all have hidden agendas and will say and do anything for money.
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D.J. Kyos
“
Semiautomatic weapons are also used to protect people and save lives. Single-shot rifles that require reloading by hand may not do people a lot of good when they are facing multiple criminals. The first shot may also miss or fail to stop an attacker. People wanting to protect themselves and their families might not have the luxury of time to reload their guns.
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John Lott (Gun Control Myths: How politicians, the media, and botched "studies" have twisted the facts on gun control)
“
In real life, crime guns are very rarely left at the scene of incidents, and the only exceptions occur when criminals have been seriously injured or killed.
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John Lott (Gun Control Myths: How politicians, the media, and botched "studies" have twisted the facts on gun control)
“
The claim that guns are rarely used in self-defense comes from only counting defensive actions that result in the death of the attacker. But by any measure, only a fraction of one percent of defensive gun uses result in the criminal attacker being killed or wounded. In 95% of the cases, merely brandishing a firearm is enough to fend off an attacker.
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John Lott (Gun Control Myths: How politicians, the media, and botched "studies" have twisted the facts on gun control)
“
Blacks vote overwhelmingly for liberal Democrats and yet no group has suffered more from the way liberal Democrats among politicians and judges have let violent criminals walk the streets. Moreover, no one has done more to make it illegal for the victims of these criminals to get guns to defend themselves with than liberal Democrats. No group has lost more from the dumbing down of public schools than blacks, as liberal propaganda has replaced academic study. —Loving enemies; March 22, 1999.
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Dean Kalahar (The Best of Thomas Sowell)
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Politicians in the 1990s had already embraced the idea that criminality was a deeply embedded moral failing that was largely impervious to reform.
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Alex S. Vitale (The End of Policing)
“
The paper fails to report that in only 8 of these 444 homicide cases was the murder weapon the gun that had been kept in the home. Moreover, the number of criminals stopped with a gun is much greater than the number killed in defensive gun uses. In fact, the attacker is killed in fewer than 1 out of every 1,000 defensive gun uses.
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John Lott (Gun Control Myths: How politicians, the media, and botched "studies" have twisted the facts on gun control)
“
Bans on large-capacity magazines are more or less exclusively obeyed by law-abiding citizens, and will prevent concealed handgun permit holders from carrying many bullets in their guns.15 Concealed handgun permit holders usually don’t carry multiple guns or magazines, whereas attackers often arm themselves to the teeth. Magazine limits mean that criminals are more likely to out-gun law-abiding citizens.
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John Lott (Gun Control Myths: How politicians, the media, and botched "studies" have twisted the facts on gun control)
“
Then we have the real criminals.” “Who?” “The super-rich and the politicians.” “Do tell.” “They feel so entitled that when they can’t have their way, they resort to bribery, extortion, and general bullying to get what they want. Most of our politicians start out as ordinary middle-class citizens when they enter office, and twenty years later, most of them are multimillionaires.
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Bob Blanton (Delphi Embassy (Delphi in Space #11))
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In a country where those who are committing crime are supported, rewarded, applauded and promoted. In a country where no one is arrested for doing wrong or for breaking the law. No one is taking responsibility and accountability. It will make everyone in that country to voluntarily participate in committing crime. Everyone will eventually end up being corrupt or criminals including foreigners. It will be a competition or a dare for thieves on who steals more and who steals better. People everyday will ask themselves why should they bother being good and not committing a crime, when everyone is doing it. Crime stats will be so high and increasing everyday. It is a duty of the president and the cabinet ministers in making sure the law is followed .If not everyone in that country will commit crime and they will be ok with it. No one will see anything wrong. That includes the law enforcement or institution.
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D.J. Kyos
“
In going along with the Panic, it can be argued that they broke the Nuremberg Code and the basic public health laws that are based on that code. The politicians and their advisors could therefore be arraigned as criminals and taken to face an independent court to be tried for their crimes against humanity. Many court cases started by human rights lawyers are now underway in Western countries following exactly this reasoning.299 Criminal convictions for the politicians who violated the Nuremberg Code during the Great Panic would serve as a warning to future politicians who find themselves in similar circumstances, where in the face of overwhelming demands from their populations they could become criminals. It would give them an incentive to more vigorously combat the wave of fear in their populations, and to act within the boundaries of the law.
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Paul Frijters (The Great Covid Panic: What Happened, Why, and What To Do Next)
“
There are more criminals made every day. You can blame the war for it: running young men through a meat grinder and expecting them to just go back to an ordinary life afterward. Or you can blame Prohibition. The police who line their pockets with bribes to look the other way. Or the ordinary people who gladly exchange their honest money for a bottle of booze to take the hurt out of their lives for a moment. Regardless of who is to blame, reality persists: There's money to be had. A big, messy pool of it. And for once it doesn't belong solely to the businessmen and the politicians. Now, you can choose to sit on the sidelines and feel morally superior for it, or you can wade into the cesspool with the rest of us wretched, miserable people and get a piece of it for yourself. Either way, there will be agony and death. Because that's what life is: an exhausting saga filled with suffering and disappointment. You can't change that. But you can mollify it for yourself.
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Nate Granzow (Black Cordite, White Snow: A Minnesotan Prohibition Thriller (Crooks' Haven Book 1))
“
Every solution they have. it is about stealing public funds and not be caught. Every little solution from them. It is not about the people or people's needs. It is all about themselves and stomach politics. They all thrive in corruption.
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D.J. Kyos
“
What makes voting so hard .It is not the task itself but is the option you are given to choose from. When comes elections In Africa we are choosing between who is a better thief, criminal , not too much corrupt, senior citizen, rather than choosing on who is a better leader. We are choosing on who is less greedy rather than who has more integrity.
It is all about who lies better rather than who can provide what they promised.. To them it is what they can personally benefit if they win rather than what the country can benefit if they win. That is why their win is always our loss. Its sad that we must place our fate and future in the hands of criminals, because good man want nothing to do with politics.
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D.J. Kyos
“
Only in Africa where people will think their future is in good by hands, by voting for a criminal who keeps on stealing from them, because of the association they have with the criminal.
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D.J. Kyos
“
Some political parties think being a politicians is about being corrupt. So they made corruption their mandate. The more corrupt you are . The more they will promote you to higher positions. The more they feel you are one of their own. You don't stand a chance or have a say if you are not corrupt within the party.
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D.J. Kyos
“
A greedy heart kills. That is why there is no honor amongst thieves. That is why those greedy , corrupt politicians kill each other. If they are not killing each other. They are killing the country. If they are not killing the country. They are killing the economy. If they are not killing the economy they are killing the citizens.
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D.J. Kyos
“
She knew that politicians loved to take strong stances against crime, but the reality was that by the time the criminal justice system got involved, it was usually too late to do anything. Criminals weren’t made when they turn eighteen. They were made through a lifetime of experiences.
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R.D. Brady (The Belial Stone (Belial #1))
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Robert Jay Lifton, the sense of being personally adrift is not uncommon among survivors of atrocious events.
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Carol Shaben (Into the Abyss: How a Deadly Plane Crash Changed the Lives of a Pilot, a Politician, a Criminal and a Cop)
“
The USA is the leading country for lodges, secret societies, the Ku-Klux-Klan, sects, and spiritualists. There are about 4,178,000 Free Masons in the entire world; 3.3 million of them live in the USA. All leading men of the government, from the president on down, belong to lodges, and all the lodges of course belong to and are led by the Jews. There are 49 major lodges in the USA with 16,518 branches. One cannot even count the sects and secret societies. We see that the Jew has understood how to break the USA down into individual particles and atoms, killing any kind of national life. The parties belong to him entirely, for over half of those in Congress — 213 members of the House — and more than half of the Senators, 48 in all — are Freemasons.
Gangsters and criminals along with stock brokers are other manifestations of decay brought about by Jewry. The legal system in the USA is fragmented and disunified. The benefactors are the plutocrats, corrupt politicians and businessmen without consciences. Judges are elected to their offices for a limited time. It is clear than they are dependent on the corrupt parties. Major insurance swindles, corrupting juries, and making false statements under oath are the order of the day.
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Robert Ley
“
Literally everyday we must choose between being raped, assaulted , robbed, mugged, hijacked, scammed, abused, kidnapped, stabbed , killed, or do what we have to do to survive .
All of this can go away or can continue. It all depends on which party you choose to vote for.
Be careful of a party that only cares about votes and power and not about its people. It will do and say anything that includes putting you in harm’s way , cuddling with criminals, terrorists, and enemies. Most people choose to be of the problem not part of the solution by supporting corrupt and criminal parties and leaders because they hope to personally benefit in future.
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D.J. Kyos
“
Politicians don't have race, politicians don't have religion, politicians don't have nationality. You may think, this is a good thing - well, in this case, it's not. You know why? Because their race is self-interest - their religion is self-interest - their nationality is self-interest. Politicians can be white, black, brown or martian - but once a moron, always a moron. Some monkeys are white, some monkeys are colored, but inside they are not white or colored - they are politicians - which means, they are all monkeys.
And the exception to this norm often comes from not so popular parts of the world - for example, South Africa. Which only proves that, you don't need to be a so-called geopolitical superpower to do what's right - you don't have to be a superpower to be a peacemaker. In fact in most cases, the so-called superpowers are the most morally bankrupt states in the world. Because guess what - governments don't exist to do the right thing, governments exist to do whatever keeps them in power. And the day the politics of self-interest comes to an end, there will be no longer any need for activists, humanitarians and reformers.
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Abhijit Naskar (World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets)
“
In other part of the world. Scientist create problems and then provide solutions for the problems they created in order to make profit.. In Africa criminals create problems and also they provide solutions for the problems they created in order to make profit. Most of our problems are made by the people who say they are here to save us.
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D.J. Kyos
“
While these are the most high-profile examples of politicians feeling the criminal law’s heat, many others have, too. The list of American politicians who’ve been found guilty of a crime this century is long and growing:
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William Cooper (How America Works... and Why It Doesn't: A Brief Guide to the U.S. Political System)
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Any crime reported after 31 days It happened. The person reporting it should be arrests for defending hands of justice and for being an accomplice. We can’t have people who knows of a crime being committing and they have information about it and want to use that information to their advantage or to benefit from it. They use it as their power move, card in their sleeves or as a chess move. We can’t be having people occupying high positions and be in government while they committed crimes and had not been sentenced for the crimes they committed and there are people amongst themselves who know about their crimes and want to expose it the day they are no longer benefiting, getting along, or they want to use it as leverage. Next thing we will be told they are fighting for us when they expose such information. If they are really fighting for us. Why had they let people they know are criminals rule us or serve us.
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D.J. Kyos
“
The same criminals you are working with and working for. The same criminals you are enabling , protecting, and defending today.
If the law doesn’t deal with you. Those criminals will deal with you or will kill you. There is no honor amongst thieves .
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De philosopher DJ Kyos
“
The export of cartel power into the USA is a sensitive issue. The discussion about Mexican cartels’ northward push gets pulled, often unfairly, into the flaming American immigration debate. The anti-immigrant brigade talk about Mexican laborers as an invading army; and they see all undocumented workers as potential cartel emissaries, using migrant communities to hide undercover ops. The Mexican Drug War, they say, is a reason to militarize the border. Residents of border states vex about the danger of spillover. If thugs are decapitating in Juárez, they fret, how long before they cut off heads in El Paso? Is the Mexican disease contagious?
Down in Mexico, the argument is reversed. A common complaint by politicians and journalists is that there aren’t enough arrests of big players in El Norte. Why haven’t we heard of the capos in the United States? they ask. How come some Mexican fugitives live unharmed north of the border? Why has Mexico been goaded into a drug war while narcotics move freely around the fifty states of the union?
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Ioan Grillo (El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency)
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Fourteen Ways To Tame Pharma
1. No more direct-to-consumer advertising on TV, in magazines, or on the internet
2. No more drug company-sponsored junkets, dinners, promotional gifts, or continuing medical education for doctors or medical students
3. No more financial support for medical professional organizations
4. No more beautiful salespeople congregating in the doctors' waiting room
5. No more free samples
6. No more off-label marketing
7. No more co-opting of thought leaders
8. No more drug company funding for the Food and Drug Administration
9. Bigger fines and criminal penalties for malfeasance that are directed against the executives as well as the companies
10. Shortened patent protection for companies that break the law
11. No more financial aid for consumer advocacy groups
12. No more disease-awareness campaigns
13. No more unlimited and undisclosed contributions to politicians
14. A three-year quarantine before politicians, staffers, and bureaucrats involved in setting or monitoring drug company regulations can join a drug company as officer or employee
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Allen Frances
“
The Big question is ?
How will government protect us from individuals who are corrupt government officials . Who are using state resources to put our lives in danger, to hurt us and to kill us. Who are compromising our countries sovereignty, status, our health, safety and security . Who are working with terrorist and criminals . Who are selling states secrets. Extorting and blackmailing other members of parliament. The reason being is for everything wrong and shocking that is happening. For every crime committed. Someone in government knows about it and approved it or they are involved in it or they are the ones causing it.
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De philosopher DJ Kyos
“
He might not have been a criminal, but he was a politician, so that wasn’t far off.
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Jill Ramsower (Corrupted Union (The Byrne Brothers #2))
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Our suffering, miseries, troubles, problems, poverty, unemployment is been manufactured, created and engineered by our elected leaders or politicians .
Our suffering is not natural, but it is man made by our leaders. They act like they are helping meanwhile they the ones who are hurting, sabotaging, failing , destroying and killing us.
They are breaking the system , working with criminals, our enemies and oppressors to keep us poor, disadvantaged, weak, vulnerably, struggling, unemployed, uneducated, suffering and dying.
They say they are one of us, but in the shadows, they are the ones fighting, oppressing and destroying us. They are fighting everyone and everything that is trying to better our lives.
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De philosopher DJ Kyos
“
Leading the propaganda blitz was Marco Rubio, the Florida senator born into Miami's notoriously reactionary Cuban expat community. A middle-aged career politician with boyish looks and cowlick-y hair, Rubio was once considered a rising Republican star — despite a questionable past. In 2011, the Washington Post revealed that Rubio had based his entire political coming-of-age story on a lie. Though he repeatedly spouted a clichéd south Florida tale of his parents' escape from Fidel Castro's socialist hellscape, immigration records demonstrated that the Rubios had in fact gained permanent US residency nearly three years before Cuba's 1959 revolution — meaning they had actually fled the regime of the country's US-backed military dictator, Fulgencio Batista.
Aside from pathetic dishonesty, Rubio's character was tarnished by revelations that throughout the 1980s, his brother-in-law, Orlando Cicilia, directed a $75 million cocaine smuggling ring out of his home in West Kendall, Florida. Cicilia was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison in 1989, but released early in the year 2000. In his 2013 memoir, Rubio — who by then had featured Cicilia at numerous campaign events — claimed that he was unaware of his brother-in-law's criminal activity and had been "stunned" by news of his arrest. Yet a 2016 investigation by the Miami New Times cast doubt on the senator's account, revealing that as a teenager, Rubio had actually lived in the home at the center of Cicilia's drug operation.
"For anyone to argue that teens or adults living at this time in Miami didn't know their family members were in the coke business is total horseshit," a former Miami-Dade detective told the publication in response to Rubio's claims of ignorance.
Though Rubio declined to comment on the story, it earned him the nickname "Narco Rubio" among Venezuelans, including government officials whom the senator repeatedly accused of trafficking drugs. The senator's most well-known moniker, however, was "Little Marco," an alias bestowed upon him by then candidate Trump during the 2016 Republican primary, when the future president publicly mocked Rubio's affinity for high-heeled boots — an apparent product of his dearth of height.
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Anya Parampil (Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire)
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Even for a country where corruption is taken for granted as a part of daily life, the revelations have stunned citizens — for uncovering a wholly new criminal ring smack in the heart of the capital, and for the staggering array of charges involving politicians across the spectrum. The inquiry has blossomed into a national scandal and a reminder that virtually no corner of Italy is immune to criminal penetration. It has also raised fresh questions about Italy’s ability ever to reform itself and fulfill the demands for fiscal responsibility demanded by its eurozone partners. The widespread and unchecked corruption of public money revealed by the inquiry has helped bloat Italy’s national debt to one of the highest levels in Europe. Mr. Carminati and his associates are accused of infiltrating contracts for a wide assortment of tasks including garbage collection and park maintenance. The charges cover a gamut of activities — vote rigging, usury, extortion and embezzlement. Rome’s chief prosecutor, Giuseppe Pignatone, told Italy’s anti-Mafia commission Thursday that new operations were imminent.
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Anonymous
“
Started in Argentina, escrache has spread to other Latin American countries as a popular movement to oust, shame and ostracize retired generals, politicians and other powerful figures who have committed unpunished crimes. After locating the criminal in question, the organizers would inform his neighbors that here lives a state-sanctioned mass murderer or torturer, or a looter of public funds. Later, thousands of people would converge on this man's house to publicly indict the blood-drenched fat cat. Though this Latin American version of a Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush or Obama is never physically attacked, the monster will be shunned by many of his neighbors, with local businesses even refusing to sell him a meal or a newspaper.
Critics of escrache have denounced it as a form of vigilante justice and, as the outburst of an angry mob, something that should be declared illegal, but the protesters are only reacting to acts that are themselves clearly illegal, not to mention outrageously immoral. The protesters' public harassment does not compare to their targets' torturing and/or raping, then throwing their victims from airplanes into the ocean, or kidnapping their children and erasing their identities.
Too often, the state will use the legality argument to bind its opponents, while doing whatever it pleases, legal or not. Not satisfied with a monopoly on violence, the state also wants to be the sole interpreter of what's right and wrong, as implied by the often-bandied-about legality question, and the more criminal the state is, the more illegal, the more it will shriek about the need for everyone else to walk the straight and narrow, according to its own power-drunk markings. Talking to Borzutsky's class, I asked the students to consider escrache in the North American context. Who are our criminals in high places and what should we do about them? Unlike our southern neighbors, we have neither the clarity to identify our enemies from within, nor the courage or unity to confront them. To be fair, though, our top criminals don't move among us, with many never even being mentioned by our obfuscating media, as great a killer of brain cells as any, and worse than any glue. Even when not anonymous, however, the most malignant Americans are hidden behind guarded gates, bulletproof glass or acres of real estate, so that it would take considerable enterprise to target them.
When faced with an illegal and ultraviolent enemy, we must resort to any and all tricks, be extra clever and strike hard, for real, but most of us are too tightly bound to our bifurcated harness to do more the jiggle, every once in a while, an electronic voting machine. Geez, I wonder who they'll let us pretend to vote for next time, if there's a next time?
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Linh Dinh (Postcards from the End of America)
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I was born into a unique conjunction of female prime minister and monarch. To a child growing up in the 1980s, women ruled. Female heads were on coins and notes, criminals were incarcerated at Her Majesty’s pleasure, and the queen’s armed forces fought a female politician’s wars. Accustomed
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Kate Williams (Becoming Queen Victoria: The Tragic Death of Princess Charlotte and the Unexpected Rise of Britain's Greatest Monarch)
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The UPA government, instead of implementing the Supreme Court order—which would have been the defining indicator of its bona fides in retrieving the black money looted from the people of India— instead demanded a recall of the order. This establishes its complete mala fide, connivance and conspiracy, and confirms that it has no intention of taking any substantive steps to recover the black money stashed away abroad, or take any serious action to combat this grievous economic crime impoverishing our nation—the 21st century version of UPA imperialism. The nation should be informed that no investigation has taken place regarding the issues before it since the Supreme Court judgement, but the finance minister chose to conceal these extremely pertinent facts in his Paper. The White Paper coyly discussed the dimensions of black money stashed away abroad by quoting statistics that are more than a decade old, saying that these are being researched upon by three agencies whose report is expected in September 2012. From this it would appear that the government had no knowledge of the quantum of black money lying abroad. One wonders why the government presented the paper at this stage. Interestingly, the Paper officially disclosed a figure regarding Indian accounts held with Swiss banks, at around only US $213 billion (as against $88 billion projected by the International Monetary Fund, and $213.2 billion by GFI), down 60% between 2006 and 2010. A reasonable conclusion that can be drawn is that black money holders, in anticipation of international and national public pressure (not governmental) transferred their money to other safe havens, the safest, it is said, being India. The last two years have seen several enabling statutes and mechanisms to stealthily repatriate the ill-gotten wealth back to India. I am also given to understand that there is evidence of a huge disparity between export figures, particularly of metals quoted by the government, and actual exports through data available from independent sources. The same applies to figures regarding FIIs. The game is clear. Use every government tool and instrument available to repatriate the money to India, without disclosure, culpability or punishment. There must be ways, and ways that we can never fathom or document, but the black money holders control legislation, either through being important politicians, or big businesses, who can buy safe passage, necessary loopholes and escape routes through statute or legislation. The finance minister through his negligence and active cooperation with the criminals allowed the stolen money to be removed from the accounts in which it was held and only a small fraction now remains, which too he is determined to place beyond the reach of the people of India who are its legitimate owners.
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Ram Jethmalani (RAM JETHMALANI MAVERICK UNCHANGED, UNREPENTANT)
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There are many other escapes from the empirical, external self, which might seem to be, but are not, contemplation. For instance, the experience of being seized and taken out of oneself by collective enthusiasm, in a totalitarian parade: the self-righteous upsurge of party loyalty that blots out conscience and absolves every criminal tendency in the name of Class, Nation, Party, Race or Sect. The danger and the attraction of these false mystiques of Nation and of Class is precisely that they seduce and pretend to satisfy those who are no longer aware of any deep or genuine spiritual need. The false mysticism of the Mass Society captivates men who are so alienated from themselves and from God that they are no longer capable of genuine spiritual experience. Yet it is precisely these ersatz forms of enthusiasm that are “opium” for the people, deadening their awareness of their deepest and most personal needs, alienating them from their true selves, putting conscience and personality to sleep and turning free, reasonable men into passive instruments of the power politician.
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Thomas Merton (New Seeds of Contemplation)
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But the alternative is the return to power of Labour. This is the party which did more than any other to wreck Britain with its obsession with borrowing and wasting our money on its public-sector paymasters; its policy of diluting our national identity by allowing uncontrolled immigration; its attempts to destroy the middle classes, which Labour loathed, by removing any excellence or aspiration from our education system while Labour politicians mostly sent their own children to private schools; and its pandering to the liberal elites through the introduction of human rights legislation which has made human rights lawyers wealthy, has protected criminals and has been used to persecute those who do try to obey the law.
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David Craig (GREED UNLIMITED: How Cameron and Clegg protect the elites while squeezing the rest of us)
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Over the past quarter century, the leaders of both the Democratic and the Republican political parties have perfected a remarkable system for remaining in power while serving the new economic oligarchy. Both parties take in huge amounts of money, in many forms — campaign contributions, lobbying, revolving-door hiring, favours, and special access of various kinds. Politicians in both parties enrich themselves and betray the interests of the nation, including most of the people who vote for them. Yet both parties are still able to mobilize support because they skilfully exploit America’s cultural polarization. Republicans warn social conservatives about the dangers of secularism, taxes, abortion, welfare, gay marriage, gun control, and liberals. Democrats warn social liberals about the dangers of guns, pollution, global warming, making abortion illegal, and conservatives. Both parties make a public show of how bitter their conflicts are, and how dangerous it would be for the other party to achieve power, while both prostitute themselves to the financial sector, powerful industries, and the wealthy. Thus, the very intensity of the two parties’ differences on “values” issues enables them to collaborate when it comes to money.
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Charles H. Ferguson (Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America)
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Considering the design of this new system of control, it is astonishing that so many people labeled criminals still manage to care for and feed their children, hold together marriages, obtain employment, and start businesses. Perhaps most heroic are those who, upon release, launch social justice organizations that challenge the discrimination ex-offenders face and provide desperately needed support for those newly released from prison. These heroes go largely unnoticed by politicians who prefer to blame those who fail, rather than praise with admiration and awe all those who somehow manage, despite seemingly insurmountable hurdles, to survive.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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The bigger the machine, the more grease it requires to keep the thing moving. If individual politicians at times behave like criminals, and you therefore expect groups of politicians to act like organized crime, you’d be correct. Unfortunately (for American taxpayers), there are too many examples of “political crime machines” to include them all, but some are so egregious they cannot be ignored.
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Eric Bolling (The Swamp: Washington's Murky Pool of Corruption and Cronyism and How Trump Can Drain It)
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When norms of mutual toleration are weak, democracy is hard to sustain. If we view our rivals as a dangerous threat, we have much to fear if they are elected. We may decide to employ any means necessary to defeat them - and therein lies a justification for authoritarian measures. Politicians who are tagged as criminal or subversive may be jailed; governments deemed to pose a threat to the nation may be overthrown.
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Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future)
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Dealing with politicians is almost identical to dealing with criminals; the only difference between the two is that occasionally a criminal will tell you the truth.
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John W. Hartmann
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Why did you get laid off? The reality is because a bunch of inept bankers, criminal real estate developers, amoral mortgage brokers and corrupt politicians created the world’s largest housing bubble. But ironically, the average man during the Great Recession probably took this personally, illogically blaming his sole self for the entire financial crisis of 2009. Worse still, men across America felt an incredible amount of guilt and shame for not being able to provide for their families. And worse than that, how many men committed suicide because of a recession that was not caused by them? All of this can be avoided in mastering the skill of recognizing what you do and do not control.
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Aaron Clarey (Enjoy the Decline)
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What makes Berlusconi so interesting as a political phenomenon is the fact that he, as the most powerful politician in his country, acts more and more shamelessly: he not only ignores or neutralizes any legal investigation into the criminal activity that has allegedly supported his private business interests, he also systematically undermines the basic dignity associated with being the head of state. The dignity of classical politics is grounded in its elevation above the
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Slavoj Žižek (First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (The Essential Zizek))
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I’m Captain Florida, the state history pimp Gatherin’ more data than a DEA blimp West Palm, Tampa Bay, Miami-Dade Cruisin’ the coasts till Johnny Vegas gets laid Developer ho’s, and the politician bitches Smackin’ ’em down, while I’m takin’ lots of pictures Hurricanes, sinkholes, natural disaster ’Scuse me while I kick back, with my View-Master (S:) I’m Captain Florida, obscure facts are all legit (C:) I’m Coleman, the sidekick, with a big bong hit (S:) I’m Captain Florida, staying literate (C:) Coleman sees a book and says, “Fuck that shit” Ain’t never been caught, slippin’ nooses down the Keys Got more buoyancy than Elián González Knockin’ off the parasites, and takin’ all their moola Recruiting my apostles for the Church of Don Shula I’m an old-school gangster with a psycho ex-wife Molly Packin’ Glocks, a shotgun and my 7-Eleven coffee Trippin’ the theme parks, the malls, the time-shares Bustin’ my rhymes through all the red-tide scares (S:) I’m the surge in the storms, don’t believe the hype (C:) I’m his stoned number two, where’d I put my hash pipe? (S:) Florida, no appointments and a tank of gas (C:) Tequila, no employment and a bag of grass Think you’ve seen it all? I beg to differ Mosquitoes like bats and a peg-leg stripper The scammers, the schemers, the real estate liars Birthday-party clowns in a meth-lab fire But dig us, don’t diss us, pay a visit, don’t be late And statistics always lie, so ignore the murder rate Beaches, palm trees and golfing is our curse Our residents won’t bite, but a few will shoot first Everglades, orange groves, alligators, Buffett Scarface, Hemingway, an Andrew Jackson to suck it Solarcaine, Rogaine, eight balls of cocaine See the hall of fame for the criminally insane Artifacts, folklore, roadside attractions Crackers, Haitians, Cuban-exile factions The early-bird specials, drivin’ like molasses Condo-meeting fistfights in cataract glasses (S:) I’m the native tourist, with the rants that can’t be beat (C:) Serge, I think I put my shoes on the wrong feet (S:) A stack of old postcards in another dingy room (C:) A cold Bud forty and a magic mushroom Can’t stop, turnpike, keep ridin’ like the wind Gotta make a detour for a souvenir pin But if you like to litter, you’re just liable to get hurt Do ya like the MAC-10 under my tropical shirt? I just keep meeting jerks, I’m a human land-filler But it’s totally unfair, this term “serial killer” The police never rest, always breakin’ in my pad But sunshine is my bling, and I’m hangin’ like a chad (S:) Serge has got to roll and drop the mike on this rap . . . (C:) Coleman’s climbin’ in the tub, to take a little nap . . . (S:) . . . Disappearin’ in the swamp—and goin’ tangent, tangent, tangent . . . (C:) He’s goin’ tangent, tangent . . . (Fade-out) (S:) I’m goin’ tangent, tangent . . . (C:) Fuck goin’ platinum, he’s goin’ tangent, tangent . . . (S:) . . . Wikipedia all up and down your ass . . . (C:) Wikity-Wikity-Wikity . . .
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Tim Dorsey (Electric Barracuda (Serge Storms #13))
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Unfortunately, the trading of political influence for money has come back in a big way in American politics, this time in a form that is perfectly legal and much harder to eradicate. Criminalized bribery is narrowly defined in American law as a transaction in which a politician and a private party explicitly agree upon a specific quid pro quo exchange. What is not covered by the law is what biologists call reciprocal altruism, or what an anthropologist might label a gift exchange. In a relationship of reciprocal altruism, one person confers a benefit on another with no explicit expectation that it will immediately buy a return favor, unlike an impersonal market transaction.
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Francis Fukuyama (Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy)
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As the KGB rezident at Leningrad State University and as an employee of the Leningrad Fifth Chief Directorate, where he worked as a member of the active reserves after returning from East Germany, Putin would certainly have had access to the lists of agents and informants who worked for the KGB during the Soviet period. He also would have been tasked to monitor political activity among faculty and students at the university. Lieutenant Colonel Andrey Zykov,XVII the lead Russian investigator in St. Petersburg for especially important cases, who was assigned to examine Putin’s activities for criminal behavior, even went so far as to allege that two of Putin’s later associates, Anatoliy Sobchak and Dmitriy Medvedev, both of whom were teaching law at Leningrad State University at the time, had provided Putin with information (“I Anatoliy Sobchak, i Dmitriy Medvedev byli ego stykachkami”).127 Thus Putin would not have been the only person interested in “cleansing” his own file of damaging materials. Eastern Europe at this time was awash with exposés as high-ranking politicians were unmasked as agents of either the KGB or local security services. No one in Russia wanted a repeat of this, and indeed there has never been such a period in post-Soviet Russia. Clearly the KGB got there first, and files, lots of files, were burned. As mentioned earlier, Putin himself admits that in Dresden, after the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, he burned so many files that the furnace exploded. But also the entire mood in Russia, the heart of the Soviet Empire, was quite different compared to the rest of the Soviet Bloc—it was one thing to unmask someone in Poland who had worked for the Russians; it was quite another to reveal that a Russian son had been spying on his father, for example.128 Russians as a whole sensed that such a settling of accounts would be divisive, ruinous, and pointless. And those tens of thousands of people coming out of the collapsed CPSU and KGB had other tasks in mind—most notably making a living in new conditions. The elites from these two organizations knew where the money was and how to use it. They had more lucrative assignments in mind than revenge.
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Karen Dawisha (Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (A Modern History of Russia))
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have seen billionaires, including convicted criminals, extract admissions of guilt from British newspapers too poor or too frightened to fight, and use them to convince journalists and politicians around the world that legitimate criticisms of their actions were groundless.
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Nick Cohen (You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom)
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It is hard to prove people wrong when they can’t be pinned down. So instead of focusing on particulars, manipulators talk in the most vague terms they can get away with. This fallacy is popular with politicians. For example, “Forget what the spineless liberals say. It’s time to be tough: tough on criminals, tough on terrorists, and tough on those who belittle our country.” They make sure they don’t use specifics that might cause people to question what they are doing (for example, who exactly you are going to be tough on, and what exactly do you intend to do with these people when you get “tough” with them.
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Richard Paul (The Thinker's Guide to Fallacies: The Art of Mental Trickery and Manipulation)
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All the criminals do their work on the screen, which people can see. Politicians work behind the screen, which the public can’t see.1 —Gang leader Chotta Shakeel, in Suketu Mehta, Maximum City
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Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
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So what changed? What changed is an aggressive campaign, conducted by progressive politicians and community activists, to force banks and financial institutions to lower their lending standards. This goes back to the early 1970s.3 Before that, progressives had focused their political energies in getting government money to build large housing projects for the poor. These projects, however, soon became dens of dilapidation, decay, and criminal activity. They symbolized the failure of the liberal welfare state.
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Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
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Progressives run for office as the champions of Social Security. Progressives viciously attack any politician who exposes the financial irresponsibility or speaks out against the Ponzi scheme as being “against Social Security” and “against seniors.
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Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
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When you steal other people’s belongings, you become a thief. This is very simple and clear. But people’s today think one becomes a criminal only after being arrested by a policeman, investigated by a prosecutor, sentenced by a judge, and confined in a prison. Therefore, corrupt politicians think they are men of virtue and skill if they can cover up their deeds and escape getting caught. They are heavily influenced by “group stupidity.”
Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Genghis Khan were nothing other than great thieves, Hitler and Mussolini where greater robbers than the legendary thieves Ishikawa Goemon and Tenichibo. Although these dictators operated on a much larger scale, they were not fundamentally different from Kunisada Chuji, who said, “Let’s go as far as we can, no matter what.” And hey the henchmen of thieves think their bosses are respected.
We’re always falling into ruts. Politicians and their followers, many schoolteachers, and opinion leaders work hard to manipulate people into biased, habitual ways of thinking. The ways we’re distorted are subtle, deliberate, and complicated. When we’re liberated from this distortion, we will find the true wisdom of Buddhism.
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Kosho Uchiyama (The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo)
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When a country is run by thieves who are masquerading as politicians. All crime and criminal activities will prevail. All criminals will prosper and flourish. Everything they think is a problem will be resolved by a threat or killing. Especially those who stand in their way or who dare to question their actions or them. Illegal way will be the right way. The corrupt way will be the only way.
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D.J. Kyos
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Even powerful politicians, like New York Senator Chuck Schumer (much more later on this) were not enough to protect Mr. Madoff when the news about his fraud became a “national event.” Although Bernie contributed money to the New York Congressmen and Senators, he made relatively few contributions (payoffs) to national
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Richard Lawless (Capitol Hill's Criminal Underground: The Most Thorough Exploration of Government Corruption Ever Put in Writing)
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House of Representative’s Bill - H.R 4900 – April 12th, 2016 The new legislation known as “PROMESA” says the following: The Oversight Board shall consist of 7 members appointed by the President who meet the qualifications described in subsection (e), except that the Oversight Board may take any action under this Act (or any amendments made by this Act) at any time after the President has appointed 3 of its members. The Oversight Board, its members, and its employees may not be liable for any obligation of or claim against the Oversight Board or its members or employees or the territorial government resulting from actions taken to carry out this Act. There shall be no jurisdiction in any United States district court to review challenges to the Oversight Board’s certification determinations under this Act. AUTOMATIC STAY UPON ENACTMENT. (No civil Lawsuits) For a Time to be Specified by the appointed Board. Even before this Bill was passed politician’s like Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal and Harry Reed moved quickly to cash in. They were among the first to propose a ban on civil lawsuits relating to the Puerto Rico financial meltdown. If you follow the money, it paid off terrifically for all four of them but not so well for millions of honest Americans.
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Richard Lawless (Capitol Hill's Criminal Underground: The Most Thorough Exploration of Government Corruption Ever Put in Writing)
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Voting for a politician in a corrupted political system is no different than giving a set of keys to your home to a criminal just because everyone says that if you don't do it then you can't complain about crime.
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James Thomas Kesterson Jr
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It might have been that Paul had exceeded his quota of nights at the shelter.
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Carol Shaben (Into the Abyss: How a Deadly Plane Crash Changed the Lives of a Pilot, a Politician, a Criminal and a Cop)
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Today’s bush pilots maintain their vaulted position
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Carol Shaben (Into the Abyss: How a Deadly Plane Crash Changed the Lives of a Pilot, a Politician, a Criminal and a Cop)
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Scott had assured the men that the seats were inflammable, but they decided to haul one back to the fire and try burning it.
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Carol Shaben (Into the Abyss: How a Deadly Plane Crash Changed the Lives of a Pilot, a Politician, a Criminal and a Cop)
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Although such an organized criminal gang may enter into many fields, organized crime finds its basic support in black market activities. A black market is any area of the market which is legally prohibited. If left unprohibited, it would be an area of trade involving peaceful, willing exchanges between sellers and buyers. But when government initiates force by forbidding this area of trade to honest men, it throws it open to men who are willing to take the risk of violating bureaucratic dictates and the statutory laws of the politicians. The violence and fraud associated with any black market do not spring from the nature of the good or service being sold; they are a direct result of the fact that entrepreneurs have been legally forbidden to deal in this area of the market, leaving it open to men who dare to ignore prohibitions and who are willing to resort to violence in order to do business without getting caught. Unless prohibited, every market activity is operated on the basis of willing exchange, without the initiation of force, because this is the only way a business can be operated successfully, as force is a nonproductive expenditure of energy.
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Morris Tannehill (Market for Liberty)
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Recently—no; for as long as I can remember, large and powerful nations within the capitalist bloc have been ruled by people who according to accepted legal norms are simply criminals, who from a lust for power and financial gain have led their peoples into an abyss of egoism, self-indulgence and a view of life based entirely on materialism and ruthlessness toward their fellow human beings. Only in very few cases are such politicians punished, but the punishments are token and the guilty persons’ successors are guided by the same motives.
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Maj Sjöwall (The Terrorists (Martin Beck, #10))
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Politicians never seemed to learn that criminals paid absolutely no attention to gun laws.
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William W. Johnstone (Terror in the Ashes)
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Like the hunt for war criminals, the restitution of art stolen during World War II is an uphill battle fought not only in courts of law, but also in national parliaments and even in schools and universities. It is estimated that 650,000 works of art were looted by the Nazis while 100,000 have not yet been returned to their legitimate owners or heirs. Some hang in public museums for the whole world to see, while others are hidden in private collections or used as bargaining chips in dubious commercial transactions.
This uphill battle registers another win every time a painting, sculpture, or book is returned to its legitimate owners, but also by convincing politicians to pass laws that allow such restitution. It is won by investigating the provenance of works that have been exhibited in renowned museums for decades. Above all, it is won by bringing restitution stories to the public’s attention.
Because it is an uphill battle in which the main enemy is oblivion.
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W.S. Mahler (The Testament of Elias: An Archaeological Thriller (Provenance Book 1))
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That’s not actually true – something people who think our hereditary monarchy should be replaced by easily bought, corrupt, publicity-seeking criminals with egos the size of a planet, or politicians as they’re sometimes known, don’t seem to be able to comprehend. The monarch advises and warns and, because he or she can say no, a wise politician – sorry, just struggling with the unfamiliar use of the words ‘wise’ and ‘politician’ in the same sentence – a wise politician ensures they never have to. It’s a system that worked well, give or take a few tweaks, until comparatively recently. Until something went wrong. No one knows what. The details
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Jodi Taylor (Long Story Short - A Short Story Collection (The Chronicles of St Mary's #7.7/8.1/8.6/9.5/9.6/9.7/10.5))
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The President, politicians and government officials will never stop something bad from happening or any criminal activities, Kidnapping, human trafficking, drugs, illegal immigrant, violence, vandalism, bribe, stealing, extortion, corruption, fraud, scams as long they are benefiting from it.
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D.J. Kyos
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To put my explanation in its boldest and most surprising form: bad news is manmade, top–down, purposed stuff, imposed on history. Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves. The things that go well are largely unintended; the things that go badly are largely intended. Let me give you two lists. First: the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Versailles Treaty, the Great Depression, the Nazi regime, the Second World War, the Chinese Revolution, the 2008 financial crisis: every single one was the result of top–down decision-making by relatively small numbers of people trying to implement deliberate plans – politicians, central bankers, revolutionaries and so on. Second: the growth of global income; the disappearance of infectious diseases; the feeding of seven billion; the clean-up of rivers and air; the reforestation of much of the rich world; the internet; the use of mobile-phone credits as banking; the use of genetic fingerprinting to convict criminals and acquit the innocent. Every single one of these was a serendipitous, unexpected phenomenon supplied by millions of people who did not intend to cause these big changes.
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Matt Ridley (The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge)
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the worst kind of criminal,” Bubba said. “Smuggler?” Albert asked. “Gun-runner?” Neil ventured. “Assassin?” I guessed. Bubba shook his head. “Politician.” We “oooohed” collectively as a group as understanding set in.
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Drew Hayes (The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant (Fred, the Vampire Accountant, #1))
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Bush pilots have the highest mortality rate of any commercial pilots and bush flying consistently ranks in the top three of the world’s most dangerous professions, after commercial fishermen and loggers. Erik
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Carol Shaben (Into the Abyss: How a Deadly Plane Crash Changed the Lives of a Pilot, a Politician, a Criminal and a Cop)
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There are two problems with our current acronym-based (AML, KYC, CFT, OMG) approach to compliance. The first is that it punishes the good guys. The second is that it doesn’t catch many of the bad ones. Crypto is different, and assumes most people are not criminals, for the simple reason that they aren’t. The bankers and politicians who refuse to accept this reality are only protecting the status quo—and their position
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Omid Malekan (Re-Architecting Trust: The Curse of History and the Crypto Cure for Money, Markets, and Platforms)
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I’ve often discovered that individuals of exemplary character and unbridled enthusiasm surround themselves with like-minded souls.
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Carol Shaben (Into the Abyss: How a Deadly Plane Crash Changed the Lives of a Pilot, a Politician, a Criminal and a Cop)
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In the early 1960s, Northern cities including Philadelphia, Rochester, and New York, were the sites of particularly intense urban rebellions against seemingly intractable discrimination and the lack of jobs, as well as against the abusive actions of law enforcement.1 Although Northern politicians had been relatively sympathetic when such racial uprisings rocked Southern cities like Birmingham, Alabama, when they witnessed upheaval in their own downtowns they were greatly unnerved. Northern politicians very quickly began responding to the unrest and anger they saw on their city streets just as their Southern counterparts had: they sought to discredit these protests as the behavior of a criminal element bent on destruction. By 1965, politicians from both North and South, and from both major political parties, were routinely equating urban disorder with urban criminality. All agreed not only that crime was fast becoming the nation’s most serious problem, but also that it was well past time to wage a major new war against it.
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Heather Ann Thompson (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy)
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It was hard, the authors said, to put a cost on the damage that gambling causes, but politicians needed to recognise that there was a trade-off. If you allowed gambling in order to raise revenue, you were causing damage to people’s lives by doing so and ultimately undermining society. Unlike insurance or other productive financial services, this is a zero sum industry: bookies’ profits are simply gamblers’ losses, and there is no broader societal benefit.
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Oliver Bullough (Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals)
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It is so sad to watch criminals fighting each other to run our country in the name of Politics. These people know each other shenanigans. They know who committed which crime , when and where. They are keeping the Information as their secret and bait. Waiting for the day, they are being caught and charged. So, they can play check mate card. To them this Is all a game. To us It Is our lives. Citizens are suffering and dying , because they are putting their hope and trust on this people. Thinking they are representing them and are trying to do good things for them. When one of this politicians is exposed. They are doing everything In their power to distract us. The day we realize we are on our own. Is the day we will take voting seriously.
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D.J. Kyos
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In Kuchma’s Ukraine, the institutional corruption that had pervaded all aspects of life in the Soviet era continued unabated. Kuchma kept the Soviet system of “telephone justice,” where politicians picked up the phone and told prosecutors and judges what to do. Tax audits, civil suits, and criminal investigations were weaponized against political adversaries and even businessmen, embroiling them in costly and time-consuming legal battles and often causing them significant public embarrassment.
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Marie Yovanovitch (Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir – An Instant NYT Bestseller: A Diplomat's Story of Courage and Democracy)
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Whether in aviation, mountain climbing or other high-risk scenarios, several factors can predispose individuals to lose situational awareness. Broadly, these factors are environmental, psychological and physiological.
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Carol Shaben (Into the Abyss: How a Deadly Plane Crash Changed the Lives of a Pilot, a Politician, a Criminal and a Cop)
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As you go the way of life you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think. NATIVE AMERICAN PROVERB
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Carol Shaben (Into the Abyss: How a Deadly Plane Crash Changed the Lives of a Pilot, a Politician, a Criminal and a Cop)
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People talk about the right to life. I don’t talk about the right to life; I talk about the privilege it is to live because any one of us can be killed at any time. It is so easy and it happens so quick. So if you haven’t done the things that you’ve always wanted to do, it’s time to do them.
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Carol Shaben (Into the Abyss: How a Deadly Plane Crash Changed the Lives of a Pilot, a Politician, a Criminal and a Cop)
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Politicians give criminals a bad name. A bad name like a bad word like shit.
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Jarod Kintz (99 Cents For Some Nonsense)
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Part of the problem is that our politicians, media, and criminal justice institutions too often equate justice with revenge. Popular culture is suffused with revenge fantasies in which the aggrieved bring horrible retribution down on those who have hurt them. Often this involves a fantasy of those who have been placed on the margins taking aim at the powerful; it’s a fantasy of empowerment through violence. Police and prisons have come to be our preferred tools for inflicting punishment. Our entire criminal justice system has become a gigantic revenge factory. Three-strikes laws, sex-offender registries, the death penalty, and abolishing parole are about retribution, not safety. Whole segments of our society have been deemed always-already guilty. This is not justice; it is oppression. Real justice would look to restore people and communities, to rebuild trust and social cohesion, to offer people a way forward, to reduce the social forces that drive crime, and to treat both victims and perpetrators as full human beings. Our police and larger criminal justice system not only fail at this but rarely see it as even related to their mission.
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Alex S. Vitale (The End of Policing)
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teachers and criminals and real-estate agents may lie, and politicians, and even C.I.A. analysts. But numbers don’t.
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Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything)
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I called it. The chain of deceit. Criminals Influence and have captured Politicians. Politicians Influence and have captured the media. The Media Influence and have captured the people. If you break free from this chain. They make you an enemy and want to destroy you, because they can’t control you. They will do everything in their power to attack you. Chances are when you are fighting real crime or corruption . You are probably fighting the system and are fighting the guys are on top.
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D.J. Kyos
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Troublingly, the various reports disseminated by the FBI were often misleading if not outright inaccurate. In one teletype sent to the director of the Domestic Intelligence Division of the FBI, as well as to the White House and the U.S. attorney general, at 11:58 p.m. on September 9, the Buffalo office reported that during the riot “the whites were reportedly forced into the yard area by the blacks” and Black Power militants there were rounding up not just employee hostages but also all white prisoners, which was misleading in that it suggested a race riot was unfolding.42 More inflammatory still, the FBI’s Buffalo office stated that the prisoners “have threatened to kill one guard for every shot fired [at them]”; that they “have threatened to kill all hostages unless demands are met”; and that all of the hostages “are being made to stand at attention” out in D Yard.43 None of this proved to be the case. During the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s the FBI was deeply invested in destabilizing and undermining grassroots organizations that it considered a threat to national security—as were the politicians, such as Nixon, Agnew, and Mitchell, who supported its efforts and relied on its briefings.44 One of the FBI’s counterintelligence programs in this period—COINTELPRO—was notorious for using rumor and outright fabrication stories in an attempt to destroy leftist, antiwar, and civil rights groups from within. For this reason Commissioner Oswald’s determination to keep negotiating with the men in D Yard infuriated much of the Bureau. As one internal FBI memo put it, state officials had “capitulated to the unreasonable demands of prisoners.”45 And these weren’t just any criminals; as the FBI noted on multiple occasions, “The majority of the mutinous prisoners are black.”46 As dusk fell over D Yard on the first day of the Attica uprising, FBI and State Police rumors about black prisoners’ threats and outrageous actions only multiplied. But no matter how hostile everyone else was to the idea of the state negotiating with the prisoners, Commissioner Russell Oswald insisted even more forcefully that he was going to see these talks through.
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Heather Ann Thompson (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy)
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During the Bosnian War in 1992, the Serb forces took over the Prijedor municipality. The Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) repeatedly broadcasted the Serb forces’ capture of Prijedor on radio as a display of significant victory. For further hostile takeover, 400 men were added to the Serb forces in Cirkin Polje (town in Prijedor) to seize Prijedor’s governing bodies such as the municipality, post office, police, bank, courts etc. By April, they successfully captured these government entities.
This forceful takeover by Serb politicians was declared to be an illegal coup d’état by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The coup was a cold blooded, pre-planned strategic effort to capture Prijedor and convert it into a pure Serb municipality. These strategic plans were never concealed. Milomir Stakić played an important role in the strategic capture by the Serb forces.
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Aida Mandic
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By the attention it gives their misdeeds it makes criminals heroic and politicians larger than life.
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Richard M. Weaver (Ideas Have Consequences)
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When you are guilty of something but are not punished or exposed, you don't want to correct others who are doing wrong because they might remind you of your own wrongdoings. That is the government we have. Everyone is doing wrong or committing crimes. They don't want to correct or stop others who are committing crimes or doing bad things because they might be called out for their own crimes. This is why everyone is doing what they want, because everyone is corrupt, a criminal, or guilty of something wrong.
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De philosopher DJ Kyos
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The study of abnormality is one of the main ways that power relations are established in society. When an abnormality and its corresponding norm are defined, somehow it is always the normal person who has the power over the abnormal.
The psychologist tells us about the madmen, the physician about the patients, the criminologist (or the legal theorist, or the politician) talks about the criminal, but we never expect to hear the latter talk about the former - what they have to say has already been ruled irrelevant, because by definition they have no knowledge (but that is code for not wanting them to have any power).
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Lydia Alix Fillingham
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The launching of the War on Drugs and the initial construction of the new system required the expenditure of tremendous political initiative and resources. Media campaigns were waged; politicians blasted “soft” judges and enacted harsh sentencing laws; poor people of color were vilified. The system now, however, requires very little maintenance or justification. In fact, if you are white and middle class, you might not even realize the drug war is still going on. Most high school and college students today have no recollection of the political and media frenzy surrounding the drug war in the early years. They were young children when the war was declared, or not even born yet. Crack is out; terrorism is in. Today, the political fanfare and the vehement, racialized rhetoric regarding crime and drugs are no longer necessary. Mass incarceration has been normalized, and all of the racial stereotypes and assumptions that gave rise to the system are now embraced (or at least internalized) by people of all colors, from all walks of life, and in every major political party. We may wonder aloud “where have the black men gone?” but deep down we already know. It is simply taken for granted that, in cities like Baltimore and Chicago, the vast majority of young black men are currently under the control of the criminal justice system or branded criminals for life. This extraordinary circumstance—unheard of in the rest of the world—is treated here in America as a basic fact of life, as normal as separate water fountains were just a half century ago.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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Starting in the Clinton era and continuing through George W. Bush’s two terms, progressive activists mounted direct pressure—either in the form of public protest or lawsuits—against banks. This was aimed at intimidating banks to adopt new lending standards and also to engage the activist groups themselves in the lending process. In 1994, a young Barack Obama, recently graduated from Harvard Law School, joined two other attorneys in suing Citibank for “discriminatory lending” because it had denied home loans to several bank applicants. The case was called Selma S. Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank. Citibank denied wrongdoing, but as often happens in such situations, it settled the lawsuit to avoid litigation costs and the negative publicity. Selma Buycks-Roberson and two of her fellow plaintiffs altogether received $60,000, and Obama and his fellow lawyers received nearly a million dollars in legal fees. This was a small salvo in a massive fusillade of lawsuits filed against banks and financial institutions in the 1990s. ACORN, the most notorious of these groups, had its own ally in the Clinton administration: Hillary Clinton. (Around the same time, ACORN was also training an aspiring community activist named Barack Obama.) Hillary helped to raise money for ACORN and also for a closely allied group, the Industrial Areas Foundation. The IAF had been founded by Saul Alinsky and continued to operate as an aggressive leftist pressure group long after Alinsky’s death in 1972. Hillary lent her name to these groups’ projects and met several times with their organizers in the White House. ACORN’s efforts were also supported by progressive politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Jon Corzine, Chuck Schumer, and Harry Reid. These politicians berated the banks to make loans easier to get. “I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness,” Frank said at a September 25, 2003, hearing. “I want to roll the dice a little more.
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Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
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Mom hadn't met Ramon; her advocacy was more arm's length - petitions, the website, letter writing, meetings with politicians. Her friend Hanna had formed a close friendship with Ramon though, visiting him as often as she could. Hanna told me that Ramon's greatest regret was that he wouldn't get to see his daughter grow up.
And Jeremy's dad, who had that opportunity, was just throwing it away.
It made me furious, and I couldn't let it go.
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Robin Stevenson (The World Without Us)
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So the misfit as totalitarian politician (Putin), being of the criminal type, finds intellectual flunkies (like Dugin) to invent vainglorious political theories (like the Fourth Political Theory), which are merely excuses for an attack on normal society, on freedom, on the wellbeing of average people everywhere. For this purpose, and with simplification in mind, America is their natural whipping boy, their intended victim, their object of envy and disdain, and the focus of their strategic malevolence. On Russian television, on this day, 15 March 2015, the evil dwarf-president, demonstrating his thermonuclear manhood by way of compensation, is merely another one of those damn fool misfits – like that scrappy little Stalin, or wee little Lenin. What is needed, perhaps, is a big strapping fellow to sweep this malignant race of dwarfs from the Russian stage. Perhaps Boris Nemtsov would have been that fellow, but Boris was gunned down on the street in Moscow. It is said that the assassin shot him four times in the back. The ultimate coward, of course, is not the one who shot an unarmed man in the back. The ultimate coward was, assuredly, that same totalitarian pygmy who was blaming America on Russian TV, and whose regime has overseen many political killings. It is sad that Putin’s cleverly staged absence pushed the fallen Nemtsov from public remembrance, placing the murderer center stage and, yes, Vladimir, it is all about you after all, isn’t it? Yes, oh yes. In America as well as in Russia, it takes a traitor and a misfit.
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J.R. Nyquist
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if, overnight, you swapped the people on wanted posters with the ones featured on election flyers, less might change than people assumed. the prison population might have nicer teeth, and access to better drugs, while congress might feature more neck tattoos and wife beaters (both literal and figurative). otherwise the world would roll on pretty much the same.
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Sean Black (Blood Country (Byron Tibor, #2))
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In the weeks immediately following Sicilia-Falcon's arrest, in an uproar of murder and threats, with the intelligence agencies of a half-dozen countries scrambling for position, the political future of Mexico was irrevocably altered, and Pat Gregory, Rich Gorman, and a handful of other American narcotics agents discovered a startling fact. Falcon, with all his wealth and power a king of crime, appeared from another viewpoint to be hardly more than a footman. Far above him, way beyond him, lay a snarled, labyrinthine network of criminals, intelligence agents, diplomats, and politicians reaching into the halls of national power on four continents.
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James Mills (The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace)
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We’ve always managed to bring the Reds into the line,’ said Schultes. ‘They tried to stage a revolution ten years ago and what became of it? The minute things get serious, they throw in the towel.’ ‘Let’s hope so,’ said Wolter and made a concerned face. ‘At any rate, we can’t allow this rabble to take over the streets.’ ‘No,’ Schultes replied, ‘but the Nazis with their brownshirts aren’t much better. Better marchers perhaps.’ ‘They don’t shoot police officers.’ Schultes fixed his gaze on Uncle. ‘Law and order must be maintained at all times. You’re right there, DCI Wolter.’ ‘That’s the job of uniform, not CID,’ said Rath. ‘I for one am happy that we have nothing to do with politics, only criminals.’ ‘Politicians, criminals – who said they aren’t one and the same?’ Schultes replied and everyone laughed.
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Volker Kutscher (Babylon Berlin (Gereon Rath #1))
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I think about Sunshine and the signs in the window. Somehow the public became convinced that victims with guns don’t prevent involuntary handouts to criminals. Could the public be made to believe that crosses don’t prevent involuntary blood donations to vampires? To get crosses banned, all I’d need to do is convince some politicians that crosses exist only to offend members of other religions. I could even be magnanimous and allow police to carry crosses. With typical response times of minutes, I’d be able to finish my meal before the 911 operators could finish answering the calls.
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Chrome Oxide (28 Minutes into the Future)
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For the sake of objectivity, the programme analysed both histories - real and alternative - without being informed which was which. It concluded that the second, actual sequence of events was statistically so improbable that it could not possibly happen.
...
We are required to believe a) that a drug-addled, womanising inexperienced Catholic with strong links to criminal organisations could defeat the most experienced politician in the country, and that his dire medical condition and dubious character could be kept secret. And also that he could conduct exceptionally successful diplomacy in 1962 while being high as a kite on a coctail of painkillers and stimulants;
b) that a president, his brother and several others could all be murdered in a short space of time, by insane gunman, each acting alone, for no discernible reason. Also that Kennedy could be shot by someone with known links to the Soviet Union without there being any consequences;
c) that Nixon in office would sanction a pointless burglary, during an election campaign he was bound to win anyway, and that a man with such experience would fail to control the minor political scandal that resulted;
d) that 1980 the United States would elect as president an ageing actor with little experience and dyed orange hair.
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Iain Pears (Arcadia)
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One of the greatest benefits that the eventual triumph of artificial intelligence will bring to mankind will be the eradication of dysfunctional governments and the criminal activities of turd squeak politicians.
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David Gustafson
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If you keep on hiding and defending a criminal. One day the criminal will steal your life from you or the life of people you love.
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D.J. Kyos
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Our children are criminalized in casual conversation every day. Their swagger is analyzed, the sag of their pants pathologized—we cannot let any of this slide. This is not just how random strangers see our children, it’s how our teachers see our children, our police officers see our children, our juries see our children, and our politicians see our children. Challenge the stereotyping of black and brown youth, and the criminalization of black and brown youth culture. A swagger is not intent, baggy jeans are not intent, a bandana is not intent. This is culture, and any suggestion otherwise is racist.
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Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
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They don’t want to change their behavior.
They don’t want to change their mindset.
They don’t want to change their attitude toward citizens.
They don’t want to improve people’s lives.
Instead, they would rather change laws that allow more crime to occur, or rename streets, than make meaningful changes that uplift communities.
These are the kinds of leaders we have.
They would rather change the law in a way that permits more crime to be committed, resulting in more victims, more deaths, more danger, and more power for criminals to act without consequence, than allow one of their own to be convicted. Because if one of them goes down, they all go down. So instead, they would rather let the country collapse and burn along with its citizens than see one of their own prosecuted and held accountable for the crimes they’ve committed.
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De philosopher DJ Kyos
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Politicians often fail to hold one another accountable for crimes, treason, or corruption. Instead of reporting wrongdoing, they use it as leverage to blackmail others into compliance or support. When they themselves are eventually exposed or no longer benefitting, only then do they speak out. They show little regard for morality, legality, or justice. Many are complicit, lying under oath, aiding and abetting, obstructing justice, and protecting criminals within the government.
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De philosopher DJ Kyos
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Politicians can destroy their own country, and make deals with criminals and terrorists. Sell their own country's top government secrets because of their hunger for power and their love for money. Greed makes them heartless and shameless.
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De philosopher DJ Kyos
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Never allow those who benefit from criminals to convince you that crime is the right thing.
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De philosopher DJ Kyos
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We have a morality and ethics problem or crisis. Everyone in their profession is doing something wrong, illegal, or criminating to those they offer service or product. Clients or consumers are always being scammed. Professions, Institutions, or corporates are scamming their clients, especially the poor ones. Most business or institutes are cheating their clients. You never get the service or product you pay for. You never get what you were promised. Bank steals people’s money, ISPs steal people’s data bundles, and Hospitals steal people’s health, organs, and lives. Security companies are the ones stealing, killing and kidnapping people. The media is always feeding people lies. Police officers are committing crimes. Politicians are traitors and support terrorists. NGO and foundations are fronts for money laundering, drug dealers and criminals. It is like everyone is doing the opposite of what they need to do . It is because we lost integrity and now, we are losing morals, principles, values and ethics more and more. We have no shame in doing wrong or harm to other people.
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De philosopher DJ Kyos