Scale Of Justice Quotes

Marco opened the walkway gate just as a sprightly grey lizard skittered across the stone path. A bougainvillea vine laden with a riot of purple blooms scaled the right side of the house, and the heady scent of gardenias saturated the air.

How could she compare the lives lost? One genocide against another—how did they balance on the scale of justice? And who was she, to imagine that she could make that comparison?

Balance. Light and dark. The sun and moon. Good and evil. A snake winding through a bed of wildflowers. Offering a taste of the most forbidden fruit. Scales of justice were tipped; a choice hanging there for me to decide. To right a wrong, or damn us all.

Karma was routinely misrepresented as the scales of justice when really, it was a matter of eternal continuity.

Freedom, "that terrible word inscribed on the chariot of the storm," is the motivating principle of all revolutions. Without it, justice seems inconceivable to the rebel's mind. There comes a time, however, when justice demands the suspension of freedom. Then terror, on a grand or small scale, makes its appearance to consummate the revolution. Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the responsibility of total guilt; in other words, adopts murder and violence.

I am Sa’kagé a lord of shadows. I claim the shadows that the Shadow may not. I am the strong arm of deliverance. I am Shadowstrider. I am the Scales of Justice. I am He-Who-Guards-Unseen. I am Shadowslayer. I am Nameless. The coranti shall not go unpunished. My way is hard but I serve unbroken. In ignobility nobility. In shame honor. In darkness light. I will do justice and love mercy. Until the king returns I shall not lay my burden down.” --(Durzo Blint to Jorses Alkestes, quoted to Skylar at the edge of Ezra's Forest.)

When people can get away with crimes just because they are wealthy or have the right connections, the scales are tipped against fairness and equality. The weight of corruption then becomes so heavy that it creates a dent that forces the world to become slanted, so much so — that justice just slips off.

If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale ... we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, 'that fugitive from the camp of conquerors'.

Once you get past the scales and the blindfold, Justice is a woman with a sword.

Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.

The fashion accessories of Justitia, the Roman goddess of justice, express the logic succinctly: (1) scales; (2) blindfold; (3) sword.

...he's imagining himself Justice incarnate, balancing the scales. He's forgotten that Justice incarnate is not only balancing the scales but also blindfolded.

People talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales by a blind Justice.

And we stepped onto the tipping scales of Lady Justice with her eyes blindfolded, peeking through slits because that rag is so fucking old worn-out, stretched thin, barely even there

I have always found it interesting that the symbol for Justice is a set of scales; the implication being that to achieve perfect harmony, good and bad must balance each other out. Rather than eradicating one, both must exist in equal quantities.

Don’t misunderstand me. The terrorist actions of Al-Qaeda were and are unmitigatedly evil. But the astonishing naivety which decreed that America as a whole was a pure, innocent victim, so that the world could be neatly divided up into evil people (particularly Arabs) and good people (particularly Americans and Israelis), and that the latter had a responsibility now to punish the former, is a large-scale example of what I’m talking about - just as it is immature and naive to suggest the mirror image of this view, namely that the western world is guilty in all respects and that all protestors and terrorists are therefore completely justified in what they do. In the same way, to suggest that all who possess guns should be locked up, or (the American mirror-image of this view) that everyone should carry guns so that good people can shoot bad ones before they can get up to their tricks, is simply a failure to think into the depths of what’s going on.

The Greeks believe the Fates are three sisters: one is Order, who spins out the linear thread of a life from the beginning; another is Irony, who gently cocks up the thread, marking it with some peculiar sense of balance, like justice, only blind drunk with a scale that’s been bunged into the street so it never quite settles; and the third, Inevitability, simply sits in the corner taking notes and criticizing the other two for being shameless slags until she cuts life’s thread, leaving everyone miffed at the timing.

We have the wolf by the ears; and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.

Go, wiser thou! and in thy scale of sense Weigh thy Opinion against Providence; Call Imperfection what thou fancy'st such, Say, here he gives too little, there too much; Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust,(9) Yet cry, If Man's unhappy, God's unjust; If Man alone ingross not Heav'n's high care, Alone made perfect here, immortal there: Snatch from his hand the balance(10) and the rod, Re-judge his justice, be the GOD of GOD!

And we stepped onto the tipping scales of Lady Justice with her eyes blindfolded, peeking through slits because that rag is so fucking old worn-out, stretched thin, barely even there

Ursula was the last in line. Her gloomy dignity, the weight of her name, the convincing vehemence of her declaration made the scale of justice hesitate for a moment. "You have taken this horrible game very seriously and you have done well because you are doing your duty," she told the members of the court. "But don't forget that as long as God gives us life we will still be mothers and no matter how revolutionary you may be, we have the right to pull down your pants and give you a whipping at the first sign of disrespect.

For mankind censure injustice, fearing that they may be the victims of it and not because they shrink from committing it. And thus, as I have shown, Socrates, injustice, when on a sufficient scale, has more strength and freedom and mastery than justice; and, as I said at first, justice is the interest of the stronger, whereas injustice is a man's own profit and interest. Thrasymachus,

Weird—no one is this popular, There wasn't a single negative comment, which made Micah even more suspicious. Some sort of parishioner conspiracy of silence? Could the church organize everyone's silence on a grand scale? Can all church members be this loyal? Were they paid off?

Mari looked at the woman and took a breath. “I’m an abolitionist, which means I’m interested in investing in communities to address problems rather than carceral answers that don’t serve communities at all. Murderers and rapists do great harm,” Mari said, “but the carceral institutions in this country do little to mitigate that harm. In fact, they do more harm to individuals and communities. The carceral state depends on a dichotomy between innocent and guilty, or good and bad, so that they can then define harm on their terms, in the name of justice, and administer it on a massive scale to support a capitalistic, violent, and inherently inequitable system.” And though this was what she said, and had said so many times, a part of her even then understood what this reporter was getting at. There were some people who she did not think should be released. Her father had been one of them.

If we refuse to forgive, we have stepped into dangerous waters. First, refusing to forgive is to put ourselves in the place of God, as though vengeance were our prerogative, not his. Second, unforgiveness says God’s wrath is insufficient. For the unbeliever, we are saying that an eternity in hell is not enough; they need our slap in the face or cold shoulder to “even the scales” of justice. For the believer, we are saying that Christ’s humiliation and death are not enough. In other words, we shake our fists at God and say, “Your standards may have been satisfied, but my standard is higher!” Finally, refusing to forgive is the highest form of arrogance. Here we stand forgiven. And as we bask in the forgiveness of a perfectly holy and righteous God, we turn to our brother and say, “My sins are forgivable, but yours are not.” In other words, we act as though the sins of others are too significant to forgive while simultaneously believing that ours are not significant enough to matter.

In darker ages Justice stood alone before courthouses, but in Carlyle’s vision her sister Temperance stands to one side holding back her sword, while from the other side Reason lifts away her blindfold, so Justice can finally see the contents of her scales.

The reason the punishment should fit the crime, for example, is not to balance some mystical scale of justice but to ensure that a wrongdoer stops at a minor crime rather than escalating to a more harmful one.

In my opinion, legal training only makes a man more incompetent in questions that require knowledge of another kind. People talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales by a blind Justice. No man can judge what is good evidence on any particular subject, unless he knows that subject well. A lawyer is no better than an old woman at a post-mortem examination.

There too he had been treated with revolting injustice. His struggles, his privations,his hard work to raise himself in the social scale, had filled him with such an exalted conviction of his merits that it was extremely difficult for the world to treat him with justice— the standard of that notion depending so much upon the patience of the individual. The Professor had genius, but lacked the great social virtue of resignation.

How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.

Suppose it should turn out that no such person as Christ ever lived. What harm would that do justice or mercy? Wouldn't the tear of pity be as pure as now, and wouldn't justice, holding aloft her scales, from which she blows even the dust of prejudice, be as noble, as admirable as now? Is it not better to love justice and mercy than to love a name, and when you put a name above justice, above mercy, are you sure that you are benefiting your fellowmen?

Poetic justice, with her lifted scale, Where, in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs, And solid pudding against empty praise. Here she beholds the chaos dark and deep, Where nameless somethings in their causes sleep, Till genial Jacob, or a warm third day, Call forth each mass, a poem, or a play: How hints, like spawn, scarce quick in embryo lie, How new-born nonsense first is taught to cry.

Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering

Karma and manifestation work 24/7 to balance the scales. Do justice, in due time.

And we stepped onto the tipping scales of Lady Justice

Souls, like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But for when infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extend to which they exceed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacriface. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance.

Libra does. Winning an intellectual point or decision, however minor, major—or in the middle—is the reason for the Libra person’s very existence, symbolized by the Libra Scales, balanced in perfect harmony and justice.

Who can say what goes through the mind of a clapper in the moments before carrying out that evil deed? No doubt whatever those thoughts are, they are lies. However, like all dangerous deceptions, the lies that clappers tell themselves wear seductive disguises. For clappers who have been led to believe their acts are smiled upon by God, their lie is clothed in holy robes and has outstretched arms promising a reward that will never come. For clappers who believe their act will somehow bring about change in the world, their lie is disguised as a crowd looking back at them from the future, smiling in appreciation for what they've done. For clappers who seek only to share their personal misery with the world, their lie is an image of themselves freed from their pain by witnessing the pain of others. And for clappers who are driven by vengeance, their lie is a scale of justice, weighted evenly on both sides, finally in balance It is only when a clapper brings his hands together that the lie reveals itself, abandoning the clapper in that final instant so that he exits this world utterly alone, without so much as a lie to accompany him into oblivion. Or her.

Imagine your whole life aimed at conquest, at the spread of Radchaai space. You see murder and destruction on an unimaginable scale, but they see the spread of civilisation, of Justice and Propiety, of Benefit for the universe. The death and destruction, these are unavoidable by-products of this one, supreme good.

Remove justice and what are states but gangs of bandits on a large scale? And what are bandit gangs but kingdoms in miniature?

The scales of justice are tilted by money It's rather ironic but far from funny The powerful get cuff links, not handcuffs While prison bars make others' hands rough.

the stories we tell about injustice can also be used to enable and perpetuate large-scale violence in the first place.

Justice has to be motionless or else the scales will waver that and there is no possibility of a correct judgement

In all matters, whether to do with money, sex, or anything else, no man feels that the scales are weighted in his favor. And so just as the men of resentment talk about “justice” while meaning “revenge,” so it is that something is disguised within their talk of “equality.

It was a boat. Of course, the common word “boat” didn’t do the thing justice. Wayne stared at the massive construction, searching for a better description. One that would capture the majesty, the incredible scale, of the thing he was seeing. “That’s a damn big boat,” he finally whispered.

Political parties are a marvellous mechanism which, on the national scale, ensures that not a single mind can attend to the effort of perceiving, in public affairs, what is good, what is just, what is true. As a result – except for a very small number of fortuitous coincidences – nothing is decided, nothing is executed, but measures that run contrary to the public interest, to justice and to truth.

By December 1, Donald Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, had had enough of what he later called “bullshit” election claims. Barr told the Associated Press that the Department of Justice had been investigating the allegations of fraud, and “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” This made Trump so angry that he reportedly threw his lunch at a wall in the White House.

Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered. In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck. Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system […] is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called 'gifted' are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students. This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not. The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance – and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ – the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.

If measured by the standards of natural law and justice, all politicians, of all parties and virtually without any exception, are guilty, whether directly or indirectly, of murder, homicide, trespass, invasion, expropriation, theft, fraud, and the fencing of stolen goods on a massive and ongoing scale. And every new generation of politicians and parties appears to be worse, and piles even more atrocities and perversions on top of the already existing mountain, so that one feels almost nostalgic about the past. They all should be hung, or put in jail to rot, or set to making compensation.

Among the many symbols used to frighten and manipulate the populace of the democratic states, few have been more important than "terror" and "terrorism." These terms have generally been confined to the use of violence by individuals and marginal groups. Official violence, which is far more extensive in both scale and destructiveness, is placed in a different category altogether. This usage has nothing to do with justice, causal sequence, or numbers abused. Whatever the actual sequence of cause and effect, official violence is described as responsive or provoked ("retaliation," "protective reaction," etc.), not as the active and initiating source of abuse. Similarly, the massive long-term violence inherent in the oppressive social structures that U.S. power has supported or imposed is typically disregarded. The numbers tormented and killed by official violence-wholesale as opposed to retail terror-during recent decades have exceeded those of unofficial terrorists by a factor running into the thousands. But this is not "terror," [...] "security forces" only retaliate and engage in "police action." These terminological devices serve important functions. They help to justify the far more extensive violence of (friendly) state authorities by interpreting them as "reactive" and they implicitly sanction the suppression of information on the methods and scale of official violence by removing it from the category of "terrorism." [...] Thus the language is well-designed for apologetics for wholesale terror.

Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang is a group of men under command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention. If this villainy wins so many recruits from the ranks of the demoralized that it acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues people, it then openly arrogates itself the title of kingdom, which is conferred on it in the eyes of the world, not by the renouncing of aggression but by the attainment of impunity” —St. Augustine, City of God. 4-4.

Feathers layered like dragons’ scales, their symmetry perfectly fledged, framing slender shoulders; sublime. A tumble of red tresses shimmer. Soft wings arch toward the sky. Once a cherub, she has grown. A young woman now, strong and lithe. Powerful with stormy eyes alight, windswept in her glory. An angel in body and spirit. - Winged Justice

America is a leap of the imagination. From its beginning, people had only a persistent idea of what a good country should be. The idea involved freedom, equality, justice, and the pursuit of happiness; nowadays most of us probably could not describe it a lot more clearly than that. The truth is, it always has been a bit of a guess. No one has ever known for sure whether a country based on such an idea is really possible, but again and again, we have leaped toward the idea and hoped. What SuAnne Big Crow demonstrated in the Lead high school gym is that making the leap is the whole point. The idea does not truly live unless it is expressed by an act; the country does not live unless we make the leap from our tribe or focus group or gated community or demographic, and land on the shaky platform of that idea of a good country which all kinds of different people share. This leap is made in public, and it's made for free. It's not a product or a service that anyone will pay you for. You do it for reasons unexplainable by economics--for ambition, out of conviction, for the heck of it, in playfulness, for love. It's done in public spaces, face-to-face, where anyone is free to go. It's not done on television, on the Internet, or over the telephone; our electronic systems can only tell us if the leap made elsewhere has succeeded or failed. The places you'll see it are high school gyms, city sidewalks, the subway, bus stations, public parks, parking lots, and wherever people gather during natural disasters. In those places and others like them, the leaps that continue to invent and knit the country continue to be made. When the leap fails, it looks like the L.A. riots, or Sherman's March through Georgia. When it succeeds, it looks like the New York City Bicentennial Celebration in July 1976 or the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963. On that scale, whether it succeeds or fails, it's always something to see. The leap requires physical presence and physical risk. But the payoff--in terms of dreams realized, of understanding, of people getting along--can be so glorious as to make the risk seem minuscule.

Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold blooded and the sins of the warmhearted in different scales.

Okay... I feel like total and utter shit. They could do a full-scale model of the Eiffel Tower with the amount of shit I feel like right now.

That some advantages might have resulted from such a precaution [of supermajority rule], cannot be denied,” he writes. “It might have been an additional shield to some particular interests, and another obstacle generally to hasty and partial measures.” But then Madison proceeds to explain why “these considerations are outweighed by the inconveniences in the opposite scale.” If a minority was allowed to block a majority, he writes, then “in all cases where justice or the general good might require new laws to be passed, or active measures to be pursued, the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed. It would be no longer the majority that would rule; the power would be transferred to the minority

The statue of Justice, symbol of the law, as she holds aloft her balance scale, is blindfolded. Justice is blind to race, creed, color – and to personal eccentricity. If there were a comparable state of Clio, the Muse of history, she would have to be presented with the blindfold lying at her feet, because the balance of her scales must be weighed with a conscious awareness of the facts and interpretations she must weigh.

You have to listen to women. You should never ignore a woman’s fears. It was something like that, remembered Fate, that his mother or her neighbor, the deceased Miss Holly, used to say when both of them were young and he was a boy. For an instant he imagined a set of scales, like the scales of Blind Justice, except that instead of two platters, there were two bottles, or something like two bottles. The bottle on the left was clear and full of desert sand. There were several holes in it through which the sand escaped. The bottle on the right was full of acid. There were no holes in it, but the acid was eating away at the bottle from the inside.

Rhodes Must Fall was a small-scale example of what racial injustice looks like in Britain. It looks normal. It is pedestrian. It is unquestioned. It's just a part of the landscape, you might walk past it every day. For people who oppose anti-racism on the grounds of freedom of speech, opposition to gross racial disparities is about 'offence', rather than the heavily unequal material conditions that people affected by it carry as burden. Being in a position where their lives are so comfortable that they don't really have anything material to oppose, faux 'free speech' defenders spend all their spare time railing against 'offence culture'. When they make it about offence rather than their own complicity in a drastically unjust system, they successfully transfer the responsibility of fixing the system from the benefactors of it to those who are likely to lose out because of it. Tackling racism moves from conversations about justice to conversations about sensitivity. Those who are repeatedly struck by racism's tendency to hinder their life chances are told to toughen up and grow a thicker skin.

I am Sa'kage, a lord of shardows. I claim the shadows that the Shadow may not. I am the strong arm of deliverance. I am Shadowstrider. I am the Scales of Justice. I am He-Who-Guards-Unseen. I am Shadowslayer. I am Nameless. The coranti shall not go unpunished. My way is hard, but i serve unbroken. In ignobility, nobility. In shame, honor. In darkness, light. I will do justice and love mercy. Untill the king returns, I shall not lay my burden down.

Throughout his life Hayek wanted to affirm his identity with the classic liberal tradition, believing that the true cause of the crises leading to two world wars was the steady increase increase in the power of the state, and its misuse in the pursuit of unattainable goals. 'Social justice' was the name of one of these goals, and Hayek expressly dismissed the expression as a piece of deceptive Newspeak, used to advance large-scale injustice in the name of its opposite.

About Justice departing from the shepherds: Justice illustrates a passage from Virgil's Georgics, in which he describes how Astraea, the goddess of Justice, who used to live among mortals during the Golden Age, took refuge among country people, as times degenerated, and at length fled even from them. Rosa shows the cloud-borne goddess departing from a tumbledown farmstead as she hands her sword and scales to a bemused group of peasants, one of whom awkwardly pulls of his hat in respect.

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.

Language has such power. When we deny victims the words to describe and define their own experiences, we actively disempower them and distance them from justice. We owe it to all survivors to start describing ‘groping’ and ‘fondling’ by their real name: sexual assault.

He wore a diamond cravat pin at dinner,” Alice said. She wanted that cravat pin. She wanted six cravat pins. She wanted to pave a road with cravat pins stolen from lying reprobates. She was an avenging angel, she was justice with her scales, she was going to steal a diamond.

Of course, the common word “boat” didn’t do the thing justice. Wayne stared at the massive construction, searching for a better description. One that would capture the majesty, the incredible scale, of the thing he was seeing. “That’s a damn big boat,” he finally whispered. Much better.

Police throughout the United States have been caught fabricating, planting, and manipulating evidence to obtain convictions where cases would otherwise be very weak. Some authorities regard police perjury as so rampant that it can be considered a "subcultural norm rather than an individual aberration" of police officers. Large-scale investigations of police units in almost every major American city have documented massive evidence of tampering, abuse of the arresting power, and discriminatory enforcement of laws. There also appears to be widespread police perjury in the preparation of reports because police know these reports will be used in plea bargaining. Officers often justify false and embellished reports on the grounds that it metes out a rough justice to defendants who are guilty of wrongdoing but may be exonerated on technicalities. [internal citations omitted]

Here was the same sense of awe and mystery, and the sadness of the irrevocably vanished past. Yet the scale here was so much greater, both in time and in space, that the mind was unable to do it justice; after a while, it ceased to respond. Norton wondered if, sooner of later, he would take even Rama for granted.

At last I understood: in the final analysis, forgiveness is an act of faith. By forgiving another, I am trusting that God is a better justice-maker than I am. By forgiving, I release my own right to get even and leave all issues of fairness for God to work out. I leave in God’s hands the scales that must balance justice and mercy.

While much has been done, it has been accomplished by too few and on a scale too limited for the breadth of the goal. Freedom is not won by a passive acceptance of suffering. Freedom is won by a struggle against suffering. By this measure, Negroes have not yet paid the full price for freedom. And whites have not yet faced the full cost of justice.

Zoroaster believed that an individual’s fate was determined by free will, and not heavenly mandate. After the death of the human body, the soul was believed to make its way to a river of fire where the god Mithra—flanked by two celestial beings holding aloft the scales of justice—judged every soul based on its thoughts, words, and deeds in the human world.

There is a fervent joy in taking action. There is a non-abstract importance in what we are doing. The balance between right and wrong is always in question, and the only way to ensure we tip toward justice is to make sure our weight is firmly planted on the side of right. We are driving down to add our weight to the scale. We are singing because voices add as much weight as bodies do" -A

The headmaster used to expound the meaning of school life in his sermons.15 Sherborne was not, he explained, entirely devoted to ‘opening the mind’, although ‘historically … this was the primary meaning of school.’ Indeed, said the headmaster, there was ‘constantly a danger of forgetting the original object of school.’ For the English public school had been consciously developed into what he called ‘a nation in miniature’. With a savage realism, it dispensed with the lip service paid to such ideas as free speech, equal justice and parliamentary democracy, and concentrated upon the fact of precedence and power. As the headmaster put it: In form-room and hall and dormitory, on the field and on parade, in your relations with us masters and in the scale of seniority among yourselves, you have become familiar with the ideas of authority and obedience, of cooperation and loyalty, of putting the house and the school above your personal desires … The great theme of the ‘scale of seniority’ was the balance of privilege and duty, itself reflecting the more worthy side of the British Empire. But this was a theme to which ‘opening the mind’ came as at best an irrelevance.

Human rights surpass the rights of the state. But if a people be defeated in the struggle for its human rights, this means that its weight has proved too light in the scale of destiny, to be worthy of survival on this earth. When a people is unwilling or unable to fight for its existence, then providence, in its eternal justice, will decree that peoples end. The world is not here for cowards.

I do three weeks at the Hall of Justice Jail. It's a potent crime primer. I'm the geek that all the pro thugs disdain. I observe them up close. It's the '60s. It's social-grievance-as-justification-for-bad-actions time. My cellmates have sadness raps down. I gain a notch on my crime-as-continuing-circumstance notion. Crime is large-scale individual moral default. That means you, motherfucker.

The Sanskrit texts make it clear that a cataclysm on this scale, though a relatively rare event, is expected to wash away all traces of the former world and that the slate will be wiped clean again for the new age of the earth to begin. In order to ensure that the Vedas can be repromulgated for future mankind after each pralaya the gods have therefore designed an institution to preserve them -- the institution of the Seven Sages, a brotherhood of adepts possessed of unerring memories and supernatural powers, practitioners of yoga, performers of the ancient rituals and sacrifices, ascetics, spiritual visionaries, vigilant in the battle against evil, great teachers, knowledgeable beyond all imagining, who reincarnate from age to age as the guides of civilization and the guardians of cosmic justice.

Now I recognize it,” said K., “there’s the blindfold over her eyes and here are the scales. But aren’t those wings on her heels, and isn’t she in motion?” “Yes,” said the painter, “I’m commissioned to do it that way, it’s actually Justice and the goddess of Victory in one.” “That’s a poor combination,” said K. smiling, “Justice must remain at rest, otherwise the scales sway and no just judgment is possible.

The hard truth is that neither Negro nor white has yet done enough to expect the dawn of a new day. While much has been done, it has been accomplished by too few and on a scale too limited for the breadth of the goal. Freedom is not won by a passive acceptance of suffering. Freedom is won by a struggle against suffering. By this measure, Negroes have not yet paid the full price for freedom. And whites have not yet faced the full cost of justice.

Finally, we are confronted with the psychology and tradition of the country; if the Negro vote is so easily bought and sold, it is because it has been treated with so little respect; since no Negro dares seriously assume that any politician is concerned with the fate of Negroes, or would do much about it if he had the power, the vote must be bartered for what it will get, for whatever short-term goals can be managed. These goals are mainly economic and frequently personal, sometimes pathetic: bread or a new roof or five dollars, or, continuing up the scale, schools, houses or more Negroes in hitherto Caucasian jobs. The American commonwealth chooses to overlook what Negroes are never able to forget: they are not really considered a part of it. Like Aziz in A Passage to India or Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, they know that white people, whatever their love for justice, have no love for them.

While we may have a tendency to cast the perpetrators of such crimes as monsters, we should never lose sight of the lesson that virtually every genocide, crime against humanity, or large-scale act of violence teaches when one looks closely enough: that it is surprisingly easy to succumb to the mindsets, justifications, and acts that lead to such violence and cruelty. The form that such justifications take have a way, it seems, of always feeling new.

War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbitrator of a game would set up the initial conditions to the same pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale.” Hyrlis looked expectantly at them. “You see?” he said. “By this reasoning we must, after all, be at the most base level of reality – or at the most exalted, however one wishes to look at it. Just as reality can blithely exhibit the most absurd coincidences that no credible fiction could convince us of, so only reality – produced, ultimately, by matter in the raw – can be so unthinkingly cruel. Nothing able to think, nothing able to comprehend culpability, justice or morality could encompass such purposefully invoked savagery without representing the absolute definition of evil. It is that unthinkingness that saves us. And condemns us, too, of course; we are as a result our own moral agents, and there is no escape from that responsibility, no appeal to a higher power that might be said to have artificially constrained or directed us.

And we stepped onto the tipping scales of Lady Justice with her eyes blindfolded, peeking through slits because that rag is so fucking old worn-out, stretched thin, barely even there Amal Shahid to the left​Jeremy Mathis to the right perfectly imbalanced because where I come from jail or death were the two options she handed to us because where he comes from the American Dream was the one option she handed to them So here we are, blind Lady Justice I see you, too

I am speaking, as before, of injustice on a large scale in which the advantage of the unjust is most apparent; and my meaning will be most clearly seen if we turn to that highest form of injustice in which the criminal is the happiest of men, and the sufferers or those who refuse to do injustice are the most miserable—that is to say tyranny, which by fraud and force takes away the property of others, not little by little but wholesale; comprehending in one, things sacred as well as profane, private and public; for which acts of wrong, if he were detected perpetrating any one of them singly, he would be punished and incur great disgrace—they who do such wrong in particular cases are called robbers of temples, and man-stealers and burglars and swindlers and thieves. But when a man besides taking away the money of the citizens has made slaves of them, then, instead of these names of reproach, he is termed happy and blessed, not only by the citizens but by all who hear of his having achieved the consummation of injustice. For mankind censure injustice, fearing that they may be the victims of it and not because they shrink from committing it. And thus, as I have shown, Socrates, injustice, when on a sufficient scale, has more strength and freedom and mastery than justice; and, as I said at first, justice is the interest of the stronger, whereas injustice is a man's own profit and interest.

Believing in the second coming itself is anything but arrogant. The whole point of it is to insist, over against not only the wider pagan world, but against all self-delusion or pretension within the church, that Jesus remains sovereign and will return at last to put everything right. This putting right (the biblical word for it is “justice”) is the sort of sigh-of-relief event that the whole world, at its best and at many other times too, longs for most deeply. All sorts of things are out of joint, both on a large and a small scale, in the world; and God the creator will put them straight. All sorts of things are still going wrong, corrupting the lives of human beings and the larger life of the environment, the planet itself; God the creator will put them right. All sorts of things are still wrong with us, Jesus’s followers; Jesus, when he comes, will put us right as well. That may not be comfortable, but it’s what we need.

This is not wise!” one of the Scale burbled through the wet plaster. “We’re making you monuments to Justice!” Annabelle shouted. “You know, I think I prefer the Scale when they’re plastered.” Arianne laughed, betraying more than a tinge of vengeful glee. The girls kept pouring bucket after bucket-a full bucket over each of the threatening angels’ heads, until their voices did not carry anymore-until the Outcasts had no need to stand over the Scale with their starshots.

In the Name of Allah—the Most Compassionate, Most Merciful Allah’s Favours: 1) Speech 1. The Most Compassionate 2. taught the Quran, 3. created humanity, 4. ˹and˺ taught them speech. Favour 2) The Universe 5. The sun and the moon ˹travel˺ with precision. 6. The stars and the trees bow down ˹in submission˺.[1146] 7. As for the sky, He raised it ˹high˺, and set the balance ˹of justice˺ 8. so that you do not defraud the scales. 9. Weigh with justice, and do not give short measure.

On January 5, 1914, Henry Ford more than doubled the minimum wage for many of his employees by introducing a $5 a day minimum pay scale for employees of the Ford Motor Company. On that same day, Ford began offering profit sharing to his employees and reduced shifts from nine hours to eight. Ford’s treasurer at the time, James Couzens, explained these bold leadership moves by saying, “It is our belief that social justice begins at home. We want those who have helped us to produce this

This much was certain: Germany had agents at work inside the United States; armed American fascists were being actively supported by the Hitler government; members of Congress were colluding with a German propaganda agent to facilitate an industrial-scale Nazi information operation targeting the American people; critical U.S. munitions plants were blowing up in multiple states. And the Justice Department, at last, was going to act to take it all apart. At least it was going to try to.

Everybody has a function, everybody in a slasher cycle has a role—isn’t that a line from the Bible, even? Not the over-the-top violent one Craven and Carpenter wrote, with all the massacres and gore, but the other violent one with all the massacres and gore. The one where revenge comes not in a hulking shape lurking at the edge of the light but as a series of plagues that starts out feeling random, come to feel a lot more like justice, like the scales rebalancing. Same thing, different church.

In talks I was doing on racial justice, I began talking about the United States’ three racialized holocausts: the large-scale death and destruction of cultures that resulted from the genocide of indigenous people on which the country was founded; the African slave trade that was central to the country’s emergence as an industrial power; and the post-WWII assault on the developing world that secured the country’s dominance in the contemporary world. Millions died in these projects, in which hideous levels of violence to expand one group’s wealth and power were justified, overtly or covertly, by the alleged racial superiority of whites. Some people were turned off, objecting that my language was too strong, but many more found the bluntness refreshing and told me the framework was helpful. These experiences taught me that watering down analysis and language to reach the largest possible audience often backfired—people who disagree aren’t persuaded, and those looking for a compelling argument tend to drift away.

Thomas Jefferson's Letter to John Holmes on the Missouri Statehood Question – April 20, 1820 I thank you, dear Sir, for the copy you have been so kind as to send me of the letter to your constituents on the Missouri question. It is a perfect justification to them. I had for a long time ceased to read newspapers, or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other. Of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slaves from one State to another, would not make a slave of a single human being who would not be so without it, so their diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually happier, and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burthen on a greater number of coadjutors. An abstinence too, from this act of power, would remove the jealousy excited by the undertaking of Congress to regulate the condition of the different descriptions of men composing a State. This certainly is the exclusive right of every State, which nothing in the constitution has taken from them and given to the General Government. Could Congress, for example, say, that the non- freemen of Connecticut shall be freemen, or that they shall not emigrate into any other State? I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away, against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world. To yourself, as the faithful advocate of the Union, I tender the offering of my high esteem and respect. Th. Jefferson

The man was dead and being judged in the afterlife by the gods. A scale held his heart on one side and a feather—the symbol of Maat, the goddess of truth and justice–on the other. If the man’s heart was weighed down by guilt, it would be heavier than the feather, and the scale would tip toward his damnation. A monster stood by the scale, ready to devour the man’s heart if it proved unworthy. The words of one of the heart scarabs came to my mind, and I murmured them out loud. “Let not my heart bear witness against me.

I grew up in a neighborhood that was impoverished and in pain and bore all the modern-day outcomes of communities left without resources and yet supplied with tools of violence. But when someone in my neighborhood committed a crime, let alone a murder, all of us were held accountable, my God. Metal detectors, searchlights, and constant police presence, full-scale sweeps of kids just walking home from school--all justified by politicians and others who said they represented our needs. Where were these representatives when white guys shot us down?

Which somehow made it appropriate that The Federalist’s hardest task—showing how a republic could be an empire without becoming a tyranny—fell to Madison, the most easily underestimated of the American Founders. 63 He fulfilled it, triumphantly, by connecting time, space, and scale. History had shown “instability, injustice, and confusion” always to have extinguished “popular governments,” Madison wrote in the tenth Publius essay. Independence had yet to free Americans from these dangers. Complaints are everywhere heard . . . that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. Revoking liberty would be a remedy “worse than the disease.” But curing it through equality would leave no one safe: [D] emocracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

I intend to see that justice is done by presiding, in the manner of the omnipotent Walter Mitty, as chief justice of a tribunal trying the case of those plotting further advances for the Chinese characters on an international scale. Emulating the operatic Mikado's "object all sublime... to let the punishment fit the crime," I hand down the following dread decree: Anyone who believes Chinese characters to be a superior system of writing that can function as a universal script is condemned to complete the task of rendering the whole of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into Singlish.

Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

In criminal court, the defendant is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. These two cornerstones of criminal law, the presumption of innocence and the requirement of a very high standard of proof, are designed to tip the scales of justice in favor of criminal defendants, in recognition of the tremendous imbalance of power between individual citizens and the state. But no equivalent consideration is given to the safety and well-being of crime victims who bear witness in court, despite the very real imbalance of power that so often obtains between victim and perpetrator.

the accepted standard: as an independent, objective journalist, she was never to take a side. Her own personal prejudices and desires and fears didn’t matter – they couldn’t matter. There were always two sides to every story. Everyone has their own truth. She could hear her journalism professor saying it over and over again, could see him scrawling the words with the squeaky marker on the whiteboard. There was no right or wrong. Like Justice holding the scales, she too had to remain blindfolded to judgment, while keeping her eyes wide open, seeing and uncovering as much of the truth as she could possibly find.

At the 2010 USSF Healing Justice People’s Movement Assembly, one of many large scale gatherings on topics to occur at the USSF to draft resolutions and visionary future plans, I heard Cara say something that has stuck with me ever since: “Our movements themselves need to be healing, or there is no point to them.” This shook me. The idea that movements themselves could and should be spaces of healing, that care didn’t have to be a sideline to “the real work” but could be the work, was like a deep drink of clear water. It was something I’d been longing for for years. I think healing justice is a space of longing.

I’m an abolitionist, which means I’m interested in investing in communities to address problems rather than carceral answers that don’t serve communities at all. Murderers and rapists do great harm,” Mari said, “but the carceral institutions in this country do little to mitigate that harm. In fact, they do more harm to individuals and communities. The carceral state depends on a dichotomy between innocent and guilty, or good and bad, so that they can then define harm on their terms, in the name of justice, and administer it on a massive scale to support a capitalistic, violent, and inherently inequitable system.

Stage one of the investigative process – has a crime been committed? – is rendered redundant. Whereas for the children of Rochdale or Savile, the default conclusion of the police was always ‘No’, the equally unsatisfactory default under this model is ‘Yes’. The box is already ticked, no questions asked. Only if the police are satisfied of the opposite will it ever be unticked. I can do no better than directly quote Sir Richard: this policy ‘perverts our system of justice and attempts to impose upon a thinking investigator an artificial and false state of mind’.25 It ‘has and will generate miscarriages of justice on a considerable scale’.26

The major obstacle here is binary thinking that forces us to pigeonhole into two distinct categories a problem best conceived as a continuous scale. So-called pro-life proponents believe that human life begins at conception; before conception there is no life—after conception there is. For them, it is a binary system. With continuous thinking we can assign a probability to human life—before conception 0, the moment of conception 0.1, multicellular blastocyst 0.2, one-month-old embryo 0.3, two-month-old fetus 0.4, and so on until birth, when the fetus becomes a 1.0 human life-form. It is a continuum, from sperm and egg, to zygote, to blastocyst, to embryo, to fetus, to newborn infant.

Such is Fascist planning-the planning of those who reject the ideal postulates of Christian civilization and of the older Asiatic civilization which preceded ti and from which it derived-the planning of men whose intentions are avowedly bad. Let us now consider examples of planning by political leaders who accept the ideal postulates, whose intentions are good. The first thing to notice is that none of these men accepts the ideal postulates whole-heartedly. All believe that desirable ends can be achieved by undesirable means. Aiming to reach goals diametrically opposed to those of Fascism, they yet persist in taking the same roads as are taken by the Duces and Fuehrers. They are pacifists, but pacifists who act on the theory that peace can be achieved by means of war; they are reformers and revolutionaries, but reformers who imagine that unfair and arbitrary acts can produce social justice, revolutionaries who persuade themselves that the centralization of power and the enslavement of the masses can result in liberty for all. Revolutionary Russia has the largest army in the world; a secret police, that for ruthless efficiency rivals the German or the Italian; a rigid press censorship; a system of education that, since Stalin "reformed" it, is as authoritarian as Hitler's; an all-embracing system of military training that is applied to women and children as well as men; a dictator as slavishly adored as the man-gods of Rome and Berlin; a bureaucracy, solidly entrenched as the new ruling class and employing the powers of the state to preserve its privileges and protect its vested interests; an oligarchical party which dominates the entire country and within which there is no freedom even for faithful members. (Most ruling castes are democracies so far as their own members are concerned. Not so the Russian Communist Party, in which the Central Executive Committee acting through the Political Department, can override or altogether liquidate any district organization whatsoever.) No opposition is permitted in Russia. But where opposition is made illegal, it automatically goes underground and becomes conspiracy. Hence the treason trials and purges of 1936 and 1937. Large-scale manipulations of the social structure are pushed through against the wishes of the people concerned and with the utmost ruthlessness. (Several million peasants were deliberately starved to death in 1933 by the Soviet planners.) Ruthlessness begets resentment; resentment must be kept down by force. As usual the chief result of violence is the necessity to use more violence. Such then is Soviet planning-well-intentioned, but making use of evil means that are producing results utterly unlike those which the original makers of the revolution intended to produce.

The theoretical perspective of worldmaking and the concrete task of climate justice both force us to contend with the immense scale of injustice and thus the immense scale of the struggle for justice. It may well be outside of any generation’s ability to win outright. But if we choose to relate to the world as ancestors, we can prevent this realization from overwhelming us into political paralysis. Many of the things that we do every day link us with countless people who have come before us and—if we succeed at preventing the worst climate outcomes—countless people who will come after us. We can do the spiritual work to act from this knowledge and faith right now. The world depends on it.

The third method of dealing with large-scale moral dilemmas is to weave conspiracy theories. How does the global economy function, and is it good or bad? That question is too complicated to grasp. It is far easier to imagine that twenty multibillionaires are pulling the strings behind the scenes, controlling the media and fomenting wars in order to enrich themselves. This is almost always a baseless fantasy. The contemporary world is too complicated, not only for our sense of justice but also for our managerial abilities. No one—including the multibillionaires, the CIA, the Freemasons, and the Elders of Zion—really understands what is going on in the world. So no one is capable of pulling the strings effectively.

The vision which has been so faintly suggested in these pages has never been confined to monks or even to friars. It has been an inspiration to innumerable crowds of ordinary married men and women; living lives like our own, only entirely different. That morning glory which St. Francis spread over the earth and sky has lingered as a secret sunshine under a multitude of roots and in a multitude of rooms. In societies like ours nothing is known of such a Franciscan following. Nothing is known of such obscure followers; and if possible less is known of the well-known followers. If we imagine passing us in the street a pageant of the Third Order of St. Francis, the famous figures would surprise us more than the strange ones. For us it would be like the unmasking of some mighty secret society. There rides St. Louis, the great king, lord of the higher justice whose scales hang crooked in favour of the poor. There is Dante crowned with laurel, the poet who in his life of passions sang the praises of Lady Poverty, whose grey garment is lined with purple and all glorious within. All sorts of great names from the most recent and rationalistic centuries would stand revealed; the great Galvani, for instance, the father of all electricity, the magician who has made so many modern systems of stars and sounds. So various a following would alone be enough to prove that St. Francis had no lack of sympathy with normal men, if the whole of his own life did not prove it.

Because of the economies of scale in data, the cloud giants are increasingly powerful. And because they’re so susceptible to regulation, these companies have a vested interest in keeping government entities happy. When the Justice Department requested billions of search records from AOL, Yahoo, and MSN in 2006, the three companies quickly complied. (Google, to its credit, opted to fight the request.) Stephen Arnold, an IT expert who worked at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, says that Google at one point housed three officers of “an unnamed intelligence agency” at its headquarters in Mountain View. And Google and the CIA have invested together in a firm called Recorded Future, which focuses on using data connections to predict future real-world events.

Takeover Twattery (The Sonnet) Oligarchs don't even care about the welfare of their employees, And you want them to care about social welfare! Keep dreaming! Oligarchs have no regard for the struggles of human life, And you think they'll transform the world! Keep dreaming! I thought Mark was bad for not treating facebook's health issues, But the chief twat makes Zuck look like an incompetent simpleton. Oligarchs are poster boys for regress, not crusaders for freedom, Better to have a CEO without answers than one who answers to none. However, like corrupt politicians, oligarchs are made by people, If anybody is to blame it's the morons who put them in pedestal. If you had the common sense to question your pavlovian attraction, Spoiled brats could never treat society as daddy's mine of emerald. Now more than ever it is imperative to ban large scale takeovers. Moreover, it is vital to legally shun the rise of billionaires.

Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.

Today, the War on Drugs has given birth to a system of mass incarceration that governs not just a small fraction of a racial or ethnic minority but entire communities of color. In ghetto communities, nearly everyone is either directly or indirectly subject to the new caste system. The system serves to redefine the terms of the relationship of poor people of color and their communities to mainstream, white society, ensuring their subordinate and marginal status. The criminal and civil sanctions that were once reserved for a tiny minority are now used to control and oppress a racially defined majority in many communities, and the systematic manner in which the control is achieved reflects not just a difference in scale. The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer concerned primarily with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed. Prior drug wars were ancillary to the prevailing caste system. This time the drug war is the system of control.

When you're responsible for half the planet's military spending, and 80 percent of its military R&D, certain things can be said with confidence: No one is going to get into a nuclear war with the United States, or a large-scale tank battle, or even a dogfight. You're the Microsoft, the Standard Oil of conventional warfare: Were they interested in competing in this field, second-tier military powers would probably have filed an antitrust suit with the Department of Justice by now. When you're the only guy in town with a tennis racket, don't be surprised if no one wants to join you on center court--or that provocateurs look for other fields on which to play. If you've got uniformed infantryman and tanks and battleships and jet fighters, you're too weak to take on the hyperpower. But, if you've got illiterate goatherds with string and hacksaws and fertilizer, you can tie him down for a decade. An IED is an "improvised" explosive device. Can we still improvise? Or does the planet's most lavishly funded military assume it has the luxury of declining to adapt to the world it's living in?

qualifies as a WMD. The people putting it together in the 1990s no doubt saw it as a tool to bring evenhandedness and efficiency to the criminal justice system. It could also help nonthreatening criminals land lighter sentences. This would translate into more years of freedom for them and enormous savings for American taxpayers, who are footing a $70 billion annual prison bill. However, because the questionnaire judges the prisoner by details that would not be admissible in court, it is unfair. While many may benefit from it, it leads to suffering for others. A key component of this suffering is the pernicious feedback loop. As we’ve seen, sentencing models that profile a person by his or her circumstances help to create the environment that justifies their assumptions. This destructive loop goes round and round, and in the process the model becomes more and more unfair. The third question is whether a model has the capacity to grow exponentially. As a statistician would put it, can it scale? This might sound like the nerdy quibble of a mathematician. But scale is what turns WMDs from local nuisances into tsunami forces, ones that define and

Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in peoples collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. But even gossip has its limits. Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings. Even today, a critical threshold in human organisations falls somewhere around this magic number. Below this threshold, communities, businesses, social networks and military units can maintain themselves based mainly on intimate acquaintance and rumour-mongering. There is no need for formal ranks, titles and law books to keep order. 3A platoon of thirty soldiers or even a company of a hundred soldiers can function well on the basis of intimate relations, with a minimum of formal discipline. A well-respected sergeant can become ‘king of the company’ and exercise authority even over commissioned officers. A small family business can survive and flourish without a board of directors, a CEO or an accounting department. But once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can no longer work that way. You cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon. Successful family businesses usually face a crisis when they grow larger and hire more personnel. If they cannot reinvent themselves, they go bust. How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.

Conservative foreign policy is in the business of shaping habits of behavior, not winning hearts and minds. It announces red lines sparingly but enforces them unsparingly. It is willing to act decisively, or preventively, to punish or prevent blatant transgressions of order—not as a matter of justice but in the interests of deterrence. But it knows it cannot possibly punish or prevent every transgression. It champions its values consistently and confidently, but it doesn’t conflate its values and its interests. It wants to let citizens go about their business as freely and easily as possible. But it knows that security is a prerequisite for civil liberty, not a threat to it. Where it can use a finger, or a hand, to tilt the political scales of society toward liberal democracy, it will do so. But it won’t attempt to tilt the scales in places where the tilting demands all of its weight and strength and endurance. It does not waste its energy or time chasing diplomatic symbols: its ambitions do not revolve around a Nobel Peace Prize. It prefers liberal autocracy to illiberal democracy, because the former is likelier to evolve into democracy than the latter is to evolve into liberalism. It knows the value of hope, and knows also that economic growth based on enterprise and the freest possible movement of goods, services, capital, and labor is the best way of achieving it. And it is mindful of the claims of conscience, which is strengthened by faith.

Sociological research has shown that the maximum 'natural' size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings...How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

Intellectual Fascism – 3/3 To make matters still worse, intellectual fascist frequently demand of themselves, as well as others, perfect competence and universal achievement. If they are excellent mathematicians or dancers, they demand that they be the most accomplished. If they are outstanding scientists or manufacturers, they also must be first-rate painters or writers. If they are fine poets, they not only need to be the finest, but likewise must be great lovers, drawing room wits, and political experts. Naturally, only being human, they fail at many or most of these ventures. And then - O, poetic justice! - they apply to themselves the same excoriations and despisements that they apply to others when they fail to be universal geniuses. However righteous their denials, therefore - and even though readers who be now are not squirming with guilt are probably screaming with indignation, I will determinedly continue - the typical politico-social "liberals" of our day are fascistic in several significant ways. For they arbitrarily define certain human traits as "good" or "superior"; they automatically exclude most others from any possibility of achieving their "good" standards; they scorn, combat, and in many ways persecute those who do not live up to these capricious goals; and finally, in most instances they more or less fail to live up to their own definitional standards and bring down neurotic self-pity and blame on their own heads. .... What is the alternative? Assuming that intellectual fascism exists on a wide scale today, and that it does enormous harm and little good to people's relations with themselves and others, what philosophy of living are they to set up in its place? Surely, you may well ask, I am not suggesting an uncritical, sentimental equalitarianism, whereunder everyone would fully accept and hobnob with everyone else and where no one would attempt to excel or perfect himself at anything? No, I am not. On the contrary, significant human differences (as well as sameness) exists; and they add much variety and zest to living; and that one human may sensibly cultivate the company of another just because this other is different from, and perhaps in certain respects superior to, others. At the same time, "one's worth as a human being is not to be measured in terms of one's popularity, success, achievement, intelligence, or any other such trait, but solely in terms of one's Humanity".

For millennia, sages have proclaimed how outer beauty reflects inner goodness. While we may no longer openly claim that, beauty-is-good still holds sway unconsciously; attractive people are judged to be more honest, intelligent, and competent; are more likely to be elected or hired, and with higher salaries; are less likely to be convicted of crimes, then getting shorter sentences. Jeez, can’t the brain distinguish beauty from goodness? Not especially. In three different studies, subjects in brain scanners alternated between rating the beauty of something (e.g., faces) or the goodness of some behavior. Both types of assessments activated the same region (the orbitofrontal cortex, or OFC); the more beautiful or good, the more OFC activation (and the less insula activation). It’s as if irrelevant emotions about beauty gum up cerebral contemplation of the scales of justice. Which was shown in another study—moral judgments were no longer colored by aesthetics after temporary inhibition of a part of the PFC that funnels information about emotions into the frontal cortex.[*] “Interesting,” the subject is told. “Last week, you sent that other person to prison for life. But just now, when looking at this other person who had done the same thing, you voted for them for Congress—how come?” And the answer isn’t “Murder is definitely bad, but OMG, those eyes are like deep, limpid pools.” Where did the intent behind the decision come from? The fact that the brain hasn’t had enough time yet to evolve separate circuits for evaluating morality and aesthetics.[6] Next, want to make someone more likely to choose to clean their hands? Have them describe something crummy and unethical they’ve done. Afterward, they’re more likely to wash their hands or reach for hand sanitizer than if they’d been recounting something ethically neutral they’d done. Subjects instructed to lie about something rate cleansing (but not noncleansing) products as more desirable than do those instructed to be honest. Another study showed remarkable somatic specificity, where lying orally (via voice mail) increased the desire for mouthwash, while lying by hand (via email) made hand sanitizers more desirable. One neuroimaging study showed that when lying by voice mail boosts preference for mouthwash, a different part of the sensory cortex activates than when lying by email boosts the appeal of hand sanitizers. Neurons believing, literally, that your mouth or hand, respectively, is dirty.

Put crudely, external things do have some value, but they’re not worth getting upset over—it’s a different kind of value. One way Stoics explained this was by saying that if we could put virtue on one side of a set of scales, it wouldn’t matter how many gold coins or other indifferent things piled up on the opposing side—it should never tip the balance. Nevertheless, some external things are preferable to others, and wisdom consists precisely in our ability to make these sorts of value judgments. Life is preferable to death, wealth is preferable to poverty, health is preferable to sickness, friends are preferable to enemies, and so on. As Socrates had put it earlier, such external advantages in life are good only if we use them wisely. However, if something can be used for either good or evil, it cannot truly be good in itself, so it should be classed as “indifferent” or neutral. The Stoics would say that things like health, wealth, and reputation are, at most, advantages or opportunities rather than being good in themselves. Social, material, and physical advantages actually give foolish individuals more opportunity to do harm to themselves and others. Look at lottery winners. Those who squander their sudden wealth often end up more miserable than they could have imagined. When handled badly, external advantages like wealth do more harm than good. The Stoics would go further: the wise and good man may flourish even when faced with sickness, poverty, and enemies. The true goal of life for Stoics isn’t to acquire as many external advantages as possible but to use whatever befalls us wisely, whether it be sickness or health, wealth or poverty, friends or enemies. The Stoic Sage, or wise man, needs nothing but uses everything well; the fool believes himself to “need” countless things, but he uses them all badly. Most important of all, the pursuit of these preferred indifferent things must never be done at the expense of virtue. For instance, wisdom may tell us that wealth is generally preferable to debt, but valuing money more highly than justice is a vice. In order to explain the supreme value placed on wisdom and virtue, the Stoics compared reason, our “ruling faculty,” to a king in relation to his court. Everyone in court is situated somewhere or other on the hierarchy of importance. However, the king is uniquely important because he’s the one who assigns everyone else at court a role in the hierarchy. As mentioned earlier, the Stoics call reason, the king in this metaphor, our “ruling faculty” (hegemonikon). It’s human nature to desire certain things in life, such as sex and food. Reason allows us to step back and question whether what we desire is actually going to be good for us or not. Wisdom itself is uniquely valuable because it allows us to judge the value of external things—it’s the source of everything else’s value. How therefore does it profit a man, the Stoics might say, if he gains the whole world but loses his wisdom and virtue?

The scales of justice are not borne on one man’s shoulders alone. No, by necessity they must be supported by all who walk the earth, or there shall never be justice for any of us.

Like anything else in the delivery of justice, at the investigative or any other phase, the approach requires balance. There is no science, no mathematical formula, no precise scale on which you can balance these things, but they must be balanced nonetheless.

Living and breathing is not safe under a totalitarian dictatorship. The only way to keep yourself safe is to remove the totalitarian dictatorship.

This story is littered with hundreds of individual human tragedies rendered almost unremarkable by the scale of what went wrong. One miscarriage of justice should make us angry. Five hundred miscarriages of justice should make us five hundred times more angry, but it doesn’t. As human beings we’re not capable of processing information in that way. The inevitable consequence is that people responsible for the widespread destruction of multiple livelihoods are never punished proportionately (if they get punished at all). In this, as in other cases, they should be. The Post Office, the government, Fujitsu, the NFSP and the justice system ruined hundreds of people over two decades. The individuals responsible should not be allowed to get away with it, but I suspect they will.

At this critical point, the factions of magnets come in all sizes, ranging from single isolated magnets up to huge clumps that stretch across the entire magnet. If we added more magnets to make an array as big as the United States, the same thing would happen. The factions would range from tiny clumps to massive blobs stretching from New York to Los Angeles. As we know, the geometric regularity of any power law implies a lack of any typical scale—a feature that shows up clearly in the critical point image. But one picture really can’t do justice to the character of the critical state, which is forever changing. If you were to take snapshots at different moments, you would see the alliances of the factions constantly shifting, with some dissolving and others forming up. The critical state is subject to tremendous fluctuations, and always remains poised on the very edge of sudden, radical change. To call it “hypersensitive” would be an understatement. Since the army of arrows is balanced on the precipice between its two phases, always on the verge of falling into line, even the tiniest influence can push it over the edge. Just a single magnet flipping over can trigger an avalanche of further flippings that would rampage from one side to the other.

The Scales, a second rationale for intergenerational justice, asks us to imagine a set of scales where everyone who is alive today is on one side, and all the generations of people who are yet to be born are on the other. At least in terms of sheer numbers, the current population is easily outweighed by all those who will succeed us.

Maggie Taylor was trying to balance the scales once again toward justice. If she sometimes came across as a little too obedient to the rules, it was maybe because she saw the darkness that was possible in their absence.

Tyrannical regimes also cultivate attitudes of cynicism, indifference, and narrow egotism among the general public, encouraging people to look out for their own skins only and to look the other way when their neighbors are hurt. By undermining any sense of community or the common good, the rulers keep their subordinate populations isolated and under control. These regimes also foster corruption, on both a petty and grand scale, implicitly encouraging people to seek whatever advantage they can over their fellow citizens.

Destruction, especially in spiritual circles, is often perceived as a negative thing. In the mystery traditions, it is an often-necessary means in order to transmute into finer states of being. This is the crux of the experience of the Sephirah of Geburah, which means “severity.” It is at this stage in pathworking, also, when sacrifice is necessary. In the curanderismo traditions, swords are often used to battle and cut away aspects of a person’s lower self that no longer serve their highest good. The cut must be clean, precise, and exact. The recipient must be ready to be rid of that aspect forever. Generally known in esoteric circles as the Path of Karmic Adjustment, this is where the lords of karma operate upon us like surgeons in order to restore cosmic balance within our soul. This path is connected to Geburah, and while that Sephirah specifically calls us to banish our dross, this path is also connected to Tiphareth and so beseeches redemption. This means we must face ourselves—our entire life circumstance—as it really is and be ready and willing to change what is necessary in order keep our devotion intact. This requires brutal honesty, discernment, and a lot of courage. We also see the obvious connection to the astrological sign Libra (the scales) as well as the symbology of the tarot trump Justice.

The effect of the illusion is profound, distorting as it does the natural hostility between hunter and hunted, transforming it until it resembles a relationship more symbiotic than adversarial. That is the lie, and when the roles are perfectly performed, deceit surpasses itself, becoming manipulation on a grand scale and ultimately an act of betrayal. Because what occurs in an interrogation room is indeed little more than a carefully staged drama, a choreographed performance that allows a detective and his suspect to find common ground where none exists. There, in a carefully controlled purgatory, the guilty proclaim their malefactions, though rarely in any form that allows for contrition or resembles an unequivocal admission.

Signing a letter in gold ink was a capital crime. But so many things were. Parricide. Fratricide. Theft, on the kind of scale Rihasi had already achieved. And those were only her recent crimes. Honestly, one or two letters signed in royal gold were trivial in comparison.

DOJ is in a curious position. They demand states not enforce federal immigration laws, refuse to address cities and states contravening federal drug laws, but insist any federal gun laws be stringently enforced. Lady Justice, with her scales, is supposed to be blindfolded, not bipolar.

The times grow less dark for all the races, because within the culture, too, is memory, and understanding of what works and what does not. when those lessons are forgotten, the circle winds its way backward, and when they are remembered, society moves forward, and with each cycle, with each affirmation that which is good and that which is evil, the starting point of the next lesson is a bit closer to goodness. It is a long roll, this circle, but it is rolling in the direction of justice and goodness, for all of us. It is not hard to look back on history and see atrocities committed on a grand scale that horrify the sensibilities of the folk of this day but where simply accepted or deemed necessary by folk in days more superstitious and unenlightened

Note: The first incident happened after the arrest by the Netherlands police in May 1980. I suffered from that, which destroyed my career, future, health, and life. I tried and tried to investigate that, but the police didn't even register the first information report (FIR). It stayed, refusing since 1980 until now, which creates suspicious questions about what the reasons are for not filing the case. It mirrors whether the Netherlands government victimised me or whether the hired ones of the international intelligence agencies have been a hindrance or the criminal groups. - The second incident happened in the shape of uncurable cancer; it was a deliberate mistake and ignorance of the Netherlands Urologists, who did not follow even the primary medical borderlines for the checkup during one year from 2016 to 2017. After the diagnosis, they are hiding the reality, and they still do not take it seriously. I still hope that the Netherlands' neutral and free media will awaken to help me investigate the incident. It will save millions of lives around the world. In God's name, take it seriously to protect me and others. I feel suspicious elements around me. I cry and pray day and night for God's protection since I do not exclude the Qadeyanis witches and magicians, who keep doing black magic continuously that the West does not understand. My Real Story In A Poem *** I never thought I would suffer from cancer The metastatic prostate gland I still cannot decide that It is natural or human-made Since everything is possible In the medical-criminal world How it happened in Western society; Civilized urologists ignored it deliberately From 2016 to 2017 Telling that nothing was wrong Whereas I was suffering from Bleeding, burning, and pain During urinating I begged urologists for a wide-scale checkup With MRI scans and other new technologies But urologists stayed rejecting; Whereas I was paying insurance for that Consequently, at the beginning of 2017 The diagnosis became a time bomb that I had metastatic prostate gland cancer, Which was not curable, They listed me on the death list, Treating for longer life expectancy However, they do tell not the truth And stay suspicious It confuses me and creates grave fear Since then I am bearing terrible side effects Factually, I became victimized twice By criminals, Intelligence Agencies And underground-mafias Which I am unable to trace alone In this regard, I approached Western Media, Ministries, police, courts, Euro Union Unfortunately, none of those responded Even my motherland media cruelly ignored It seems as if I am in the grip of the demon And The Prisoner Of The Hague Everyone has left me alone in pain, Stress, fear, depression Even my children don't care And realize my tears Where resides sympathy, empathy, And humanity? I feel death before death It is a silent cruelty Ah, where should I ask and beg For justice, help, and investigation That civilized world should know An innocent is under victimization I believe God will help and protect And someone from somewhere Appear to hold my hands To eliminate all criminals and demons My cancer will be curable With a longer life expectancy, in some ways Amen, O' merciful God amen.

Lady Justice is not blind. She is blindfolded. She is a prisoner; her scales are rigged, her promise a lie. There is no such thing as justice, Consuela. The law, our entire system, is designed for men

What I say here will be then repeated many times, not because it comes from my lips, but because the problem of justice is eternal and the people have a deep sense of justice above and beyond the hairsplitting of jurisprudence. The people wield simple but implacable logic, in conflict with all that is absurd and contradictory. Furthermore, if there is in this world a people that utterly abhors favoritism and inequality, it is the Cuban people. To them, justice is symbolized by a maiden with a scale and a sword in her hands. Should she cower before one group and furiously wield that sword against another group, then to the people of Cuba the maiden of justice will seem nothing more than a prostitute brandishing a dagger. My logic is the simple logic of the people.

several of the clerks would look up from their work from time to time, and direct apprehensive glances over towards the seated figure, as if, sitting there tapping his foot impatiently as he waited for Jukes to return, he was about to weigh the feather of truth in the scales of justice against their sinful hearts.

Libra. The scales. The only astrological sign on the zodiac chart that is neither creature nor human.

This isn’t black and white, Luke,” Dash said. “Never will be. There’s justice for Scarlett. She holds no blame here. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. You can’t balance the scales. You’ll go crazy if you try because there’s no such thing. We live in a gray world and you’ve got to pick the shade closest to white. So do what your heart tells you.

All schadenfreude is, at heart, a symptom of pain, suffering and a lack of fulfilment. We can’t know exactly what the other’s problem is, but we can be assured that there is one. And while we may not be able to get back directly at our enemies, by a strange piece of cosmic justice we can know that something or someone has got there first; their behaviour is proof of the scale of their inner misery.

Profits built on deception, manipulation, and exploitation may seem sweet for a season, but they will ultimately turn bitter. For every tear shed, every heart broken, and every trust betrayed, God will exact a price seven times over. The innocent and vulnerable may suffer now, but justice will prevail, and the scales will balance. Remember, true wealth is built on integrity, compassion, and kindness, not on the suffering of others.

In The Merchant of Venice, it isn’t a pie-in-the-sky ideal of mercy that tips figurative scales of justice, but the threat of real flesh tipping real metal scales that determines the outcome of the trial. If there is mercy in the outcome for Antonio, it is an incidental by-product of precision.

Karma's menu: what goes around, comes around! So, sprinkle some kindness, top it off with good vibes, and serve it up with a side of positivity. Remember, the universe has a way of balancing the scales, so whether it's a slice of sweet justice or a hearty helping of good fortune, rest assured, karma's got your back. Bon appétit!

Vanishing Freedoms [Verse] Our freedoms are vanishing gone like the wind. The scales are tipped against fairness lost my friend. They strip your rights they don't ask they just take. We're left here reeling feeling betrayed ain't no mistake [Verse 2] They got the power they got the gold. Locked us in this system tight grip hold. Scream for justice they turn a deaf ear. In this land I'm drowning in fear can't you hear? [Chorus] Once they strip your rights away no lookin' back. You will pay hell tryin' to get 'em back. Chains of oppression wrap round us so tight. Fight for our freedom we gotta rise and fight [Bridge] Grassroots growing voices loud and strong. Can't stay silent while they do us wrong. Torn and tattered but we stand tall. This country ain't free if freedom's gone at all [Verse 3] Faceless men trading power in the halls. We the people rise truth through the walls. No more silence we break the night. Stolen liberty now we're raging for light [Chorus] Once they strip your rights away no lookin' back. You will pay hell tryin' to get 'em back. Chains of oppression wrap round us so tight. Fight for our freedom we gotta rise and fight

She has the scales of equality and impartial judgment in one hand, and the sword of decision in the other.

Laws are made by men and, therefore, fallible. Justice is something greater. Most of us—the poorest and the weakest—won’t see it on this side of the grave. But sometimes, on rare occasions, someone manages to balance the scales. It can be difficult to reconcile it with the law. That doesn’t negate the rightness of it.

nation so diverse that no group could rule by itself. Factions would check one another, and eventually the only way past such a stalemate would be to meet in the middle. In this process of finding common ground, something approaching justice and the public interest might be achieved, without the need for a king or a class of nobility. The implication was that, if practiced on a large and diverse enough scale, politics itself could solve the essential problem of government.

In my brand of justice, there is no judge or jury, but I accept that risk in the hope that I can help equal out the scales. It’s too easy for evil to prevail and for the world, as a whole, to look the other way. Someone has to get dirty to truly make a difference.

I believe the mistake many people make [. . .] is looking at the whole vast problem of poverty and social inequality and feeling helpless and guilty. For there is nothing the average man or woman can do to solve a universal social problem. But all of us can do something on a very small scale.

Justice is supposed to be blind, not judgmental.  And in case you forgot, the lady holding the scales is wearing a blindfold.” 

Greece can balance its books without killing democracy Alexis Tsipras | 614 words OPINION Greece changes on January 25, the day of the election. My party, Syriza, guarantees a new social contract for political stability and economic security. We offer policies that will end austerity, enhance democracy and social cohesion and put the middle class back on its feet. This is the only way to strengthen the eurozone and make the European project attractive to citizens across the continent. We must end austerity so as not to let fear kill democracy. Unless the forces of progress and democracy change Europe, it will be Marine Le Pen and her far-right allies that change it for us. We have a duty to negotiate openly, honestly and as equals with our European partners. There is no sense in each side brandishing its weapons. Let me clear up a misperception: balancing the government’s budget does not automatically require austerity. A Syriza government will respect Greece’s obligation, as a eurozone member, to maintain a balanced budget, and will commit to quantitative targets. However, it is a fundamental matter of democracy that a newly elected government decides on its own how to achieve those goals. Austerity is not part of the European treaties; democracy and the principle of popular sovereignty are. If the Greek people entrust us with their votes, implementing our economic programme will not be a “unilateral” act, but a democratic obligation. Is there any logical reason to continue with a prescription that helps the disease metastasise? Austerity has failed in Greece. It crippled the economy and left a large part of the workforce unemployed. This is a humanitarian crisis. The government has promised the country’s lenders that it will cut salaries and pensions further, and increase taxes in 2015. But those commitments only bind Antonis Samaras’s government which will, for that reason, be voted out of office on January 25. We want to bring Greece to the level of a proper, democratic European country. Our manifesto, known as the Thessaloniki programme, contains a set of fiscally balanced short-term measures to mitigate the humanitarian crisis, restart the economy and get people back to work. Unlike previous governments, we will address factors within Greece that have perpetuated the crisis. We will stand up to the tax-evading economic oligarchy. We will ensure social justice and sustainable growth, in the context of a social market economy. Public debt has risen to a staggering 177 per cent of gross domestic product. This is unsustainable; meeting the payments is very hard. On existing loans, we demand repayment terms that do not cause recession and do not push the people to more despair and poverty. We are not asking for new loans; we cannot keep adding debt to the mountain. The 1953 London Conference helped Germany achieve its postwar economic miracle by relieving the country of the burden of its own past errors. (Greece was among the international creditors who participated.) Since austerity has caused overindebtedness throughout Europe, we now call for a European debt conference, which will likewise give a strong boost to growth in Europe. This is not an exercise in creating moral hazard. It is a moral duty. We expect the European Central Bank itself to launch a full-blooded programme of quantitative easing. This is long overdue. It should be on a scale great enough to heal the eurozone and to give meaning to the phrase “whatever it takes” to save the single currency. Syriza will need time to change Greece. Only we can guarantee a break with the clientelist and kleptocratic practices of the political and economic elites. We have not been in government; we are a new force that owes no allegiance to the past. We will make the reforms that Greece actually needs. The writer is leader of Syriza, the Greek oppositionparty

I roll my eyes at Alys. “Do you think they give discounts?” I say. She shrugs and continues drinking her soup. “Of course they’ll give discounts. We just have to pay for them!” cackles Aunt May.

For injustice is man’s most heinous sin, be just and you will surely win

A sweet a day keeps misery at bay

If I haven’t fixed it, then it’s because I’m dead

I wish they would all just stop, you know. There has to be a better way,” she says. “I’m sure there is Ruby, but not everyone wants the same thing. Sometimes, this is the only way,” I say.

I know you don’t care about how the filing system works in government offices but you need to pretend to care Miss Scales,” he would say to me secretly. “The more you feign interest, the more they trust you. And why would we want their trust?” he’d ask rhetorically. “Because their trust in us will be our strongest weapon. Always remember, false friends are much more dangerous than true enemies.

Your mother must be very proud,” Aunt May says as he walks away. Time slows to a standstill after that.

When people can get away with crimes just because they are wealthy or have the right connections, the scales are immediately tipped against fairness and equality. The weight of corruption then becomes so heavy that it creates a dent that forces the world to become so slanted — that justice just slips off.

I leave in God’s hands the scales that must balance justice and mercy.

When the history of the Great War is written, it will be no easy task to assign to each of the titanic battles its proper place in the scale of importance, but if justice is done, the Battle of Belleau Wood will take its place beside that of Thermopylae and the other crucial battles of world history. Here a mere handful of determined, devoted men, as numbers are reckoned to-day, turned the awful tide, and they were soldiers and Marines of the United States of America.

There is an argument that blockchain technology can more equitably address issues related to freedom, jurisdiction, censorship, and regulation, perhaps in ways that nation-state models and international diplomacy efforts regarding human rights cannot. Irrespective of supporting the legitimacy of nation-states, there is a scale and jurisdiction acknowledgment and argument that certain operations are transnational and are more effectively administered, coordinated, monitored, and reviewed at a higher organizational level such as that of a World Trade Organization. The idea is to uplift transnational organizations from the limitations of geography-based, nation-state jurisdiction to a truly global cloud. The first point is that transnational organizations need transnational governance structures. The reach, accessibility, and transparency of blockchain technology could be an effective transnational governance structure. Blockchain governance is more congruent with the character and needs of transnational organizations than nation-state governance. The second point is that not only is the transnational governance provided by the blockchain more effective, it is fairer. There is potentially more equality, justice, and freedom available to organizations and their participants in a decentralized, cloud-based model. This is provided by the blockchain’s immutable public record, transparency, access, and reach. Anyone worldwide could look up and confirm the activities of transnational organizations on the blockchain. Thus, the blockchain is a global system of checks and balances that creates trust among all parties. This is precisely the sort of core infrastructural element that could allow humanity to scale to orders-of-magnitude larger progress with truly global organizations and coordination mechanisms.

is it i, who have dragged the latter of linger from the shadows the smell of death from the pits; the footprints where no one steps the pitiful thoughts of nostalgia, hate? the love for another, hate for myself, of human feeling? is it i? falling from the skies was the son of God, or his enemy? constantly torn between sun and shade, the good and not weighing scales of justice, the path to good grace living a lie for a heaven only dreamed; the preacher man's belly sweet wine and sour, deceit before the holy bible, of the preacher man's tongue testaments of old and new, what to follow for truth, what is new to old laws laws of the land, of the people, laws broken, held against ourselves is it i? to think of Christ Jesus, or His Father in Heaven, or the holy spirit solemn: my thoughts running wild, the second coming of who we love who we do not; who we believe in; who we want to follow; or not is it i? who is afraid, or the voices in my head? of Jacob's ladder? buried in myself; afraid of the light, afraid of change. is it i? in low, bottomless pits,holds the crucifix in high esteem; soar lips preaching testaments in disbelief? of what we have become, what we are, what we live to not see is it i? who have dragged myself to this? or this bottomless thoughts?

Further evidence of the repressive climate these attacks produced can be found in the reluctance of Lathrop and Abbott to ally themselves with Margaret Sanger and use the clinics established by Sheppard-Towner to promote birth control education. Fear of incurring further attacks by the AM A lay at the heart of this decision (Rosenberg, 1992). On a broader scale, the repressive political climate and a slew of reactionary lawsuits combined with the promotion of a consumer culture and sexual freedom by mass advertising to channel the energies of many women away from social justice issues toward self-liberation and sexual freedom, a trend with remarkable similarities to contemporary events (Addams, 1935; Faludi, 1991; Ryan, 1979).

The scales of Justice don't always balance nicely. Real life is about wounds and scars. Pain is the quickest teacher.

It was Thucydides who described the dealings between states as a world in which the strong do as they like and the weak put up with what they must. Power and dominion form the basis of that system, even when a balance has been achieved within it. But neither the hegemony of a given superpower nor the attempt to prevent war by means of a balance of power have ever led to a lasting peace. The big question remains: can power be replaced as a ruling principle in international relations by justice? And how can justice, if it is not to deteriorate into mere words receive access to power? Can we, to that end, develop other forms of power, in order to establish justice between states? Now that modern weaponry has made the danger of war even greater, this question has become even more urgent. A European fort, a sort of Switzerland on a large scale, is an illusion in today's world. The power to destroy, once the monopoly held by the state, is now in the hands of anyone who can obtain the necessary information through the internet. The power of mass destruction, in other words, has become increasingly privatised in this world. In such a situation, can the international institutions with their joint responsibility provide justice that is accompanied by the power it needs? For our civilisation, the ability to develop a robust international rule of law is a matter of survival. Is that a utopia? No: for half a century, Europe has been proving that it is possible. [Max Kohnstamm]

The Self is not what people believe it to be, or what the intellect can grasp. It is immeasurable. Where there is no measure, there is no scale, there is nothing at all that will work here! The Self is such that It can only be Known through the Knowledge of the Self. It is actually only through the Knowledge of the Gnani that the Self can be realized.

Even if they were able to change everything about that night, he and Glory had made enough mistakes together to learn that some of the darkest deeds in history accidentally handed victory to goodness. And when he had randomly doled out preemptive justice to villains before their villainy occurred, trying to make every past moment a paradise, he could accidentally tip the scales the wrong way. Retribution was for the end of time, and final justice was well beyond both his wisdom and authority.

Sometimes, the scales of justice find a level of their own, without our help... And sometimes, in seeking justice, we don't always serve it.

This system is called the " system of checks and balances," because each department of the government is supposed to be a check upon each of the others. To persons who do not know much about the Constitution, it is doubtless comforting to feel that they live under a government of "checks and balances." Checks and balances suggest scales, and scales suggest justice. But this comfortable feeling does not last long when one learns whence came this system, how it originated and what it means. It did not come from America. It came from England. The king of England used to be an absolute monarch. His will was the only law. The rich, titled gentlemen of his day did not always like his laws. They yearned to place a check upon him. They knew of no way to place a check upon him except by taking a hand in the making of laws. So, to put a brake upon the king, they established a house of lords, composed of some of their own number. They could not make the king enact any law they wanted, but they could 58 OUR DISHONEST CONSTITUTION prevent him from enacting any law they did not want. That helped some. It helped the aristocratic persons so much that the common people took notice. They, too, had grievances. The king and the lords sometimes passed laws that the common people did not want. So the common people decided to put a check upon both the king and the lords by establishing a house of commons. Thereafter no law could be enacted without the consent of the commons. Thus do we see how naturally this two-headed legislative body came into existence, neither of which could do anything without the consent, not only of the other, but of the head of the State. Nor was it inconsistent upon the part of Mr. Madison and other gentlemen who were opposed to majority rule, to transplant this system to America.

On the scales of justice, an ounce of words weighs no more than an ounce of feathers.

As Chafer said, long ago, “If men go to perdition it will be because every possible mercy from God has been resisted.”3 I cannot conceive of a worse punishment than knowing that God has made a way to save your soul, that you have refused that provision, and that neither you nor a loving God can do anything to mediate your judgment. In society, people commonly believe God to be a merciful one, but they misunderstand his mercy, thinking that justice is a balance scale, and if their good works do not quite outweigh their bad works, God will somehow fudge the scale with his thumb. There is no merciful thumb of God; we have been weighed and found wanting, and there remains no salvation other than that which God has wrought. “One is either a justified covenant-keeper in Christ or a condemned covenant-breaker in Adam.”4 The choice cannot be put off, for in putting it off, is not one already making a choice?

But he did refuse to answer one question on the MMPI. “And I told the guy I would leave this one particular question blank. When you answer ‘true’ it automatically pops up on the psychopathic deviance scale that you’re paranoid. You have to answer ‘true’ or ‘false.’ And the question is, ‘Someone is trying to kill me.’” I burst out laughing and felt thoroughly ashamed for losing sight of the seriousness of it all. But asking the condemned on death row whether someone is trying to kill him to prove him paranoid—too much.

In December 2014, the release of a Senate report on the use of torture by the United States after September 11 provoked a national debate on the morality of our tactics to fight terrorism. Beyond the argument over the results produced by such techniques lies a fundamental question of values and our standing in the world. The use of torture helps validate jihadist claims about the immorality and hypocrisy of the West. We must not fight violent extremism by becoming the brutal enemy that jihadists want. While painful, the process of publicly disclosing and confronting such incidents is, as David Rothkopf argues in Foreign Policy, “very American”33 in its transparency, which, in our view, is something to embrace. We should be seen, constantly, as balancing the scales of justice and individual freedom rather than letting the weight of groups like al Qaeda and ISIS constantly drag us toward an irrevocable mandate for more action, more compromise, and less concern for innocent people caught in the crossfire. “The Second Coming,” a poem by W. B. Yeats, is often quoted (maybe too often), because it feels so relevant to many modern situations. But its apocalyptic tone and cutting observations could have been written for the challenge of ISIS. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

the world is in extreme danger and that the future of humanity and a great deal of nature is now at stake. He knows that this danger is an unprecedented opportunity for rebirth and renewal on a global scale. He also knows that this rebirth and renewal depend on a whole-scale radical reimagining and reinvention of spirituality and religion on every level—a

the greatest hope for the transformation of the world lies in a grassroots revolution of love-in-action, will be a grueling one. The forces stacked against the success of our enterprise are brilliantly organized, dark, drunk on power, and lethal, and the situation we find ourselves in is already apocalyptic, with the environment in freefall, two billion people living close to starvation, hundreds of animal and plant species vanishing every day, politicians in the pay of corporations hell-bent on continuing their fundamentalism of the bottom line, a corporate-sponsored New Age addicted to a materialist and narcissistic pseudospirituality, and major world religions retreating whole-scale into divisive tribal dogmatism.

By forgiving another, I am trusting that God is a better justice-maker than I am. By forgiving, I release my own right to get even and leave all issues of fairness for God to work out. I leave in God’s hands the scales that must balance justice and mercy.”29 This is the great irony. It is the forgiving people who have the real authority and confidence. Unforgiveness offers only a pseudo feeling of power. We say, “I hold something over you because of what you did to me.” All the while, that person, alive or dead, holds the power because we are the ones who are locked up! Life is sucked from you while you stare at the scales, judging whose sin is weightier than your own: “Whenever someone wrongs you, you caricature them in your heart, making huge their worst feature. Deep in every human soul is a deep desire to justify yourself. We’re afraid that we’re not okay, that we’re not desirable. That fear is behind how you caricature the person who wrongs you. You need to feel noble, you need to feel superior, you need to feel better.”30 Demeaning the personhood of another fictitiously elevates us, and judging another leaves us full of arrogance, entitlement, and unforgiveness. “Playing God” in judging someone’s motives only infuses us with an increasingly cancerous preoccupation with self that sends us plummeting into the abyss of perceived superiority or the fears of possible inferiority. We chain ourselves to the dock, watching the life of adventure sail on without us. It is self-imposed imprisonment. We think there is so much power in unforgiveness, when the reality is we live as the forlorn castaway, powerless and pitiful.

Souls,” he said, “like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But when for infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. “For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extent to which they succeed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacrifice. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or a bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance.” His expression hardened, and then softened a little. “But so what,” he said, rising. Pointing to the fire, he added, “That’s where I want to go, and I will, and there I’ll find peace—but not yet.

The letter “L” which appears in the title of the book, Liber AL vel Legis, corresponds qabalistically to the Hebrew letter Lamed. In the Tarot this letter corresponds to Atu VIII, Adjustment, attributed to the astrological sign of Libra, the Scales of the Egyptian goddess Maat. Maat is the ruler and preserver of universal equilibrium; she is the goddess of justice, that is, justification.

I am Sa'kage, a lord of shadows. I claim the shadows that the Shadow may not. I am the strong arm of Deliverance. I am Shadowstrider. I am the Scales of Justice. I am He Who Guards Unseen. I am Shadowslayer. I am Nameless. The Coranti shall not go unpunished. My way is hard, but i serve unbroken. In ignobility, Nobility. In shame, Honor. In darkness, Light. I will do Justice and love Mercy. Untill the king returns, I shall not lay my burden down.

The Huge Artifice: an interim assessment Enough of this great work has now appeared For sightings to be taken, the ground cleared, Though the main purpose - what it's all about In the thematic sense - remains in doubt. We can be certain, even at this stage, That seriousness adequate to engage Our deepest critical concern is not To be found here. First: what there is of plot Is thin, repetitive, leaning far too much On casual meetings, parties, fights and such, With that excessive use of coincidence Which betrays authorial inexperience. We note, besides these evident signs of haste, A great deal in most questionable taste: Too many sex-scenes, far too many coarse Jokes, most of which have long lost all their force. It might be felt that, after a slow start, Abundance incident made amends for art, But the work's 'greatness' is no more than size, While the shaping mind, and all that implies, Is on a trivial scale, as can be guessed From the brash nature of the views expressed By a figure in an early episode, who Was clearly introduced in order to Act as some kind of author-surrogate, Then hastily killed off - an unfortunate Bid to retrieve a grave strategic lapse. More damaging than any of this, the gaps In sensitivity displayed are vast. Concepts that have not often been surpassed For ignorance or downright nastiness - That the habit of indifference is less Destructive than the embrace of love, that crimes Are paid for never or a thousand times, That the gentle come to grief - all these are forced Into scenes, dialogue, comment, and endorsed By the main action, manifesting there An inhumanity beyond despair. One final point remains: it has been urged That a few characters are not quite submerged In all this rubbish, the they can display Reason, justice and forethought on their day, And that this partly exculpates the mind That was their author. Not at all. We find Many of these in the history of art (So this reviewer feels), who stand apart, Who by no purpose but their own begin To struggle free from a base origin.

When we observe oppression, let us develop strategies that free not only the oppressed but also the oppressor. Let us remember that those who use their power to deny freedom to others are also imprisoned and are also worthy of care. Do not let their unjust actions inspire us to cruelty, or else we will soon become what we set out against. Here is our challenge: let us take up the miseducation of justice-making, by stripping our minds of the idea that equity can be manifested through condemnation, through humiliation, through shame and blame, and through righteous vindication. No, justice-making begins by marrying a just thought to insightful words, inviting us to collective action, by daring to free both the oppressed and the oppressor, for we know what it is like to be both. Stand we must, stand strong and bold. But let us choose a new way to balance the scales. Rather than shoving our foot on oppressors’ necks, let us instead reach out a hand, offer a seat, and show them, and even ourselves, a new way of justice-making by collectively experimenting with the moral imagination.

Barry took his sunglasses off and peeled back what was revealed as a fake mustache, raising his finger to his lips in an effort to keep his identity a secret. It was President Barack Obama.               Air

In order to understand and appreciate -yet justifiably- the significance of the US Bill of Rights, you must first see what the Jews did and are doing with it in the US through their Active Justices and Judges and then observe the consequences of its absence in contemporary Germany. Man already knows the horrifying results of the latter configuration, but only few are those who know the scale of transgression committed in the former; and even fewer who can see such a cycle.

In the Jewish Old Testament, the book of divine justice, there are men, things, and sayings on such an immense scale that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to compare with it.

Ruled by the scales, Libras have a strong sense of justice.

We paid our canvassers a living wage, and we trained them on scripts that spoke about jobs, health care, justice, education, the environment, and housing. The campaign scaled up our already large and diverse in-house filmmaking and digital team, again using core, consistent messaging with the widest array of communication tools.

You say the Little efforts that I make will do no good: they never will prevail to tip the hovering scale where Justice hangs in balance. I don’t think I ever thought they would. But I am prejudiced beyond debate in favor of my right to choose which side shall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight.

Justice is not a static ideal; it is not the maintenance of some steady state in society. The accent in biblical justice falls on positive action, the exercising of power to resist the oppressor and set the oppressed free. This is why Amos pictures justice as a thundering river that than as in the Western tradition, a neatly balanced set of scales [Amos 5:21-24].

Let me tell you what the Wilds have shown me, way out beyond civilization and its web of lies.’ He held up his hands, palm tilted to catch the last of the day’s light. ‘No good and evil, no right and wrong. The real scales upon which we are all judged are much simpler, Rant. Take a life, no matter how short or long. What’s it made up of? Well: choices, deeds, promises, beliefs, mysteries, fears, a whole list of things – whatever you care to think of, in fact. That’s what makes a life. Want to see it in terms of good and evil, of right and wrong? That’s not the way of the Wilds, because those words are really about people judging other people and the problem with that is, you can’t find truth studying the scales if your own eye’s skewed. And everyone’s eyes are skewed, whether they admit it or not.’ Damisk studied his upturned palms. ‘A soul collects marks, Rant. Like you’d find on a factor’s ledger. Some are burned into the surface. Some are placed there with a kiss. Forget good and evil, right and wrong. Think instead in terms of suffering and blessing.’ He paused, studying the half-breed’s heavy-boned face. ‘That’s the only ledger that counts. Take a life, like I said before, and now look back on it. Choices, deeds, promises. Which ones made for suffering, and which ones blessed?’ He lifted his hands higher and then let them drop. ‘Every mortal soul lives a thousand lives, even more, but that don’t mean a thousand ledgers for each soul. No, it’s just one ledger, the same ledger. The soul brings it with it every time it lands in a body, and that body plays out its life, adding one mark at a time. Suffering. Blessing. And there’s no escaping it, no cheating, no hiding it all away. What I call the Wilds is just raw nature, the universe itself, and it misses nothing and never blinks. And that’s how souls pay for every choice, every decision, every promise, broken or kept.’ ‘Pay how?’ Rant asked. ‘Whatever you put in, you get back. Spend a lifetime making others hurt and suffer, your next lifetime delivers the same upon you. No escaping it. Those scales of justice, Rant, they ain’t out there somewhere. Those are just flawed reflections.’ He jabbed his own chest. ‘They’re in here. Justice doesn’t exist in the Wilds, you see. I spent a lifetime looking for it out there, never found it. No, justice resides in each soul. So, when you cheat and think you got away with it, you didn’t. When you cause suffering in someone, either directly or with your own indifference, the ledger inside records it. And the scales tip, and that suffering will return to you, and your soul will one day know the anguish you delivered.’ He

the base and villainous treatment and slavery which the poor unfortunate Black People meet with, is spread and made known, the cry for justice, even virtue lifting up her voice, must rise the louder and higher, for the scale of equity and justice to be listen up in their defence. And doth not wisdom cry, and understanding put forth her voice? But who will regard the voice and hearken to the cry? Not the sneaking advocates for slavery, though a little ashamed of their craft; like the monstrous crocodile weeping over their prey with fine concessions (while gorging their own rapacious appetite) to hope for universal freedom taking place over the globe. Not those inebriated with avarice and infidelity,

It was a boat. Of course, the common word “boat” didn’t do the thing justice. Wayne stared at the massive construction, searching for a better description. One that would capture the majesty, the incredible scale, of the thing he was seeing. “That’s a damn big boat,” he finally whispered. Much better.

That's the kicker about being diagnosed with something no one has ever heard of before. Deep down, in the places no one really talks about, some people still don't believe it's real. Not fully, anyway. I am an enigma, a freak, an unknown. On top of the physical aspects of my disability, there's the emotional labor of explaining my body to people who think they get it, but don't. People want to understand something to believe it's real. People try to judge where I fall on the severity scale before they know how to treat me: like DEFCON ratings, but for bodies. - p. 50

Jewish Ideas Daily In Defense of the Nation-State By Diana Muir Appelbaum Friday, October 5, 2012 In [Daniel Gordis’] new book, The Promise of Israel: Why Its Seemingly Greatest Weakness Is Actually Its Greatest Strength, Gordis weaves the work of political theorists and historians into a compelling case for the nation-state in general and Israel in particular. … the governments that have produced human rights such as personal liberty and the rule of law have most often been ethnically based nation-states … Gordis quotes intellectual historian Mark Lilla, who notes that while Western Europeans have forgotten “all the long-standing problems that the nation-state, as a modern form of political life, managed to solve,” … [Zionism] remembers the wisdom of borders and the need for collective autonomy to establish self-respect and to demand respect from others. … European and American opposition to Israel … reflects the fact that Israel is the archetypal nation-state, and nation-states have fallen from favor in intellectual circles. Until recently, republics have arisen only in small city-states and, usually, only briefly. Apart from these cases, in all of human history only a few ways have been found to organize political life. There is the intense and appalling tribalism of Afghanistan. There are empires in which conquering Herrenvolk oppress conquered peoples. There are dictatorships and monarchies in which individuals may have comforts or privileges but not rights. There has been the universalizing ideology of Marxism, which has produced brutality and death on an unimaginable scale. Then there is the nation-state. The nation-state gives no assurances of the universal peace and justice promised by Marxism, Islam, or the human rights movement. It claims merely that it will attempt to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for its citizens. The nation-state does not claim it will bring peace or justice to the whole world, only that it will work to bring these benefits to a particular people living on a particular piece of land.

At first, I did them because I owed it to Sergei. He had been killed because he worked for me, and I couldn’t let his killers get away with it. As with the theft of my childhood flute, but on an infinitely grander and more meaningful scale, I have been compelled to get justice. As the theft of my flute showed, this inclination toward justice is part of who I am. It’s in my nature. To reject it would have poisoned me from the inside. Then, as things escalated, it also became a fight for survival. Not only for myself and my family, but for my friends and colleagues, and all the people who were helping Sergei’s cause inside of Russia. But in the end, I’ve done these things because doing them is the right thing to do. For better or worse, I’ve been obsessed with this cause since the moment of Sergei’s death. This obsession has affected every facet of my life, and all of my relationships, even those with my own children. These effects haven’t always been for the better.

It was the fire of justice that was burning through Townhouse now. The fire of justice that appeases the injured spirit and sets the record straight. The third blow was an uppercut that put me flat on the pavement. It was a thing of beauty, I tell you. Townhouse took two steps back, heaving a little from the exertion, the sweat running down his forehead. Then he took another step back like he needed to, like he was worried that if he were any closer, he would hit me again and again, and might not be able to stop. I gave him the friendly wave of one crying uncle. Then being careful to take my time so the blood wouldn’t rush from my head, I got back on my feet. —That’s the stuff, I said with a smile, after spitting some blood on the sidewalk. —Now we’re square, said Townhouse. —Now we’re square, I agreed, and I stuck out my hand. Townhouse stared at it for a moment. Then he took it in a firm grip and looked me eye to eye—like we were the presidents of two nations who had just signed an armistice after generations of discord. At that moment, we were both towering over the boys, and they knew it. You could tell from the expressions of respect on the faces of Otis and the teens, and the expression of dejection on the face of Maurice. I felt bad for him. Not man enough to be a man, or child enough to be a child, not black enough to be black, or white enough to be white, Maurice just couldn’t seem to find his place in the world. It made me want to tussle his hair and assure him that one day everything was going to be all right. But it was time to move along. Letting go of Townhouse’s hand, I gave him a tip of the hat. —See you round, pardner, I said. —Sure, said Townhouse. I’d felt pretty good when I settled the scores with the cowboy and Ackerly, knowing that I was playing some small role in balancing the scales of justice. But those feelings were nothing compared to the satisfaction I felt after letting Townhouse settle his score with me. Sister Agnes had always said that good deeds can be habit forming. And I guess she was right, because having given Sally’s jam to the kids at St. Nick’s, as I was about to leave Townhouse’s stoop I found myself turning back. —Hey, Maurice, I called. He looked up with the same expression of dejection, but with a touch of uncertainty too. —See that baby-blue Studebaker over there? —Yeah? —She’s all yours. Then I tossed him the keys. I would have loved to see the look on his face when he caught them. But I had already turned away and was striding down the middle of 126th Street with the sun at my back, thinking: Harrison Hewett, here I come.

As a Black, Indigenous, and Person of color struggling with CPTSD in the form of racial and historical trauma, you carry cultural legacy burdens that have shaped your thinking, your sense of self, and probably your worldview. And while burdens can also be personal--such as physical trauma in childhood that leads someone to subconsciously seek out abusive partners in adulthood--the burdens I'm talking about are large-scale, permeating throughout this nation's society to directly disadvantage and hurt you and other marginalized groups.

If justice cannot be administered by man, we must wait and allow the Lord to balance the scales. He always will, but we may not be there to see it. We must surrender our will to the Lord, and know that He will do what is right.

According to conceptual metaphor theory, we understand abstract concepts in terms of concretely embodied image and orienting schemata, so that we perceive ideas like love and justice in terms of paths and balances, construing love as a journey and justice as weighing scales.

Putin engaged in a full-scale witch-hunt against anyone connected to Khodorkovsky. In the weeks that followed his arrest, Russian law enforcement agencies went after the political parties he’d financed, his charities, and scores of his employees.

Before the ship was even discovered, Africatown’s activist groups applied for and won a $3.8 million grant from Alabama’s share of the BP oil spill settlement money, to build a new welcome center on the hill above the cemetery, to replace the destroyed mobile home. Then, in the wake of the ship’s discovery, another federal grant was given to create a “heritage center” in the community, which will be the initial facility designed to hold any relics found in the hold of the ship. But neither the welcome center nor the heritage center will be anything close to the scale and power of the new Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. To