Regulatory Quotes

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Irrespective of any external, regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.
Émile Durkheim
Women have always worked. They have worked unpaid, underpaid, underappreciated, and invisibly, but they have always worked. But the modern workplace does not work for women. From its location, to its hours, to its regulatory standards, it has been designed around the lives of men and it is no longer fit for purpose. The world of work needs a wholesale redesign--of its regulations, of its equipment, of its culture--and this redesign must be led by data on female bodies and female lives. We have to start recognising that the work women do is not an added extra, a bonus that we could do without: women's work, paid and unpaid, is the backbone of our society and our economy. It's about time we started valuing it.
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
The part of the brain most affected by early stress is the prefrontal cortex, which is critical in self-regulatory activities of all kinds, both emotional and cognitive. As a result, children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointments, and harder to follow directions. And that has a direct effect on their performance in school.
Paul Tough (How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character)
That’s why signing kids up for piano lessons or sports is so important. It has nothing to do with creating a good musician or a five-year-old soccer star,” said Heatherton. “When you learn to force yourself to practice for an hour or run fifteen laps, you start building self-regulatory strength. A five-year-old who can follow the ball for ten minutes becomes a sixth grader who can start his homework on time.
Charles Duhigg (The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business)
Regulatory compliance is critical to managing risk.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
That the power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized ontologies does not imply that repetition itself ought to be stopped—as if it could be. If repetition is bound to persist as the mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the crucial question emerges: What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?
Judith Butler (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity)
The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement. […] It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.
Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?)
I spent the beginning of my focus on activism by doing what most everyone else was doing; blaming other people and institutions. Don’t like the war? Let’s blame the president, congress, or lobbyists. Don’t like ecological disregard? Let’s blame this or that corrupt corporation or some regulatory body for poor performance. Don’t like being poor and socially immobile? Let’s blame government coercion and interference in this free market utopia everyone keeps talking about. The sobering truth of the matter is that the only thing to blame is the dynamic, causal unfolding of system expression itself on the cultural level. In other words, none of us create or do anything in isolation – it’s impossible. We are system-bound both physically and psychologically; a continuum. Therefore our view of causality with respect to societal change can only be truly productive if we seek and source the most relevant sociological influences we can and begin to alter those effects from the root causes.
Peter Joseph
Thanks to Progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, we are now living under a system where the president is forced to step in to stop a regulatory agency from promulgating regulations that Congress refused to enact.
Andrew P. Napolitano (Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom)
It’s vital to understand this, because most of us naturally have only about fifteen minutes of self-regulatory capacity available at a time.
Susan Peirce Thompson (Bright Line Eating: The Science of Living Happy, Thin and Free)
Further, in countries where wealth comes from rent-seeking, political patronage, or regulatory capture (which, I remind the reader, is how the powerful and the insiders use regulation to scam the public, or red tape to slow down competition), wealth is seen as zero-sum.*2
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Incerto))
When you learn to force yourself to practice for an hour or run fifteen laps, you start building self-regulatory strength.” The solution, Starbucks discovered, was turning self-discipline into an organizational habit.
Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business)
To further encourage flow of credit to what we thought were stressed sectors, we extended regulatory forbearance to banks by relaxing the risk weights and provisioning norms governing bank loans to the stressed sectors. This
Duvvuri Subbarao (Who Moved My Interest Rate: Leading the Reserve Bank Through Five Turbulent Years)
I am trying to stress a point which they do not sufficiently emphasize, or tend to overlook altogether-namely, that the organism is not a mosaic aggregate of elementary physico-chemical processes, but a hierarchy in which each member, from the sub-cellular level upward, is a closely integrated structure, equipped with self-regulatory devices, and enjoys an advanced form of self-government.
Arthur Koestler (The Ghost in the Machine)
Kafka would surely have been impressed by the twin ambitions of the modern empathetic state: the need to set up hyper-regulatory bodies preventing you from doing anything yourself, while simultaneously endowing lavish pseudo-agencies to hand out leaflets listing a 1-800 number you can dial to order more leaflets.
Mark Steyn
If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction.That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality.
Judith Butler (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity)
Facebook is no longer just a company, I told them. It’s a doorway into the minds of the American people, and Mark Zuckerberg left that door wide open for Cambridge Analytica, the Russians, and who knows how many others. Facebook is a monopoly, but its behavior is more than a regulatory issue—it’s a threat to national security. The concentration of power that Facebook enjoys is a danger to American democracy.
Christopher Wylie (Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America)
This crisis didn’t have to happen. America had a boom-and-bust cycle from the 1790s to the 1930s, with a financial panic every ten to fifteen years. But we figured out how to fix it. Coming out of the Great Depression, the country put tough rules in place that gave us fifty years without a financial crisis. But in the 1980s, we started pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric, and we found ourselves back in the boom-and-bust cycle. When this crisis is over, there will be a once-in-a-generation chance to rewrite the rules. What we set in place will determine whether our country continues down this path toward a boom-and-bust economy or whether we reestablish an economy with more stability that gives ordinary folks a chance at real prosperity.
Elizabeth Warren (A Fighting Chance)
Laws continue to be enacted, and the regulatory environment has become more complex due to unacceptable conduct remediation. Consequently, entities continue to be compelled to demonstrate compliance with legal mandates through documented assurance assessments.
Robert E. Davis (Assuring IT Legal Compliance (Assurance Services, #1))
intrusive government and layer upon layer of regulatory red tape. When
Matt Taibbi (Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America)
Without adjustments to our economic system and regulatory policies, we may be in for an extended period of social turmoil.
Jerry Kaplan (Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth & Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
In other words, "sex" is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize 'sex' and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms.
Judith Butler (Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex")
The best defense against legal criticism and excessive regulatory scrutiny is an enormous bank account. As Uber showed, politicians can be used to minimize any consequences for past misconduct.
Corey Pein (Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley)
The oil and gas industry—left to its own devices—will mindlessly follow its own nature. It will make tons of money. It will corrode and corrupt and sabotage democratic governance. It will screw up and—in the end—fatally injure the whole freaking planet. And yes, it will also provide oil and gas along the way! And jobs for the workers who produce those things for it. The end-times battle that we’re engaged in now is to figure out how to get along without oil and gas—and we’re plugging away but still a ways off from that—and, in the meantime, commit to a whole new level of constraint and regulatory protection against this singularly destructive industry to minimize its potential harms.
Rachel Maddow (Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth)
The decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies means they are often not subject to the same regulatory oversight as traditional financial systems. This can lead to fraud, scams, and market manipulation.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Regulatory compliance is crucial in corporate lending, with financial institutions having to adhere to various laws and guidelines. It represents another set of costs and risks that lenders have to consider.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Without sleep, however, the strong coupling between these two brain regions is lost. We cannot rein in our atavistic impulses—too much emotional gas pedal (amygdala) and not enough regulatory brake (prefrontal cortex).
Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams)
I want to remind you that the forest is far more than a source of timber. It is our collective medicine cabinet. It is our lungs. It is the regulatory system for our climate and our oceans. It is the mantle of our planet. It is the health and well-being of our children and grandchildren. It is our sacred home. It is our salvation.
Diana Beresford-Kroeger (To Speak for the Trees: My Life's Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest)
Paris was one of the justifications the Obama administration used as part of the regulatory record to justify the cost and benefits of the Clean Power Plan.” That was an Obama-era 460-page rule to lower carbon dioxide emitted by power plants that the EPA estimated would save 4,500 lives a year. Pruitt was already moving to end the policy.
Bob Woodward (Fear: Trump in the White House)
Company leaders should understand regulatory compliance because it is crucial for maintaining legal and ethical business practices. A comprehensive understanding of compliance ensures they can make informed decisions, minimize legal risks, and safeguard the company's reputation, ultimately contributing to its long-term success and stability.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
At this time we should take a brife moment to mention quacks: alternative therapists who sell vitamins and homeopathy sugar pills [the latter of which, by definition, contain no active ingredients], which perform no better than placebo in fair tests, and who use even cruder marketing tricks than the ones described in this book. In these people profit at all from the justified anger that people feel towards the pharmaceutical industry, then it comes at the expense of genuinely constructive activity. Selling ineffective sugar pills is not a meaningful policy response to the regulatory failure we have seen in this book
Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
health agencies had put regulatory capture on steroids. The CDC, for example, owns 57 vaccine patents1 and spends $4.9 of its $12.0 billion-dollar annual budget (as of 2019) buying and distributing vaccines.2,3 NIH owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High level officials, including Dr. Fauci, receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process.4 The FDA receives 45 percent of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry, through what are euphemistically called “user fees.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
I watched with incredulity as businessmen ran to the government in every crisis, whining for handouts or protection from the very competition that has made this system so productive. I saw Texas ranchers, hit by drought, demanding government-guaranteed loans; giant milk cooperatives lobbying for higher price supports; major airlines fighting deregulation to preserve their monopoly status; giant companies like Lockheed seeking federal assistance to rescue them from sheer inefficiency; bankers, like David Rockefeller, demanding government bailouts to protect them from their ill-conceived investments; network executives, like William Paley of CBS, fighting to preserve regulatory restrictions and to block the emergence of competitive cable and pay TV. And always, such gentlemen proclaimed their devotion to free enterprise and their opposition to the arbitrary intervention into our economic life by the state. Except, of course, for their own case, which was always unique and which was justified by their immense concern for the public interest.
William E. Simon
I have called it a Great Splintering, not purely an economic phenomenon, but a social one: an era where social contracts are being torn up, abrogated, betrayed, abandoned, by accident, by design, by "regulatory capture," or simply by polities too gridlocked to progress.
Umair Haque (Betterness: Economics for Humans)
Micro-regulation is micro-tyranny, a slithering, serpentine network of insinuating Ceaucescu and Kim Jong-Il mini-me's. It's time for the mass rejection of their diktats. A political order that subjects you to the caprices of faceless bureaucrats or crusading "judges" merits no respect. To counter the Bureau of Compliance, we need an Alliance of Non-Compliance to help once free people roll back the regulatory state.
Mark Steyn (After America: Get Ready for Armageddon)
Rudeness instantly establishes a set of norms, a set of regulatory orders, authority, and power. To be rude is to go against an established accepted concept or ordered regulation. Thus rudeness could be in kind, a deviation from the norm. Rudeness can also be in kind an instantiation outside a set foundation. A deviation from a norm holds the same set foundation as the norm, their disagreement merely a manner of degrees.
Dew Platt (The Rudeness of Soul)
If you are going to start a regulatory regime from scratch, you’d design it to protect middle-and lower-middle-income people, because the opportunity for them to get ripped off was so high. Instead what we had was a regime where those were the people who were protected the least.” Eisman
Michael Lewis (The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)
The wealthy exert a commanding influence over the state through virtually unlimited political campaign contributions, armies of lobbyists, the revolving door that shuffles former government officials into corporate jobs as consultants and lobbyists (and moves bankers into positions in financial regulatory agencies), and the aforementioned control of news and media outlets that defines both the subjects of public discourse and the range of acceptable opinion.
David A. Nibert (Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict (Critical Perspectives on Animals: Theory, Culture, Science, and Law))
Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars. If phone companies want to operate in the “free market,” then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we’ll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let’s hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public’s rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can.
Cory Doctorow (Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century)
Trump is the best thing ever to have happened to the new American oligarchy. In addition to his tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks, he stokes divisiveness in ways that keeps the bottom 90 percent from seeing how the oligarchy has taken over the reins of government, twisted government to its benefit, and siphoned off the economy’s benefits. His deal with the oligarchy has been simple: He’ll stoke division and tribalism so most Americans won’t see CEOs getting exorbitant pay while they’re slicing the pay of average workers, won’t pay attention to the giant tax cut that went to big corporations and the wealthy, and won’t notice a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign donations.
Robert B. Reich (The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It)
Corporations aren’t citizens or neighbors or parents. They can’t vote or serve in combat. They don’t learn the Pledge of Allegiance. They don’t have souls. They’re revenue machines. I don’t have any problem with that. I think it’s absurd to lay moral or civic obligations on them. Their only obligations are strategic, and while they can get very complex, at root they’re not civic entities. With corporations, I have no problem with government enforcement of statutes and regulatory policy serving a conscience function.
David Foster Wallace (The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel)
Achieving such deep and liquid markets requires large-scale financial sector reforms, with a complete replacement of the existing regulatory framework.
Bibek Debroy (Getting India Back on Track: An Action Agenda for Reform)
China is a political beast, with the Party at its heart, and the importance of political and regulatory due diligence cannot be overstated.
Jeremy Gordon (Risky Business In China. A Guide To Due Diligence)
If the power to tax is the power to destroy, the power to regulate is no less so.
Markham Shaw Pyle
regulatory impact analysis
Steven Johnson (Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most)
A technical summary on pressure piping Engineering and Regulatory documents used in Quality Control and Construction of Pressure Piping
Shahin Shardi
Thirty years ago [written 2009], over-regulation, over-taxation, mis-regulation, statism, state corporatism, and economic folly, cosiness and regulatory capture, and a crescent ideological enemy without, who were assisted by enemies – both fifth columnists and useful fools – within, had led to a crisis of confidence in the West, and in all lands that – and amongst all peoples, particularly those who were oppressed in their own lands, who – loved and desired liberty. Of course, thirty years ago, Britain had Margaret Thatcher to turn to.
G.M.W. Wemyss
Our analyses of the FDA data showed relatively little difference between the effects of antidepressants and the effects of placebos. Indeed, the effects were so small that they did not qualify as clinically significant. The drug companies knew how small the effect of their medications were compared to placebos, and so did the FDA and other regulatory agencies. The companies found various ways to make the data seem more favorable to their products, and the FDA helped them keep their negative data secret. In fact, in some instances, the FDA urged the companies to keep negative data hidden, even when the companies wanted to reveal them. My colleagues and I hadn't really discovered anything new. We had merely revealed their 'dirty little secret'.
Irving Kirsch (The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth)
Thus Marx begins his attack on the liberal concept of freedom. The freedom of the market is not freedom at all. It is a fetishistic illusion. Under capitalism, individuals surrender to the discipline of abstract forces (such as the hidden hand of the market made much of by Adam Smith) that effectively govern their relations and choices. I can make something beautiful and take it to market, but if I don’t manage to exchange it then it has no value. Furthermore, I won’t have enough money to buy commodities to live. Market forces, which none of us individually control, regulate us. And part of what Marx wants to do in Capital is talk about this regulatory power that occurs even “in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products.” Supply and demand fluctuations generate price fluctuations around some norm but cannot explain why a pair of shoes on average trades for four shirts. Within all the confusions of the marketplace, “the labour-time socially necessary to produce [commodities] asserts itself as a regulative law of nature. In the same way, the law of gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him” (168). This parallel between gravity and value is interesting: both are relations and not things, and both have to be conceptualized as immaterial but objective.
David Harvey (A Companion to Marx's Capital)
regulatory norms of “sex” work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative. In this sense, what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought
Judith Butler (Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex")
Ian also had issues with Elizabeth’s management, especially the way she siloed the groups off from one another and discouraged them from communicating. The reason she and Sunny invoked for this way of operating was that Theranos was “in stealth mode,” but it made no sense to Ian. At the other diagnostics companies where he had worked, there had always been cross-functional teams with representatives from the chemistry, engineering, manufacturing, quality control, and regulatory departments working toward a common objective. That was how you got everyone on the same page, solved problems, and met deadlines.
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
[Free trade agreements] are trade agreements that don't stick to trade…they colonize environmental labor, and consumer issues of grave concern (in terms of health safety, and livelihoods too) to many, many hundreds of millions of people - and they do that by subordinating consumer, environmental, and labor issues to the imperatives and the supremacy of international commerce. That is exactly the reverse of how democratic societies have progressed, because over the decades they've progressed by subordinating the profiteering priorities of companies to, say, higher environmental health standards; abolition of child labor; the right of workers to have fair worker standards…and it's this subordination of these three major categories that affect people's lives, labor, environment, the consumer, to the supremacy and domination of trade; where instead of trade getting on its knees and showing that it doesn't harm consumers - it doesn't deprive the important pharmaceuticals because of drug company monopolies, it doesn't damage the air and water and soil and food (environmentally), and it doesn't lacerate the rights of workers - no, it's just the opposite: it's workers and consumers and environments that have to kneel before this giant pedestal of commercial trade and prove that they are not, in a whole variety of ways, impeding international commerce…so this is the road to dictatorial devolution of democratic societies: because these trade agreements have the force of law, they've got enforcement teeth, and they bypass national courts, national regulatory agencies, in ways that really reflect a massive, silent, mega-corporate coup d'etat…that was pulled off in the mid-1990's.
Ralph Nader
When you're thinking about where is the best place to start a business, there's a lot to consider - It's about culture, it's about physical infrastructure, it's about how educated the people are, it's about the housing, it's about the natural ecosystem, it's about the regulatory and legal frameworks, it's about the local transportation system and the efficiency of all the other systems that are there. But location matters.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Companies should maintain accurate and timely financial records because it serves as the foundation for informed decision-making, ensures compliance with regulatory requirements, and enhances transparency, ultimately bolstering trust among stakeholders and facilitating long-term financial stability and growth. Without good records, businesses may risk financial mismanagement and uncertainty, hindering their ability to thrive in a competitive market.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Capital Acquisition: Small Business Considerations for How to Get Financing)
America has potholed roads and decrepit airports, but it builds state-of-the-art offices for regulatory bureaucrats—and their enforcers. The federal Department of Education doesn’t employ a single teacher, but it does have a SWAT team.
Mark Steyn (After America: Get Ready for Armageddon)
Patterned, repetitive, rhythmic activity makes the overactive and overly reactive core regulatory networks (see Figure 2) get back “in balance.” Music falls into this category—both playing and listening. All sports involve doses of it. Dance, too.
Bruce D. Perry (What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing)
Exxon abandoned its good-citizen approach of funding research, allowing its publication, and discussing ways to transition to a new energy economy. It began to fund climate denial aimed at obfuscating the science and slowing its regulatory response.
Shawn Lawrence Otto (The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It)
In other words, if you wanted good government, then expertise mattered. You needed public institutions stocked with people whose job it was to pay attention to important stuff so the rest of us citizens didn’t have to. And it was thanks to those experts that Americans could worry less about the quality of the air we breathed or the water we drank, that we had recourse when employers failed to pay us the overtime we were due, that we could count on over-the-counter drugs not killing us, and that driving a car or flying on a commercial airplane was exponentially safer today than it had been just twenty or thirty or fifty years ago. The “regulatory state” conservatives complained so bitterly about had made American life a hell of a lot better.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
In the 1970s only about 3 percent of retiring members of Congress went on to become Washington lobbyists. By 2016, fully half of all retiring senators and 42 percent of retiring representatives had turned to lobbying, regardless of party affiliation. This wasn’t because more recent retirees have had fewer qualms than their predecessors about making money off their contacts in government. It was because the financial rewards from corporate lobbying had ballooned. The revolving door rotates the other way, too: If a lobbyist can land a plum job in an administration, he or she becomes even more valuable on leaving. In his first six months as president, Trump handed control of every major regulatory agency to lobbyists from the industries they would oversee.
Robert B. Reich (The Common Good)
If you are going to start a regulatory regime from scratch, you’d design it to protect middle-and lower-middle-income people, because the opportunity for them to get ripped off was so high. Instead what we had was a regime where those were the people who were protected the least.
Michael Lewis (The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)
... people with a secure attachment style view their partners' well-being as their responsibility. As long as they have reason to believe their partner is in some sort of trouble, they'll continue to back him or her. Mario Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver, in their book Attachment in Adulthood, show that people with a secure attachment style are more likely than others to forgive their partner for wrongdoing. They explain this as a complex combination of cognitive and emotional abilities: "Forgiveness requires difficult regulatory maneuvers . . . understanding a transgressor's needs and motives, and making generous attributions and appraisals concerning the transgressor's traits and hurtful actions . . . Secure people are likely to offer relatively benign explanations of their partners' hurtful actions and be inclined to forgive the partner." Also, as we've seen previously in this chapter, secure people just naturally dwell less on the negative and can turn off upsetting emotions without becoming defensively distant. The good news is that people with a secure attachment style have healthy instincts and usually catch on very early that someone is not cut out to be their partner. The bad news is that when secure people do, on occasion, enter into a negative relationship, they might not know when to call it quits--especially if it's a long-term, committed relationship in which they feel responsible for their partner's happiness.
Amir Levine & Rachel S.F. Heller (Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love)
In the comfortingly distorted view of the past, American slavery came about in the passive sense. That's just the way things were back then. Slavery was an inherited reality, a long-standing if unsavory fact of trade and war. In reality, colonial legislatures consciously conceived American chattel slavery at the turn of the eighteenth century, and they spelled out its terms in painstaking regulatory detail. Virginia's slave codes contained forty-one sections and more than four thousand words. ... The slave codes of 1705 are among American history's most striking evidence that our nation's greatest sins were achieved with clear forethought and determined maintenance.
Kai Wright (Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019)
The structure of the human genome can thus be likened to a sentence that reads- This......is the......str...uc......ture...,,,...of...your...(...gen...ome...)... - where the words correspond to the genes, the ellipses correspond to the spacers and stuffers, and the occasional punctuation marks demarcate the regulatory sequence of genes.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
Templet refers me to a 1992 study by the MIT political scientist Stephen Meyer, who rated the fifty states according to the strictness of their environmental protection. Meyer then matched regulatory strictness to economic growth over a twenty-year period and found that the tougher the regulation, the more jobs were available in the economy.
Arlie Russell Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right)
In the 1970s Allan Wilson and Mary-Claire King at Berkeley correctly theorized that the evolution of genes is less important than the evolution of regulatory sequences upstream of genes (and thus how the environment regulates genes). Reflecting that, a disproportionate share of genetic differences between chimps and humans are in genes for TFs.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
This crisis didn’t have to happen. America had a boom-and-bust cycle from the 1790s to the 1930s, with a financial panic every ten to fifteen years. But we figured out how to fix it. Coming out of the Great Depression, the country put tough rules in place that gave us fifty years without a financial crisis. But in the 1980s, we started pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric, and we found ourselves back in the boom-and-bust cycle. When this crisis is over, there will be a once-in-a-generation chance to rewrite the rules. What we set in place will determine whether our country continues down this path toward a boom-and-bust economy or whether we reestablish an economy with more stability that gives ordinary folks a chance at real prosperity. Done.
Elizabeth Warren (A Fighting Chance)
Apple raised $17 billion in a bond offering in 2013. Not to invest in new products or business lines, but to pay a dividend to stockholders. The company is awash with cash, but much of that money is overseas, and there would be a tax charge if it were repatriated to the USA. For many other companies, the tax-favoured status of debt relative to equity encourages financial engineering. Most large multinational companies have corporate and financial structures of mind-blowing complexity. The mechanics of these arrangements, which are mainly directed at tax avoidance or regulatory arbitrage, are understood by only a handful of specialists. Much of the securities issuance undertaken by Goldman Sachs was not ‘helping companies to grow’ but represented financial engineering of the kind undertaken at Apple. What
John Kay (Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance)
He understood the theory. In an emergency people would have to exit that way, out through the window and over the wing. Hence all kinds of regulations mandated a minimum space, so people would be comfortable on their way through, except that if such a thing existed as a minimum space for a person to be comfortable, then why wasn’t every row just as capacious? It was a regulatory conundrum he couldn’t unravel.
Lee Child (Make Me (Jack Reacher, #20))
Over the last fifty years at NIH, Dr. Fauci has played a leading role in Big Pharma’s engineered demolition of American health and democracy, working hand in glove with pharmaceutical companies to overcome federal regulatory obstacles and transform the NIH and NIAID into a single-minded vehicle for development, promotion, and marketing of patented pharmaceutical products, including vaccines and vaccine-like products.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
The government is commonly conceptualized as a business. If it is seen as a service industry, taxes can be seen as payment for services provided to the public. Those services can include protection (by the military, the criminal justice system, and regulatory agencies), adjudication of disputes (by the judiciary and other agencies), social insurance (as in Social Security and Medicare and various “safety nets”), and so on. Under
George Lakoff (Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think)
These initially adaptive responses to immediate danger turn into inflexible and pervasive procedural tendencies when trauma is unresolved. Once these actions have been procedurally encoded, individuals are left with regulatory deficits and “suffer both from generalized hyperarousal [and hypoarousal] and from physiological emergency reactions to specific reminders” (van der Kolk, 1994, p. 254). Traumatized clients often experience rapid, dramatic, exhausting, and confusing shifts of intense emotional states, from dysregulated fear, anger, or even elation, to despair, helplessness, shame, or flat affect. They may continue to feel frozen, numb, tense, or constantly ready to fight or flee. They may be hyperalert, overly sensitive to sounds or movements and easily startled by unfamiliar stimuli. Or they may underreact to stimuli, feel distant from their experience and their bodies, or even feel dead inside.
Pat Ogden (Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology))
The U.S. conceit that its financial and regulatory system could withstand massive capital inflows on a sustained basis without any problems arguably laid the foundations for the global financial crisis of the late 2000s. The thinking that “this time is different”—because this time the U.S. had a superior system—once again proved false. Outsized financial market returns were in fact greatly exaggerated by capital inflows, just as would be the case in emerging markets.
Carmen M. Reinhart (This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly)
Our goal should be to make decision makers internalize the full consequences of their decisions, rather than prevent them from making decisions altogether [...] But we tend to reform under the delusion that the regulated institutions and the markets they operate in are static and passive, and that the regulatory environment will not vary with the cycle. Ironically, faith in draconian regulation is strongest at the bottom of the cycle, when there is little need for participants to be regulated. By contrast, the misconception that markets will govern themselves is most widespread at the top of the cycle, at the point of maximum danger to the system. We need to acknowledge these differences and enact cycle-proof regulation, for a regulation set against the cycle will not stand. To have a better chance of creating stability throughout the cycle--of being cycle-proof--new regulations should be comprehensive, nondiscretionary, contingent, and cost-effective.
Raghuram G. Rajan
A yajaman is one who does not blame anyone for any situation. He knows that his fortune and misfortune are dependent on many forces. Besides his knowledge, skills, experience and his power of anticipation, a lot depends on the talent of people around him—the market conditions and regulatory environment. He simply takes charge of whatever situation he is in, focusing on what he can do, never letting the anxiety of failure pull him back, or the confidence of success make him smug.
Devdutt Pattanaik (How to take decisions (Management Sutras Book 5))
As of today, the majority of Asian countries are still examining crypto technology and drafting their regulatory outlines. Better crypto tax regulations should come in the next few months or a year from now. Now, we can settle the argument on crypto taxation laws enforcement. It is very certain that it is just a matter of time for this event to unfold, collecting capital gains tax is just a time bomb waiting to explode in the cryptocurrency space, or else, the government will place outright ban on these commodities.
Olawale Daniel
Our capitalist elites have used propaganda, money, and the marginalizing of their critics to erase the first three of philosopher John Locke’s elements of the perfect state: liberty, equality, and freedom. They exclusively empower the fourth, property. Liberty and freedom in the corporate state mean the liberty and freedom of corporations and the rich to exploit and pillage without government interference or regulatory oversight. And the single most important characteristic of government is its willingness to use force, at home and abroad, to protect the interests of the property classes. This abject surrender of the state to the rich is illustrated in the 2017 tax code and the dismantling of environmental regulations. This degradation of basic democratic ideals—evidenced when the Supreme Court refuses to curb wholesale government surveillance of the public or defines pouring unlimited dark money into political campaigns as a form of free speech and the right to petition the government—means the society defines itself by virtues that are dead.
Chris Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour)
The agency even had its own mascot—the Blue Eagle. Paying a disturbing, un-American kind of homage to this new, powerful, government agency, shopkeepers displayed the Blue Eagle in their store windows to advertise their compliance with the regulatory rules, and chorus girls wore emblems of the bird on their costumes.11 Consumers, meanwhile, were encouraged to shop only where the Blue Eagle was proudly displayed. In fact, the mascot inspired the name of the NFL franchise created in Philadelphia in 1933, the Philadelphia Eagles.
Mike Lee (Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America's Founding Document)
It always helps to have the referees on your side. Modern states possess various agencies with the authority to investigate and punish wrongdoing by both public officials and private citizens. These include the judicial system, law enforcement bodies, and intelligence, tax, and regulatory agencies. In democracies, such institutions are designed to serve as neutral arbiters. For would-be authoritarians, therefore, judicial and law enforcement agencies pose both a challenge and an opportunity. If they remain independent, they might expose and punish government abuse. It is a referee’s job, after all, to prevent cheating. But if these agencies are controlled by loyalists, they could serve a would-be dictator’s aims, shielding the government from investigation and criminal prosecutions that could lead to its removal from power. The president may break the law, threaten citizens’ rights, and even violate the constitution without having to worry that such abuse will be investigated or censured. With the courts packed and law enforcement authorities brought to heel, governments can act with impunity.
Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die)
Studies of expert-novice differences have demonstrated that experts' performance is determined not by superior problem-solving strategies or better working memories but rather; better knowledge base that includes a large interconnected set of domain-specific schematic knowledge structures, well-developed cognitive skills (automated knowledge), and metacognitive self-regulatory skills that allow experts to control their performance , assess their work, predict its results, and generally, use the available knowledge base. From cognitive load theory American Psychologist ,45,149-158
R.Glaser
As government regulates business more, that favors corporations large enough to have substantial legal and compliance departments. Regulation serves as a kind of fixed cost of doing business, discouraging market entry. Not only do higher rates of regulatory growth correlate with increases in market concentration ratios, but the period during which regulation increased significantly, 1990–2000, was followed by increases in market concentration. None of those correlations prove causality, but at the very least it is possible that government regulation is a major force behind the rise of market power.
Tyler Cowen (Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero)
So what are people actually referring to when they talk about "deregulation"? In ordinary usage, the word seems to mean "changing the regulatory structure in a way that I like." In practice this can refer to almost anything. In the case of airlines or telecommunications in the seventies and eighties, it meant changing the system of regulation from one that encouraged a few large firms to one that fostered carefully supervised competition between midsize firms. In the case of banking, "deregulation" has usually meant exactly the opposite: moving away from a situation of managed competition between mid-sized firms to one where a handful of financial conglomerates are allowed to completely dominate the market. This is what makes the term so handy. Simply by labeling a new regulatory measure "deregulation," you can frame it in the public mind as a way to reduce bureaucracy and set individual initiative free, even if the result is a fivefold increase in the actual number of forms to be filled in, reports to be filed, rules and regulations for lawyers to interpret, and officious people in offices whose entire job seems to be to provide convoluted explanations for why you're not allowed to do things. (p. 17)
David Graeber (The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy)
The larger Europe grows, the more diverse must be the forms of co-operation it requires. Instead of a centralised bureaucracy, the model should be a market — not only a market of individuals and companies, but also a market in which the players are governments. Thus governments would compete with each other for foreign investments, top management and high earners through lower taxes and less regulation. Such a market would impose a fiscal discipline on governments because they would not want to drive away expertise and business. It would also help to establish which fiscal and regulatory policies produced the best overall economic results. No wonder socialists don't like it.
Margaret Thatcher
In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.
Matt Taibbi (Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus)
At the same time, Kaufmann discovered that in developing his genetic networks, he had reinvented some of the most avant-garde work in physics and applied mathematics-albeit in a totally new context. The dynamics of his genetic regulatory networks turned out to be a special case of what the physicists were calling "nonlinear dynamics." From the nonlinear point of view, in fact, it was easy to see why his sparsely connected networks could organize themselves into stable cycles so easily: mathematically, their behavior was equivalent to the way all the rain falling on the hillsides around a valley will flow into a lake at the bottom of the valley. In the space of all possible network behaviors, the stable cycles were like basins-or as the physicists put it, "attractors.
M. Mitchell Waldrop (Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos)
The will to truth is enshrined in the mind. It is undeniable, inescapable, mutable only if one’s humanity itself is rejected, itself muted. Yet the form of this truth, whether it be elaborate, simple, exclusive and regulatory or comprehensive and positive… this is a matter of aesthetics, taste... ...It is all inherently meaningless, the puzzle just as much as the pieces themselves, ephemeral. Yet more than this it is concrete, eternal, heavy and inescapable, a preponderous amalgam of things small and large, the actuality of which is imminent, the meaning of which is too great to acknowledge, let alone comprehend. So we tell stories. We read stories, write them, consider them and like them, or not. Simply ways, simple ways, to limit the All to that which can be understood.
Jeffrey Panzer (Epoch Awakening (Epoch, #1))
For most of human history, when you were born you inherited an off-the-shelf package of religious and cultural constraints. This was a kind of library of limits that was embedded in your social and physical environment. These limits performed certain self-regulatory tasks for you so you didn’t have to take them on yourself. The packages included habits, practices, rituals, social conventions, moral codes, and a myriad of other constraints that had typically evolved over many centuries, if not millennia, to reliably guide – or shall we say design – our lives in the direction of particular values, and to help us give attention to the things that matter most. In the twentieth century the rise of secularism and modernism in the West occasioned the collapse – if not the jettisoning – of many of these off-the-shelf packages of constraints in the cause of the liberation of the individual. In many cases, this rejection occurred on the basis of philosophical or cosmological disagreements with the old packages. This has, of course, had many great benefits. Yet by rejecting entire packages of constraint, we’ve also rejected those constraints that were actually useful for our purposes. “The left’s project of liberation,” writes the American philosopher Matthew Crawford, “led us to dismantle inherited cultural jigs that once imposed a certain coherence (for better and worse) on individual lives. This created a vacuum of cultural authority that has been filled, opportunistically, with attentional landscapes that get installed by whatever ‘choice architect’ brings the most energy to the task – usually because it sees the profit potential.” The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in his book You Must Change Your Life, has called for a reclamation of this particular aspect of religion – its habits and practices – which he calls “anthropotechnics.”6 When you dismantle existing boundaries in your environment, it frees you from their limitations, but it requires you to bring your own boundaries where you didn’t have to before. Sometimes, taking on this additional self-regulatory burden is totally worth it. Other times, though, the cost is too high. According to the so-called “ego-depletion” hypothesis, our self-control, our willpower, is a finite resource.7 So when the self-regulatory cost of bringing your own boundaries is high enough, it takes away willpower that could have been spent on something else.
James Williams (Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy)
The third cardinal feature of gene regulation, Monod and Jacob discovered, was that every gene had specific regulatory DNA sequences appended to it that acted like recognition tags. Once a sugar sensing-protein had detected sugar in the environment, it would recognize one such tag and turn the target genes on or off. That was a gene's signal to make more RNA messages and thereby generate the relevant enzyme to digest the sugar. A gene, in short, possessed not just information to encode a protein, but also information about when and where to make that protein. All that data was encrypted in DNA, typically appended to the front of every gene (although regulatory sequences) an also be appended to the ends and middle of genes). The combination of regulatory sequences and the protein-encoding sequence defined a gene.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
But the story of BPA is not just about gender: it’s also about class. Or at least it’s about gendered class. Fearing a major consumer boycott, most baby-bottle manufacturers voluntarily removed BPA from their products, and while the official US line on BPA is that it is not toxic, the EU and Canada are on their way to banning its use altogether. But the legislation that we have exclusively concerns consumers: no regulatory standard has ever been set for workplace exposure.5 ‘It was ironic to me,’ says occupational health researcher Jim Brophy, ‘that all this talk about the danger for pregnant women and women who had just given birth never extended to the women who were producing these bottles. Those women whose exposures far exceeded anything that you would have in the general environment. There was no talk about the pregnant worker who is on the machine that’s producing this thing.
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
Many people take this as evidence of duplicity or cynicism. But they don’t know what it’s like to be expected to make comments, almost every working day, on things of which they have little or no reliable knowledge or about which they just don’t care. They don’t appreciate the sheer number of things on which a politician is expected to have a position. Issues on which the governor had no strong opinions, events over which he had no control, situations on which it served no useful purpose for him to comment—all required some kind of remark from our office. On a typical day Aaron might be asked to comment on the indictment of a local school board chairman, the ongoing drought in the Upstate, a dispute between a power company and the state’s environmental regulatory agency, and a study concluding that some supposedly crucial state agency had been underfunded for a decade. Then there were the things the governor actually cared about: a senate committee’s passage of a bill on land use, a decision by the state supreme court on legislation applying to only one county, a public university’s decision to raise tuition by 12 percent. Commenting on that many things is unnatural, and sometimes it was impossible to sound sincere. There was no way around it, though. Journalists would ask our office about anything having remotely to do with the governor’s sphere of authority, and you could give only so many minimalist responses before you began to sound disengaged or ignorant or dishonest. And the necessity of having to manufacture so many views on so many subjects, day after day, fosters a sense that you don’t have to believe your own words. You get comfortable with insincerity. It affected all of us, not just the boss. Sometimes I felt no more attachment to the words I was writing than a dog has to its vomit.
Barton Swaim (The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics)
This is the crux of the issue, the crux of our story. For the shift in the American environmental movement from aesthetic environmentalism to regulatory environmentalism wasn’t just a change in political strategy. It was the manifestation of a crucial realization: that unrestricted commercial activity was doing damage—real, lasting, pervasive damage. It was the realization that pollution was global, not just local, and the solution to pollution was not dilution. This shift began with the understanding that DDT remained in the environment long after its purpose was served. And it grew as acid rain and the ozone hole demonstrated that pollution traveled hundreds or even thousands of kilometers from its source, doing damage to people who did not benefit from the economic activity that produced it. It reached a crescendo when global warming showed that even the most seemingly innocuous by-product of industrial civilization—CO2, the stuff on which plants depend—could produce a very different planet.
Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
Even women deeply committed to the emancipatory promises of modernity were alarmed by the "inappropriateness" of unrelated men and omen socializing in the streets. In the women's press, articles exhorted young men to treat women respectfully in public. Other articles encouraged women to act as their own police and to be more observant of their hijab and public modesty. From the beginning, then, women's entry on the streets was subject to the regulatory harassment of men. The modernist heterosocializing promise that invited women to leave their homosocial spaces and become educated companionate partners for modernist men was underwritten by policing of women's public presence through men's street actions. Men at once desired heterosociality of the modern and yet would not surrender the privileged masculinity of the streets. Women's public presence was also underwritten by disciplinary approbation of modernizing women themselves whose emancipatory drive would be jeopardized by unruly public conduct.
Afsaneh Najmabadi (Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity)
The current systems have failed to provide answers for citizens, and people are looking outside of the mainstream political spectrum. These dissatisfactions are now being used by right-wing, nativist, opportunist, corrupted, cynical political players. The same ones who helped create and stoke all of this now offer salvation. That's their game. It's the same strategy as defunding a program or regulatory agency they want to get rid of, then holding up its resulting ineffectiveness as evidence that it needs to be folded. If nationalist aggression, closed borders, exceptionalism of any kind really worked for society, North Korea would be the most prosperous country on earth. They have never really worked, but we keep buying it. That's how we got Trump, Brexit, Le Pen, Orban, etc. In Russia, President Putin is playing these games too: he exploits the complex of rage, pain, impoverishment of the Russian people caused by the shock economy and the Machiavellian privatization and deregulation that took place in the 1990s.
Nadya Tolokonnikova (Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism)
But I was wrong about that. From the moment of my reluctant entrance into the vaccine debate in 2005, I was astonished to realize that the pervasive web of deep financial entanglements between Pharma and the government health agencies had put regulatory capture on steroids. The CDC, for example, owns 57 vaccine patents1 and spends $4.9 of its $12.0 billion-dollar annual budget (as of 2019) buying and distributing vaccines.2,3 NIH owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High level officials, including Dr. Fauci, receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process.4 The FDA receives 45 percent of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry, through what are euphemistically called “user fees.”5 When I learned that extraordinary fact, the disastrous health of the American people was no longer a mystery; I wondered what the environment would look like if the EPA received 45 percent of its budget from the coal industry!
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Under the Fugitive Persons Act, those who escape from service are to be captured and returned, anywhere they are found in the United States, slave state or free. All law enforcement agencies are obliged to assist in these operations when called upon (as, indeed, “all good citizens” are so obliged), but it is the US Marshals Service that is specifically charged with the job. This law was passed in the ancient year of 1793 under its old name, but it’s been updated repeatedly: strengthened in 1850, reinforced in 1861, revised and strengthened a half dozen times since. When, in 1875, Congress at last ended slavery in the nation’s capital, the slaveholding powers were appeased by the raising of fees for obstruction. When President Roosevelt, in 1935, proposed the creation of a “comprehensive regulatory framework” for the plantations (and the Bureau of Labor Practices to enforce it), he quieted howling southern senators with a sweeping immunity bill, shielding US marshals from zealous northern prosecutors. Tit for tat. Give and take. Negotiation and conciliation. Compromise. It’s how the Union survives. People
Ben H. Winters (Underground Airlines)
The state does not take a merely temporal regulatory role and leave salvation in the hands of the church; rather, the modern state seeks to replace the church by itself becoming a soteriological institution.16 It is in this sense, then, that the modern state is a parody of the church: “The body of the state is a simulacrum, a false copy, of the Body of Christ” (RONT, 182). As a result, while political rhetoric may suggest that the state is confined to a “public” sphere or that the reign of the secular is circumscribed, in fact the modern state demands complete allegiance, and the reign of the secular does not tolerate territories of resistance.17 The state is happy to absorb all kinds of private pursuits under the umbrella of civil society, but it cannot tolerate a religious community that claims to be the only authentic polis and proclaims a king who is a rival to both Caesar and Leviathan. In such a case, this community’s allegiance to its king ultimately trumps its allegiance to the state or empire, and its understanding of the nature of human persons does not fit the normative picture of liberalism. This the state cannot tolerate. It is in this sense that “every worship service is a challenge to Caesar.
James K.A. Smith (Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology)
Perhaps what matters,” Sunstein muses, “is not whether people are right on the facts, but whether they are frightened.” And people do seem to be frightened. We are locking our doors and pulling our children out of public school and buying guns and ritually sanitizing our hands to allay a wide range of fears, most of which are essentially fears of other people. All the while we are also, in our way, reckless. We get intoxicated, from the Latin “to poison,” for fun. This contradiction leads Sunstein to worry that regulatory laws based on the priorities of the general public maybe prone to a pattern of “paranoia and neglect.” Too much attention may be spent on minimal risks, while too little is paid to pressing threats. Paranoia, the theorist Eve Sedgwick observes, tends to be contagious. She calls it a “strong theory,” meaning a wide-ranging, reductive theory that displaces other ways of thinking. And paranoia very frequently passes for intelligence. As Sedgwick observes, “to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant.” She does not believe that paranoid thinking is necessarily delusional or wrong, but only that there is value to approaches that are less rooted in suspicion. “Paranoia,” Sedgwick writes, “knows some things well and others poorly.
Eula Biss (On Immunity: An Inoculation)
Old Hubert must have had a premonition of his squalid demise. In October he said to me, ‘Forty-two years I’ve had this place. I’d really like to go back home, but I ain’t got the energy since my old girl died. And I can’t sell it the way it is now. But anyway before I hang my hat up I’d be curious to know what’s in that third cellar of mine.’ The third cellar has been walled up by order of the civil defence authorities after the floods of 1910. A double barrier of cemented bricks prevents the rising waters from invading the upper floors when flooding occurs. In the event of storms or blocked drains, the cellar acts as a regulatory overflow. The weather was fine: no risk of drowning or any sudden emergency. There were five of us: Hubert, Gerard the painter, two regulars and myself. Old Marteau, the local builder, was upstairs with his gear, ready to repair the damage. We made a hole. Our exploration took us sixty metres down a laboriously-faced vaulted corridor (it must have been an old thoroughfare). We were wading through a disgusting sludge. At the far end, an impassable barrier of iron bars. The corridor continued beyond it, plunging downwards. In short, it was a kind of drain-trap. That’s all. Nothing else. Disappointed, we retraced our steps. Old Hubert scanned the walls with his electric torch. Look! An opening. No, an alcove, with some wooden object that looks like a black statuette. I pick the thing up: it’s easily removable. I stick it under my arm. I told Hubert, ‘It’s of no interest. . .’ and kept this treasure for myself. I gazed at it for hours on end, in private. So my deductions, my hunches were not mistaken: the Bièvre-Seine confluence was once the site where sorcerers and satanists must surely have gathered. And this kind of primitive magic, which the blacks of Central Africa practise today, was known here several centuries ago. The statuette had miraculously survived the onslaught of time: the well-known virtues of the waters of the Bièvre, so rich in tannin, had protected the wood from rotting, actually hardened, almost fossilized it. The object answered a purpose that was anything but aesthetic. Crudely carved, probably from heart of oak. The legs were slightly set apart, the arms detached from the body. No indication of gender. Four nails set in a triangle were planted in its chest. Two of them, corroded with rust, broke off at the wood’s surface all on their own. There was a spike sunk in each eye. The skull, like a salt cellar, had twenty-four holes in which little tufts of brown hair had been planted, fixed in place with wax, of which there were still some vestiges. I’ve kept quiet about my find. I’m biding my time.
Jacques Yonnet (Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City)
the mystery was far from solved. Nobody understood why heparin—which is made from the mucosal lining of pig intestines, most of which come from China—was suddenly making patients sick. In February 2008, the FDA discovered the likely source of the contamination: a Chinese plant supplying crude heparin to Baxter. In a clerical blunder, the FDA had completely overlooked and failed to inspect the facility, Changzhou SPL, located about 150 miles west of Shanghai. Instead, it inspected and approved a plant with a similar-sounding name. Predictably, once FDA officials finally traveled to Changzhou in February 2008 to make an on-the-ground inspection, they found serious problems. The facility had dirty manufacturing tanks and no reliable method of removing impurities from heparin, and it acquired the crude heparin from workshops that had not been inspected. Chinese regulators were no help at all. A loophole in Chinese regulations allowed certain pharmaceutical plants to register as chemical plants, which made them subject to far less oversight. For U.S. congressional investigator David Nelson, whose committee was now immersed in the heparin crisis as well, the situation laid bare the “classically good reason to be suspect of production coming from any country that doesn’t have competent regulatory authority.” The FDA issued an import alert in March 2008, meaning that Changzhou SPL’s shipments would be stopped at the U.S. border. Though
Katherine Eban (Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom)
Working independently, Baltimore and Temin discovered an enzyme found in retroviruses that could build DNA from an RNA template. They called the enzyme reverse transcriptase-"reverse" because it inverted the normal direction of information flow: from RNA back to DNA, or from a gene's message backward to a gene, thereby violating Crick's "central dogma" (that genetic information only moved from genes to messages, but never backward). Using reverse transcriptase, ever RNA in a cell could be used as a template to build its corresponding gene. A biologist could thus generate a catalog, or "library" of all "active" genes in a cell-akin to a library of books grouped by subject. There would be a library of genes for T cells and another for red blood cells, a library for neurons in the retina, for insulin-secreting cells of the pancreas, and so forth. By comparing libraries derived from two cells-a T cell and a pancreas cell, say-an immunologist could fish out genes that were active in one cell and not the other (e.g., insulin or the T cell receptor). Once identified, that gene could be amplified a millionfold in bacteria. The gene could be isolated and sequenced, its RNA and protein sequence determined, its regulatory regions identified; it could be mutated an inserted into a different cell to decipher the gene's structure and function. In 1984 this technique was deployed to clone the T cell receptor-a landmark achievement in immunology.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
At this point, another trope makes its appearance. It can be called the invention of anachronistic space, and it reached full authority as an administrative and regulatory technology in the late Victorian era. Within this trope, the agency of women, the colonized and the industrial working class are disavowed and projected onto anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity. According to the colonial version of this trope, imperial progress across the space of empire is figured as a journey backward in time to an anachronistic moment of prehistory. By extension, the return journey to Europe is seen as rehearsing the evolutionary logic of historical progress, forward and upward to the apogee of the Enlightenment in the European metropolis. Geographical difference across space is figured as a historical difference across time. The ideologue J.-M. Degerando captured this notion concisely: “The philosophical traveller, sailing to the ends of the earth, is in fact travelling in time; he is exploring the past.” 46 The stubborn and threatening heterogeneity of the colonies was contained and disciplined not as socially or geographically different from Europe and thus equally valid, but as temporally different and thus as irrevocably superannuated by history. Hegel, for example, perhaps the most influential philosophical proponent of this notion, figured Africa as inhabiting not simply a different geographical space but a different temporal zone, surviving anachronistically within the time of history. Africa, announces Hegel, “is no Historical part of the world … it has no movement or development to exhibit.” Africa came to be seen as the colonial paradigm of anachronistic space, a land perpetually out of time in modernity, marooned and historically abandoned. Africa was a fetish-land, inhabited by cannibals, dervishes and witch doctors, abandoned in prehistory at the precise moment before the Weltgeist (as the cunning agent of Reason) manifested itself in history.
Anne McClintock (Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest)