Tri Bureau Quotes

What are you two up to today?" "Oh, I just figured I'd show Ty some more of Texas. Head down to San Antonio and visit the Bureau office there," Zane said. He shot a sideways look at Ty. "Maybe spend the night in Beaumont." Ty smacked his forehead and turned his head away. "Not much in Beaumont to see," Harrison said with a frown. Zane grinned. "Even so, we're going to try to get it in." Ty had his hand over his mouth, his head down. He was either going to throw up or he was laughing. Harrison felt he'd missed a joke, but he thought maybe he didn't want to know.

Think of the most fussy science teacher you ever had. The one who docked your grade if the sixth decimal place in your answer was rounded incorrectly; who tucked in his periodic table T-shirt, corrected every student who said "weight" when he or she meant "mass", and made everyone, including himself, wear goggles even while mixing sugar water. Now try to imagine someone whom your teacher would hate for being anal-retentive. That is the kind of person who works for a bureau of standards and measurement.

And, increasingly, I find myself fixing on that refusal to pull back. Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here’s the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence—of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do—is catastrophe. Forget all this ridiculous ‘Our Town’ nonsense everyone talks: the miracle of a newborn babe, the joy of one simple blossom, Life You Are Too Wonderful To Grasp, &c. For me—and I’ll keep repeating it doggedly till I die, till I fall over on my ungrateful nihilistic face and am too weak to say it: better never born, than born into this cesspool. Sinkhole of hospital beds, coffins, and broken hearts. No release, no appeal, no “do-overs” to employ a favored phrase of Xandra’s, no way forward but age and loss, and no way out but death. [“Complaints bureau!” I remember Boris grousing as a child, one afternoon at his house when we had got off on the vaguely metaphysical subject of our mothers: why they—angels, goddesses—had to die? while our awful fathers thrived, and boozed, and sprawled, and muddled on, and continued to stumble about and wreak havoc, in seemingly indefatigable health? “They took the wrong ones! Mistake was made! Everything is unfair! Who do we complain to, in this shitty place? Who is in charge here?”] And—maybe it’s ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn’t matter since no one’s ever going to see this—but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end—and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it’s possible to play it with a kind of joy?

McCoy smiled, though he looked as if he was trying not to. “Am I to assume the two of you will agree to representing the Bureau in this?” “I think ‘agree’ is too strong a term,” Zane said.

Baby smuggling is a serious crime,' he said. 'There were thirty-six babies on that plane. We could charge you with thirty-six counts of kidnapping.' That, at least, got Second to look back at Mr. Reardon. 'Does FBI mean Federal Bureau of Idiots?' he asked. 'If any of you were any good at analyzing footprints, you would know that I fell when I was trying to sneak into the airport grounds, not out.' 'And why would you do that?' Mr. Reardon asked, hunching forward over a notepad. 'It was a dare, all right?' Second snarled. 'I was with my friends and we were talking about what it would be like to stand on a runway when a plane was landing and...we decided to try it out.' 'That's a crime too,' Mr. Reardon said. Second shrugged. 'It ain't thirty-six counts of kidnapping,' he said.

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like -- what’s going on -- what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming another third of it spent in telling lies. [Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness]

The main problem with Sentinel, Fulgham believed, was that the bureau—like many big organizations—had tried to plan everything in advance. But creating great software requires flexibility. Problems pop up unexpectedly and breakthroughs are unpredictable.

Because, here’s the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence—of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do—is catastrophe. Forget all this ridiculous ‘Our Town’ nonsense everyone talks: the miracle of a newborn babe, the joy of one simple blossom, Life You Are Too Wonderful To Grasp, &c. For me—and I’ll keep repeating it doggedly till I die, till I fall over on my ungrateful nihilistic face and am too weak to say it: better never born, than born into this cesspool. Sinkhole of hospital beds, coffins, and broken hearts. No release, no appeal, no “do-overs” to employ a favored phrase of Xandra’s, no way forward but age and loss, and no way out but death. [“Complaints bureau!” I remember Boris grousing as a child, one afternoon at his house when we had got off on the vaguely metaphysical subject of our mothers: why they—angels, goddesses—had to die? while our awful fathers thrived, and boozed, and sprawled, and muddled on, and continued to stumble about and wreak havoc, in seemingly indefatigable health? “They took the wrong ones! Mistake was made! Everything is unfair! Who do we complain to, in this shitty place? Who is in charge here?”] And—maybe it’s ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn’t matter since no one’s ever going to see this—but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end—and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it’s possible to play it with a kind of joy?

Martin got up and brushed off the seat of his pants with his hat. He put his hat on his head and started back toward the path. For when you woke from a long dream, into the new morning, then try as you might you couldn't not hear, beyond your door, the sounds of the new day, the drawer opening in your father's bureau, the bang of a pot, you couldn't not see, through your trembling lashes, the stripe of light on the bedroom wall. Boys shouted in the park, on a sunny tree-root he saw a cigar band, red and gold. One of these days he might find something to do in a cigar store, after all he still knew his tobacco, you never forgot a thing like that. But not just yet. Boats moved on the river, somewhere a car horn sounded, on the path a piece of broken glass glowed in a patch of sun as if at any second it would burst into flame. Everything stood out sharply: the red stem of a green leaf, horse clops and the distant clatter of a pneumatic drill, a smell of riverwater and asphalt. Martin felt hungry: chops and beer in a little he remembered on Columbus Avenue. But not yet. For the time being he would just walk along, keeping a little out of the way of things, admiring the view. It was a warm day. He was in no hurry.

What we learned from the Manson interview was later applied to the bureau’s dealing with other cults with charismatic and manipulative leaders, such as Reverend Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple in Guyana, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and the Freemen militia movement in Montana. The outcome is not always as we would like it, but it is important to understand the personality of those we are dealing with so we can try to predict behavior.

Darya Alexandrovna, in a dressing jacket, and with her now scanty, once luxuriant and beautiful hair fastened up with hairpins on the nape of her neck, with a sunken, thin face and large, startled eyes, which looked prominent from the thinness of her face, was standing among a litter of all sorts of things scattered all over the room, before an open bureau, from which she was taking something. Hearing her husband's steps, she stopped, looking towards the door, and trying assiduously to give her features a severe and contemptuous expression. She felt she was afraid of him, and afraid of the coming interview. She was just attempting to do what she had attempted to do ten times already in these last three days—to sort out the children's things and her own, so as to take them to her mother's—and again she could not bring herself to do this; but now again, as each time before, she kept saying to herself, "that things cannot go on like this, that she must take some step" to punish him, put him to shame, avenge on him some little part at least of the suffering he had caused her. She still continued to tell herself that she should leave him, but she was conscious that this was impossible; it was impossible because she could not get out of the habit of regarding him as her husband and loving him. Besides this, she realized that if even here in her own house she could hardly manage to look after her five children properly, they would be still worse off where she was going with them all. As it was, even in the course of these three days, the youngest was unwell from being given unwholesome soup, and the others had almost gone without their dinner the day before. She was conscious that it was impossible to go away; but, cheating herself, she went on all the same sorting out her things and pretending she was going.

But when I tried to meet her eye now, she pointedly looked away, and fixed her red and swollen eyes on the big stained-glass window above the slate. Since (a) it was dark outside and (b) the window depicted Saunt Grod and his research assistants being beaten with rubber hoses in the dungeons of some Praxic Age spy bureau and (c) Tulia had already spent something like a quarter of her life in this room, I reckoned that inspecting the window wasn’t really the point.

He didn’t know how to help. If Max were anyone else, Jules would sit with him for a while, looking out at the night, and then start to talk. About nothing too heavy at first. Warming up to get into the hard stuff. Although, maybe, if he tried that now, the man would either open up—Ha, ha, ha! Riotous laughter. Like that would ever happen—or he’d stand up and move outside of talking range, which would put him away from the window with nothing to look at, at which point he might close his eyes for a while. It was certainly worth a try. Of course there were other possibilities. Max could put Jules into a chokehold until he passed out. So okay. Start talking. Although why bother with inconsequential chitchat, designed to make Max relax? And weren’t those words--Max and relax--two that had never before been used together in a sentence? It wasn’t going to happen, so it made sense to just jump right in. Although, what was the best way to tell a friend that the choices he’d made were among the stupidest of all time, and that he was, in short, a complete dumbfuck? Max was not oblivious to Jules’s internal hemming and hawing. “If you have something you need to say, for the love of God, just say it. Don’t sit there making all those weird noises.” What? “What noises? I’m not making weird noises.” “Yeah,” Max said. “You are.” “Like what? Like . . .?” He held out his hands, inviting Max to demonstrate. “Like . . .” Max sighed heavily. “Like . . .” He made a tsking sound with his tongue. Jules laughed. “Those aren’t weird noises. Weird noises are like, whup-whup-whup-whup”-- he imitated sounds from a Three Stooges movie—“or Vrrrrrr.” “Sometimes I really have to work to remind myself that you’re one of the Bureau’s best agents,” Max said.

He never really voice pure, raw outrage to me about Watergate or what it represented. The crimes and abuses were background music. Nixon was trying to subvert not only the law but the Bureau. So Watergate became Felt's instrument to reassert the Bureau's independence and thus its supremacy. In the end, the Bureau was damaged, seriously but not permanently, while Nixon lost much more, maybe everything - the presidency, power, and whatever moral authority he might have had. He was disgraced. But surviving and enduring his hidden life, in contrast and in his own way, Mark Felt won.

One of the many aspects of Bureau life that preserves reliance on the FBI code is the Bureau’s reluctance to assign agents back to their hometowns. It is still a rare event for anyone to be transferred back home right out of the academy. I tried for twenty-five years to get back to Connecticut, but it never happened. This isn’t about keeping an agent off-balance. It’s about mitigating the risk that an agent might be more influenced by external factors than by the Bureau’s internal code. So of course, the Bureau took this Connecticut Yankee and sent me to Atlanta, Georgia, right after training.

Fair warning: You might get stared at,” Zoe says as we walk through the security scanner. There are more people in the hallways up ahead now than there were earlier--it must be time for them to start work. “Your face is a familiar one here. People in the Bureau watch the screens often, and for the past few months, you’ve been involved in a lot of interesting things. A lot of the younger people think you’re downright heroic.” “Oh, good,” I say, a sour taste in my mouth. “Heroism is what I was focused on. Not, you know, trying not to die.” Zoe stops. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make light of what you’ve been through.

Each month Cohn brought Trump the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, called JOLTS, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He realized he was being an asshole by rubbing it in because each month was basically the same, but he didn’t care. “Mr. President, can I show this to you?” Cohn fanned out the pages of data in front of the president. “See, the biggest leavers of jobs—people leaving voluntarily—was from manufacturing.” “I don’t get it,” Trump said. Cohn tried to explain: “I can sit in a nice office with air conditioning and a desk, or stand on my feet eight hours a day. Which one would you do for the same pay?

Listen! Listen! “Well now,”’ he mimicked, ‘“I don’t know – maybe we shouldn’t get gas in that station. I read recently in National Petroffious Petroleum News that this kind of gas has a great deal of O-Octane gook in it and someone once told me it even had semi-official high-frequency cock in it, and I don’t know, well I just don’t feel like it anyway …” Man, you dig all this.’ He was poking me furiously in the ribs to understand. I tried my wildest best. Bing, bang, it was all Yes! Yes! Yes! in the back seat and the people up front were mopping their brows with fright and wishing they’d never picked us up at the travel bureau. It was only the beginning, too.

You’ve been coming here a lot,” Cara says as she approaches. “Are you afraid of the rest of the compound? Or of something else?” She’s right, I have been coming to the control room a lot. It’s just something to pass the time as I wait for my sentence from Tris, as I wait for our plan to strike the Bureau to come together, as I wait for something, anything. “No,” I say. “I’m just keeping an eye on my parents.” “The parents you hate?” She stands next to me, her arms folded. “Yes, I can see why you would want to spend every waking hour staring at people you want nothing to do with. It makes perfect sense.” “They’re dangerous,” I say. “More dangerous because no one else knows how dangerous they are but me.” “And what are you going to do from here, if they do something terrible? Send a smoke signal?” I glare at her. “Fine, fine.” She puts up her hands in surrender. “I’m just trying to remind you that you aren’t in their world anymore, you’re in this one. That’s all.” “Point taken.

Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here’s the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence—of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do—is catastrophe. Forget all this ridiculous ‘Our Town’ nonsense everyone talks: the miracle of a newborn babe, the joy of one simple blossom, Life You Are Too Wonderful To Grasp, &c. For me—and I’ll keep repeating it doggedly till I die, till I fall over on my ungrateful nihilistic face and am too weak to say it: better never born, than born into this cesspool. Sinkhole of hospital beds, coffins, and broken hearts. No release, no appeal, no “do-overs” to employ a favored phrase of Xandra’s, no way forward but age and loss, and no way out but death. [“Complaints bureau!” I remember Boris grousing as a child, one afternoon at his house when we had got off on the vaguely metaphysical subject of our mothers: why they—angels, goddesses—had to die? while our awful fathers thrived, and boozed, and sprawled, and muddled on, and continued to stumble about and wreak havoc, in seemingly indefatigable health? “They took the wrong ones! Mistake was made! Everything is unfair! Who do we complain to, in this shitty place? Who is in charge here?”] And—maybe it’s ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn’t matter since no one’s ever going to see this—but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end—and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it’s possible to play it with a kind of joy? To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I’ve been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it’s there.

I select the right practice gun, the one about the size of a pistol, but bulkier, and offer it to Caleb. Tris’s fingers slide between mine. Everything comes easily this morning, every smile and every laugh, every word and every motion. If we succeed in what we attempt tonight, tomorrow Chicago will be safe, the Bureau will be forever changed, and Tris and I will be able to build a new life for ourselves somewhere. Maybe it will even be a place where I trade my guns and knives for more productive tools, screwdrivers and nails and shovels. This morning I feel like I could be so fortunate. I could. “It doesn’t shoot real bullets,” I say, “but it seems like they designed it so it would be as close as possible to one of the guns you’ll be using. It feels real, anyway.” Caleb holds the gun with just his fingertips, like he’s afraid it will shatter in his hands. I laugh. “First lesson: Don’t be afraid of it. Grab it. You’ve held one before, remember? You got us out of the Amity compound with that shot.” “That was just lucky,” Caleb says, turning the gun over and over to see it from every angle. His tongue pushes into his cheek like he’s solving a problem. “Not the result of skill.” “Lucky is better than unlucky,” I say. “We can work on skill now.” I glance at Tris. She grins at me, then leans in to whisper something to Christina. “Are you here to help or what, Stiff?” I say. I hear myself speaking in the voice I cultivated as an initiation instructor, but this time I use it in jest. “You could use some practice with that right arm, if I recall correctly. You too, Christina.” Tris makes a face at me, then she and Christina cross the room to get their own weapons. “Okay, now face the target and turn the safety off,” I say. There is a target across the room, more sophisticated, than the wooden-board target in the Dauntless training rooms. It has three rings in three different colors, green, yellow, and red, so it’s easier to tell where the bullets it. “Let me see how you would naturally shoot.” He lifts up the gun with one hand, squares off his feet and shoulders to the target like he’s about to lift something heavy, and fires. The gun jerks back and up, firing the bullet near the ceiling. I cover my mouth with my hand to disguise my smile. “There’s no need to giggle,” Caleb says irritably. “Book learning doesn’t teach you everything, does it?” Christina says. “You have to hold it with both hands. It doesn’t look as cool, but neither does attacking the ceiling.” “I wasn’t trying to look cool!” Christina stands, her legs slightly uneven, and lifts both arms. She stares the target for a moment, then fires. The training bullet hits the outer circle of the target and bounces off, rolling on the floor. It leaves a circle of light on the target, marking the impact site. I wish I’d had this technology during initiation training. “Oh, good,” I say. “You hit the air around your target’s body. How useful.” “I’m a little rusty,” Christina admits, grinning.

Can I get a regular skim cap?” I didn’t get coffee here every day—because I had my coffee machine, or used to have—how depressing—but I visited regularly enough that they knew me. Sometimes I wanted something frothy with chocolate on the top, and I was too lazy to do that at home. Frances was in her mid-thirties, had gorgeous straight blonde hair, which was pulled back in a sleek ponytail, and an infectious smile. “Hey, chicky. Coming right up. A little birdie told me it was your birthday yesterday. Happy birthday!” She banged used coffee grounds out of the thingamajig and filled it with new ones. “Aw, thanks. Did you run into the girls last night?” The girls being my besties, Sophie and Michelle. “Yep. How come you weren’t there? They told me you piked.” She screwed the thingamajig into the machine and pressed the button. And wouldn’t you know, it worked. I wish my machine still worked. “Big day photographing a wedding. One drink and I would have fallen asleep.” I laughed—it wasn’t too far from the truth. So what if I left out the bit where I had a pity party because my brother hadn’t called. I’d try calling him later. Knowing him, he had a good

Cohn assembled every piece of economic data available to show that American workers did not aspire to work in assembly factories. Each month Cohn brought Trump the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, called JOLTS, conducted y the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He realized he was being an asshole by rubbing it in because each month was basically the same, but he didn't care. "Mr. President, can I show this to you?" Cohn fanned out the pages of data in front of the president. "See, the biggest leavers of jobs--people leaving voluntarily--was from manufacturing." "I don't get it," Trump said. Cohn tried to explain: "I can sit in a nice office with air conditioning and a desk, or stand on my feet eight hours a day. Which one would you do for the same pay?" Cohn added, "People don't want to stand in front of a 2,000 degree blast furnace. People don't want to go into coal mines and get black lung. For the same dollars or equal ollars, they're going to choose something else." Trump wasn't buying it. Severl times Cohn just asked the president, "Why do you have these views?" "I just do," Trump replied. "I've had these views for 30 years." "That doesn't mean they're right," Cohn said. "I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn't mean I was right.

Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. Already, in January 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, which, to take some of the pressure off his army as thousands of slaves eagerly fled their plantations and trailed behind his troops, “reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for black settlement.” Less than a year after he issued the order, forty thousand former slaves had begun to work four hundred thousand acres of this land.36 Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”37 Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not “extend to … abandoned or confiscated property.”38 Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order,

Oh, man! man! man!" moaned Dean. "And it's not even the beginning of it-and now here we are at last going east together, we've never gone east together, Sal, think of it, we'll dig Denver together and see what everybody's doing although that matters little to us, the point being that we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE."Then he whispered, clutching my sleeve, sweating, "Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there-and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. Listen! Listen! 'Well now,' " he mimicked, " 'I don't know-maybe we shouldn't get gas in that station. I read recently in National Petroffious Petroleum News that this kind of gas has a great deal of O-Octane gook in it and someone once told me it even had semi-official high-frequency cock in it, and I don't know, well I just don't feel like it anyway . . .' Man, you dig all this." He was poking me furiously in the ribs to understand. I tried my wildest best. Bing, bang, it was all Yes! Yes! Yes! in the back seat and the people up front were mopping their brows with fright and wishing they'd never picked us up at the travel bureau. It was only the beginning, too.

Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. Already, in January 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, which, to take some of the pressure off his army as thousands of slaves eagerly fled their plantations and trailed behind his troops, “reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for black settlement.” Less than a year after he issued the order, forty thousand former slaves had begun to work four hundred thousand acres of this land.36 Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”37 Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not “extend to … abandoned or confiscated property.”38 Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order, commanding the army to throw tens of thousands of freedpeople off the land and reinstall the plantation owners.39 While this could have come from a simple ideological aversion to land redistribution, that was not the case and, for Johnson, not the issue; who received it was. Beginning in 1843, when he was first elected to the U.S. Congress, and over the next nineteen years, Johnson had championed the Homestead Act,

Noah smiled at her, then his smile froze. He looked her slowly up and down. And again. “What?” she demanded hotly, hands on her hips. “Nothing,” he said, turning away. “No. What? What’s the matter?” He turned back slowly, put his tools down on top of the ladder and approached her. “I don’t know how to say this. I think it would be in the best interests of both of us if you’d dress a little more…conservatively.” She looked down at herself. “More conservatively than overalls?” she asked. He felt a laugh escape in spite of himself. He shook his head. “Ellie, I’ve never seen anybody look that good in overalls before.” “And this is a bad thing?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest. “It’s provocative,” he tried to explain. “Sexy. People who work around churches usually dress a little more… What’s the best way to put this…?” “Frumpy? Dumpy? Ugly?” “Without some of their bra showing, for one thing.” “Well now, Reverend, just where have you been? Because this happens to be in style. And I’ll do any work you give me, but you really shouldn’t be telling me what to wear. The last guy I was with tried to do me over. He liked me well enough when he was trying to get my attention, but the second I married him, he wanted to cover me up so no one would notice I had a body!” “The husband?” “The very same. It didn’t work for him and it’s not going to work for you. You didn’t say anything about a dress code. Maybe I’ll turn you in to the Better Business Bureau or something.” “I think you mean the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Or maybe you should go straight to the American Civil Liberties Union.” He stepped toward her. “Ellie,” he said, using his tender but firm minister voice. “I’m a single man. You’re a very beautiful young woman. I would like it if the good people of Virgin River assumed you were given this job solely because of your qualifications and not because you’re eye candy. Tomorrow, could you please wear something less distracting?” “I’ll do my best,” she said in a huff. “But this is what I have, and there’s not much I can do about that. Especially on what you’re paying me.” “Just think ‘baggy,’” he advised. “We’re going to have a problem there,” she said. “I don’t buy my clothes baggy. Or ugly. Or dumpy. And you can bet your sweet a…butt I left behind the clothes Arnie thought I should wear.” She just shook her head in disgust. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about. You know how many guys would rather have something nice to look at than a girl in a flour sack? Guess you didn’t get to Count Your Blessings 101.” She cocked her head and lifted her eyebrows. “I’m counting,” he said. But his eyes bore down on hers seriously. He was not giving an inch. “Just an ounce of discretion. Do what you can.” She took a deep breath. “Let’s just get to work. Tomorrow I’ll look as awful as possible. How’s that?” “Perfect.

Eight months [after 9/11], after the most intensive international investigation in history, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation informed the press that they still didn't know who did it. He said they had suspicions. The suspicions were that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan but implemented in Germany and the United Arab Emirates, and, of course, in the United States. After 9/11, Bush II essentially ordered the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, and they temporized. They might have handed him over, actually. They asked for evidence that he was involved in the attacks of 9/11. And, of course, the government, first of all, couldn't given them any evidence because they didn't have any. But secondly, they reacted with total contempt. How can you ask us for evidence if we want you to hand somebody over? What lèse-majesté is this? So Bush simply informed the people of Afghanistan that we're going to bomb you until the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden. He said nothing about overthrowing the Taliban. That came three weeks later, when British admiral Michael Boyce, the head of the British Defense Staff, announced to the Afghans that we're going to continue bombing you until you overthrow your government. This fits the definition of terrorism exactly, but it's much worse. It's aggression. How did the Afghans feel about it? We actually don't know. There were leading Afghan anti-Taliban activists who were bitterly opposed to the bombing. In fact, a couple of weeks after the bombing started, the U.S. favorite, Abdul Haq, considered a great martyr in Afghanistan, was interviewed about this. He said that the Americans are carrying out the bombing only because they want to show their muscle. They're undermining our efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within, which we can do. If, instead of killing innocent Afghans, they help us, that's what will happen. Soon after that, there was a meeting in Peshawar in Pakistan of a thousand tribal leaders, some from Afghanistan who trekked across the border, some from Pakistan. They disagreed on a lot of things, but they were unanimous on one thing: stop the bombing. That was after about a month. Could the Taliban have been overthrown from within? It's very likely. There were strong anti-Taliban forces. But the United States didn't want that. It wanted to invade and conquer Afghanistan and impose its own rule. ...There are geostrategic reasons. They're not small. How dominant they are in the thinking of planners we can only speculate. But there is a reason why everybody has been invading Afghanistan since Alexander the Great. The country is in a highly strategic position relative to Central Asian, South Asia, and the Middle East. There are specific reasons in the present case having to do with pipeline projects, which are in the background. We don't know how important these considerations are, but since the 1990s the United States has been trying hard to establish the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAPI)from Turkmenistan, which has a huge amount of natural gas, to India. It has to go through Kandahar, in fact. So Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India are all involved. The United States wants the pipeline for two reasons. One reason is to try to prevent Russia from having control of natural gas. That's the new "great game": Who controls Central Asian resources? The other reason has to do with isolating Iran. The natural way to get the energy resources India needs is from Iran, a pipeline right from Iran to Pakistan to India. The United States wants to block this from happening in the worst way. It's a complicated business. Pakistan has just agreed to let the pipeline run from Iran to Pakistan. The question is whether India will try to join in. The TAPI pipeline would be a good weapon to try to undercut that.

We are nothing to the white people; we are a few Hopis, but they are Americans, millions of them. My father told me that their leader, whoever he is, ends his speech by saying that God is on their side; and then he shakes his fist and says to all the other nations: You had better pay attention, because we are big, and we will shoot to kill, if you don’t watch out. My mother says all the big countries are like that, but I only know this one. We belong to it, that is what the government of the United States says. They come here, the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] people, and they give us their orders. This law says . . . another law says . . . and soon there will be a new law. In case we have any objections, they have soldiers, they have planes. We see the jets diving high in the sky. The clouds try to get out of the way, but they don’t move fast enough. The water tries to escape to the ocean, but can only go at its own speed.

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like—what’s going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies

Lane shut the door on the man's face, grabbed a pair of boxers from the bureau, and yanked them on so hard, he nearly wedgie'd himself. "Try not to kill him," Lizzie muttered as he headed back for the idiot. "I make no promises.

IN THE NINE YEARS since the standoff at Ruby Ridge and in the six years since this book first appeared, much has happened. Yet little has changed. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent on hearings and investigations that failed to resolve the most basic questions about the standoff. Almost $3.5 million was paid out in settlements that settled nothing. Nine years later, the courts are still flip-flopping over whether a federal agent should be tried for his actions at Ruby Ridge. Investigators, lawyers, and federal officers are still debating who shot first. Top FBI officials are still denying that they approved the bureau’s unprecedented and illegal orders to shoot civilians without provocation. Nine years later, the sniper who killed Vicki Weaver still works for the FBI. The case continues to hum on Internet Web sites and scream from right-wing newspapers. The words Ruby Ridge are fixed at the bottom of every news story about the ten-year crisis of confidence and competence in the FBI. And every time a person holes up in a ramshackle house, every time a suspect refuses to come out, every time a person accuses the government of going too far, someone is likely to say, “We don’t want this to become another Ruby Ridge.” The Weaver case gave a name to that sometimes dangerous space between people and their government. It brought paranoia into the mainstream. For how can you convince people that their government isn’t out to get them when, on Ruby Ridge, the FBI gave itself permission to shoot its own citizens? How can you tell people to trust a government that covered up details of the case and assigned agents to investigate themselves?

acquired a terrible reputation for abusing people who served them. The Bureau of Buddhist and Tibetan Affairs strongly defended the monks at court and imposed a host of special rights for them. At one point the bureau tried to enforce laws that stipulated that anyone who hit a monk would have his hand

2018 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper14 looked at data from four million people in eighty lower-income countries and found that TV ownership was associated with a 6 percent drop in likelihood that a couple had had sex in the previous week. And, interestingly, the decline in the sexual frequency of married couples discussed earlier in the chapter started in about 2000, just as broadband Internet was reaching most homes. “The No. 1 recommendation that every sex therapist will give is to get the technology out of the bedroom,” says Canadian sex researcher (a lot of sex researchers are Canadian) Lori Brotto. “The bedroom really should just be saved for two things and two things only.” When your focus in bed is on a screen, it cannot be on your partner. And if your partner is trying to get your attention, it’s disheartening to be ignored for a slab of glass and microprocessors. Dismay and horniness cancel each other out.

[B]lack Texans, in the face of this hostility, went about the business of making new lives in the state, when they could have, in some places, unleashed carnage on their former enslavers. They, like freed people throughout the South, focused on other things: solemnizing their marriages, keeping away from the violence of Whites, trying to reunite with family members who had been sold during slavery, working, and, very happily, taking advantage of the schools the Bureau created. Adults sat in classrooms with children, all eager to learn to read and write. In the midst of all this, any false step by a Black person, any wrong decision by the Bureau—and there definitely were some—was taken as proof that the whole effort was a grievous mistake. [p. 131]

FIVE-THIRTY TUESDAY MORNING FBI Special Agent Brogan was alone in the third-floor meeting room, using one of the newly installed phone lines for an early call to his girlfriend. Five-thirty in the morning is not the best time to deliver an apology for a broken date from the night before, but Brogan had been very busy, and he anticipated being busier still. So he made the call. He woke her and told her he had been tied up, and probably would be for the rest of the week. She was sleepy and annoyed, and made him repeat it all twice. Then she chose to interpret the message as a cowardly prelude to some kind of a brush-off. Brogan got annoyed in turn. He told her the Bureau had to come first. Surely she understood that? It was not the best point to be making to a sleepy annoyed woman at five-thirty in the morning. They had a short row and Brogan hung up, depressed.

They quickly started passing from hand to hand and operated something like currency. The government first tried to forbid their use, then a year or two later—and this became a familiar pattern in China—when it realized that it could not suppress them, switched gears and established a bureau empowered to issue such notes themselves.

Larry Kudlow hosted a business talk show on CNBC and is a widely published pundit, but he got his start as an economist in the Reagan administration and later worked with Art Laffer, the economist whose theories were the cornerstone of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies. Kudlow’s one Big Idea is supply-side economics. When President George W. Bush followed the supply-side prescription by enacting substantial tax cuts, Kudlow was certain an economic boom of equal magnitude would follow. He dubbed it “the Bush boom.” Reality fell short: growth and job creation were positive but somewhat disappointing relative to the long-term average and particularly in comparison to that of the Clinton era, which began with a substantial tax hike. But Kudlow stuck to his guns and insisted, year after year, that the “Bush boom” was happening as forecast, even if commentators hadn’t noticed. He called it “the biggest story never told.” In December 2007, months after the first rumblings of the financial crisis had been felt, the economy looked shaky, and many observers worried a recession was coming, or had even arrived, Kudlow was optimistic. “There is no recession,” he wrote. “In fact, we are about to enter the seventh consecutive year of the Bush boom.”19 The National Bureau of Economic Research later designated December 2007 as the official start of the Great Recession of 2007–9. As the months passed, the economy weakened and worries grew, but Kudlow did not budge. There is no recession and there will be no recession, he insisted. When the White House said the same in April 2008, Kudlow wrote, “President George W. Bush may turn out to be the top economic forecaster in the country.”20 Through the spring and into summer, the economy worsened but Kudlow denied it. “We are in a mental recession, not an actual recession,”21 he wrote, a theme he kept repeating until September 15, when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Wall Street was thrown into chaos, the global financial system froze, and people the world over felt like passengers in a plunging jet, eyes wide, fingers digging into armrests. How could Kudlow be so consistently wrong? Like all of us, hedgehog forecasters first see things from the tip-of-your-nose perspective. That’s natural enough. But the hedgehog also “knows one big thing,” the Big Idea he uses over and over when trying to figure out what will happen next. Think of that Big Idea like a pair of glasses that the hedgehog never takes off. The hedgehog sees everything through those glasses. And they aren’t ordinary glasses. They’re green-tinted glasses—like the glasses that visitors to the Emerald City were required to wear in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Now, wearing green-tinted glasses may sometimes be helpful, in that they accentuate something real that might otherwise be overlooked. Maybe there is just a trace of green in a tablecloth that a naked eye might miss, or a subtle shade of green in running water. But far more often, green-tinted glasses distort reality. Everywhere you look, you see green, whether it’s there or not. And very often, it’s not. The Emerald City wasn’t even emerald in the fable. People only thought it was because they were forced to wear green-tinted glasses! So the hedgehog’s one Big Idea doesn’t improve his foresight. It distorts it. And more information doesn’t help because it’s all seen through the same tinted glasses. It may increase the hedgehog’s confidence, but not his accuracy. That’s a bad combination.

The 1900 Galveston storm was the worst US natural disaster in the twentieth century. The city, population 37,789, was submerged in 8 to 15 feet of water, and prior to the wind destroying the Weather Bureau’s anemometer, the last recorded wind velocity was 84 miles per hour. It is speculated that during the height of the storm the winds ranged from 120 to 150 miles per hour. Historians estimate that over 6,000 people were killed in the city and that another 1,000 perished on the rest of the island. On the mainland, the death toll was approximately 1,000. The Promise is a work of fiction but I tried to keep the depiction of the island, the sequence of the storm, and the aftermath grounded in fact as much as possible. A great deal has been written about the city of Galveston but very little about the people who lived outside of the city limits.

In the 1950s, Harry became aware that an extremely important member of Congress was a heroin addict. “He headed one of the powerful9 committees of Congress,” he wrote. “His decisions and statements helped to shape and direct the destiny of the United States and the free world.” Harry went to this man in the corridors of Washington, D.C., and told him sternly he must stop using the drug. “I wouldn’t try to do anything about it, Commissioner,” replied the legislator. “It will be the worse for you.” He would go to the gangsters to get it whatever Harry did, “and if it winds up in a public scandal and that should hurt this country, I wouldn’t care . . . The choice is yours.”10 All over America, Anslinger had cut off legal avenues to drugs and forced addicts to go to gangsters for a filthy supply. But he had always pictured it being done to the “unstable, emotional, hysterical,11 degenerate, mentally deficient and vicious classes.” Now, before Harry, there was a man he respected, and he was an addict. So he assured the legislator that there would be a safe, legal supply for him at a Washington, D.C., pharmacy so he would never have to go to the gangsters or go without. The bureau even picked up the tab until the day the congressman died. A journalist uncovered the story and was about to break it. Harry told him that if he published a word, Harry would have him sent to prison for two years. He smothered the story.12 Years

Through that space of an inch, he saw her reflection in the bureau mirror. Her back faced the mirror and she had pulled her bulky sweatshirt up over her head and shoulders, trying to get a glimpse of her back and upper arms in the mirror. She was covered with bruises. Lots of big bruises on her back, one on her shoulder and upper arms. Preacher was mesmerized. For a moment his eyes were locked on those purple splotches. “Aw, Jesus,” he whispered in a breath. He quickly backed away from the slit in the door and got up against the wall outside, out of sight. It took him a moment to collect himself; he was stricken. Horrified. All he could think was, what kind of animal does something like that? His mouth hung open because he couldn’t imagine this. He was a warrior, a trained fighter, and he was pretty sure he hadn’t done that much damage to a man equal to him in size, in a fair fight. Some instinct kicked in that told him he shouldn’t let on that he’d seen. She was already afraid of everything, including him. But there was also the reality that this wasn’t a woman who’d been smacked. She’d been pummeled. He didn’t even know the girl, yet all he wanted was to kill the son of a bitch who’d done that to her. After five or eleven months of beatings, then death for the sorry bastard. She

A husband and wife are sound asleep at two a.m. when the phone rings. The husband picks it up sleepily, and says, “Hello?... How the hell should I know?... What am I, the fuckin’ Weather Bureau???” He slams the phone down and tries to get comfortable again. “Who was that?” asks his wife. “I don’t know, some jerk wanted to know if the coast was clear.

Evelyn tried to control people by controlling weapons, but Jeanine was more ambitious—she knew that when you control information, or manipulate it, you don’t need force to keep people under your thumb. They stay there willingly. That is what the Bureau—and the entire government, probably—is doing: conditioning people to be happy under its thumb.

From the moment I’ve met you, I’ve tried to play the hero in your story. But the closer I get to you, the more I realize that you don’t need one.

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.

Still, my reporting found that P2P meth in massive quantities is damaging minds, perhaps irreparably, across the United States. The growing homeless encampments in many cities and rural towns are meth’s deadening creation, I’m convinced. Though other drugs and alcohol are part of the mix, many encampments are simply meth colonies. They provide a community for users, creating the kinds of environmental cues that USC psychologist Wendy Wood found crucial in forming habits. Encampments are places where addicts flee from treatment, where they can find the warm embrace of approval for their meth use. “It took me twelve years of using before I was homeless,” said Talie Wenick, a counselor in Bend, Oregon. “Now, within a year they’re homeless. So many homeless camps have popped up around Central Oregon—huge camps on Bureau of Land Management land, with tents and campers and roads they’ve cleared themselves. And everyone’s using. You’re trying to help someone get clean, and they live in a camp where everyone is using.

Again, let’s take the Push Up, a standard exercise that works your chest, shoulders, triceps, abs, obliques, and lower back (unlike benching which only works half of these). If you do Push Ups standing up with your hands against a wall a couple of feet in front of you, the exercise is pretty easy. Then try them with your hands on an elevated surface, like the edge of a bureau or windowsill. The lower the surface you use–a desk, a couch, a coffee table, telephone books–the harder it gets. Putting your hands on the floor, like a standard Push Up, is harder. If we put our feet on the coffee table and our hands on the ground, the exercise becomes significantly more difficult. This is using leverage to increase the exercise’s difficulty. To make the exercise still harder we could place our hands on one or two balls, like a basketball. Now we’re using an unstable surface. Still harder would be to do basketball Push Ups with pauses at the bottom. Still not hard enough? Try doing them one-handed on the floor. Then one-handed with your feet on the couch. Then on an unstable surface. Then with pauses … You get the idea. And this is only a simple example that can be repeated with many of my exercises. You’ll see the possibilities are endless. So there you have it: We’ve gone from one variation of an exercise, that probably everyone reading this book can do, to a more difficult variation that probably no one reading this book can do right off the bat. The difficulty of bodyweight exercises can be tailored to suit the needs of virtually anyone. You have total control of the resistance.

To get leather, each department procured its quota of hides, made contracts with the tanners, obtained hands for them by exemptions from the army, got transportation over the railroads for the hides and for supplies. To the varied functions of this bureau was finally added that of assisting the tanners to procure the necessary supplies for the tanneries. A fishery, even, was established on Cape Fear River to get oil for mechanical purposes, and at the same time food for the workmen. In cavalry equipments the main thing was to get a good saddle which would not hurt the back of the horse. For this purpose various patterns were tried, and reasonable success was obtained. One of the most difficult wants to supply in this branch of the service was the horseshoe for cavalry and artillery. The want of iron and of skilled labor was strongly felt. Every wayside blacksmith-shop accessible, especially those in and near the theatre of operations, was employed. These, again, had to be supplied with material, and the employees exempted from service.

You can disrupt a behavior you don’t want by removing the prompt. This isn’t always easy, but removing the prompt is your best first move to stop a behavior from happening. A few years ago I went to the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. I walked into my hotel room and threw my bag on the bed. When I scanned the room, I saw something on the bureau. “Oh nooooo,” I said out loud to absolutely no one. There was an overflowing basket of goodies. Pringles. Blue chips. A giant lollipop. A granola bar. Peanuts. I try to eat healthy foods, but salty snacks are delicious. I knew the goody bin would be a problem for me at the end of every long day. It would serve as a prompt: Eat me! I knew that if the basket sat there I would eventually cave. The blue chips would be the first to go. Then I would eat those peanuts. So I asked myself what I had to do to stop this behavior from happening. Could I demotivate myself? No way, I love salty snacks. Can I make it harder to do? Maybe. I could ask the front desk to raise the price on the snacks or remove them from the room. But that might be slightly awkward. So what I did was remove the prompt. I put the beautiful basket of temptations on the lowest shelf in the TV cabinet and shut the door. I knew the basket was still in the room, but the treats were no longer screaming EAT ME at full volume. By the next morning, I had forgotten about those salty snacks. I’m happy to report that I survived three days in Austin without opening the cabinet again. Notice that my one-time action disrupted the behavior by removing the prompt. If that hadn’t worked, there were other dials I could have adjusted—but prompts are the low-hanging fruit of Behavior Design. Teaching the Behavior Model Now that you’ve seen how my Behavior Model applies to various types of behavior, I’ll show you more ways to use this model in the pages that follow.

I think the general public has never understood the “special” kind of life that civil rights advocates had to lead in those years. Racists showed high ingenuity in developing schemes to destroy a man’s reputation as a means of nullifying his work. For example, many civil rights advocates, white and black, traveled and lectured extensively. In the early days, a number of effective men were entrapped in situations that either damaged them personally or ruined their reputations. Those who were with lecture bureaus were particularly vulnerable. Anyone could write the lecture bureau for the travel schedule of its speakers. If a man made a long flight to fulfill a speaking engagement, the chances were at least fair that when he landed at the distant airport he might make use of the rest room. It would be enough to plant one or two men in the rest room and accuse him of some indecency. This happened to a Mississippi white attorney in a case that was given maximum publicity in white newspapers. He had to fly to Los Angeles for an appearance. His travel schedule was known. At the end of this flight he went to the men’s rest room, and when he emerged, he was arrested because two men claimed he had indecently exposed himself. He was tried in absentia and found guilty in Mississippi. He was publicly labeled a pervert and his career in civil rights was effectively quashed.

Following this meeting in the Hoover Building, McCabe passed the word to Rosenstein: the president was under criminal investigation for obstruction of justice. (Once McCabe became director, FBI officials were so concerned that Trump would try to shut down the investigation that they secreted at least three copies of key documents in remote locations around the bureau. This was to make sure that in the event Trump directed an end to these inquiries, the documents could always be preserved and located, and shared.)

Lovely to meet you,” said her mother. “I’ve heard so much about you. And don’t you two make a gorgeous couple.” She beamed. I tried to mask the horror that was surely radiating from my face. “Oh, no. William’s just my assistant. He’s more like a big brother to me.” “Oh. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.” Cassandra blushed. “Don’t worry about it,” said William. “I’ve always said we’d make a good couple, but Lily won’t hear of it. She broke my heart the first day I met her by turning me down, but I live in hope.” He placed one hand over his heart and looked at me with a syrupy gaze, head tilted to the side. He was such a dirty fighter. But I could be too. “I know where I’d love to set up for the first lot of formal pictures! By the topiaries at the end of the garden.” The farthest point from the back of the house. Good luck with that, Will. “The light isn’t too harsh there, and it’s so pretty. Would you like to do them now? We can do some other ones later, and in between, I’ll just flit around taking shots of the party.

Cheng’s intelligence bureau had worked for years using cutouts, front corporations and sham companies in a program designed to compromise members of the US Congress. You would run out of digits trying to compute the amounts of money they had spent. The approach was always the same. Shower the politicians with cash, campaign contributions if you had to, outright bribes if you could convince them to take it. The goal was to compromise them so that the Bureau might extort official acts and secret information—to own them. The Chinese thought their program was unique. In fact rogues from the US intelligence community, people who had left the government in some cases decades earlier and who went private setting up their own companies, were doing the same thing. Only they were doing it on a much larger scale and with much greater success.

Hitler wanted new environs, new men and new methods. He began appointing special plenipotentiaries to perform certain tasks parallel to the fossilizing government agencies – it was less exhausting than trying to revive the latter. The Ribbentrop bureau was one example. Cabinet meetings as such virtually ceased late in 1937. Instead Hitler dealt directly – through Lammers – with affairs of state, while he transmitted his will directly to the ministers and generals without discussion.

The head of the Secret Army Organization—a provocateur in the pay of the FBI-drove past his house, and his companion fired shots into it, seriously wounding a young woman. The young man who was their target was not at home at the time. The weapon had been stolen by this FBI provocateur. According to the local branch of the ACLU, the gun was handed over the next day to the San Diego FBI Bureau, who hid it; and for six months the FBI lied to the San Diego police about the incident. This affair did not become publicly known until later. This terrorist group, directed and financed by the FBI, was finally broken up by the San Diego police, after they had tried to fire-bomb a theater in the presence of police. The FBI agent in question, who had hidden the weapon, was transferred outside the state of California so that he could not be prosecuted. The FBI provocateur also escaped prosecution, though several members of the secret terrorist organization were prosecuted.

World War II, Korea was divided in two parts.”  Thomas blew smoke toward the ceiling.  “The Russians occupied the north, and the U. S. occupied the south  They thought after a while the two parts would get back together as one country, but the Russians set up a communist government in the north.  We set up a democratic government in the south.  So now the North Koreans think they can take over the South and make it all one communist country.” “I knowed it had something to do with them communists,” Grandpa nodded his head energetically. “They’s gonna take over the whole world if we don’t stop them.” “Looks like Harry Truman’s going to try to stop them,” WC said.  “We heard on the radio while we drove down here that lots of U. S. soldiers was already fighting in Korea.  I expect they’ll start drafting lots more soldiers right soon.” “Will you have to go back to the army?” Jeannie asked Uncle Thomas. “I don’t know, Honey. I think they’ll take younger men than me and WC, but I guess if they call us up, we’ll have to go.” “I sure hope you don’t have to go. War scares me.” Betty Lou folded her arms across her chest. “War’s a pretty scary thing. But I guess somebody’s got to go.” “Do you reckon they’ll start rationing again?” Grandma asked. “I still got some of them ration books in my bureau. Wonder if I could still use them?” Jeannie turned to Grandma. “What’s rationing?” “During the war they was certain things you couldn’t buy unless you had the stamps in the ration books.” Aunt Lillian explained. “Like what?” “Shoes, sugar, meat, gasoline, all sorts of stuff like that.” Grandma said.

After World War II, Korea was divided in two parts.”  Thomas blew smoke toward the ceiling.  “The Russians occupied the north, and the U. S. occupied the south  They thought after a while the two parts would get back together as one country, but the Russians set up a communist government in the north.  We set up a democratic government in the south.  So now the North Koreans think they can take over the South and make it all one communist country.” “I knowed it had something to do with them communists,” Grandpa nodded his head energetically. “They’s gonna take over the whole world if we don’t stop them.” “Looks like Harry Truman’s going to try to stop them,” WC said.  “We heard on the radio while we drove down here that lots of U. S. soldiers was already fighting in Korea.  I expect they’ll start drafting lots more soldiers right soon.” “Will you have to go back to the army?” Jeannie asked Uncle Thomas. “I don’t know, Honey. I think they’ll take younger men than me and WC, but I guess if they call us up, we’ll have to go.” “I sure hope you don’t have to go. War scares me.” Betty Lou folded her arms across her chest. “War’s a pretty scary thing. But I guess somebody’s got to go.” “Do you reckon they’ll start rationing again?” Grandma asked. “I still got some of them ration books in my bureau. Wonder if I could still use them?” Jeannie turned to Grandma. “What’s rationing?” “During the war they was certain things you couldn’t buy unless you had the stamps in the ration books.” Aunt Lillian explained. “Like what?” “Shoes, sugar, meat, gasoline, all sorts of stuff like that.” Grandma said.

Did you join the Bureau to get as far from that case as possible?' Rainey said. 'I took this job to make a difference.' 'Honey.' The tries rang on the concrete. 'Course you did. We all did. You can say you love it. You're scared of it. You're proud. You're a badass bitch. Girl Scout with a twelve gauge. Reading psychopaths' minds is your superpower.' She cut a glance Caitlin's way. 'you can dig it.

And in the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), American families now had a powerful advocate in their corner. Through its work, they could expect a fairer, more transparent credit market, and real savings as they tried to buy a house, finance a car, deal with a family emergency, send their kids to college, or plan for retirement.

In answer to an inquiry Wilbur sent to the United States Weather Bureau in Washington about prevailing winds around the country, they were provided extensive records of monthly wind velocities at more than a hundred Weather Bureau stations, enough for them to take particular interest in a remote spot on the Outer Banks of North Carolina called Kitty Hawk, some seven hundred miles from Dayton. Until then, the farthest the brothers had been from home was a trip to Chicago for the Columbian Exposition of 1893. And though they had “roughed it” some on a few camping trips, it had been nothing like what could be expected on the North Carolina coast. To be certain Kitty Hawk was the right choice, Wilbur wrote to the head of the Weather Bureau station there, who answered reassuringly about steady winds and sand beaches. As could be plainly seen by looking at a map, Kitty Hawk also offered all the isolation one might wish for to carry on experimental work in privacy. Still further encouragement came when, on August 18, 1900, the former postmaster at Kitty Hawk, William J. Tate, sent a letter saying: Mr. J. J. Dosher of the Weather Bureau here has asked me to answer your letter to him, relative to the fitness of Kitty Hawk as a place to practice or experiment with a flying machine, etc. In answering I would say that you would find here nearly any type of ground you could wish; you could, for instance, get a stretch of sandy land one mile by five with a bare hill in center 80 feet high, not a tree or bush anywhere to break the evenness of the wind current. This in my opinion would be a fine place; our winds are always steady, generally from 10 to 20 miles velocity per hour. You can reach here from Elizabeth City, N.C. (35 miles from here) by boat . . . from Manteo 12 miles from here by mail boat every Mon., Wed., & Friday. We have telegraph communication & daily mails. Climate healthy, you could find good place to pitch tent & get board in private family provided there were not too many in your party; would advise you to come anytime from September 15 to October 15. Don’t wait until November. The autumn generally gets a little rough by November. If you decide to try your machine here and come, I will take pleasure in doing all I can for your convenience and success and pleasure, and I assure you you will find a hospitable people when you come among us. That decided the matter. Kitty Hawk it would be.

The manner in which Indians have been recorded, tracked, and identified has also worked against establishing concrete tribal identities. Lacking a relationship with the federal government, these groups do not posses associated reservation records, tribal rolls, and recorded blood degrees that often help modern tribes prove their indigenousness. The work of U.S. census takers also clouds the waters. Until 1960, when self-identification became the rule, census Bureau instructed enumerators to use their own judgement to identify the supposed race of residents. This was most often based on the testimony of respondents or the visual judgement of the census taker. Neither was scientific, and this was hardly foolproof, yet these record would prove important for groups trying to establish tribal recognition.

When, in a woman, full maturity is combined with character and with pride, it creates a special beauty unattainable by the very young. Her strong chin was high, and there was a look around her mouth of a person who has tasted something slightly spoiled. It’s pride, he thought. That damn rare wonderful thing. A proud man will keep getting up. Break both his legs and he’ll still give it a try. A proud woman won’t whine. She won’t give you the stifled sob and sheep-dog routine. She’ll square her pretty shoulders and stick those knockers out like a bureau drawer and suck in her tummy, and put a little swing in her hips, and spit right square in your eye.

James hoped the newsletter would garner support from Bahana, or white people, to stop a town well that the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted to dig and a tower it wanted to erect to store the water. The Hotevilla elders were willing to lay down their lives in this battle. They’d done it before, preventing the BIA from bringing electricity to the village by lying down in front of bulldozers. If that well went in, James explained, people would waste water. Their spring would dry out- an unthinkable tragedy, as it would make it impossible for them to live there any longer. Could two cultures be any different? I now wondered. We were taking federal money to mine water and would do so until the unlikely day that same government made us stop. The Hopi had been trying to prevent the government from giving them a well in the first place.