Told U So Quotes

He got a tan over break. I used to tell him he was so pale he looked like a marshmallow. He hated that I compared him to food. I told him that's what he got for calling me caramel. It shut him up.

Society has put before you the ideal of a 'perfect man'. No matter in which culture you were born, you have scriptural doctrines and traditions handed down to you to tell you how to behave. You are told that through due practice you can even eventually come into the state attained by the sages, saints and saviors of mankind. And so you try to control your behavior, to control your thoughts, to be something unnatural.

You'll want all your strength for the wedding night." I cannot think why I should need strength," she said, ignoring a host of spine-tingling images rising in her mind's eye. "All I have to do is lie there." "Naked," he said grimly. "Truly?" She shot him a glance from under her lashes. "Well, if I must, I must, for you have the advantage of experience in these matters. Still, I do wish you'd told me sooner. I should not have put the modiste to so much trouble about the negligee." "The what?" "It was ghastly expensive," she said, "but the silk is as fine as gossamer, and the eyelet work about the neckline is exquisite. Aunt Louisa was horrified. She said only Cyprians wear such things, and it leaves nothing to the imagination." Jessica heard him suck in his breath, felt the muscular thigh tense against hers. "But if it were left to Aunt Louisa," she went on,"I should be covered from my chin to my toes in thick cotton ruffled with monstrosities with little bows and rosebuds. Which is absurd, when an evening gown reveals far more, not to mention--" "What color?" he asked. His low voice had roughened. "Wine red," she said, "With narrow black ribbons threaded through the neckline. Here." She traced a plunging U over her bosom. "And there's the loveliest openwork over my...well, here." She drew her finger over the curve of her breast a bare inch above the nipple. "And openwork on the right side of the skirt. From here" --she pointed to her hip--"down to the hem. And I bought---" "Jess." Her name was a strangled whisper. "--slippers to match," she continued." Black mules with--" "Jess." In one furious flurry of motion he threw down the reins and hauled her into his lap.

YOU KNOW HOW RAMADI WAS WON? We went in and killed all the bad people we could find. When we started, the decent (or potentially decent) Iraqis didn’t fear the United States; they did fear the terrorists. The U.S. told them, “We’ll make it better for you.” The terrorists said, “We’ll cut your head off.” Who would you fear? Who would you listen to? When we went into Ramadi, we told the terrorists, “We’ll cut your head off. We will do whatever we have to and eliminate you.” Not only did we get the terrorists’ attention—we got everyone’s attention. We showed we were the force to be reckoned with. That’s where the so-called Great Awakening came. It wasn’t from kissing up to the Iraqis. It was from kicking butt. The tribal leaders saw that we were bad-asses, and they’d better get their act together, work together, and stop accommodating the insurgents. Force moved that battle. We killed the bad guys and brought the leaders to the peace table. That is how the world works.

Would you believe me if I told you that there’s an investment strategy that a seven-year-old could understand, will take you fifteen minutes of work per year, outperform 90 percent of finance professionals in the long run, and make you a millionaire over time?   Well, it is true, and here it is: Start by saving 15 percent of your salary at age 25 into a 401(k) plan, an IRA, or a taxable account (or all three). Put equal amounts of that 15 percent into just three different mutual funds:   A U.S. total stock market index fund An international total stock market index fund A U.S. total bond market index fund.   Over time, the three funds will grow at different rates, so once per year you’ll adjust their amounts so that they’re again equal. (That’s the fifteen minutes per year, assuming you’ve enrolled in an automatic savings plan.)   That’s it; if you can follow this simple recipe throughout your working career, you will almost certainly beat out most professional investors. More importantly, you’ll likely accumulate enough savings to retire comfortably.

Truth is mightier than the sword.” “And granddad’s squirrel gun,” he added. “The militias need to know what they are up against in order to be as effective as this country needs them to be.” “Granddad’s squirrel gun is no match for DARPA,” Mark agreed. “Squirrel guns in the hands of potentially 200 million people have the Feds sweating, though.” Becraft smiled. “They won’t be able to disarm this country. There are too many people already awake, aware, and armed.” “If the latest TV polls tell the people they are disarmed, they might blindly follow it,” Mark speculated. “People are what they’re told, and they love to be told what the majority is doing so they can do it too. It’s a socially engineered herd mentality.

Nonsense! Nonsense!” snorted Tasbrough. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen.” “The answer to that,” suggested Doremus Jessup, “if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is ‘the hell it can’t!’ Why, there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?. . .Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We’re ready to start on a Children’s Crusade—only of adults—right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!” “Well, what if they are?

Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors. “So that’s what war looks like!” von Trapp wrote in a later memoir. He told his chief officer, “We are like highway men, sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship in such a cowardly fashion.” Fighting in a trench or aboard a torpedo boat would have been better, he said. “There you hear shooting, hear your comrades fall, you hear the wounded groaning—you become filled with rage and can shoot men in self defense or fear; at an assault you can even yell! But we! Simply cold-blooded to drown a mass of men in an ambush!

an official with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission learned I was writing about specialization and contacted me to make sure I knew that specialization had played a critical role in the 2008 global financial crisis. “Insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulators regulated banks, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers,” the official told me. “But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, ‘Who looks across those markets?’ The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues.

Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors. “So that’s what war looks like!” von Trapp wrote in a later memoir. He told his chief officer, “We are like highway men, sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship in such a cowardly fashion.

Where did Grizel go?” Sandor asked as they turned to leave. “She’s supposed to stay by your side.” “I’m right here,” a husky female voice said as a lithe gray goblin in a fitted black jumpsuit seemed to melt out of the shadows. Fitz’s bodyguard was just as tall as Sandor, but far leaner—and what she lacked in bulk she made up for in stealth and grace. “I swear,” she said, tapping Sandor on the nose. “It’s almost too easy to evade you.” “Anyone can hide in this chaos,” Sandor huffed. “And now is not the time for games!” “There’s always time for games.” Grizel tossed her long ponytail in a way that almost seemed . . . Was it flirty? Sandor must’ve noticed too, because his gray skin tinted pink. He cleared his throat and turned to Sophie. “Weren’t we heading to the cafeteria?” She nodded and followed Fitz into the mazelike halls, where the colorful crystal walls shimmered in the afternoon sunlight. The cafeteria was on the second floor of the campus’s five-story glass pyramid, which sat in the center of the courtyard framed by the U-shaped main building. Sophie spent most of the walk wondering how long it would take Dex to notice her new accessories. The answer was three seconds—and another after that to notice the matching rings on Fitz’s thumbs. His periwinkle eyes narrowed, but he kept his voice cheerful as he said, “I guess we’re all giving rings this year.” Biana held out her hand to show Sophie a ring that looked familiar—probably because Sophie had a less sparkly, slightly more crooked, definitely less pink version on her own finger. “I also made one for you,” Dex told Fitz. “It’s in your thinking cap. And I have some for Tam and Linh, whenever we see them again. That way we’ll all have panic switches—and I added stronger trackers, so I can home in on the signal even if you don’t press your stone. Just in case anything weird happens.” “Your Technopath tricks aren’t necessary,” Sandor told him, pointing to their group of bodyguards—four goblins in all. “But it’s still good to have a backup plan, right?” Biana asked, admiring her ring from another angle. The pink stone matched the glittery shadow she’d brushed around her teal eyes, as well as the gloss on her

Forget the Bush family, they are the most negligible family in the country. They are unintelligent, they are reasonably decorative, they are obedient to the great economic powers. Nixon said something interesting to Murray Kempton about Bush senior when he became President. Murray and Nixon used to have lunch, and when Murray said, “Well, what is this Bush like?” Nixon said, “Oh, nothing, nothing there, just a lightweight. He’s the sort of person you appoint to things, like the U.N., the CIA. But that Barbara Bush, she’s really something; she’s really vindictive!”—which was the highest complement that Nixon could deliver.

The list of correlations to that night is as long as the Jersey coast. And so is the list of reasons I shouldn't be looking forward to seeing him at school. But I can't help it. He's already texted me three times this morning: Can I pick you up for school? and Do u want 2 have breakfast? and R u getting my texts? My thumbs want to answer "yes" to all of the above, but my dignity demands that I don't answer at all. He called my his student. He stood there alone with me on the beach and told me he thinks of me as a pupil. That our relationship is platonic. And everyone knows what platonic means-rejected. Well, I might be his student, but I'm about to school, him on a few things. The first lesson of the day is Silent Treatment 101. So when I see him in the hall, I give him a polite nod and brush right by him. The zap from the slight contact never quite fades, which mean he's following me. I make it to my locker before his hand is on my arm. "Emma." The way he whispers my name sends goose bumps all the way to my baby toes. But I'm still in control. I nod to him, dial the combination to my locker, then open it in his face. He moves back before contact. Stepping around me, he leans his hand against the locker door and turns me around to face him. "That's not very nice." I raise my best you-started-this brow. He sighs. "I guess that means you didn't miss me." There are so many things I could pop off right now. Things like, "But at least I had Toraf to keep my company" or "You were gone?" Or "Don't feel bad, I didn't miss my calculus teacher either." But the goal is to say nothing. So I turn around. I transfer books and papers between my locker and backpack. As I stab a pencil into my updo, his breath pushes against my earlobe when he chuckles. "So your phone's not broken; you just didn't respond to my texts." Since rolling my eyes doesn't make a sound, it's still within the boundaries of Silent Treatment 101. So I do this while I shut my locker. As I push past him, he grabs my arm. And I figure if stomping on his toe doesn't make a sound... "My grandmother's dying," he blurts. Commence with the catching-Emma-off-guard crap. How can I continue Silent Treatment 101 after that? He never mentioned his grandmother before, but then again, I never mentioned mine either. "I'm sorry, Galen." I put my hand on his, give it a gentle squeeze. He laughs. Complete jackass. "Conveniently, she lives in a condo in Destin and her dying request is to meet you. Rachel called your mom. We're flying out Saturday afternoon, coming back Sunday night. I already called Dr. Milligan." "Un-freaking-believable.

Some guns were fired to give notice that the departure of the balloon was near. ... Means were used, I am told, to prevent the great balloon's rising so high as might endanger its bursting. Several bags of sand were taken on board before the cord that held it down was cut, and the whole weight being then too much to be lifted, such a quantity was discharged as would permit its rising slowly. Thus it would sooner arrive at that region where it would be in equilibrio with the surrounding air, and by discharging more sand afterwards, it might go higher if desired. Between one and two o'clock, all eyes were gratified with seeing it rise majestically from above the trees, and ascend gradually above the buildings, a most beautiful spectacle. When it was about two hundred feet high, the brave adventurers held out and waved a little white pennant, on both sides of their car, to salute the spectators, who returned loud claps of applause. The wind was very little, so that the object though moving to the northward, continued long in view; and it was a great while before the admiring people began to disperse. The persons embarked were Mr. Charles, professor of experimental philosophy, and a zealous promoter of that science; and one of the Messrs Robert, the very ingenious constructors of the machine. {While U.S. ambassador to France, writing about witnessing, from his carriage outside the garden of Tuileries, Paris, the first manned balloon ascent using hydrogen gas by Jacques Charles on the afternoon of 1 Dec 1783. A few days earlier, he had watched the first manned ascent in Montgolfier's hot-air balloon, on 21 Nov 1783.}

MOMENTS I saw you first You looked exactly The same as before Tall and awkward and shy I walked towards you My hands clammy I felt cold inside My insides were shaking Cant run This is it. U saw me Your face brightened A smile painted on your face I missed it Your smile It brought back the past You walked I walked Nearer It feels like in the Movies Two people A boy and a girl Meeting halfway Hoping for a happy Ever after I stopped Right before I reached you I realized This isn't like the movies I turned I told myself Don’t smile You reached me Close So close I felt the urge To touch you Hug you And maybe Kiss you There weren't Hellos Only silent prayers Smiling You reached for my hand Giving me something You knew I love It was awkward You standing there Me standing there So close Too close Yet so far I looked up to you I tried to ask myself Are you for real? You smiled wider Shy but happy You left as fast As you came back It was for a second I hated time I wished it was A little bit longer With that, I knew I still want you.

Audiences would not be so easily fooled if they would only recall that educated people were and are more likely to be Republicans, while high school dropouts are more likely to be Democrats. Hawkish right-wing Republicans, including the core supporters of Barry Goldwater in 1964, of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and of groups like the John Birch Society, come disproportionately from the most educated and affluent segments of our society, particularly dentists and physicians. So we should not be surprised that education correlates with hawkishness. At the other end of the social-status spectrum, although most African Americans, like most whites, initially supported U.S. intervention in Vietnam, blacks were always more questioning and more dovish than whites, and African American leaders—Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X—were prominent among the early opponents of the war.22

Watching him then, I simply couldn’t think of him doing anything other than winning. Loss wasn’t the norm, it couldn’t be. I didn’t have the words for it then, what it felt like to watch my cousin, whom I love and whose worries are our worries and whose pain is our pain, manage to be so good at something, to triumph so completely. More than a painful life, more than a culture or a society with the practice and perfection of violence as a virtue and a necessity, more than a meanness or a willingness to sacrifice oneself, what I felt—what I saw—were Indian men and boys doing precisely what we’ve always been taught not to do. I was seeing them plainly, desperately, expertly wanting to be seen for their talents and their hard work, whether they lost or won. That old feeling familiar to so many Indians—that we can’t change anything; can’t change Columbus or Custer, smallpox or massacres; can’t change the Gatling gun or the legislative act; can’t change the loss of our loved ones or the birth of new troubles; can’t change a thing about the shape and texture of our lives—fell away. I think the same could be said for Sam: he might not have been able to change his sister’s fate or his mother’s or even, for a while, his own. But when he stepped in the cage he was doing battle with a disease. The disease was the feeling of powerlessness that takes hold of even the most powerful Indian men. That disease is more potent than most people imagine: that feeling that we’ve lost, that we’ve always lost, that we’ve already lost—our land, our cultures, our communities, ourselves. This disease is the story told about us and the one we so often tell about ourselves. But it’s one we’ve managed to beat again and again—in our insistence on our own existence and our successful struggles to exist in our homelands on our own terms. For some it meant joining the U.S. Army. For others it meant accepting the responsibility to govern and lead. For others still, it meant stepping into a metal cage to beat or be beaten. For my cousin Sam, for three rounds of five minutes he gets to prove that through hard work and natural ability he can determine the outcome of a finite struggle, under the bright, artificial lights that make the firmament at the Northern Lights Casino on the Leech Lake Reservation.

Both women were mothers of children caught up in mind control cover-up, one of which paralleled Kelly’s and my case. She, too, had volumes of documents and evidences whereby it was inexcusable that justice had not prevailed. The other mother conveyed a story that touched me so deeply it undoubtedly will continue to motivate me with reverberating passion forever. This mother was very weak from the final stages of cancer and chemotherapy, and tears slid down her pale gray cheeks as she told me her story. When she reported sexual abuse of her three daughters, the local court system took custody of them. The children appeared dissociative identity disordered from their ordeal, yet were reportedly denied therapy and placed in Foster care “since the mother was dying anyway.” When she finally was granted brief visitation with her precious daughters, they looked dazed and robotic with no memory of her or their sexual abuse. Mind control was apparent to this mother, and she struggled to give voice to their plight to no avail. She explained how love and concern for her children had kept her alive far longer than her doctors thought possible. She embraced me and said, “Now I can die in peace knowing that you are out there talking, raising awareness with the same passion for justice and love for children that I have. Thank you. Please keep talking. Please remember my daughters.

The “Muslim speech,” as we took to calling the second major address, was trickier. Beyond the negative portrayals of terrorists and oil sheikhs found on news broadcasts or in the movies, most Americans knew little about Islam. Meanwhile, surveys showed that Muslims around the world believed the United States was hostile toward their religion, and that our Middle East policy was based not on an interest in improving people’s lives but rather on maintaining oil supplies, killing terrorists, and protecting Israel. Given this divide, I told Ben that the focus of our speech had to be less about outlining new policies and more geared toward helping the two sides understand each other. That meant recognizing the extraordinary contributions of Islamic civilizations in the advancement of mathematics, science, and art and acknowledging the role colonialism had played in some of the Middle East’s ongoing struggles. It meant admitting past U.S. indifference toward corruption and repression in the region, and our complicity in the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government during the Cold War, as well as acknowledging the searing humiliations endured by Palestinians living in occupied territory. Hearing such basic history from the mouth of a U.S. president would catch many people off guard, I figured, and perhaps open their minds to other hard truths: that the Islamic fundamentalism that had come to dominate so much of the Muslim world was incompatible with the openness and tolerance that fueled modern progress; that too often Muslim leaders ginned up grievances against the West in order to distract from their own failures; that a Palestinian state would be delivered only through negotiation and compromise rather than incitements to violence and anti-Semitism; and that no society could truly succeed while systematically repressing its women. —

Eric Leeds said at one point Prince wanted the band to all be vegan. Alan told his brother that to survive being in Prince’s band you had to at least pretend to drink the Kool-Aid, so, Eric said, you had guys being vegan when Prince was around and eating whatever they wanted when he wasn’t around. “He attached some spiritual component to it but looked at it as another way for him to exercise control,” Eric said. “If you’re gonna work for me then you have to conform to my ideal.

Hallie didn't believe she was invulnerable. She was never one of those daredevil types; she knew she could get hurt. What I think she meant was that she was lucky to be on her way to Nicaragua. It was the slowest thing to sink into my head, how happy she was. Happy to be leaving. We'd had one time of perfect togetherness in our adult lives, the year when we were both in college in Tucson-her first year, my last-and living together for the first time away from Doc Homer. That winter I'd wanted to fail a subject just so I could hang back, stay there with her, the two of us walking around the drafty house in sweatshirts and wool socks and understanding each other precisely. Bringing each other cups of tea without having to ask. So I stayed on in Tucson for medical school, instead of going to Boston as I'd planned, and met Carlo in Parasitology. Hallie, around the same time, befriended some people who ran a safehouse for Central American refugees. After that we'd have strangers in our kitchen every time of night, kids scared senseless, people with all kinds of damage. Our life was never again idyllic. I should have seen it coming. Once she and I had gone to see a documentary on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was these Americans who volunteered without our government's blessing to fight against Franco and Hitler in the Spanish Civil War. At that point in U.S. history fascism was only maybe wrong, whereas communism was definitely. When we came home from the movie Hallie cried. Not because of the people who gave up life and limb only to lose Spain to Franco, and not for the ones who came back and were harassed for the rest of their lives for being Reds. The tragedy for Hallie was that there might never be a cause worth risking everything for in our lifetime. She was nineteen years old then, and as she lay blowing her nose and sobbing on my bed she told me this. That there were no real causes left. Now she had one-she was off to Nicaragua, a revolution of co-op farms and literacy crusades-and so I guess she was lucky. Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain. Almost no one really gets the chance to alter the course of human events on purpose, in the exact way they wish for it to be altered.

I’ll start in the air,” I said, far more steadily than I thought I could, considering. I knelt to tie the shirt around his thigh, cinching it tight above the wound; he stiffened but let me finish the knot. “The air first, the airship, and then-then I’ll dive.” “You can’t swim,” broke in Armand. “You told me that you can’t.” “Maybe I can now. If I’m a dragon.” “Don’t be an idiot! If you can’t swim, you can’t swim, Eleanore! You’ll drown out there, and what the bloody hell do you think you’re going to do anyway to a U-boat? Bite it open?” I stood again. “Yes! If I must! I don’t hear you coming up with a better-“ “You’ll die out there!” “Or we’ll all die here!” “We’re going to find another way!” “You two work on that. I’m off.” I fixed them both with one last, vehement look, the Turn rising inside me. Remember this. Remember them, this moment, this heartbreak, these two boys. Remember that they loved you. Armand had reached for my shoulders. “I forbid-Eleanore, please, no-“ “No,” echoed Jesse, speaking at last. “You’re not going after the submarine, Lora. You won’t need to.” Armand and I paused together, glancing down at him. I stood practically on tiptoe, so ready to become my other self. Jesse climbed clumsily to his feet. When he swayed, we both lunged to catch him. “Armand will take me to the shore. I’ll handle the U-boat.” “How?” demanded Armand at once. But I understood. I could read him so well now, Jesse-of-the-stars. I understood what he meant to do, and what it would cost him. I felt myself shaking my head. Above us, the airship propellers thumped louder and louder. “Yes,” said Jesse, smiling his lovely smile at me. “I already sense your agreement. Death and the Elemental were stronger joined than apart, remember? This is our joining. Don’t waste any more time quarreling with me about it. That’s not your way.” He leaned down to me, a hand tangled in my hair. His mouth pressed to mine, and for the first time ever I didn’t feel bliss at his touch. I felt misery. “Go on, Lora-of-the-moon,” he murmured against my lips. “You’re going to save us. I know you will.” I glared past him to the harsh, baffled face of Armand. “Will you help him? Do you swear it?” “I-yes, I will. I do.” I disentangled Jesse’s hand, kissed it, stepped back, and let the Turn consume me, smoke rising and rising, leaving the castle and all I loved behind me for the wild open sky.

The whole town is in a daze. Satanism, child molestation, missing children, mind control, injustice through the courts. I’m telling you, these people need help just to cope with the PTSD. You could give them coping skills, Mark. And the information you have could clarify why cover-up is so prevalent and why Aquino is allowed on their Daycare Board. Understanding might help them survive and solve their nightmare.” “I’m told Aquino owns the building that houses the Marin County Daycare Board,” Mark injected. “The Presidio is pretty close to the Grove3,” I said, the picture becoming even clearer from my perspective.

Audio of interview - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=... "it's not surprising that in that first group I worked with over 20 years ago I had 2 accounts of Jimmy Savile being an abuser where I did support some people to go to the police but it was seen as something impossible to consider at the time." "We have improved a lot as a society in the last 20 years in accepting the reality of abuse, even though it's still so hard for us." "When we look at adults who were abused in childhood we find that nearly all of them had told somebody..." "The culture of the police has changed dramatically but 20 years ago when even counselors and social workers didn't think the abuse could be so widespread the police were obviously part of that culture too. I mean it's hard to realise that in the 1980s there was a point where it was thought that there were only 486 children on the abuse register. Now the government accepts that 1 in 4 adults will have been abused at some point in their lives. That is a huge change." "This is really different for any survivors listening now if a police officer doesn't listen sympathetically and offer a believing response then something has gone wrong because the police really do have this in their guidelines now." - Dr Valerie Sinason, Clinic for Dissociative Studies, London

While I was researching this book, an official with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission learned I was writing about specialization and contacted me to make sure I knew that specialization had played a critical role in the 2008 global financial crisis. “Insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulators regulated banks, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers,” the official told me. “But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, ‘Who looks across those markets?’ The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues.

It's only second period, and the whole school knows Emma broke up with him. So far, he's collected eight phone numbers, one kiss on the cheek, and one pinch to the back of his jeans. His attempts to talk to Emma between classes are thwarted by a hurricane of teenage females whose main goal seems to be keeping him and his ex-girlfriend separated. When the third period bell rings, Emma has already chosen a seat where she'll be barricaded from him by other students. Throughout class, she pays attention as if the teacher were giving instructions on how to survive a life-threatening catastrophe in the next twenty-four hours. About midway through class, he receives a text from a number he doesn't recognize. If you let me, I can do things to u to make u forget her. As soon as he clears it, another one pops up from a different number. Hit me back if u want to chat. I'll treat u better than E. How did they get my number? Tucking his phone back into his pocket, he hovers over his notebook protectively, as if it's the only thing left that hasn't been invaded. Then he notices the foreign handwriting scribbled on it by a girl named Shena who encircled her name and phone number with a heart. Not throwing it across the room takes almost as much effort as not kissing Emma. At lunch, Emma once again blocks his access to her by sitting between people at a full picnic table outside. He chooses the table directly across from her, but she seems oblivious, absently soaking up the grease from the pizza on her plate until she's got at least fifteen orange napkins in front of her. She won't acknowledge that he's staring at her, waiting to wave her over as soon as she looks up. Ignoring the text message explosion in his vibrating pocket, he opens the contain of tuna fish Rachel packed for him. Forking it violently, he heaves a mound into his mouth, chewing without savoring it. Mark with the Teeth is telling Emma something she thinks is funny, because she covers her mouth with a napkin and giggles. Galen almost launches from his bench when Mark brushes a strand of hair from her face. Now he knows what Rachel meant when she told him to mark his territory early on. But what can he do if his territory is unmarking herself? News of their breakup has spread like an oil spill, and it seems as though Emma is making a huge effort to help it along. With his thumb and index finger, Galen snaps his plastic fork in half as Emma gently wipes Mark's mouth with her napkin. He rolls his eyes as Mark "accidentally" gets another splotch of JELL-O on the corner of his lips. Emma wipes that clean too, smiling like she's tending to a child. It doesn't help that Galen's table is filling up with more of his admirers-touching him, giggling at him, smiling at him for no reason, and distracting him from his fantasy of breaking Mark's pretty jaw. But that would only give Emma a genuine reason to assist the idiot in managing his JELL-O.

Flash forward to the 1980s and 1990s and it is not foreign fascists we have to put out of our minds in order to fall asleep at night, even if we do fantasize about hostile forces doing us great harm. (Witness the immediate presumption after the Oklahoma City bombing and the crash of TWA Flight 800 that Middle Eastern terrorists were to blame.) Mostly our fears are domestic, and so are the eerie invaders who populate them—killer kids, men of color, monster moms. The stories told about them are, like “War of the Worlds,” oblique expressions of concern about problems that Americans know to be pernicious but have not taken decisive action to quash—problems such as hunger, dilapidated schools, gun proliferation, and deficient health care for much of the U.S. population.

how difficult it is to say, “Boy, did I mess up,” without the protective postscript of self-justification—to say “I dropped a routine fly ball with the bases loaded” rather than “I dropped the ball because the sun was in my eyes” or “because a bird flew by” or “because it was windy” or “because a fan called me a jerk.” A friend returning from a day in traffic school told us that as participants went around the room, reporting the violations that had brought them there, a miraculous coincidence had occurred: Not one of them had broken the law! They all had justifications for speeding, ignoring a stop sign, running a red light, or making an illegal U-turn. He became so dismayed (and amused) by the litany of flimsy excuses that, when his turn came, he was embarrassed to give in to the same impulse. He said, “I didn’t stop at a stop sign. I was entirely wrong and I got caught.” There was a moment’s silence, and then the room erupted in cheers for his candor. There are plenty of good reasons for admitting mistakes, starting with the simple fact that you will probably be found out anyway—by your family, your company, your colleagues, your enemies, your biographer. But there are more positive reasons for owning up. Other people will like you more. Someone else may be able to pick up your fumble and run with it; your error might inspire someone else’s solution. Children will realize that everyone screws up on occasion and that even adults have to say “I’m sorry.” And if you can admit a mistake when it is the size of an acorn, it will be easier to repair than if you wait until it becomes the size of a tree, with deep, wide-ranging roots.

You must put yourself in the skin of a man who is wearing the uniform of his country, is a candidate for death in its defense, and who is called a “nigger” by his comrades-in-arms and his officers; who is almost always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to do; who knows that the white G.I. has informed the Europeans that he is subhuman (so much for the American male’s sexual security); who does not dance at the U.S.O. the night white soldiers dance there, and does not drink in the same bars white soldiers drink in; and who watches German prisoners of war being treated by Americans with more human dignity than he has ever received at their hands. And who, at the same time, as a human being, is far freer in a strange land than he has ever been at home. Home! The very word begins to have a despairing and diabolical ring. You must consider what happens to this citizen, after all he has endured, when he returns—home: search, in his shoes, for a job, for a place to live; ride, in his skin, on segregated buses; see, with his eyes, the signs saying “White” and “Colored,” and especially the signs that say “White Ladies” and “Colored Women”; look into the eyes of his wife; look into the eyes of his son; listen, with his ears, to political speeches, North and South; imagine yourself being told to “wait.” And all this is happening in the richest and freest country in the world, and in the middle of the twentieth century. The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

The U.S. media’s shallow lens dates back to 1952, when Christine Jorgensen became the media’s first “sex change” darling, breaking barriers and setting the tone for how our stories are told. These stories, though vital to culture change and our own sense of recognition, rarely report on the barriers that make it nearly impossible for trans women, specifically those of color and those from low-income communities, to lead thriving lives. They’re tried-and-true transition stories tailored to the cis gaze. What I want people to realize is that “transitioning” is not the end of the journey. Yes, it’s an integral part of revealing who we are to ourselves and the world, but there’s much life afterward. These stories earn us visibility but fail at reporting on what our lives are like beyond our bodies, hormones, surgeries, birth names, and before-and-after photos.

Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!

MATTHEW 28  m Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and  n the other Mary went to see the tomb. 2And behold, there was a great earthquake, for  o an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3 p His appearance was like lightning, and  q his clothing white as snow. 4And for fear of him the guards trembled and  r became like dead men. 5But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. 6He is not here, for he has risen,  s as he said. Come, see the place where he [1] lay. 7Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold,  t he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. See, I have told you.” 8So they departed quickly from the tomb  u with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9And behold, Jesus  v met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came up and  w took hold of his feet and

When I moved to the U.S. at six, I was unrecognizable to my mother. I was angry, chronically dissatisfied, bratty. On my second day in America, she ran out of the room in tears after I angrily demanded that she buy me a pack of colored pencils. You're not you! she sputtered between sobs, which brought me to a standstill. She couldn't recognize me. That's what she told me later, that this was not the daughter she had last seen. Being too young, I didn't know enough to ask: But what did you expect? Who am I supposed to be to you? But if I was unrecognizable to her, she was also unrecognizable to me. In this new country, she was disciplinarian, restrictive, prone to angry outbursts, easily frustrated, so fascist with arbitrary rules that struck me, even as a six-year-old, as unreasonable. For most of my childhood and adolescence, my mother was my antagonist. Whenever she'd get mad, she'd take her index finger and poke me in the forehead. You you you you you, she'd say, as if accusing me of being me. She was quick to blame me for the slightest infractions, a spilled glass, a way of sitting while eating, my future ambitions (farmer or teacher), the way I dressed, what I ate, even the way I practiced English words in the car..She was the one to deny me: the extra dollar added to my allowance; an extra hour to my curfew; the money to buy my friends' birthday presents, so that I was forced to gift them, no matter what the season, leftover Halloween candy. In those early days, we lived so frugally that we even washed, alongside the dishes in the sink, used sheets of cling wrap for reuse. She was the one to punish me, sending me to kneel in the bathtub of the darkened bathroom, carrying my father's Casio watch with an alarm setting to account for when time was up. Yet it was I who would kneel for even longer, going further and further, taking more punishment just to spite her, just to show that it meant nothing. I could take more. The sun moved across the bathroom floor, from the window to the door.

How do you get into making video games anyway? Sadie hated answering this question, especially after a person told her he hadn't heard of Ichigo. "Well, I learned to program computers in middle school, I got an 800 on my math SAT, won a Westinghouse and a Leipzig, and then I went to MIT, which, by the way, is highly competitive, even for a lowly female like myself, and studied computer science. At MIT, I learned four or five more programming languages and studied psychology with an emphasis on ludic techniques and persuasive designs, and English, including narrative structures, the classics, and the history of interactive storytelling. Got myself a great mentor. Regrettably made him my boyfriend. Suffice it to say, I was young. And then I dropped out of school for a time to make a game because my best frenemy wanted me to. That game became the game you never heard of. But yeah, it sold around two and a half million copies, just in the U.S., so...." Instead, she said, "I like to play games a lot, so I thought I'd see if I could make them.

Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!" "Nonsense! Nonsense!" snorted Tasbrough. "That couldn't happen here in America, not possibly! We're a country of freemen." "The answer to that," suggested Doremus Jessup, "if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?... Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?... Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!

The Resurrection MATTHEW 28  m Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and  n the other Mary went to see the tomb. 2And behold, there was a great earthquake, for  o an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3 p His appearance was like lightning, and  q his clothing white as snow. 4And for fear of him the guards trembled and  r became like dead men. 5But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. 6He is not here, for he has risen,  s as he said. Come, see the place where he [1] lay. 7Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold,  t he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. See, I have told you.” 8So they departed quickly from the tomb  u with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9And behold, Jesus  v met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came up and  w took hold of his feet and  x worshiped him. 10Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid;  y go and tell  z my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.

The Fifth Congress had recessed in July 1798 without declaring war against France, but in the last days before adjourning it did approve other measures championed by Abigail Adams that aided in the undoing of her husband—the Alien and Sedition Acts. Worried about French agents in their midst, the lawmakers passed punitive measures changing the rules for naturalized citizenship and making it legal for the U.S. to round up and detain as “alien enemies” any men over the age of fourteen from an enemy nation after a declaration of war. Abigail heartily approved. But it was the Sedition Act that she especially cheered. It imposed fines and imprisonment for any person who “shall write, print, utter, or publish…any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States” with the intent to defame them. Finally! The hated press would be punished. To Abigail’s way of thinking, the law was long overdue. (Of course she was ready to use the press when it served her purposes, regularly sending information to relatives and asking them to get it published in friendly gazettes.) Back in April she had predicted to her sister Mary that the journalists “will provoke measures that will silence them e’er long.” Abigail kept up her drumbeat against newspapers in letter after letter, grumbling, “Nothing will have an effect until Congress pass a Sedition Bill, which I presume they will do before they rise.” Congress could not act fast enough for the First Lady: “I wish the laws of our country were competent to punish the stirrer up of sedition, the writer and printer of base and unfounded calumny.” She accused Congress of “dilly dallying” about the Alien Acts as well. If she had had her way, every newspaperman who criticized her husband would be thrown in jail, so when the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed and signed, Abigail still wasn’t satisfied. Grumping that they “were shaved and pared to almost nothing,” she told John Quincy that “weak as they are” they were still better than nothing. They would prove to be a great deal worse than nothing for John Adams’s political future, but the damage was done. Congress went home. So did Abigail and John Adams.

KNEE SURGERY I’D FIRST HURT MY KNEES IN FALLUJAH WHEN THE WALL FELL on me. Cortisone shots helped for a while, but the pain kept coming back and getting worse. The docs told me I needed to have my legs operated on, but doing that would have meant I would have to take time off and miss the war. So I kept putting it off. I settled into a routine where I’d go to the doc, get a shot, go back to work. The time between shots became shorter and shorter. It got down to every two months, then every month. I made it through Ramadi, but just barely. My knees started locking and it was difficult to get down the stairs. I no longer had a choice, so, soon after I got home in 2007, I went under the knife. The surgeons cut my tendons to relieve pressure so my kneecaps would slide back over. They had to shave down my kneecaps because I had worn grooves in them. They injected synthetic cartilage material and shaved the meniscus. Somewhere along the way they also repaired an ACL. I was like a racing car, being repaired from the ground up. When they were done, they sent me to see Jason, a physical therapist who specializes in working with SEALs. He’d been a trainer for the Pittsburgh Pirates. After 9/11, he decided to devote himself to helping the country. He chose to do that by working with the military. He took a massive pay cut to help put us back together. I DIDN’T KNOW ALL THAT THE FIRST DAY WE MET. ALL I WANTED to hear was how long it was going to take to rehab. He gave me a pensive look. “This surgery—civilians need a year to get back,” he said finally. “Football players, they’re out eight months. SEALs—it’s hard to say. You hate being out of action and will punish yourselves to get back.” He finally predicted six months. I think we did it in five. But I thought I would surely die along the way. JASON PUT ME INTO A MACHINE THAT WOULD STRETCH MY knee. Every day I had to see how much further I could adjust it. I would sweat up a storm as it bent my knee. I finally got it to ninety degrees. “That’s outstanding,” he told me. “Now get more.” “More?” “More!” He also had a machine that sent a shock to my muscle through electrodes. Depending on the muscle, I would have to stretch and point my toes up and down. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is clearly a form of torture that should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention, even for use on SEALs. Naturally, Jason kept upping the voltage. But the worst of all was the simplest: the exercise. I had to do more, more, more. I remember calling Taya many times and telling her I was sure I was going to puke if not die before the day was out. She seemed sympathetic but, come to think of it in retrospect, she and Jason may have been in on it together. There was a stretch where Jason had me doing crazy amounts of ab exercises and other things to my core muscles. “Do you understand it’s my knees that were operated on?” I asked him one day when I thought I’d reached my limit. He just laughed. He had a scientific explanation about how everything in the body depends on strong core muscles, but I think he just liked kicking my ass around the gym. I swear I heard a bullwhip crack over my head any time I started to slack. I always thought the best shape I was ever in was straight out of BUD/S. But I was in far better shape after spending five months with him. Not only were my knees okay, the rest of me was in top condition. When I came back to my platoon, they all asked if I had been taking steroids.

Thakur still felt that he was groping in the dark. He needed numbers. Arun called in his executive assistant to help. Thakur asked the young man what percentage of the dossiers submitted to regulators contained data that did not match what the company had on file. The assistant was evasive: “It . . . varies from region to region.” “Give me an estimate in each region,” said Thakur. “How about in the U.S.?” The assistant thought for a moment, then estimated, “Perhaps between 50 and 60 percent?” Thakur could barely breathe. Ranbaxy had faked over half its dossiers to the FDA? And that was one of the better regions? “How about Europe?” “About the same,” came the assistant’s reply. “And India?” After some hemming and hawing, the assistant answered, “100 percent.” Testing the drugs for India was just a waste of time, he explained, because no regulators ever looked at the data. So the regional representatives just invented the dossiers on their own and sent them to the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI). What was needed for the DCGI was not real data but good connections, which they had, the assistant explained. The scale of the deception stunned Thakur. He felt physically sick thinking about the patients. Thakur told the men he wanted a breakdown: each product by year, and the problem with each dossier.

JOHN 6 After this  jJesus went away to the other side of  kthe Sea of Galilee, which is  lthe Sea of Tiberias. 2And a large crowd was following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing on the sick. 3Jesus went up on  mthe mountain, and there he sat down with his disciples. 4Now  nthe Passover, the  ofeast of the Jews, was at hand. 5 pLifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to  qPhilip, “Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?” 6He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do. 7 rPhilip answered him, “Two hundred denarii [1] worth of bread would not be enough for each of them to get a little.” 8One of his disciples,  sAndrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, 9“There is a boy here who has five  tbarley loaves and two fish, but  twhat are they for so many?” 10Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.”  uNow there was much grass in the place. So the men sat down, about five thousand in number. 11Jesus then took the loaves, and  vwhen he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated. So also the fish, as much as they wanted. 12And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, “Gather up the leftover fragments, that nothing may be lost.” 13So they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves left by those who had eaten. 14When the people saw the sign that he had done, they said,  w“This is indeed  xthe Prophet  ywho is to come into the world!

When one looks at the all-prevailing schizophrenia of democratic societies, the lies that have to be told for vote-catching purposes, the silence about major issues, the distortions of the press, it is tempting to believe that in totalitarian countries there is less humbug, more facing of the facts. There, at least, the ruling groups are not dependent on popular favour and can utter the truth crudely and brutally. Goering could say ‘Guns before butter’, while his democratic opposite numbers had to wrap the same sentiment up in hundreds of hypocritical words. Actually, however, the avoidance of reality is much the same everywhere, and has much the same consequences. The Russian people were taught for years that they were better off than everybody else, and propaganda posters showed Russian families sitting down to an abundant meal while the proletariat of other countries starved in the gutter. Meanwhile the workers in the western countries were so much better off than those of the U.S.S.R. that non-contact between Soviet citizens and outsiders had to be a guiding principle of policy. Then, as a result of the war, millions of ordinary Russians penetrated far into Europe, and when they return home the original avoidance of reality will inevitably be paid for in frictions of various kinds. The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye. To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

JOHN 14  d“Let not your hearts be troubled.  eBelieve in God; [1] believe also in me. 2In  fmy Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that  gI go to prepare a place for you? [2] 3And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you  hto myself, that  iwhere I am you may be also. 4And you know the way to where I am going.” [3] 5 jThomas said to him, “Lord,  kwe do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” 6Jesus said to him, “I am  lthe way, and  mthe truth, and  nthe life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 oIf you had known me, you would have  pknown my Father also. [4] From now on you do know him and  qhave seen him.” 8 rPhilip said to him, “Lord,  sshow us the Father, and it is enough for us.” 9Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip?  tWhoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10Do you not believe that  uI am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you  vI do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. 11Believe me that  uI am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else  wbelieve on account of the works themselves. 12“Truly, truly, I say to you,  xwhoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I  yam going to the Father. 13 zWhatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that  athe Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 zIf you ask me [5] anything in my name, I will do it.

The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War marks, for me, a turning point in the Negro’s relation to America. To put it briefly, and somewhat too simply, a certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded. One began to pity them, or to hate them. You must put yourself in the skin of a man who is wearing the uniform of his country, is a candidate for death in its defense, and who is called a “nigger” by his comrades-in-arms and his officers; who is almost always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to do; who knows that the white G.I. has informed the Europeans that he is subhuman (so much for the American male’s sexual security); who does not dance at the U.S.O. the night white soldiers dance there, and does not drink in the same bars white soldiers drink in; and who watches German prisoners of war being treated by Americans with more human dignity than he has ever received at their hands. And who, at the same time, as a human being, is far freer in a strange land than he has ever been at home. Home! The very word begins to have a despairing and diabolical ring. You must consider what happens to this citizen, after all he has endured, when he returns—home: search, in his shoes, for a job, for a place to live; ride, in his skin, on segregated buses; see, with his eyes, the signs saying “White” and “Colored,” and especially the signs that say “White Ladies” and “Colored Women”; look into the eyes of his wife; look into the eyes of his son; listen, with his ears, to political speeches, North and South; imagine yourself being told to “wait.” And all this is happening in the richest and freest

Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy? … Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution? … Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We’re ready to start on a Children’s Crusade—only of adults—right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!

there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?. . .Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people

On the eve of Fort Sumter, the governor of South Carolina, Francis Pickens, reportedly acknowledged the clash of realities in a private conversation with a U.S. Army officer in Charleston. Pickens told the army man about “the whole plan and secret of the Southern conspiracy,” admitting that “the South had never been wronged, and that all their pretenses of grievance in the matter of tariffs, or anything else, were invalid. ‘But,’ said [Pickens], ‘we must carry the people with us; and we allege these things, as all statesmen do many things that they do not believe, because they are the only instruments by which the people can be managed.’ He then and there declared that the two sections of the country were so antagonistic in ideas and policies that they could not live together, that it was foreordained that Northern and Southern men must keep apart…and that all the pretenses of the South about wrongs suffered were but pretenses, as they very well knew.” As news of the attack reached Washington—it had rained all night in the national capital as Friday became Saturday—the president of the United States pithily but unmistakably made himself clear. “And, in every event,” Lincoln wrote on Saturday, April 13, “I shall, to the extent of my ability, repel force by force.” His initial policy to hold the nation together had failed. “The last ray of hope for preserving the Union peaceably expired at the assault upon Fort Sumter,” Lincoln remarked. To his friend Orville Browning, the president confided, “Browning, of all the trials I have had since I came here, none begin to compare with those I had between the inauguration and the fall of Fort Sumter. They were so great that could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.” The rebel South would not be convinced. The Union would not hold. War had come.

When Bush and Clinton were talking in 1984, Bush told Clinton ‘when the American people become disillusioned with Republicans leading them into the New World Order, you, as a Democrat, will be put into place.’ I expect that Clinton will be our next President based on that conversation I heard.” “This is serious information!” Billy looked up from his work. “Its no wonder the Feds are worried about your revealing what you know.” “There are a lot of people who know what I know7,” I assured him. “And even more are waking up to reality fast. People with Intelligence operating on a Need-to-Know are gaining insight into a bigger picture with the truth that is emerging. They gain one more piece of the puzzle and the Big Picture suddenly comes into focus. When it does, their paradigms shift. Mark and I are also aware of numerous scientists waking up to the reality of a New World Order agenda who are furious that they’ve been mislead and used. These people are uniting with strength, and the New World Order elite will need to play their hold card and switch political parties. Watch and see. Clinton will appear to ‘defeat’ Bush according to plan, while Bush continues business as usual from behind the scenes of the New World Order.” “Who do you think will follow Clinton?” “A compliant, sleeping public mesmerized by his Oxford learned charisma.” Billy looked up from his work again to clarify his question. “I mean into the Presidency.” “Hillary?” I smiled half-heartedly. “Seriously, she is brighter than Bill, and is even more corrupt. Knowing her, she’d probably rather work behind the scenes, although she may be used as another appearance of ‘change’ since she’s a woman. That’s just speculation based on how these criminals operate. They want to keep their power all in the family. I did see Bush, Jr. being conditioned, and trained for the role of President at the Mount Shasta, California military programming compound in 19868. He’s not very bright, though, so I don’t know how they could possibly prop him up…

sure what happened after the accident was client-protected,” he told Mazzone. By their silence, “Markham and Gargan were taking the big fall to protect Ted Kennedy.” Paul Redmond doubted the lawyer-client issue would even arise at the inquest. “People were walking around Boston whaling the bee-jesus out of Paul Markham and Joe Gargan for not reporting the accident—that was so unfair. Here were two guys, good lawyers and fine men, made to look like stooges or worse by the press.” Gargan had told him he could not have reported an accident in which a driver faced a possible manslaughter charge, Redmond said. “It’s no secret Joe was a dear friend. When I left the U.S. Attorney’s office, Paul Markham took my spot.” A week before the inquest, Redmond bumped into Gargan in the elevator of the building in which both had law offices. The Boiler Room girls were “upstairs,” Redmond said. “They haven’t seen you in a long time. I think they’d like to say hello.” Gargan went straight to Redmond’s office for “a nice reunion, a pleasant chat. Very friendly.” There was no discussion about the inquest. Gargan did not want to become involved in the preparation of anybody else’s testimony. As one of two persons at the party who wasn’t “a bit bombed,” Gargan’s memory of the occasion was “clear as a bell.” So it was Gargan’s description of the party that, along with the Senator’s two public versions of the accident, would provide the scenario for inquest testimony. If Gargan testified to the Senator’s attempt to cover up his involvement in the accident as the reason he had failed to report it until the next day, he could blow the entire lid off the case. But that prospect became moot when a writ of certiorari was filed on Tuesday, September 2, asking the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to determine whether “errors of law” had been made in Judge Boyle’s ruling on the conduct of the scheduled inquest in re: Mary Jo Kopechne. Justice Paul Reardon scheduled a hearing for three o’clock. Notified an appeal had been filed,

I used to be a roller coaster girl" (for Ntozake Shange) I used to be a roller coaster girl 7 times in a row No vertigo in these skinny legs My lipstick bubblegum pink As my panther 10 speed. never kissed Nappy pigtails, no-brand gym shoes White lined yellow short-shorts Scratched up legs pedaling past borders of humus and baba ganoush Masjids and liquor stores City chicken, pepperoni bread and superman ice cream Cones. Yellow black blending with bits of Arabic Islam and Catholicism. My daddy was Jesus My mother was quiet Jayne Kennedy was worshipped by my brother Mark I don’t remember having my own bed before 12. Me and my sister Lisa shared. Sometimes all three Moore girls slept in the Queen. You grow up so close never close enough. I used to be a roller coaster girl Wild child full of flowers and ideas Useless crushes on polish boys in a school full of white girls. Future black swan singing Zeppelin, U2 and Rick Springfield Hoping to be Jessie’s Girl I could outrun my brothers and Everybody else to that reoccurring line I used to be a roller coaster girl Till you told me I was moving too fast Said my rush made your head spin My laughter hurt your ears A scream of happiness A whisper of freedom Pouring out my armpits Sweating up my neck You were always the scared one I kept my eyes open for the entire trip Right before the drop I would brace myself And let that force push my head back into That hard iron seat My arms nearly fell off a few times Still, I kept running back to the line When I was done Same way I kept running back to you I used to be a roller coaster girl I wasn’t scared of mountains or falling Hell, I looked forward to flying and dropping Off this earth and coming back to life every once in a while I found some peace in being out of control allowing my blood to race through my veins for 180 seconds I earned my sometime nicotine pull I buy my own damn drinks & the ocean Still calls my name when it feels my toes Near its shore. I still love roller coasters & you grew up to be Afraid of all girls who cld ride Fearlessly like me.

Some raised a more practical concern, arguing that if Rome really wanted to empty seminaries of gay men—a proposal under consideration at the Vatican—it would face more empty rectories and more barren altars. Some Church experts estimate that from 30 percent to fully one half of the forty-five thousand U.S. priests are gay. “If they were to eliminate all those who were homosexually oriented, the number would be so staggering that it would be like an atomic bomb. It would do the same damage to the Church’s operation,” Sipe said. “And it’s very much against the tradition of the Church. Many saints had a gay orientation. And many popes had gay orientations. Discriminating against orientation is not going to solve the problem.” But the issue was now on the table. At the Vatican meeting, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory of Belleville, Illinois, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told reporters that he was concerned about the increasing number of gays in the priesthood. “One of the difficulties we do face in seminary life or recruitment is when there does exist a homosexual atmosphere or dynamic that makes heterosexual men think twice” about joining the priesthood for fear that they’ll be harassed. “It is an ongoing struggle. It is most importantly a struggle to make sure that the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men [and] that the candidates that we receive are healthy in every possible way—psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually.” And Cardinal Adam J. Maida of Detroit argued that clergy sexual abuse is “not truly a pedophilia-type problem but a homosexual-type problem.… We have to look at this homosexual element as it exists, to what extent it is operative in our seminaries and our priesthood and how to address it.” Bishops need to “cope with and address” the extent of a homosexual presence in Catholic seminaries, he said. Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua of Philadelphia said he wouldn’t let gay men become priests. “We feel that a person who is homosexually oriented is not a suitable candidate for the priesthood even if he has never committed any homosexual act,” he said.

TARYN GRANT, DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE for the U.S. Senate, suffered from narcissistic personality disorder, or so she’d been told by a psychologist in her third year at the Wharton School. He’d added, “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, as long as you don’t go into a life of crime. Half the people here are narcissists. The other half are psychopaths. Well, except for Roland Shafer. He’s normal enough.” Taryn didn’t know Roland Shafer, but all these years later, she sometimes thought about him, and wondered what happened to him, being . . . “normal.” The shrink had explained the disorder to her, in sketchy terms, perhaps trying to be kind. When she left his office, she’d gone straight to the library and looked it up, because she knew in her heart that she was far too perfect to have any kind of disorder. •   •   • NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER: Has excessive feelings of self-importance. Reacts to criticism with rage. Takes advantage of other people. Disregards the feelings of others. Preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, and intelligence. •   •   • EXCESSIVE FEELINGS OF SELF-IMPORTANCE? Did that idiot shrink know she’d inherit the better part of a billion dollars, that she already had enough money to buy an entire industry? She was important. Reacts to criticism with rage? Well, what do you do when you’re mistreated? Shy away from conflict and go snuffle into a Kleenex? Hell no: you get up in their face, straighten them out. Takes advantage of other people? You don’t get anywhere in this world by being a cupcake, cupcake. Disregards the feelings of others? Look: half the people in the world were below average, and “average” isn’t anything to brag about. We should pay attention to the dumbasses in life? How about, “Preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, and intelligence”? Hey, had he taken a good look at her and her CV? She was in the running for class valedictorian; she looked like Marilyn Monroe, without the black spot on her cheek; and she had, at age twenty-two, thirty million dollars of her own, with twenty or thirty times more than that, yet to come. What fantasies? Welcome to my world, bub. •   •   • THAT HAD BEEN more than a decade ago.

BUYING OFF THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS Where are the environmentalists? For fifty years, they’ve been carrying on about overpopulation; promoting family planning, birth control, abortion; and saying old people have a “duty to die and get out of the way”—in Colorado’s Democratic Governor Richard Lamm’s words. In 1971, Oregon governor and environmentalist Tom McCall told a CBS interviewer, “Come visit us again. . . . But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.” How about another 30 million people coming here to live? The Sierra Club began sounding the alarm over the country’s expanding population in 1965—the very year Teddy Kennedy’s immigration act passed65—and in 1978, adopted a resolution expressly asking Congress to “conduct a thorough examination of U.S. immigration laws.” For a while, the Club talked about almost nothing else. “It is obvious,” the Club said two years later, “that the numbers of immigrants the United States accepts affects our population size and growth rate,” even more than “the number of children per family.”66 Over the next three decades, America took in tens of millions of legal immigrants and illegal aliens alike. But, suddenly, about ten years ago, the Sierra Club realized to its embarrassment that importing multiple millions of polluting, fire-setting, littering immigrants is actually fantastic for the environment! The advantages of overpopulation dawned on the Sierra Club right after it received a $100 million donation from hedge fund billionaire David Gelbaum with the express stipulation that—as he told the Los Angeles Times—“if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”67 It would be as if someone offered the Catholic Church $100 million to be pro-abortion. But the Sierra Club said: Sure! Did you bring the check? Obviously, there’s no longer any reason to listen to them on anything. They want us to get all excited about some widening of a road that’s going to disturb a sandfly, but the Sierra Club is totally copasetic with our national parks being turned into garbage dumps. Not only did the Sierra Club never again say another word against immigration, but, in 2004, it went the extra mile, denouncing three actual environmentalists running for the Club’s board, by claiming they were racists who opposed mass immigration. The three “white supremacists” were Dick Lamm, the three-time Democratic governor of Colorado; Frank Morris, former head of the Black Congressional Caucus Foundation; and Cornell professor David Pimentel, who created the first ecology course at the university in 1957 and had no particular interest in immigration.68 But they couldn’t be bought off, so they were called racists.

Esther Agrees to Help the Jews ESTHER 4 When Mordecai learned all that had been done, Mordecai tore his clothes  o and put on sackcloth and ashes, and went out into the midst of the city, and he cried out with a loud and bitter cry. 2He went up to the entrance of the king’s gate, for no one was allowed to enter the king’s gate clothed in sackcloth. 3And in every province, wherever the king’s command and his decree reached, there was great mourning among the Jews,  p with fasting and weeping and lamenting, and many of them  q lay in sackcloth and ashes. 4When Esther’s young women and her eunuchs came and told her, the queen was deeply distressed. She sent garments to clothe Mordecai, so that he might take off his sackcloth, but he would not accept them. 5Then Esther called for Hathach, one of the king’s eunuchs, who had been appointed to attend her, and ordered him to go to Mordecai to learn what this was and why it was. 6Hathach went out to Mordecai in the open square of the city in front of the king’s gate, 7and Mordecai told him all that had happened to him,  r and the exact sum of money that Haman had promised to pay into the king’s treasuries for the destruction of the Jews. 8Mordecai also gave him  s a copy of the written decree issued in Susa for their destruction, that he might show it to Esther and explain it to her and command her to go to the king to beg his favor and plead with him on behalf of her people. 9And Hathach went and told Esther what Mordecai had said. 10Then Esther spoke to Hathach and commanded him to go to Mordecai and say, 11“All the king’s servants and the people of the king’s provinces know that if any man or woman goes to the king inside  t the inner court without being called,  u there is but one law—to be put to death, except the one  v to whom the king holds out the golden scepter so that he may live. But as for me, I have not been called to come in to the king these thirty days.” 12And they told Mordecai what Esther had said. 13Then Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, “Do not think to yourself that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. 14For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” 15Then Esther told them to reply to Mordecai, 16“Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for  w three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law,  x and if I perish, I perish.” 17Mordecai then went away and did everything as Esther had ordered him.

Another obstacle was the stubbornness of the countries the pipeline had to cross, particularly Syria, all of which were demanding what seemed to be exorbitant transit fees. It was also the time when the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel were aggravating American relations with the Arab countries. But the emergence of a Jewish state, along with the American recognition that followed, threatened more than transit rights for the pipeline. Ibn Saud was as outspoken and adamant against Zionism and Israel as any Arab leader. He said that Jews had been the enemies of Arabs since the seventh century. American support of a Jewish state, he told Truman, would be a death blow to American interests in the Arab world, and should a Jewish state come into existence, the Arabs “will lay siege to it until it dies of famine.” When Ibn Saud paid a visit to Aramco’s Dhahran headquarters in 1947, he praised the oranges he was served but then pointedly asked if they were from Palestine—that is, from a Jewish kibbutz. He was reassured; the oranges were from California. In his opposition to a Jewish state, Ibn Saud held what a British official called a “trump card”: He could punish the United States by canceling the Aramco concession. That possibility greatly alarmed not only the interested companies, but also, of course, the U.S. State and Defense departments. Yet the creation of Israel had its own momentum. In 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended the partition of Palestine, which was accepted by the General Assembly and by the Jewish Agency, but rejected by the Arabs. An Arab “Liberation Army” seized the Galilee and attacked the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Violence gripped Palestine. In 1948, Britain, at wit’s end, gave up its mandate and withdrew its Army and administration, plunging Palestine into anarchy. On May 14, 1948, the Jewish National Council proclaimed the state of Israel. It was recognized almost instantly by the Soviet Union, followed quickly by the United States. The Arab League launched a full-scale attack. The first Arab-Israeli war had begun. A few days after Israel’s proclamation of statehood, James Terry Duce of Aramco passed word to Secretary of State Marshall that Ibn Saud had indicated that “he may be compelled, in certain circumstances, to apply sanctions against the American oil concessions… not because of his desire to do so but because the pressure upon him of Arab public opinion was so great that he could no longer resist it.” A hurriedly done State Department study, however, found that, despite the large reserves, the Middle East, excluding Iran, provided only 6 percent of free world oil supplies and that such a cut in consumption of that oil “could be achieved without substantial hardship to any group of consumers.

Another episode startled Trump’s advisers on the Asia trip. As the president and his entourage embarked on the journey, they stopped in Hawaii on November 3 to break up the long flight and allow Air Force One to refuel. White House aides arranged for the president and first lady to make a somber pilgrimage so many of their predecessors had made: to visit Pearl Harbor and honor the twenty-three hundred American sailors, soldiers, and marines who lost their lives there. The first couple was set to take a private tour of the USS Arizona Memorial, which sits just off the coast of Honolulu and straddles the hull of the battleship that sank into the Pacific during the Japanese surprise bombing attack in 1941. As a passenger boat ferried the Trumps to the stark white memorial, the president pulled Kelly aside for a quiet consult. “Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?” Trump asked his chief of staff. Kelly was momentarily stunned. Trump had heard the phrase “Pearl Harbor” and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle, but he did not seem to know much else. Kelly explained to him that the stealth Japanese attack here had devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet and prompted the country’s entrance into World War II, eventually leading the United States to drop atom bombs on Japan. If Trump had learned about “a date which will live in infamy” in school, it hadn’t really pierced his consciousness or stuck with him. “He was at times dangerously uninformed,” said one senior former adviser. Trump’s lack of basic historical knowledge surprised some foreign leaders as well. When he met with President Emmanuel Macron of France at the United Nations back in September 2017, Trump complimented him on the spectacular Bastille Day military parade they had attended together that summer in Paris. Trump said he did not realize until seeing the parade that France had had such a rich history of military conquest. He told Macron something along the lines of “You know, I really didn’t know, but the French have won a lot of battles. I didn’t know.” A senior European official observed, “He’s totally ignorant of everything. But he doesn’t care. He’s not interested.” Tillerson developed a polite and self-effacing way to manage the gaps in Trump’s knowledge. If he saw the president was completely lost in the conversation with a foreign leader, other advisers noticed, the secretary of state would step in to ask a question. As Tillerson lodged his question, he would reframe the topic by explaining some of the basics at issue, giving Trump a little time to think. Over time, the president developed a tell that he would use to get out of a sticky conversation in which a world leader mentioned a topic that was totally foreign or unrecognizable to him. He would turn to McMaster, Tillerson

During his time working for the head of strategy at the bank in the early 1990s, Musk had been asked to take a look at the company’s third-world debt portfolio. This pool of money went by the depressing name of “less-developed country debt,” and Bank of Nova Scotia had billions of dollars of it. Countries throughout South America and elsewhere had defaulted in the years prior, forcing the bank to write down some of its debt value. Musk’s boss wanted him to dig into the bank’s holdings as a learning experiment and try to determine how much the debt was actually worth. While pursuing this project, Musk stumbled upon what seemed like an obvious business opportunity. The United States had tried to help reduce the debt burden of a number of developing countries through so-called Brady bonds, in which the U.S. government basically backstopped the debt of countries like Brazil and Argentina. Musk noticed an arbitrage play. “I calculated the backstop value, and it was something like fifty cents on the dollar, while the actual debt was trading at twenty-five cents,” Musk said. “This was like the biggest opportunity ever, and nobody seemed to realize it.” Musk tried to remain cool and calm as he rang Goldman Sachs, one of the main traders in this market, and probed around about what he had seen. He inquired as to how much Brazilian debt might be available at the 25-cents price. “The guy said, ‘How much do you want?’ and I came up with some ridiculous number like ten billion dollars,” Musk said. When the trader confirmed that was doable, Musk hung up the phone. “I was thinking that they had to be fucking crazy because you could double your money. Everything was backed by Uncle Sam. It was a no-brainer.” Musk had spent the summer earning about fourteen dollars an hour and getting chewed out for using the executive coffee machine, among other status infractions, and figured his moment to shine and make a big bonus had arrived. He sprinted up to his boss’s office and pitched the opportunity of a lifetime. “You can make billions of dollars for free,” he said. His boss told Musk to write up a report, which soon got passed up to the bank’s CEO, who promptly rejected the proposal, saying the bank had been burned on Brazilian and Argentinian debt before and didn’t want to mess with it again. “I tried to tell them that’s not the point,” Musk said. “The point is that it’s fucking backed by Uncle Sam. It doesn’t matter what the South Americans do. You cannot lose unless you think the U.S. Treasury is going to default. But they still didn’t do it, and I was stunned. Later in life, as I competed against the banks, I would think back to this moment, and it gave me confidence. All the bankers did was copy what everyone else did. If everyone else ran off a bloody cliff, they’d run right off a cliff with them. If there was a giant pile of gold sitting in the middle of the room and nobody was picking it up, they wouldn’t pick it up, either.” In

It was discussed and decided that fear would be perpetuated globally in order that focus would stay on the negative rather than allow for soul expression to positively emerge. As people became more fearful and compliant, capacity for free thought and soul expression would diminish. There is a distinct inability to exert soul expression under mind control, and evolution of the human spirit would diminish along with freedom of thought when bombarded with constant negative terrors. Whether Bush and Cheney deliberately planned to raise a collective fear over collective conscious love is doubtful. They did not think, speak, or act in those terms. Instead, they knew that information control gave them power over people, and they were hell-bent to perpetuate it at all costs. Cheney, Bush, and other global elite ushering in the New World Order totally believed in the plan mapped out by artificial intelligence. They were allowing technology to dictate global control. “Life is like a video game,” Bush once told me at the rural multi-million dollar Lampe, Missouri CIA mind control training camp complex designed for Black Ops Special Forces where torture and virtual reality technologies were used. “Since I have access to the technological source of the plans, I dictate the rules of the game.” The rules of the game demanded instantaneous response with no time to consciously think and critically analyze. Constant conscious disruption of thought through television’s burst of light flashes, harmonics, and subconscious subliminals diminished continuity of conscious thought anyway, creating a deficit of attention that could easily be refocused into video game format. DARPA’s artificial intelligence was reliant on secrecy, and a terrifying cover for reality was chosen to divert people from the simple truth. Since people perceive aliens as being physical like them, it was decided that the technological reality could be disguised according to preconceptions. Through generations of genetic encoding dating back to the beginning of man, serpents incite an innate autogenic response system in humans to “freeze” in terror. George Bush was excited at the prospects of diverting people from truth by fear through perpetuating lizard-like serpent alien misconceptions. “People fear what they don’t know anyway. By compounding that fear with autogenic fear response, they won’t want to look into Pandora’s Box.” Through deliberate generation of fear; suppression of facts under the 1947 National Security Act; Bush’s stint as CIA director during Ford’s Administration; the Warren Commission’s whitewash of the Kennedy Assassination; secrecy artificially ensured by mind control particularly concerning DARPA, HAARP, Roswell, Montauk, etc; and with people’s fluidity of conscious thought rapidly diminishing; the secret government embraced the proverbial ‘absolute power that corrupts absolutely.’ According to New World Order plans being discussed at the Grove, plans for reducing the earth’s population was a high priority. Mass genocide of so-called “undesirables” through the proliferation of AIDS4 was high on Bush’s agenda. “We’ll annihilate the niggers at their source, beginning in South and East Africa and Haiti5.” Having heard Bush say those words is by far one of the most torturous things I ever endured. Equally as torturous to my being were the discussions on genetic engineering, human cloning, and depletion of earth’s natural resources for profit. Cheney remarked that no one would be able to think to stop technology’s plan. “I’ll destroy the planet first,” Bush had vowed.

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson later said that there should be a “consilience” between art and science. 79 Former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison took selected images with her on her first trip to space, including a poster of dancer and former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Judith Jamison performing the dance Cry, and a Bundu statue from Sierra Leone, because, as she said, “the creativity that allowed us . . . to conceive and build and launch the space shuttle, springs from the same source as the imagination and analysis it took to carve a Bundu statue, or the ingenuity it took to design, choreograph, and stage ‘Cry.’ . . . That’s what we have to reconcile in our minds, how these things fit together.” 80 As a jazz musician once told me, musicians are mathematicians as well as artists. Morse’s story suggests that the argument started not because of the need to bring art and science together, but because they were once not so far apart. 81 When Frank Jewett Mather Jr. of The Nation stated that Morse “was an inventor superimposed upon an artist,” it was factually true. 82 Equally true is that Morse could become an inventor because he was an artist all the while. In one of the final paintings that laid him flat, the painting that failed to secure his last attempt at a commission, one he had worked fifteen years to achieve, Morse may have left a clue about his shift from art to invention, and the fact that the skills required for both are the same. He painted The House of Representatives (1822–23) as evidence of his suitability for a commission from Congress to complete a suite of paintings that still adorn the U.S. Capitol building. The painting has an odd compositional focus. In the center is a man screwing in an oil chandelier, preoccupied with currents. Morse was “rejected beyond hope of appeal” by the congressional commission led by John Quincy Adams. When he toured the picture for seven weeks—displayed in a coffee house in Salem, Massachusetts, and at exhibitions in New York, Boston, Middleton, and Hartford, Connecticut—it lost twenty dollars in the first two weeks. Compounded by a litany of embarrassing, near-soul-stealing artistic failures, he took to his bed for weeks, “more seriously depressed than ever.” This final rejection forced him to shift his energies to his telegraph invention. 83 By 1844 Morse went to the Capitol focused on a current that would occupy the work of Congress—obtaining a patent for the telegraph.

At the time, we were told that this was also the area from which up to ninety-eight percent of the opium, and eventually heroin, that enters the U.S. originates. The Taliban would use the profits of that sale to fund their terrorist activities. I remember thinking in those early days in the country when we were being so heavily fired on, from where the heck did these guys get all their armament?

Become a junk mail detective. • Commercial catalogs: Go to CatalogChoice.org (they cancel catalogs for you) or call the catalogs directly. I opted out and I have never been happier with my personal sense of decorating and celebrating. • First-class mail: Do not open the unwanted letter. Its postage includes return service; you can write “Refused—Return to sender” and “Take me off your mailing list” on the front of the unopened envelope. I keep a pen in my mailbox for that specific purpose. • Mail addressed to the previous resident: Fill out a U.S. Postal Service change-of-address card for each previous resident. In lieu of a new address, write: “Moved, no forwarding address.” In the signature area, sign your name and write “Form filled by current resident of home [your name], agent for the above.” Hand the form to your carrier or postal clerk. • For standard/ third-class presorted mail: Do not open those that mention “return service requested,” “forwarding service requested,” “change service requested,” or “address service requested.” These postages also include return service, so here, too, you can write “Refused—Return to sender” and “Take me off your mailing list” on the front of an unopened envelope. Otherwise, open the letter, look for contact info, then call/ email/ write to be taken off the mailing list. These items typically include promotional flyers, brochures, and coupon packs. Make sure to also request that your name or address not be sold, rented, shared, or traded. • Bulk mail: Inexpensive bulk mailing, used for items such as community education catalogs, allows advertisers to mail to all homes in a carrier route. It is not directly addressed to a specific name or address but to “local” or “postal customer,” and is therefore most difficult to stop. A postal supervisor told me that my carrier had to deliver them and that he could take them back when refused, but since the postage does not include return service, the mailman would simply throw the mail away with no further action. The best way to reduce the production of such mailings is to contact the senders directly and convince them to either choose a different type of postage or adopt Internet communication instead. In the case of community-born mailing, one could also persuade his/ her city council to boycott the postage preference. But ideally, the U.S. Postal Service would not even provide this wasteful option.

In early 1991, although the Stern-Robertson plan was far from finalized, the decision was made to announce the new-town project to the public. Before that could happen, the new town needed a name. The development team had been kicking around dozens of names, but nothing seemed to click. Some people like to Oak Tree. Others favored Green Meadows. But nobody liked any of them much. One day Eisner and his wife, Jane dropped by the teams offices in a nondescript building off the Disney property, near International Drive in Orlando. Eisner asked whether a name had been selected and was told it had not. However, Celebration Gardens had been listed as a potential name for the shopping mall." I think it's a better name for the town, " replied Eisner, with his wife nodding her agreement... "We are so happy to find a name that he actually liked that we latched onto it, " said Killoren, although the decision was later made to chop off the final word and just call the town Celebration.

He sings, in one of the deepest lyrics in all of his oeuvre, “Would you run to me if somebody hurt you, even if that somebody was me?” Could I be the shoulder you cry on and could the bond between us be so deep that I’m the one you want holding you after I made you cry? Could I be your salvation if I’m the sinner? When he snaps back to a male perspective he remains female focused, sweetly trying to win her over in a way that he thinks she would want, ways that move through intimacy rather than traditional masculine expressions of sexuality. He offers a tickle war that’ll make her laugh and laugh then suggests he’ll kiss her down there where it counts and “drink every ounce” and then they’ll have the ultimate cuddlefest: “I’ll hold u tight and hold u long and together we’ll stare into silence and we’ll try 2 imagine what it looks like.” People say Prince did crave that sort of intimacy in his relationships with women even as he struggled with the intimacy he wanted. Two lines in “If I Was Your Girlfriend” stand out after talking with people close to Prince. When he’s imagining himself as her girlfriend he sings, “Would u let me wash your hair?” And later as a man he says, “Would u let me give u a bath?” Those desires I’m told are part of his real life. Someone who was intimate with him and knows others who were, too, says Prince was not doing exactly as much screwing as he’d have you believe. I was told by someone who knows that Prince loves to bathe women. And brush their hair. And sometimes he did these things in lieu of intercourse. It was not part of trying to get laid or deepen the sexual experience, but as a worshipful appreciation of femininity. A person who was close to Prince said, “One girl told me that she got frustrated because he’d rather bathe her.

The president fundamentally wants to be liked” was Katie Walsh’s analysis. “He just fundamentally needs to be liked so badly that it’s always … everything is a struggle for him.” This translated into a constant need to win something—anything. Equally important, it was essential that he look like a winner. Of course, trying to win without consideration, plan, or clear goals had, in the course of the administration’s first nine months, resulted in almost nothing but losses. At the same time, confounding all political logic, that lack of a plan, that impulsivity, that apparent joie de guerre, had helped create the disruptiveness that seemed to so joyously shatter the status quo for so many. But now, Bannon thought, that novelty was finally wearing off. For Bannon, the Strange-Moore race had been a test of the Trump cult of personality. Certainly Trump continued to believe that people were following him, that he was the movement—and that his support was worth 8 to 10 points in any race. Bannon had decided to test this thesis and to do it as dramatically as possible. All told, the Senate Republican leadership and others spent $ 32 million on Strange’s campaign, while Moore’s campaign spent $ 2 million. Trump, though aware of Strange’s deep polling deficit, had agreed to extend his support in a personal trip. But his appearance in Huntsville, Alabama, on September 22, before a Trump-size crowd, was a political flatliner. It was a full-on Trump speech, ninety minutes of rambling and improvisation—the wall would be built (now it was a see-through wall), Russian interference in the U.S. election was a hoax, he would fire anybody on his cabinet who supported Moore. But, while his base turned out en masse, still drawn to Trump the novelty, his cheerleading for Luther Strange drew at best a muted response. As the crowd became restless, the event threatened to become a hopeless embarrassment. Reading his audience and desperate to find a way out, Trump suddenly threw out a line about Colin Kaepernick taking to his knee while the national anthem played at a National Football League game. The line got a standing ovation. The president thereupon promptly abandoned Luther Strange for the rest of the speech. Likewise, for the next week he continued to whip the NFL. Pay no attention to Strange’s resounding defeat five days after the event in Huntsville. Ignore the size and scale of Trump’s rejection and the Moore-Bannon triumph, with its hint of new disruptions to come. Now Trump had a new topic, and a winning one: the Knee.

A true opponent of Russia would have championed a stronger U.S. nuclear deterrent. Clinton didn’t. As a nuclear war expert with long experience in government told me, our nuclear arsenal is so badly deteriorated after eight years of Obama, we won’t see a new replacement warhead until after Trump completes his second term in office. That is the extent to which Obama’s stewardship effectively sabotaged our strategic deterrent. And Hillary Clinton would have extended that sabotage.

didnt i just say we were both violent to each other???? i didnt post the pictures of the bruises because i know i gae you some too.... now you're hating on me entirely while i was neutral pretty much the whole time bro. Plus, you tell me i block u off? HELLO, YOU DO IT TOO AND ACTUALLY MORE THAN ME. BRUH YOURE A HYPOCRITE WHILE I WAS TRYING TO MAKE THE POST SOUND LIKE I WASNT BLAMING YOU BECAUSE I DONT WANT TO. You focused on work? you told me i changed so much and you're so proud of me the last time we had a shoot. Plus, i share all my money with you because i know you dont come from a wealty family and my parents were not happy about that but i empathised with you and i know you built me up to this day thats why taking care of you was part of my duty as well.

Let’s look at your average American Muslim, someone like Siraj Wahaj, the recipient of the American Muslim community’s highest honors. Mr. Wahaj had the privilege in June of 1991 of becoming the first Muslim to deliver a daily prayer before the U.S. House of Representatives. In his prayer he recited from the Koran and appealed to almighty God to guide America’s leaders ‘and grant them righteousness and wisdom.’ The same Wahaj spoke to a Muslim audience a year later in New Jersey. This time Wahaj was singing a different tune to a different audience, and his words were far from his moderate ones in front of the U.S. House of Representatives. ‘If only Muslims were more clever politically,’ he told his New Jersey listeners, ‘they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate. If we were united and strong, we’d elect our own emir [leader] and give allegiance to him. . . . [T]ake my word, if 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us." If Wahaj is the example of the American Muslim community and the receiver of its highest honors, who needs enemies? If this is whom our government calls a ‘moderate’ and invites to deliver a prayer before the House of Representatives, we have ignorant elected officials sitting in our capital running our country. Do you feel safer now knowing that not all Muslims are plane-flying, bomb-wearing, or car-driving terrorists? Talking about overthrowing our government and replacing it with an Islamic caliphate is terrorism of a different kind, but it is still terrorism. This is the more dangerous kind, the kind that circles you slowly, so that by the time you realize you are about to be killed, it’s already too late to do anything about it. Where is the outrage? Have we lost our sense of patriotism and loyalty to America? Do you consider this ‘moderation’? A highly respected, award-winning Muslim from the Islamic American community calling to overthrow the United States government?

Photos have emerged establishing that David William Ferrie had been in the same Civil Air Patrol unit as Lee Harvey Oswald and apparently Ferrie had met with Oswald during the summer of 1963. Ferrie was extremely against the Communistic philosophy. He was a member of the anti-Castro Cuban Revolutionary group, and was dubbed the master of intrigue. Once when he gave an anti-Kennedy speech to an American veterans’ group in New Orleans regarding the Bay of Pigs Invasion, his rant against the President was so belligerent that he was asked to leave the podium. On February 22, 1967, Ferrie mysteriously died of a stroke. The strange part concerning his death was that he left behind two suicide notes and then died of natural causes. In the days preceding his death, he had told friends that he was a dead man. Ferrie was only one of many who were somehow connected to Kennedy’s death and who later died in a mysterious way.

Just before Thanksgiving, I met with Bunker Hunt, then the richest man in the world, at the Petroleum Club in Dallas. Bud Dillard, a Texan friend and client of mine who was big in the oil and cattle businesses, had introduced us a couple of years before, and we regularly talked about the economy and markets, especially inflation. Just a few weeks before our meeting, Iranian militants had stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking fifty-two Americans hostage. There were long lines to buy gas and extreme market volatility. There was clearly a sense of crisis: The nation was confused, frustrated, and angry. Bunker saw the debt crisis and inflation risks pretty much as I saw them. He’d been wanting to get his wealth out of paper money for the past few years, so he’d been buying commodities, especially silver, which he had started purchasing for about $ 1.29 per ounce, as a hedge against inflation. He kept buying and buying as inflation and the price of silver went up, until he had essentially cornered the silver market. At that point, silver was trading at around $ 10. I told him I thought it might be a good time to get out because the Fed was becoming tight enough to raise short-term interest rates above long-term rates (which was called “inverting the yield curve”). Every time that happened, inflation-hedged assets and the economy went down. But Bunker was in the oil business, and the Middle East oil producers he talked to were still worried about the depreciation of the dollar. They had told him they were also going to buy silver as a hedge against inflation so he held on to it in the expectation that its price would continue to rise. I got out.

Mom and Dad rented a great big U-Haul truck. Mom explained that since only she and Dad could fit in the front of the U-Haul, Lori, Brian, Maureen, and I were in for a treat: We got to ride in the back. It would be fun, she said, a real adventure, but there wouldn’t be any light, so we would have to use all our resources to entertain one another. Plus we were not allowed to talk. Since it was illegal to ride in the back, anyone who heard us might call the cops. Mom told us the trip would be about fourteen hours if we took the highway, but we should tack on another couple of hours because we might make some scenic detours.

It was now my responsibility to build my own culture within the U.S. Attorney’s office, one that would get the best out of our team and drawing, in different ways, on the lessons of Giuliani and Fahey. I tried to attend to this task from the very first day. I hired about fifty new prosecutors during my time as U.S. Attorney and sat with each of them as they took the oath of office. I invited them to bring their families. I told them that something remarkable was going to happen when they stood up and said they represented the United States of America—total strangers were going to believe what they said next. I explained to them that, although I didn’t want to burst their bubbles, this would not happen because of them. It would happen because of those who had gone before them and, through hundreds of promises made and kept, and hundreds of truths told and errors instantly corrected, built something for them. I called it a reservoir. I told them it was a reservoir of trust and credibility built for you and filled for you by people you never knew, by those who are long gone. A reservoir that makes possible so much of the good that is done by the institution you serve. A remarkable gift. I would explain to these bright young lawyers that, like all great gifts, this one comes with a responsibility, a solemn obligation to guard and protect that reservoir and pass it on to those who follow as full as you received it, or maybe even fuller. I would explain that the problem with reservoirs is that they take a very long time to fill but they can be drained by one hole in the dam. The actions of one person can destroy what it took hundreds of people years to build.

the next stop, this really annoying girl in my class named Andrea who thinks she knows everything got on the bus with curly brown hair. Well, the bus didn’t have curly brown hair. Andrea did. “Bingle boo, Andrea!” said Mrs. Kormel. “Bingle boo,” Andrea said. “I’ll go limpus kidoodle now.” What a brownnoser! Andrea plopped her dumb self down in the seat right in front of me, like always. “Good morning, Arlo,” she said. I hate her. Andrea’s mother found out that A.J. stands for Arlo Jervis, so Andrea went and told everybody. It was the worst day of my life. I thought I was gonna die. I wanted to switch schools or move to Antarctica and go live with the penguins, but my mom wouldn’t let me. Penguins are cool. “Are you boys ready for the big spelling test this afternoon?” Andrea asked. Oh no. I forgot all about the big dumb spelling test! How can I be expected to remember stuff over the weekend? Weekends are for having fun, not for studying for tests. I hate spelling. “Do you know how to spell ‘spelling,’ A.J.?” asked Andrea. “Sure,” I said. “I-H-A-T-E-Y-O-U.” Michael and Ryan laughed.

While I was in the partisan unit, I received a letter from my husband by some miracle. This was such a joy, so unexpected, because for two years I had heard nothing from him. And then a plane dropped some food, ammunition…And the mail…And in the mail, in this canvas bag, there was a letter—for me. Then I wrote a letter to the Central Committee. I wrote that I would do anything so long as my husband and I were together. We waited for the plane, it was nighttime and pitch-dark. And some sort of plane was circling over us, and then it dumped bombs on us. It was a Messerschmitt. The German had spotted our camp and circled back again. And at the same time our plane, a U-2, arrived and landed just by the fir tree where I was standing. The pilot barely landed and immediately began to take off again, because he saw that the German was circling back and would start shooting again. I took hold of the wing and shouted, “I must go to Moscow, I have permission.” He even swore: “Get in!” And we flew together, just the two of us. I figured out from the postal code where my husband was fighting... They said, “You know, it’s very dangerous where your husband is…” I sat there and wept, so he took pity on me and gave me the pass. “Go out to the highway,” he said. “There’ll be a traffic controller, he’ll tell you how to go.” I arrive at the unit, everybody’s surprised, “Who are you?” they ask. I couldn’t say I was a wife. I tell them—his sister. “Wait,” they tell me, “it’s a four-mile walk to the trenches.” They told him that his sister had arrived. What sister? They say, “The redhead.” His sister had black hair. So he figured out at once what sister. I don’t know how he managed to crawl out of there, but he came soon, and he and I met. What joy… Suddenly I see the superiors coming to the dugout: the major, the colonel. Everybody shakes my hand. Then we sat down and drank, and each of them said something about a wife finding her husband in the trenches. That’s a real wife! The next day my husband was wounded, badly wounded. We ran together, we waded together through some swamp, we crawled together. The machine guns kept rattling, and we kept crawling, and he got wounded in the hip. With an exploding bullet, and try bandaging that—it was in the buttock. It was all torn open, and mud and dirt all over. We were encircled and tried to break out. There was nowhere to take the wounded, and there were no medications. When we did break through, I took my husband to the hospital. I buried him on January 1, and thirty-eight days later I gave birth to a son.

I’m amazed at how this has snowballed into such a media event. It began last week when I saw a national news report by Tom Brokaw about this adorable little lady from Georgia, Mrs. Hill, who was trying to save her farm from being foreclosed. Her sixty-seven-year-old husband had committed suicide a few weeks earlier, hoping his life insurance would save the farm, which had been in the family for generations. But the insurance proceeds weren’t nearly enough. It was a very sad situation, and I was moved. Here were people who’d worked very hard and honestly all their lives, only to see it all crumble before them. To me, it just seemed wrong. Through NBC I was put in touch with a wonderful guy from Georgia named Frank Argenbright, who’d become very involved in trying to help Mrs. Hill. Frank directed me to the bank that held Mrs. Hill’s mortgage. The next morning, I called and got some vice president on the line. I explained that I was a businessman from New York, and that I was interested in helping Mrs. Hill. He told me he was sorry, but that it was too late. They were going to auction off the farm, he said, and “nothing or no one is going to stop it.” That really got me going. I said to the guy: “You listen to me. If you do foreclose, I’ll personally bring a lawsuit for murder against you and your bank, on the grounds that you harassed Mrs. Hill’s husband to his death.” All of a sudden the bank officer sounded very nervous and said he’d get right back to me. Sometimes it pays to be a little wild. An hour later I got a call back from the banker, and he said, “Don’t worry, we’re going to work it out, Mr. Tramp.” Mrs. Hill and Frank Argenbright told the media, and the next thing I knew, it was the lead story on the network news. By the end of the week, we’d raised $40,000. Imus alone raised almost $20,000 by appealing to his listeners. As a Christmas present to Mrs. Hill and her family, we’ve scheduled a mortgage-burning ceremony for Christmas Eve in the atrium of Trump Tower. By then, I’m confident, we’ll have raised all the money. I’ve promised Mrs. Hill that if we haven’t, I’ll make up any difference. I tell Imus he’s the greatest, and I invite him to be my guest one day next week at the tennis matches at the U.S. Open. I have a courtside box and I used to go myself almost every day. Now I’m so busy I mostly just send my friends.

If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there

On the morning of November 10, 2007, Obama was determined to woo one voting block that seemed estranged from Clinton’s campaign. Obama was going to win over white farmers. Obama set himself apart from Clinton by staking out territory on farm policy that Clinton had largely abandoned. As he traveled the state, Obama heard stories about the rising power of corporations like Tyson Foods, Monsanto, Smithfield, and ConAgra. He heard a narrative of frustration, and he appealed to it. Obama told farmers that his administration would take a different approach to agriculture, and it would take on the oligarchy of giant corporations that now dominated U.S. food production. So

Business was booming for Tiffany & Co. in the late 1990s, thanks to the introduction of a new affordable silver jewellery line. The $110 silver charm bracelet inscribed with the Tiffany name was coveted by teenage girls, causing sales of the new silver product line to skyrocket 67% between 1997 and 2002. By 2003, company earnings had doubled and the silver jewellery line accounted for a third of Tiffany’s U.S. sales. And yet the queues of excited girls didn’t fill the store managers with joy. Sure, sales were up and stores were busy, but the people close to the brand, who understood its heritage, began to worry that this lower price point would forever change how the brand was perceived by its high-end customers. “We didn’t want the brand to be defined by any single product.” —Michael Kowalski, CEO, Tiffany & Co. Despite some unease from investors, Tiffany raised prices on their most popular silver products by 30% over the next three years and managed to halt the growth of their highly profitable silver line. And so the company sacrificed short-term gain and profits for the long-term good of the brand by telling the story they wanted customers to believe—that Tiffany’s represents something special. A client recently told me about her friend’s excited engagement announcement on Facebook. All she did was post a photo of the Tiffany blue box—not a picture of the ring in sight. The box alone was enough to say everything she wanted to say. QUESTIONS FOR YOU How are you least like the competition?

Guidelines for ROE 1. When on post, mobile, or foot patrol, keep loaded magazine in weapon, bolt closed, weapon on safe, no round in the chamber. 2. Do not chamber a round unless told to do so by a commissioned officer unless you must act in immediate self-defense where deadly force is authorized. 3. Keep ammo for crew-served weapons readily available but not loaded. Weapon is on safe. 4. Call local forces to assist in self-defense effort. Notify headquarters. 5. Use only minimum degree of force to accomplish any mission. 6. Stop the use of force when it is no longer needed to accomplish the mission. 7. If you receive effective hostile fire, direct your fire at the source. If possible, use friendly snipers. 8. Respect civilian property; do not attack it unless absolutely necessary to protect friendly forces. 9. Protect innocent civilians from harm. 10. Respect and protect recognized medical agencies such as Red Cross, Red Crescent, etc. Col. Jim Mead’s 32nd MAU was relieved by Col. Tom Stokes’s 24th MAU on October 30, 1982. The transition was seamless, morale was high, and all hands assumed their responsibilities enthusiastically. Colonel Stokes also honored the Ministry of Defense’s request to help train the LAF. The government of Lebanon (GOL) introduced conscription, and young men from all over Lebanon answered the call to colors. The various religious groups—the Christians, Druze, Sunnis, and Shiites—were being trained and integrated into the Lebanese Army. Although the U.S. Army already had an ongoing training mission in effect, it was viewed that the Marines’ additional training would quickly improve the LAF’s combat capabilities. The results of the training courses led to their expansion, particularly among the noncommissioned officers (NCOs). The religious integration of the LAF was a major goal of its commander, Gen. Ibrahim Tannous, who wanted to produce a true national army. The Marine training was contributing to that end.

During NASA’s first fifty years the agency’s accomplishments were admired globally. Democratic and Republican leaders were generally bipartisan on the future of American spaceflight. The blueprint for the twenty-first century called for sustaining the International Space Station and its fifteen-nation partnership until at least 2020, and for building the space shuttle’s heavy-lift rocket and deep spacecraft successor to enable astronauts to fly beyond the friendly confines of low earth orbit for the first time since Apollo. That deep space ship would fly them again around the moon, then farther out to our solar system’s LaGrange points, and then deeper into space for rendezvous with asteroids and comets, learning how to deal with radiation and other deep space hazards before reaching for Mars or landings on Saturn’s moons. It was the clearest, most reasonable and best cost-achievable goal that NASA had been given since President John F. Kennedy’s historic decision to land astronauts on the lunar surface. Then Barack Obama was elected president. The promising new chief executive gave NASA short shrift, turning the agency’s future over to middle-level bureaucrats with no dreams or vision, bent on slashing existing human spaceflight plans that had their genesis in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush White Houses. From the starting gate, Mr. Obama’s uncaring space team rolled the dice. First they set up a presidential commission designed to find without question we couldn’t afford the already-established spaceflight plans. Thirty to sixty thousand highly skilled jobs went on the chopping block with space towns coast to coast facing 12 percent unemployment. $9.4 billion already spent on heavy-lift rockets and deep space ships was unashamedly flushed down America’s toilet. The fifty-year dream of new frontiers was replaced with the shortsighted obligations of party politics. As 2011 dawned, NASA, one of America’s great science agencies, was effectively defunct. While Congress has so far prohibited the total cancellation of the space agency’s plans to once again fly astronauts beyond low earth orbit, Obama space operatives have systematically used bureaucratic tricks to slow roll them to a crawl. Congress holds the purse strings and spent most of 2010 saying, “Wait just a minute.” Thousands of highly skilled jobs across the economic spectrum have been lost while hundreds of billions in “stimulus” have been spent. As of this writing only Congress can stop the NASA killing. Florida’s senior U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, a former spaceflyer himself, is leading the fight to keep Obama space advisors from walking away from fifty years of national investment, from throwing the final spade of dirt on the memory of some of America’s most admired heroes. Congressional committees have heard from expert after expert that Mr. Obama’s proposal would be devastating. Placing America’s future in space in the hands of the Russians and inexperienced commercial operatives is foolhardy. Space legend John Glenn, a retired Democratic Senator from Ohio, told president Obama that “Retiring the space shuttles before the country has another space ship is folly. It could leave Americans stranded on the International Space Station with only a Russian spacecraft, if working, to get them off.” And Neil Armstrong testified before the Senate’s Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee that “With regard to President Obama’s 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement. Rumors abound that neither the NASA Administrator nor the President’s Science and Technology Advisor were knowledgeable about the plan. Lack of review normally guarantees that there will be overlooked requirements and unwelcome consequences. How could such a chain of events happen?

Paul Costelloe One of the most established and experienced names in British fashion, Irish-born Paul Costelloe has maintained a highly successful design label for more than twenty-five years. He was educated in Paris and Milan, and has since become known for his expertise in fabrics, primarily crisp linen and tweed. I was commuting to London from Ireland at the time when I got a call to come to Kensington Palace. I got a minicab and threw some garments in the back of the car, and the driver drove me to Kensington Palace. The police at the gate were surprised to see a battered minicab--it was no black cab, if you know the difference between a black cab and a minicab in London (a minicab is half the price of a black cab and always more battered). Anyway, they asked me who I was. I said, “I have an appointment to see Diana,” and they told me to wait. They were reluctant to let me through the gates--it was during the major troubles in Northern Ireland, during the mid to late seventies and early eighties, when Belfast was blazing--but I was soon met at the door. I remember hauling my garments up the stairs of the palace. I fell. Diana came halfway down the stairs and gave me a hand with the garments. Then we went into the living room and had a lovely cup of tea, and I met the children, William and Harry. She tried on some of the garments right there in front of me. I (being a confirmed heterosexual) found her very attraction. I came back down the stairs, and half an hour later she made her selection. She was a perfect size 10 (that would be a U.S. size 8), except she was tall, so a few things had to be lengthened. She was an absolute delight. Afterward, I went into Hyde Park for the afternoon and sat on a bench. I just couldn’t believe what had just happened!

He pursed his lips as if wrestling with how much he wanted to say, then finally told me. “Have you seen news accounts of the mass graves found south of the border?” I nodded. Mass graves containing scores of murder victims were sometimes found, and were so horrific they made national news in the U.S. He said, “These were immigrants abducted for ransom, Mr. Cole. Bajadores leave no witnesses. Let us hold a good thought until we know more.” I thanked Mr. Locano for his help, and went out to my car. I wanted to talk with Pike about what he had found, but Starkey called as I got into my car. “I

Meanwhile, angered by white violence in the South and inspired by the gigantic June 23 march in Detroit, grassroots people on the streets all over the country had begun talking about marching on Washington. “It scared the white power structure in Washington, D.C. to death,” as Malcolm put it in his “Message to the Grassroots” and in his Autobiography.6 So the White House called in the Big Six national Negro leaders and arranged for them to be given the money to control the march. The result was what Malcolm called the “Farce on Washington” on August 28, 1963. John Lewis, then chairman of SNCC and fresh from the battlefields of Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama where hundreds of blacks and their white student allies were being beaten and murdered simply for trying to register blacks to vote, was forced to delete references to the revolution and power from his speech and, specifically, to take out the sentence, “We will not wait for the President, the Justice Department nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory.” Marchers were instructed to carry only official signs and to sing only one song, “We Shall Overcome.” As a result, many rank-and-file SNCC militants refused to participate.7 Meanwhile, conscious of the tensions that were developing around preparations for the march on Washington and in order to provide a national rallying point for the independent black movement, Conrad Lynn and William Worthy, veterans in the struggle and old friends of ours, issued a call on the day of the march for an all-black Freedom Now Party. Lynn, a militant civil rights and civil liberties lawyer, had participated in the first Freedom Ride from Richmond, Virginia, to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1947 and was one of Robert Williams’s attorneys.8 Worthy, a Baltimore Afro-American reporter and a 1936–37 Nieman Fellow, had distinguished himself by his courageous actions in defense of freedom of the press, including spending forty-one days in the Peoples Republic of China in 1957 in defiance of the U.S. travel ban (for which his passport was lifted) and traveling to Cuba without a passport following the Bay of Pigs invasion in order to help produce a documentary. The prospect of a black independent party terrified the Democratic Party. Following the call for the Freedom Now Party, Kennedy twice told the press that a political division between whites and blacks would be “fatal.

Hell, you knew she had baggage. Layers. You told me you wanted to find out everything about her. Find out why she doesn’t have a family. Find out why she’s all alone in New York. Find out why she’s living in Pete’s spare room until tomorrow.” I spin to face him. “She’s living with Pete and Reagan?” I didn’t know about that. “Why?” He shrugs. “She had to move out of the dorm after graduation. They had an empty room. But Reagan’s parents are coming to stay for two weeks, so she’s going somewhere else.” “Where?” I ask quickly. He shrugs. “Does it matter?” But he’s grinning. Fuck yeah, it matters. “Is she going to stay with one of the douchebags?” “What douchebags?” Matt scratches his head. “Never mind,” I say. Hope swells within me. I shouldn’t let it, but it does. I get out a piece of paper and write on it in magic marker: ROOM FOR RENT PRICE NEGOTIABLE ONLY BEAUTIFUL LITTLE BOMBSHELLS NEED APPLY PREFERABLY ONES NAMED FRIDAY I walk out of the back room and go to the bulletin board. I stick a thumbtack in the “advertisement” and walk away. I hear a snicker from behind me and turn to grin at Logan. You’re a d-o-o-f-u-s, he signs, fingerspelling the last word because there’s no sign for something so stupid. I know, I sign back. He looks a little worried for me, but I don’t care. I can’t get where I want to go if I don’t take a first step. Regardless of whether or not she’s pregnant, she needs a place to stay and I have two empty rooms. And she’s family, for Christ’s sake. I’ve never wanted to eat out a member of my family, though. I scratch my head. I should probably stop thinking like that. I whistle to myself as I walk to my office. I have some paperwork to do before my first appointment arrives. And I need to give Friday time to find my ad.

From the Bridge” by Captain Hank Bracker Behind “The Exciting Story of Cuba” It was on a rainy evening in January of 2013, after Captain Hank and his wife Ursula returned by ship from a cruise in the Mediterranean, that Captain Hank was pondering on how to market his book, Seawater One. Some years prior he had published the book “Suppressed I Rise.” But lacking a good marketing plan the book floundered. Locally it was well received and the newspapers gave it great reviews, but Ursula was battling allergies and, unfortunately, the timing was off, as was the economy. Captain Hank has the ability to see sunshine when it’s raining and he’s not one easily deterred. Perhaps the timing was off for a novel or a textbook, like the Scramble Book he wrote years before computers made the scene. The history of West Africa was an option, however such a book would have limited public interest and besides, he had written a section regarding this topic for the second Seawater book. No, what he was embarking on would have to be steeped in history and be intertwined with true-life adventures that people could identify with. Out of the blue, his friend Jorge suggested that he write about Cuba. “You were there prior to the Revolution when Fidel Castro was in jail,” he ventured. Laughing, Captain Hank told a story of Mardi Gras in Havana. “Half of the Miami Police Department was there and the Coca-Cola cost more than the rum. Havana was one hell of a place!” Hank said. “I’ll tell you what I could do. I could write a pamphlet about the history of the island. It doesn’t have to be very long… 25 to 30 pages would do it.” His idea was to test the waters for public interest and then later add it to his book Seawater One. Writing is a passion surpassed only by his love for telling stories. It is true that Captain Hank had visited Cuba prior to the Revolution, but back then he was interested more in the beauty of the Latino girls than the history or politics of the country. “You don’t have to be Greek to appreciate Greek history,” Hank once said. “History is not owned solely by historians. It is a part of everyone’s heritage.” And so it was that he started to write about Cuba. When asked about why he wasn’t footnoting his work, he replied that the pamphlet, which grew into a book over 600 pages long, was a book for the people. “I’m not writing this to be a history book or an academic paper. I’m writing this book, so that by knowing Cuba’s past, people would understand it’s present.” He added that unless you lived it, you got it from somewhere else anyway, and footnoting just identifies where it came from. Aside from having been a ship’s captain and harbor pilot, Captain Hank was a high school math and science teacher and was once awarded the status of “Teacher of the Month” by the Connecticut State Board of Education. He has done extensive graduate work, was a union leader and the attendance officer at a vocational technical school. He was also an officer in the Naval Reserve and an officer in the U.S. Army for a total of over 40 years. He once said that “Life is to be lived,” and he certainly has. Active with Military Intelligence he returned to Europe, and when I asked what he did there, he jokingly said that if he had told me he would have to kill me. The Exciting Story of Cuba has the exhilaration of a novel. It is packed full of interesting details and, with the normalizing of the United States and Cuba, it belongs on everyone’s bookshelf, or at least in the bathroom if that’s where you do your reading. Captain Hank is not someone you can hold down and after having read a Proof Copy I know that it will be universally received as the book to go to, if you want to know anything about Cuba! Excerpts from a conversation with Chief Warrant Officer Peter Rommel, USA Retired, Military Intelligence Corps, Winter of 2014.

Taki As a prolific author and journalist, Taki has written for many top-rated publications, including the Spectator, the London Sunday Times, Vanity Fair, National Review, and many others. Greek-born and American-educated, Taki is a well-known international personality and a respected social critic all over the world. In June 1987, I was an usher at the wedding of Harry Somerset, Marquis of Worcester, to Tracy Ward. The wedding and ensuing ball took place in the grand Ward country house, attended by a large portion of British society, including the Prince and Princess of Wales. Late in the evening, while I was in my cups, a friend, Nicky Haslam, grabbed my arm and introduced me to Diana, who was coming off the dance floor. We exchanged pleasantries, me slurring my words to the extent that she suddenly took my hand, looked at me straight in the face, and articulated, “T-a-k-e y-o-u-r t-i-m-e.” She mistook my drunken state for a severe speech impediment and went into her queen-of-hearts routine. Nicky, of course, ruined it all by pulling her away and saying, “Oh, let him be, ma’am; he’s drunk as usual.” We occasionally met after that and always had a laugh about it. But we never got further than that rather pathetic incident. In 1994, I began writing the “Atticus” column for the Sunday Times, the bestselling Sunday broadsheet in Britain. By this time Diana and Charles had separated, and Diana had gone on the offensive against what was perceived by her to be Buckingham Palace plotting. As a confirmed monarchist, I warned in one of my columns that her popularity was enough to one day bring down the monarchy. I also wrote that she was bonkers. One month or so later, at a ball given in London by Sir James Goldsmith and his daughter Jemima Khan, a mutual friend approached me and told me that Princess Diana would like to speak with me. As luck would have it, yet again I was under the weather. When I reached her table, she pulled out a seat for me and asked me to sit down. The trouble was that I missed the chair and ended up under the table. Diana screamed with laughter, pulled up the tablecloth, looked underneath, and asked me pointblank: “Do you really think I’m mad?” For once I had the right answer. “All I know is I’m mad about you.” It was the start of a beautiful friendship, as Bogie said in Casablanca.

Oh, they’ll catch them,” said Walters. “Catch ’em? Catch ’em?” Porter was astounded. “You out of your fuckin mind? They’ll catch ’em, all right, and give ’em a big party and a medal.” “Yeah. The whole town planning a parade,” said Nero. “They got to catch ’em.” “So they catch ’em. You think they’ll get any time? Not on your life!” “How can they not give ’em time?” Walters’ voice was high and tight. “How? Just don’t, that’s how.” Porter fidgeted with his watch chain. “But everybody knows about it now. It’s all over. Everywhere. The law is the law.” “You wanna bet? This is sure money!” “You stupid, man. Real stupid. Ain’t no law for no colored man except the one sends him to the chair,” said Guitar. “They say Till had a knife,” Freddie said. “They always say that. He could of had a wad of bubble gum, they’d swear it was a hand grenade.” “I still say he shoulda kept his mouth shut,” said Freddie. “You should keep yours shut,” Guitar told him. “Hey, man!” Again Freddie felt the threat. “South’s bad,” Porter said. “Bad. Don’t nothing change in the good old U.S. of A. Bet his daddy got his balls busted off in the Pacific somewhere.” “If they ain’t busted already, them crackers will see to it. Remember them soldiers in 1918?” “Ooooo. Don’t bring all that up….” The men began to trade tales of atrocities, first stories they had heard, then those they’d witnessed, and finally the things that had happened to themselves. A litany of personal humiliation, outrage, and anger turned sicklelike back to themselves as humor. They laughed then, uproariously, about the speed with which they had run, the pose they had assumed, the ruse they had invented to escape or decrease some threat to their manliness, their humanness. All but Empire State, who stood, broom in hand and drop-lipped, with the expression of a very intelligent ten-year-old.

BEHIND THE WALL The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, twenty-five years ago this month, but the first attempts to breach it came immediately after it went up, just past midnight on August 13, 1961. The East German regime had been secretly stockpiling barbed wire and wooden sawhorses, which the police, who learned of their mission only that night, hastily assembled into a barrier. For many Berliners, the first sign that a historic turn had been taken was when the U-Bahn, the city’s subway, stopped running on certain routes, leaving late-night passengers to walk home through streets that were suddenly filled with soldiers. As realization set in, so did a sense of panic. By noon the next day, as Ann Tusa recounts in “The Last Division,” people were trying to pull down the barbed wire with their hands. Some succeeded, in scattered places, and a car drove through a section of the Wall to the other side. In the following weeks, the authorities began reinforcing it. Within a year, the Wall was nearly eight feet high, with patrols and the beginnings of a no man’s land. But it still wasn’t too tall for a person to scale, and on August 17, 1962, Peter Fechter, who was eighteen years old, and his friend Helmut Kulbeik decided to try. They picked a spot on Zimmerstrasse, near the American Checkpoint Charlie, and just after two o’clock in the afternoon they made a run for it. Kulbeik got over, but Fechter was shot by a guard, and fell to the ground. He was easily visible from the West; there are photographs of him, taken as he lay calling for help. Hundreds of people gathered on the Western side, shouting for someone to save him. The East German police didn’t want to, and the Americans had been told that if they crossed the border they might start a war. Someone tossed a first-aid kit over the Wall, but Fechter was too weak to pick it up. After an hour, he bled to death. Riots broke out in West Berlin, and many asked angrily why the Americans had let Fechter die. He was hardly more than a child, and he wanted to be a free man. It’s a fair question, though one can imagine actions taken that day which could have led to a broader confrontation. It was not a moment to risk grand gestures; Fechter died two months before the Cuban missile crisis. (When the Wall went up, John F. Kennedy told his aides that it was “not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”) And there was something off key about Germans, so soon after the end of the Second World War, railing about others being craven bystanders. Some observers came to see the Wall as the necessary scaffolding on which to secure a postwar peace. That’s easy to say, though, when one is on the side with the department stores, and without the secret police. Technically, West Berlin was the city being walled in, a quasi-metropolis detached from the rest of West Germany. The Allied victors—America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—had divided Germany into four parts, and, since Berlin was in the Soviet sector, they divided the city into four parts, too. In 1948, the Soviets cut off most road and rail access to the city’s three western sectors, in an effort to assert their authority. The Americans responded with the Berlin Airlift, sending in planes carrying food and coal, and so much salt that their engines began to corrode. By the time the Wall went up, it wasn’t the West Berliners who were hungry. West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder , or economic miracle, was under way, while life in the East involved interminable shortages. West Berliners were surrounded by Soviet military encampments, but they were free and they could leave—and so could anyone who could get to their part of the city. The East Berliners were the prisoners. In the weeks before the Wall went up, more than a thousand managed to cross the border each day; the Wall was built to keep them from leaving. But people never stopped trying to tear it down.

I’d taken German in college and thought I understood so I picked up our bags and we proceeded to what I thought was Bahn Drei.  We were about to board the train that was parked there when we heard a very loud shout to HALT!!  It was the Zugmeister.  He was shouting in German, and I finally said, “English bitte.”      Disgustedly he said, “You are on zee wrong platform and are trying to get on zee wrong train.  I told you Bahn Drei and you are on Bahn Funf. (5) Bahn Funf is ober der!”      I looked in the direction he pointed and there was no train.  I said, “There’s no train over there and we are supposed to be leaving here in 5 minutes.”  I was thinking in British Rail terms.      “Zat is zee Bahn fer der train to Munich and zer vill be a train on time for zer departure!”      “Ok, Ok, we’ll go over and wait there.  How long will it be before the train comes in?” This guy was about to bust a blood vessel.      “Zee train vill be der and leaf on time.”  He pointed at Bahn funf platform again and stomped off.”      Marguerite said, “You suppose he was in the German Army in the War?”      “What would be your first clue?”      “I can’t believe we didn’t get on the right platform, I thought you said you took German in college.”      “I did, but I got a C.

The Pasty was the time honored lunch of Cornish miners.  It was flaky pastry stuffed with a meat, potato, and vegetable, usually turnips.  Robert told me that Cornwall had been famous for Copper and Tin mining years ago.  The miners didn’t want to take the time to climb all the way out of the mines for lunch but needed a hot hearty meal.  So the women had come up with the Pasty.  In the old days besides the meat, potato, and vegetable, there had been some type of fruit put in at the end for desert.  The women would bring these to the miners fresh from the oven and lower them down.  They put different designs in the dough so the miners could identify their wife’s work and the markings were always put on the desert end so the men would know to eat it last. 

I asked them when I could get my household goods delivered.  At first they told me ten days, but when I started screaming at them they apologized and said they had the wrong Captain Spicer, the other guy was a Navy Captain, so in my case they could be there to unload tomorrow afternoon but not till about three pm.  I was pretty sure they were lying about a Navy Captain.

It was a source of income for the United Kingdom to have the German Panzer Battalions rent their ranges for training.      In fact Major Brown took it upon himself to increase those profits in any way he could.  As we were all gathering in the mess the first evening for drinks before dinner, he had champagne delivered to our little contingent of officers.  We made it very clear to him we didn’t order this and didn’t want the cost appearing on our mess bills.  With a quick wink and a smile he told us not to worry.     “The damn Panzer officers are drinking our beer dry, so I told them the Royal Navy pilots only drink champagne.  Not to be out done, the Panzer Battalion Commander has ordered that his officers shall drink champagne while you’re here.  I’m socking it to them on the cost, so yours is on the house.

Whatever was under his jacket broke and liquid went everywhere. He was cussing and carrying on, but I didn’t take the time to think about all that just then. As the fight ran out of him, I cuffed him and looked around. The cops, seated in their patrol car nearby, were just about doubled over laughing. I went over to see what was up. “That’s so and so, they told me. One of the biggest drug dealers in the city. We wish we could have beat him like you just did.” Apparently, Mr. Popo ignored all the signs and wandered into the training exercise figuring he’d carry on business as usual. There are idiots everywhere—but I guess that explains how he got into that line of work in the first place.

Umm, why is it that we don’t have any of this in a book? So we could study?” There was a hint of irritation in her voice. Silvia shook her head. “Dear girls, history isn’t something you study. It’s something you should just know.” Marlee turned to me and whispered, “But clearly we don’t.” She smiled at her own joke, and then focused again on Silvia. I thought about that, how we all knew different things or had to guess at the truth. Why weren’t we given history books? I remembered a few years ago when I went into Mom and Dad’s room, since Mom said I could choose what I wanted to read for English. As I went through my options, I spotted a thick, ratty book in the back corner and pulled it out. It was a U.S. history book. Dad came in a few minutes later, saw what I was reading, and said it was okay, so long as I never told anyone about it. When

According to the Nobel Committee (the group of ultra-liberals in Norway who pick the prize winners), Obama was awarded the 2009 prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”8 Really? After less than a year in office? This was an award modeled after Seinfeld—it truly was about nothing, and meant nothing, at least in reality. Even the Obama administration had the good grace to be embarrassed by the award. Besides giving an abysmally naïve “speech to the Muslim world” in Cairo and talking about things like nuclear nonproliferation and climate change, the man had done squat in terms of forwarding world peace in the months he had been in office. He said so himself: “To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize.”9 Though the administration was not quite embarrassed enough to show the good grace of declining the honor in favor of someone who actually deserved it. But here’s why this award matters—because it fits so perfectly with Leftist philosophy. Obama was a global rock star who had replaced the “evil” George W. Bush. He was also the first African American to lead the United States. And the Nobel Committee wanted to do what felt good. They wanted in on the action. Essentially, this once-prestigious organization decided to act like squealing teenagers at a Beatles concert; they got caught up in “Obamamania” and just couldn’t help themselves. It felt good, so it felt right. So they did it. And then this Nobel Laureate went on to spend eight years undermining world peace by kneecapping the one thing that keeps a lid on this bubbling cauldron of a world: the U.S. military. He also invaded and destabilized Libya, broke his promises on Syria, has been downright dismissive to Israel, kowtowed to China, and let Russian President Vladimir Putin walk all over him (and therefore us). This man has done more to destabilize the world than perhaps any American President, ever. And guess what? Even the Nobel Committee who scrambled to award him the prize came to regret their decision! The Nobel Institute’s director at the time told the media in September 2015 that they “thought it would strengthen Obama and it didn’t have this effect,” and “even many of Obama’s supporters thought that the prize was a mistake.”10 Oops.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) estimates that there are 340 jurisdictions with sanctuary policies, located in forty-three states and the District of Columbia. CIS found that in just one eight-month period in 2014, more than 8,100 deportable aliens were released by sanctuary jurisdictions. Three thousand were felons and 62 percent had prior criminal records. Nineteen hundred were later rearrested a total of 4,300 times on 7,500 offenses including assaults, burglaries, sexual assaults, thefts, and even murders—none of which would have occurred except for these sanctuary policies! Such sanctuary policies are illegal under federal immigration law, which specifies that “no State or local government entity may be prohibited, or in any way restricted, from sending to or receiving from the Immigration and Naturalization Service information regarding the immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any alien in the United States.”9 But in accordance with its nonenforcement policy on immigration, the Obama administration announced in 2010 that it would not sue sanctuary cities for violating federal law. As Kate Steinle’s father, Jim Steinle, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 21, 2015: Everywhere Kate went throughout the world, she shined the light of a good citizen of the United States of America. Unfortunately, due to disjointed laws and basic incompetence at many levels, the U.S. has suffered a self-inflicted wound in the murder of our daughter by the hand of a person who should have never been on the streets of this country.10 Kate Steinle’s murderer had been deported five times, and kept reentering the country with no consequences. So on July 9, 2015, Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ) introduced H.R. 3011—Kate’s Law—to impose a five-year mandatory prison sentence on anyone arrested in the United States after having been previously deported. A companion bill was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). But the Obama administration made it clear it would not support such a bill if it passed Congress.

Saturday morning Eli called Max at the Mayflower Hotel, where we were residing, and told him that Father had died in the morning hours. Of course, we returned home on Saturday and on Sunday, May 6, 1948 was Father's funeral. He had been so interested in the deliberations at the U.N., before the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel, which occurred on May 15, 1948, about nine days after his death. Father was buried on the Stadler family plot, on Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens, where my Mother's parents (my grandparents) and her brothers rest in peace. Mother survived Father by 23 years; she was laid to rest, next to him, in 1971.

When Dr. Falk realized in what desperate situation my parents found themselves, he wrote to Bernie in New York and to me, in Bucharest. He told me about the seriousness of his condition and that somebody had to come and arranged for them to go to the U.S., otherwise, as his state of health worsens, he would not be able to leave anymore; he may not be granted an American visa. When I received that letter, in August 1947, I was absolutely distraught. I can not remember ever crying as hysterically as I did, after reading that letter. My hopelessness and helplessness in the situation was so extreme, I felt like tearing my hair out.

Never Let Me Down" (feat. Jay-Z, J-Ivy) [Intro:] Yeah Grandmama Told you I won't let you down Told you I won't let this rap game change me, right? [Chorus:] When it comes to being true, at least true to me One thing I found,one thing I found Oh no you'll neva let me down, Get up I get(down) Get up I get(down) Get up I get(down) Get up I get(down) Get up I get(down) Get up I get(down) [Jay-Z:] Yo, yo first I snatched the street then I snatched the charts, First had they ear now I hav they're heart, Rappers came and went, I've been hear from the start, Seen them put it together Watch them take it apart, See the Rovers roll up wit ribbons I've seen them re-poed, re-sold and re-driven So when I reload, he holds #1 position When u hot I'm hot And when your feet cold, mines is sizzelin It's plain to see Nigga's can't f*** wit me Cuz ima be that nigga fo life This is not an image This is God given This is hard liven Mixed wit crystal sipping It's the most consistent Hov Give you the most hits you can fit inside a whole disc and Nigga I'm home on these charts, y'all niggaz visitin It's Hov tradition, Jeff Gordan of rap I'm back to claim pole position, holla at ya boy [Chorus] [Kanye West:] I get down for my grandfather who took my momma Made her sit that seat where white folks ain't wanna us to eat At the tender age of 6 she was arrested for the sit in With that in my blood I was born to be different Now niggas can't make it to ballots to choose leadership But we can make it to Jacob and to the dealership That's why I hear new music And I just don't be feeling it Racism still alive they just be concealing it But I know they don't want me in the damn club They even made me show I.D to get inside of Sam's club I did dirt and went to church to get my hands scrubbed Swear I've been baptised at least 3 or 4 times But in the land where nigga's praise Yukons and getting paid It gon' take a lot more than coupons to get us saved Like it take a lot more than do-rags to get your waves Noting sadder than that day my girl father past away So I promised to Mr Rany I'm gonna marry your daughter And u know I gotta thank u for they way that she was brought up And I know that u were smiling when u see that car I bought her And u sent tears from heaven when u seen my car get balled up But I can't complaint what the accident did to my Left Eye Cuz look what a accident did to Left Eye First Aaliyah and now romeo must die I know a got angels watching me from the other side

Jones had a dog; it had a chain; Not often worn, not causing pain; But, as the I.K.L. had passed Their 'Unleashed Cousins Act’ at last, Inspectors took the chain away; Whereat the canine barked ‘Hooray!’ At which, of course, the S.P.U. (Whose Nervous Motorists’ Bill was through) Were forced to give the dog in charge For being Audibly at Large. None, you will say, were now annoyed, Save, haply, Jones - the yard was void. But something being in the lease About ‘alarms to aid the police,’ The U.S.U. annexed the yard For having no sufficient guard. Now if there’s one condition The C.C.P. are strong upon It is that every house one buys Must have a yard for exercise; So Jones, as tenant, was unfit, His state of health was proof of it. Two doctors of the T.T.U.'s Told him his legs, from long disuse, Were atrophied; and saying ‘So From step to higher step we go Till everything is New and True.’ They cut his legs off and withdrew. You know the E.T.S.T.'s views Are stronger than the T.T.U.'s: And soon (as one may say) took wing The Arms, though not the Man, I sing. To see him sitting limbless there Was more than the K.K. could bear. 'In mercy silence with all speed That mouth there are no hands to feed; What cruel sentimentalist, O Jones, would doom thee to exist - Clinging to selfish Selfhood yet? Weak one! Such reasoning might upset The Pump Act, and the accumulation Of all constructive legislation; Let us construct you up a bit ­­- ' The head fell off when it was hit: Then words did rise and honest doubt, And four Commissioners sat about Whether the slash that left him dead Cut off his body or his head. An author in the Isle of Wight Observed with unconcealed delight A land of just and old renown Where Freedom slowly broadened down From Precedent to Precedent. And this, I think, was what he meant.

Don’t shoot,” Tom cautioned again. “That brave in the lead has a crooked lance with a white flag. Whatever it is they’re wantin’, it ain’t a fight. You speak any Comanch’?” “Not a word,” Henry replied. “I don’t know much. If they do a lot of tradin’, they can probably talk English, but if they don’t--all we can do is hope my Injun will get us by.” Tom spat a glob of chew onto Rachel’s bleached floor. Then he bellowed, “What do you want?” Loretta’s nerves were strung so taut, she leaped. Nausea surged into her throat as the brown tobacco juice soaked into the floor. Was she losing her mind? Who cared if the puncheon got stained? Before this was over, the house might be burned to the ground. She heard Rachel crying, a soft, irregular whimpering. Terror. The metallic taste of it shriveled her tongue. “What brings you here?” Tom cried again. “Hites!” a deep voice called back. “We come as friends, White-Eyes.” The lead warrior moved some twenty feet in front of his comrades, holding the crooked lance high so the dusty white rag was clearly visible. He sat proudly on his black stallion, gleaming brown shoulders straight, leather-sheathed legs pressed snugly to his mount. A rush of wind lifted his mahogany hair, wisping it across his bronzed, sharply chiseled face. Loretta’s first thought when she saw him was that he seemed different from the others. A closer look told her why. He was unquestionably a half-breed, taller on horseback than the rest, lighter-skinned. If not for his sun-darkened complexion and long hair, he might have passed for a white man. Everything else about him was savage, though, from the cruel sneer on his mouth to the expert way he balanced on his horse, as if he and the animal were one entity. Tom Weaver stiffened. “Son of a--Henry, you know who that is?” “I was hopin’ I was wrong.” Loretta inched closer to get a better look. Then it hit her. Hunter. She had heard his name whispered with dread, heard tales. But until this moment she hadn’t believed he existed. A blue-eyed half-breed, one of the most cunning and treacherous adversaries the U.S. Army had run across. Now that the war had pitted North against South, the homesteaders had no cavalry to keep Hunter and his marauders at bay, and his raiders struck ever deeper into settled country, advancing east. Some claimed he was far more dangerous than a full-blooded Comanche because he had a white man’s intelligence. As vicious as he was, there were stories that he spared women and children. Whether that was coincidence, design, or a lie some Indian lover had dreamed up, no one knew. Loretta opted for the latter.

As they started buying property and interacting with the government and organizations like the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Africans, like all newly emancipated Black people, had to formalize their names, and come up with both a first and a last name. They needed full names to become U.S. citizens, which they accomplished in 1868, less than three years after they were freed. And they needed names so they could vote, which they tried to do for the first, and perhaps only, time in 1874, in one of the most contentious elections in U.S. history, marred by racial violence across the South. It was a bold and dangerous step, and required much persistence on the part of the Africans. They told the story to Roche in great detail.