Uniforms Are Bad Quotes

A uniformed cop around 6’4” with pock marked face squinted, “Looky here, if it ain’t one a the bad seed O’Shaughnessy’s, female version.

The wish of death had been palpably hanging over this otherwise idyllic paradise for a good many years. All business and politics is personal in the Philippines. If it wasn't for the cheap beer and lovely girls one of us would spend an hour in this dump. They [Jehovah's Witnesses] get some kind of frequent flyer points for each person who signs on. I'm not lazy. I'm just motivationally challenged. I'm not fat. I just have lots of stored energy. You don't get it do you? What people think of you matters more than the reality. Marilyn. Despite standing firm at the final hurdle Marilyn was always ready to run the race. After answering the question the woman bent down behind the stand out of sight of all, and crossed herself. It is amazing what you can learn in prison. Merely through casual conversation Rick had acquired the fundamentals of embezzlement, fraud and armed hold up. He wondered at the price of honesty in a grey world whose half tones changed faster than the weather. The banality of truth somehow always surprises the news media before they tart it up. You've ridden jeepneys in peak hour. Where else can you feel up a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl without even trying? [Ralph Winton on the Philippines finer points] Life has no bottom. No matter how bad things are or how far one has sunk things can always get worse. You could call the Oval Office an information rain shadow. In the Philippines, a whole layer of criminals exists who consider that it is their right to rob you unhindered. If you thwart their wicked desires, to their way of thinking you have stolen from them and are evil. There's honest and dishonest corruption in this country. Don't enjoy it too much for it's what we love that usually kills us. The good guys don't always win wars but the winners always make sure that they go down in history as the good guys. The Philippines is like a woman. You love her and hate her at the same time. I never believed in all my born days that ideas of truth and justice were only pretty words to brighten a much darker and more ubiquitous reality. The girl was experiencing the first flushes of love while Rick was at least feeling the methadone equivalent. Although selfishness and greed are more ephemeral than the real values of life their effects on the world often outlive their origins. Miriam's a meteor job. Somewhere out there in space there must be a meteor with her name on it. Tsismis or rumours grow in this land like tropical weeds. Surprises are so common here that nothing is surprising. A crooked leader who can lead is better than a crooked one who can't. Although I always followed the politics of Hitler I emulate the drinking habits of Churchill. It [Australia] is the country that does the least with the most. Rereading the brief lines that told the story in the manner of Fox News reporting the death of a leftist Rick's dark imagination took hold. Didn't your mother ever tell you never to trust a man who doesn't drink? She must have been around twenty years old, was tall for a Filipina and possessed long black hair framing her smooth olive face. This specter of loveliness walked with the assurance of the knowingly beautiful. Her crisp and starched white uniform dazzled in the late-afternoon light and highlighted the natural tan of her skin. Everything about her was in perfect order. In short, she was dressed up like a pox doctor’s clerk. Suddenly, she stopped, turned her head to one side and spat comprehensively into the street. The tiny putrescent puddle contrasted strongly with the studied aplomb of its all-too-recent owner, suggesting all manner of disease and decay.

You don’t need fashion designers when you are young. Have faith in your own bad taste. Buy the cheapest thing in your local thrift shop - the clothes that are freshly out of style with even the hippest people a few years older than you. Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents - that is the key to fashion leadership. Ill-fitting is always stylish. But be more creative - wear your clothes inside out, backward, upside down. Throw bleach in a load of colored laundry. Follow the exact opposite of the dry cleaning instructions inside the clothes that cost the most in your thrift shop. Don’t wear jewelry - stick Band-Aids on your wrists or make a necklace out of them. Wear Scotch tape on the side of your face like a bad face-lift attempt. Mismatch your shoes. Best yet, do as Mink Stole used to do: go to the thrift store the day after Halloween, when the children’s trick-or-treat costumes are on sale, buy one, and wear it as your uniform of defiance.

Fathers are always so proud the first time they see their sons in uniform," she said. "I know Big John Karpinski was," I said. He is my neighbor to the north, of course. Big John's son Little John did badly in high school, and the police caught him selling dope. So he joined the Army while the Vietnam War was going on. And the first time he came home in uniform, I never saw Big John so happy, because it looked to him as though Little John was all straightened out and would amount to something. But then Little John came home in a body bag.

I supposed, being shy as she appeared to be, attention would seem like a bad thing to her. Most humans felt the opposite. Though they didn’t want to stand out from the herd, at the same time they craved a spotlight for their individual uniformity.

And then there's this whole section of people who fall somewhere in the middle. People who you don't even notice until they say something unexpected and then you realise they are smart and funny, or people who look bad in a school uniform but then you see them in a coat and scarf and everything changes.

What the hell do you have on?” Emily looked down at her ensemble. “I have done something wrong, haven't I?” “Did Tinker put you up to this?” “Well, she said it was my manager uniform.” “You...you look like an oversexed librarian.” She blinked. “Is that a bad thing?

In truth she is not a hard lady naturally, and the time has been when the sight of the venerable figure suing to her with such strong earnestness would have moved her to great compassion. But so long accustomed to suppress emotion and keep down reality, so long schooled for her own purposes in that destructive school which shuts up the natural feelings of the heart like flies in amber and spreads one uniform and dreary gloss over the good and bad, the feeling and the unfeeling, the sensible and the senseless, she had subdued even her wonder until now.

If I were the Devil . . . I mean, if I were the Prince of Darkness, I would of course, want to engulf the whole earth in darkness. I would have a third of its real estate and four-fifths of its population, but I would not be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree, so I should set about however necessary to take over the United States. I would begin with a campaign of whispers. With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve: “Do as you please.” “Do as you please.” To the young, I would whisper, “The Bible is a myth.” I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around. I would confide that what is bad is good, and what is good is “square”. In the ears of the young marrieds, I would whisper that work is debasing, that cocktail parties are good for you. I would caution them not to be extreme in religion, in patriotism, in moral conduct. And the old, I would teach to pray. I would teach them to say after me: “Our Father, which art in Washington” . . . If I were the devil, I’d educate authors in how to make lurid literature exciting so that anything else would appear dull an uninteresting. I’d threaten T.V. with dirtier movies and vice versa. And then, if I were the devil, I’d get organized. I’d infiltrate unions and urge more loafing and less work, because idle hands usually work for me. I’d peddle narcotics to whom I could. I’d sell alcohol to ladies and gentlemen of distinction. And I’d tranquilize the rest with pills. If I were the devil, I would encourage schools to refine yound intellects but neglect to discipline emotions . . . let those run wild. I would designate an athiest to front for me before the highest courts in the land and I would get preachers to say “she’s right.” With flattery and promises of power, I could get the courts to rule what I construe as against God and in favor of pornography, and thus, I would evict God from the courthouse, and then from the school house, and then from the houses of Congress and then, in His own churches I would substitute psychology for religion, and I would deify science because that way men would become smart enough to create super weapons but not wise enough to control them. If I were Satan, I’d make the symbol of Easter an egg, and the symbol of Christmas, a bottle. If I were the devil, I would take from those who have and I would give to those who wanted, until I had killed the incentive of the ambitious. And then, my police state would force everybody back to work. Then, I could separate families, putting children in uniform, women in coal mines, and objectors in slave camps. In other words, if I were Satan, I’d just keep on doing what he’s doing. (Speech was broadcast by ABC Radio commentator Paul Harvey on April 3, 1965)

If there was magic in this world, it happened within sight of the three bases and home plate. All the gems in my world that decorated the walls and floors of dragons' lairs, the sword hilts of privileged princes, and crowns worn by emperors and kings, were nothing compared to the beauty and splendor of the diamond in Wrigley Stadium. It wasn't just a yard with dirt, chalk lines, bases, and a small hill in its center. Wrigley was a field of dreams. Dreams of eternal glory for the men who ran to the outfield, who took their respective bases, and prepared for battle against those who would dare enter their hallowed realm. Dreams for the kids in the stands, all wanting to don a uniform, kiss their moms goodbye, and wield their bats as enchanted weapons destined to knock the cover off the ball. And for the adults who had already selected their lot in life, Wrigley made the dreams of past innocence, lost wonder, and the promise that there was something inherently good still left in the world, come true. Yeah, corny as hell. But all true.

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground., to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

You don't have to come with me," Ash said. "I only brought you along because you're good with a knife. And got us the uniforms. And the explosives." Lila snorted. "Sorry I'm not pulling my weight." "This may not be your idea," Ash said doggedly, "but it's what we're going to do." "Is it? Are you really going to start playing the prince card after all?" "Don' start in about my mother the queen, because I don't want to hear it." "All right, then, as your peer and absolute equal, I can't help thinking this is a really bad idea.

When Buzz gets in, he won't be having any parade of wounded soldiers. That'll be bad Fascist psychology. All those poor devils he'll hide away in institutions, and just bring out the lively young human slaughter cattle in uniforms.

If he’s a false prince, then I’m his street Cinderella. I don’t need glass slippers or a pretty gown to change our stars. I can do it in my quiet leather boots and my gray uniform.

I'm driving." Roarke's hand paused as it reached for the car door, and his brow winged up. "It's my car." "It's my deal." They studied each other a minute, crowded together at the driver's side door. "Why are you driving?" "Because." Vaguely embarrassed, she dug her hands in her pockets. "Don't smirk." "I'll try to resist. Why?" "Because," she said again, "I drive when I'm on a case, so if I drive, it'll feel like -- it'll feel official instead of criminal." "I see. Well, that makes perfect sense. You drive." She started to climb in while he circled around to the passenger side. "Are you smirking behind my back?" "Yes, of course." He sat, stretched out his legs. "Now, to make it really official, I should have a uniform. I'll go that far, but I refuse to wear those amazingly ugly cop shoes." "You're a real joker," she muttered and jerked the car into reverse, did a quick, squealing spin, and shot out of the garage. "Too bad this vehicle doesn't have a siren. But we can pretend nothing works on it, so you'll feel official." "Keep it up. Just keep it up." "Maybe I'll call you sir. Could be sexy." He smiled blandly when she glared at him. "Okay, I'm done. How do you want to play this?

Diversity, not uniformity, is what works. Our problem is not that people are living a bad way but rather that they're all living the same way. The earth can accommodate many people living in a voraciously wasteful and pollutive way, it just can't accommodate all of us living that way.

So, when there is a strife of tongues, at some meeting, the chairman, to obtain unity, suggests that every one shall speak in French. Perhaps it is bad French; French may not contain the words that express the speaker's thoughts; nevertheless speaking French imposes some order, some uniformity.

Fucksocks! It’s Chet the huge shaved vampyre cat, down on the street. He looks bigger, and I think he ate a meter maid. Her little cart is running and there’s an empty uniform on the curb. Bad kitty!

Don't take this as a compliment, but you actually don't smell that bad." Dan let out a burst of surprised laughter. "What did you expect me to smell like?" "Well..." I wrinkled my nose. "I heard you guys soak your uniforms in urine." "So you assumed I'd smell like pee." "Yes," I said. "But you don't," I added kindly.

Sigmund Freud once asserted, "Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge." Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the "individual differences" did not "blur" but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints. And today you need no longer hesitate to use the word "saints": think of Father Maximilian Kolbe who was starved and finally murdered by an injection of carbolic acid at Auschwitz and who in 1983 was canonized. You may be prone to blame for invoking examples that are the exceptions ot the rule. "Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt" (but everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find) reads the last sentence of the Ethics of Spinoza. You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to "saints." Wouldn't it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority . More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So let us be alert-alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.

In other words, he looked like uniformed police hotness, and she wasn’t entirely uninterested in being cuffed. Wait. That’s a bad thought. I don’t mean it. She took him in again, her throat suddenly dry. Well, she didn’t exactly not mean it, but she knew better than to want it.

He caught her staring and waggled his eyebrows. Heat flooded her cheeks, and she worked to recover. “The minivan suits you. I think you should get one.” “Sweetheart, I already have to beat the ladies off me with a stick. If I get one of these bad boys, I might cause a riot.” “Do you ever stop?” “I can go all. Night. Long.

But Mama told me it’s not the color of a person’s uniform that makes him a good man or a bad one. It’s what’s in here.

War did not walk into a battlefield in uniform in a way that allowed him to pick them out as bad guys.

It was bad,” Terry replied. “Maybe this is worse, though. At least in a war the other guys wear uniforms.

Mr. Big Bad Virgin SEAL. Wow.

I consider saying a final good-bye to Peeta, decide it would only be bad for both of us. But I do slip the pearl into the pocket of my uniform. A token of the boy with the bread. A

I consider saying a final good-bye to Peeta, decide it would only be bad for both of us. But I do slip the pearl into the pocket of my uniform. A token of the boy with the bread.

I know it's a bad time for boys in uniforms," Stoke said, then lay back on his pillow and closed his eyes. But a good time to be a girl, Carol had said. 1966 was a good time to be a girl.

A kiss from you?” He stepped forward into her finger, forcing her to open her hand against his chest or take a step back. She refused to budge. He leaned down, crowding her. “I’d rather kiss a snake.” “Then it’s too bad it’s winter, because they’re in short supply.” She pushed at his chest again, nearly snarling when he didn’t move. “You should just burn something else down. That might draw a few to the heat.” “Or maybe I’ll just set fire to your goddamn granny panties. That’s sure to create a big enough blaze.” Her jaw dropped open and she swallowed hard. “As if you could.” “Watch me.

God's earth is good. It is only we who are bad. How little justice and humility we have, how poor our understanding of patriotism! ... Instead of knowledge, there is insolence and boundless conceit, instead of labor, idleness and caddishness; there is no justice, the understanding of honor does not go beyond "the honor of the uniform," a uniform usually adorning our prisoners' dock. We must work, the hell with everything else. The important thing is that we must be just, and all the rest will be added unto us.

This is a tough business. The cops, the army…,” he said, and he appeared to be struggling for words. “Put a uniform on somebody, tell ’em you got to kill this other guy because he’s the bad guy, you got to kill him—and then anybody can pull the trigger. But in this business, sometimes you got to kill people who maybe they’re your friends.” He stopped and shrugged, as if he were taking a moment to think about this himself. “That’s the way it is in this business. Sometimes maybe it’s even people you love and you got to do it. That’s just the way it is,” he repeated, “in this business.

The old housekeeper leaves her with the letter in her hand. In truth she is not a hard lady naturally, and the time has been when the sight of the venerable figure suing to her with such strong earnestness would have moved her to great compassion. But so long accustomed to suppress emotion and keep down reality, so long schooled for her own purposes in that destructive school which shuts up the natural feelings of the heart like flies in amber and spreads one uniform and dreary gloss over the good and bad, the feeling and the unfeeling, the sensible and the senseless, she had subdued even her wonder until now.

I leaned against the SUV he was working on. “So….” “So?” he asked, looking back down at the tablet. “How rich are we?” He snorted. “Get back to work.” And I was going to do just that, except that Kelly Bennett decided to appear right at that moment. Wearing a deputy’s uniform. Tight green pants with a tan button-up shirt that pulled against his torso. He had a mic clipped near his shoulder and a black utility belt around his waist. He wasn’t carrying a gun, but I barely noticed because at that exact moment, I discovered my legs decided to quit working and I tripped and fell into the side of the SUV. Everyone stopped what they were doing to look at me. “Sorry,” I said quickly, using the SUV to pull myself back up. And immediately hit the top of my head on the open hood. “Son of a bitch.” “What are you doing?” Gordo asked slowly. I laughed wildly. “Nothing! It’s nothing. Just… don’t even worry about it.” He turned toward the front of the garage. “Oh no,” he said when he saw who was standing there. “Not this again.” He pointed the tablet at Kelly. “I swear to god, if I find an animal carcass brought here at any point, I will make both your lives a living hell. Do you understand me? I’m getting too old for this shit.” “I can’t believe we have to watch this all over again,” Chris said to Tanner. “It was bad enough the first time. Remember when Robbie figured out that he wanted to put himself all over Kelly?” “Yeah,” Tanner said. “How could I forget? We had to tell Ms. Martin that her side mirror was broken by accident instead of telling her the truth, that Robbie got a weird wolf boner and forgot his own strength.” “Maybe it’ll be like it was with Ox and Joe,” Rico said, tapping a socket wrench against his hand. “Mini muffins, you know? I ate, like, ten of them.” Chris looked scandalized. “You did what? That was one of their mystical moon magic presents! You don’t touch another man’s mystical moon magic present, Rico. They could have killed you, or worse, gotten confused and made you their mate.” He frowned. “Are there werewolf threesomes? That sounds complicated. Too many limbs. I don’t know anything about being a wolf.

How are you this morning? You get up in time for your workout?" "Yeah. Just finished that. It was just a run... well, a run in full combat uniform including our packs, but it was only five miles so not so bad." Her eyes opened wide. "Oh, sure. That's nothing. I do at least that every morning, you know, before tea.

Edward Said summed up “the principal dogmas of Orientalism” in his majesterial study of the same name. The first dogma is that the same Orientalist histories that portray “the West” as “rational, developed, humane [and] superior,” caricature “the Orient” as “aberrant, undeveloped [and] inferior.” Another dogma is that “the Orient” lives according to set rules inscribed in sacred texts, not in response to the changing demands of life. The third dogma prescribes “that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself; therefore it is assumed that a highly generalized and systematic vocabulary for describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is inevitable and scientifically ‘objective.’ “And the final dogma is “that the Orient is at the bottom something either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible).

The extreme inequalities in the manner of living of the several classes of mankind, the excess of idleness in some, and of labour in others, the facility of irritating and satisfying our sensuality and our appetites, the too exquisite and out of the way aliments of the rich, which fill them with fiery juices, and bring on indigestions, the unwholesome food of the poor, of which even, bad as it is, they very often fall short, and the want of which tempts them, every opportunity that offers, to eat greedily and overload their stomachs; watchings, excesses of every kind, immoderate transports of all the passions, fatigues, waste of spirits, in a word, the numberless pains and anxieties annexed to every condition, and which the mind of man is constantly a prey to; these are the fatal proofs that most of our ills are of our own making, and that we might have avoided them all by adhering to the simple, uniform and solitary way of life prescribed to us by nature.

Do you think Archer is right about everyone here being de-magicked? Or maybe the fog, like, made his and Evan’s magic…de-magic.” Crossing over to the closet, I sighed and said, “I’m betting the kids here are de-magicked, but it doesn’t really matter.” I flung open the closet. Just as I’d thought, the only things hung up inside where Hex Hall uniforms. “I’m pretty much de-magicked myself these days,” I said to Jenna over my shoulder. “Also, maybe we should stop saying de-magicked. It’s starting to sound weird.” She sat up straighter. “What?” “You know, when you say things too much, and-“ “Sophie,” Jenna said, tilting her head and frowning at me. Sighing, I sat down on my own bed, facing her. “Thanks to some mojo from the Council, I’m currently powerless.” Her expression softening, Jenna breathed, “Oh, Soph. I’m so sorry.” “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” I told her. “My powers aren’t gone gone. They’re still bumping around in here, but I can’t use them unless I touch this particular-whoa.” “What?” I crossed the room to grip the footboard of Jenna’s bed. “There’s this spell in the Throne family grimoire. If I touch it, my powers will be restored. And Dad was sure the Casnoffs had the grimoire. It might be here, Jenna.” I let go of her bed to pace as my magic pounded inside me. “If we find it, I could be demoning up the place by dinnertime.

The lesson was that in walking, the authentic sign of assurance is a good slowness. What I mean is a sort of slowness that isn’t exactly the opposite of speed. In the first place it’s the extreme regularity of paces, a uniformity. Here one might almost say that a good walker glides, or perhaps that his legs rotate, describing circles. A bad walker may sometimes go fast, accelerate, then slow down. His movements are jerky, his legs form clumsy angles. His speed will be made of sudden accelerations, followed by heavy breathing. Large voluntary movements, a new decision every time the body is pushed or pulled, a red perspiring face. Slowness really is the opposite of haste.

I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees, ignoring the bite of the frosty air on my bare skin. I launched myself in the direction of the door, fumbling around until I found it. I tried shaking the handle, jiggling it, still thinking, hoping, praying that this was some big birthday surprise, and that by the time I got back inside, there would be a plate of pancakes at the table and Dad would bring in the presents, and we could—we could—we could pretend like the night before had never happened, even with the evidence in the next room over. The door was locked. “I’m sorry!” I was screaming. Pounding my fists against it. “Mommy, I’m sorry! Please!” Dad appeared a moment later, his stocky shape outlined by the light from inside of the house. I saw Mom’s bright-red face over his shoulder; he turned to wave her off and then reached over to flip on the overhead lights. “Dad!” I said, throwing my arms around his waist. He let me keep them there, but all I got in return was a light pat on the back. “You’re safe,” he told me, in his usual soft, rumbling voice. “Dad—there’s something wrong with her,” I was babbling. The tears were burning my cheeks. “I didn’t mean to be bad! You have to fix her, okay? She’s…she’s…” “I know, I believe you.” At that, he carefully peeled my arms off his uniform and guided me down, so we were sitting on the step, facing Mom’s maroon sedan. He was fumbling in his pockets for something, listening to me as I told him everything that had happened since I walked into the kitchen. He pulled out a small pad of paper from his pocket. “Daddy,” I tried again, but he cut me off, putting down an arm between us. I understood—no touching. I had seen him do something like this before, on Take Your Child to Work Day at the station. The way he spoke, the way he wouldn’t let me touch him—I had watched him treat another kid this way, only that one had a black eye and a broken nose. That kid had been a stranger. Any hope I had felt bubbling up inside me burst into a thousand tiny pieces. “Did your parents tell you that you’d been bad?” he asked when he could get a word in. “Did you leave your house because you were afraid they would hurt you?” I pushed myself up off the ground. This is my house! I wanted to scream. You are my parents! My throat felt like it had closed up on itself. “You can talk to me,” he said, very gently. “I won’t let anyone hurt you. I just need your name, and then we can go down to the station and make some calls—” I don’t know what part of what he was saying finally broke me, but before I could stop myself I had launched my fists against him, hitting him over and over, like that would drive some sense back into him. “I am your kid!” I screamed. “I’m Ruby!” “You’ve got to calm down, Ruby,” he told me, catching my wrists. “It’ll be okay. I’ll call ahead to the station, and then we’ll go.” “No!” I shrieked. “No!” He pulled me off him again and stood, making his way to the door. My nails caught the back of his hand, and I heard him grunt in pain. He didn’t turn back around as he shut the door. I stood alone in the garage, less than ten feet away from my blue bike. From the tent that we had used to camp in dozens of times, from the sled I’d almost broken my arm on. All around the garage and house were pieces of me, but Mom and Dad—they couldn’t put them together. They didn’t see the completed puzzle standing in front of them. But eventually they must have seen the pictures of me in the living room, or gone up to my mess of the room. “—that’s not my child!” I could hear my mom yelling through the walls. She was talking to Grams, she had to be. Grams would set her straight. “I have no child! She’s not mine—I already called them, don’t—stop it! I’m not crazy!

Not if you’ve been where we have. Forty years ago, in Südwest, we were nearly exterminated. There was no reason. Can you understand that? No reason. We couldn’t even find comfort in the Will of God Theory. These were Germans with names and service records, men in blue uniforms who killed clumsily and not without guilt. Search-and-destroy missions, every day. It went on for two years. The orders came down from a human being, a scrupulous butcher named von Trotha. The thumb of mercy never touched his scales.” “We have a word that we whisper, a mantra for times that threaten to be bad. Mba-kayere. You may find it will work for you. Mba-kayere. It means ‘I am passed over.’ To those of us who survived von Trotha, it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid. A sense for the statistics of our being. One reason we grew so close to the Rocket, I think, was this sharp awareness of how contingent, like ourselves, the Aggregat 4 could be—how at the mercy of small things…dust that gets in a timer and breaks electrical contact…a film of grease you can’t even see, oil from the touch of human fingers, left inside a liquid-oxygen valve, flaring up soon as the stuff hits and setting the whole thing off—I’ve seen that happen…rain that swells the bushings in the servos or leaks into a switch: corrosion, a short, a signal grounded out, Brennschluss too soon, and what was alive is only an Aggregat again, an Aggregat of pieces of dead matter, no longer anything that can move, or that has a Destiny with a shape—stop doing that with your eyebrows, Scuffling. I may have gone a bit native out here, that’s all. Stay in the Zone long enough and you’ll start getting ideas about Destiny yourself.

He said they would be mad at me. He said they would hate me.’ Tina saw her hand on the poker again. Some killing was good. ‘Lockie, look at me.’ He turned away from the yellow fields and his eyes met hers. ‘I’ve told you before and you have to believe me: everything the uniform said was a lie. Everything. He lied about taking you to your parents and he lied about them not looking for you and he lied about them being angry with you. Whatever he did or you did he made you do it. He made you do it and he was bad and a liar and you are a good kid.’ ‘He said they wouldn’t love me ever again.’ Tina looked out of the window. The thing about being a kid was that you had to hear the good stuff a lot before you believed it. You only had to hear the bad shit once before it began to eat away at you.

Even innocent people find themselves in trouble, Adolfina is innocent. We're all innocent. The only ones at fault for the bad things that are happening are the authorities. They with their way of being. Their behavior. Yes, the only ones who go to jail or end up wounded or dead along the roads are the poor. And that's because the authorities have a predilection--they know who to hassle. They exist to boss the poor around. To order the poor about, to beat up on the poor and to carry them off as if they were animals. Someday the good life they're living will end. Always doing it to the people, always. They've never suffered the slightest hurt. That's where they get their pride from. Once they're in uniform they think they're kings of the world, and they themselves say they're disposed to anything

Tipping confounds me because it is not a reward but a travel tax, one of the many, one of the more insulting. No one is spared. It does not matter that you are paying thousands to stay in the presidential suite in the best hotel: the uniformed man seeing you to the elevator, inquiring about your trip, giving you a weather report, and carrying your bags to the suite expects money for this unasked-for attention. Out front, the doorman, gasconading in gold braid, wants a tip for snatching open a cab door, the bartender wants a proportion of your bill, so does the waiter, and chambermaids sometimes leave unambiguous messages, with an accompanying envelope, demanding cash. It is bad enough that people expect something extra for just doing their jobs; it is an even more dismal thought that every smile has a price.

Cray would have been disliked, anyway, because of the uniform he wore, but it was his habit of luring starving young women into his bed for money that made him an object of loathing in the district. In really bad times, the hungriest would gather at his door at nightfall, vying for the chance to earn a few coins to feed their families by selling their bodies. Had I been older when my father died, I might have been among them.

Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before them. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature.

He loved his police uniform. While he was on the force , he slept in it most nights, with his gun,He must have thought he was really something, prepared for the middle-of-the-night call to come and catch the bad guy. Such calls for heroism never came. I have to admit it one way, so I'll put it my way: He loved only himself and was full of pride and wore his badge like a gold star affixed to his chest by God himself. If he sounds trite he was trite. He was very trite.

Oak is peering at the lock on the chest. “Once, the Bomb told me a story about poisonous spiders kept inside a trunk. When the thief opened it, he was bitten all over. Died badly. I believe she was trying to dissuade me from stealing sweets.” Tiernan kicks the stack of wood with one snow-covered boot. The logs rumble out of formation. “I am going to make a fire.” I lift the fur and turn it inside out, brushing my hand over the lining to check for rot or bugs. There’s nothing. No discoloration, either, as there might be from poison. The only odor it contains is the faint smell of the smoke used to tan the hide. A few uniforms from a long-disbanded army are in a gray woolen heap. I shake them out and assess them while Oak tries to pry apart the rusty chest. “There probably aren’t any spiders,” he says when I look in his direction. Inside is a waxed wheel of cheese and ancient rolls, along with a skin of slushy wine. He appears disappointed.

That day in Chartres they had passed through town and watched women kneeling at the edge of the water, pounding clothes against a flat, wooden board. Yves had watched them for a long time. They had wandered up and down the old crooked streets, in the hot sun; Eric remembered a lizard darting across a wall; and everywhere the cathedral pursued them. It is impossible to be in that town and not be in the shadow of those great towers; impossible to find oneself on those plains and not be troubled by that cruel and elegant, dogmatic and pagan presence. The town was full of tourists, with their cameras, their three-quarter coats, bright flowered dresses and shirts, their children, college insignia, Panama hats, sharp, nasal cries, and automobiles crawling like monstrous gleaming bugs over the laming, cobblestoned streets. Tourist buses, from Holland, from Denmark, from Germany, stood in the square before the cathedral. Tow-haired boys and girls, earnest, carrying knapsacks, wearing khaki-colored shorts, with heavy buttocks and thighs, wandered dully through the town. American soldiers, some in uniform, some in civilian clothes, leaned over bridges, entered bistros in strident, uneasy, smiling packs, circled displays of colored post cards, and picked up meretricious mementos, of a sacred character. All of the beauty of the town, all the energy of the plains, and all the power and dignity of the people seemed to have been sucked out of them by the cathedral. It was as though the cathedral demanded, and received, a perpetual, living sacrifice. It towered over the town, more like an affliction than a blessing, and made everything seem, by comparison with itself, wretched and makeshift indeed. The houses in which the people lived did not suggest shelter, or safety. The great shadow which lay over them revealed them as mere doomed bits of wood and mineral, set down in the path of a hurricane which, presently, would blow them into eternity. And this shadow lay heavy on the people, too. They seemed stunted and misshapen; the only color in their faces suggested too much bad wine and too little sun; even the children seemed to have been hatched in a cellar. It was a town like some towns in the American South, frozen in its history as Lot's wife was trapped in salt, and doomed, therefore, as its history, that overwhelming, omnipresent gift of God, could not be questioned, to be the property of the gray, unquestioning mediocre.

You don't have to come with me," Ash said. "I only brought you along because you're good with a knife. And got us the uniforms. And the explosives." Lila snorted. "Sorry I'm not pulling my weight." "This may not be your idea," Ash said doggedly, "but it's what we're going to do." "Is it? Are you really going to start playing the prince card after all?" "Don't start in about my mother the queen, because I don't want to hear it." "All right, then, as your peer and absolute equal, I can't help thinking this is a really bad idea.

Proustian methodology cannot be codified; Czapski learned to let the book come back to him without forcing it. Undertaking this process of reclamation, he came to understand that the true search of À la recherche is not for what one can remember, but for what one has forgotten. Samuel Beckett insisted that “the man with a good memory does not remember anything because he does not forget anything,” and claimed therefore that Proust “had a bad memory.” A good memory is “uniform, . . . an instrument of reference instead of discovery.” Like Proust’s journey, Czapski’s was one of discovery, and affirmation.

Angelo pulled his uniform overshirt over his head without undoing the buttons, which she thought was a pretty impressive feat. Then she saw what he was hiding under there and decided the view was much more impressive. Technically, he was still clothed, but the light tan T-shirt was really tight, and she didn’t have to use her imagination very much to figure out there were a lot of muscles under it. Just the sight of his big arms rippling as he moved was enough to make Minka catch her breath. When he reached behind his head to pull off his T-shirt, Minka found herself licking her lips in anticipation. She felt bad for watching him like this, but she couldn’t help herself. Then she looked up and saw Angelo regarding her with an amused expression on his handsome face. “I understand why you want to keep the door open, and I’m okay with that,” he said. “But you might want to look the other way for this part.” Minka felt heat rush to her face. She nodded and stepped out of the doorway, turning to sit down on the floor beside the bathroom like Angelo had done. Her fingers dug into the stuffed sloth’s fur. She was glad he couldn’t see her face because it was probably bright red. Why had she been staring like that?

What’s going on?” He looked up at me, a scowl marring his cherubic features. “Bloody handcuffs—made of steel, which has too much iron, which means I can’t go anywhere.” “Well, yes, clearly, but what’s going on?” “Search me. Oh wait, they already did. You know, I take back everything I said about you being my only friend. I don’t like you at all. No amount of fun makes up for all the pain and annoyance you introduce into my life.” “Right back at ’cha,” I muttered, walking past him. I wished I had Tasey, but then again, being armed right now was probably a bad idea. I wondered why no one was watching Jack, but that was quickly answered when I walked past the corner of the unattached garage and had a view of the wraparound porch. Arianna stood there, continuing her verbal abuse, surrounded by a dozen uniformed men. I shouldn’t have found the sight amusing, but she had all of them fighting with one another. Clearly her vampire powers of compelling people were in full force, but since she could only push someone in a direction they were inclined to go anyway, the only police she could affect were those that felt some sympathy for her. Those ones were passionately arguing with the others to leave Arianna the creatively-cuss-laden-adjectives alone.

When you're a kid, the world can be bounded in a nutshell. In geographical terms, a child's universe is a space that comprises home, school and—possibly—the neighbourhood where your cousins or your grandparents live. In my case, the universe sat comfortably within a small area of Flores that ran from the junction of Boyacá and Avellaneda (my house), to the Plaza Flores (my school). My only forays beyond the area were when we went on holiday (to Córdoba or Bariloche or to the beach) or occasional, increasingly rare visits to my grandparents' farm in Dorrego, in the province of Buenos Aires. We get our fist glimpse of the big wide world from those we love unconditionally. If we see our elders suffer because they cannot get a job, or see them demoted, or working for a pittance, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the world outside is cruel and brutal. (This is politics.) If we hear our parents bad-mouthing certain politicians and agreeing with their opponents, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the former are bad guys and the latter are good guys. (This is politics.) If we observe palpable fear in our parents at the very sight of soldiers and policemen, our compassion translates our observations and we conclude that, though all children have bogeymen, ours wear uniforms. (This is politics.)

Charlotte was used to all the marks of war: the shabbiness of things, bad food, shop queues, posters about the war effort, people with worried faces, people dressed in black. She was used to seeing the wounded men from the hospital with their bright blue uniforms and bright red ties, the colours, she thought, if not the clothes of Arthur's soldiers. Such things did not disturb her, and the war seemed quite remote. But this disturbed her, the grotesque kind of circus that came now. It did not seem remote at all, nor did it fit with her vague ideas of war gained from those books of Arthur's she had read, with their flags and glory and brave drummer boys. How could you dare to become a soldier, knowing that you might end like this? There were men like clowns with white heads, white arms, white legs, men with crutches, slings, and bloodied bandages, and all so distressingly like men you would expect to see walking down the street, two armed, two legged, in hats instead of bandages and suits of black not battered khaki. Some came on stretchers borne by whole and ordinary men, some hobbled and leaned on whole ordinary arms. Most had mud dried thick across their clothes, and all came from the dark station's mouth with the spewings of trains behind, the clankings, thumpings, grindings, the sounds like great devils taking in breaths and blowing them out again.

The Court of Vienna is behaving very badly,’ Napoleon wrote to Joseph from Valladolid on January 15, 1809, ‘it may have cause to repent. Don’t be uneasy. I have enough troops, even without touching my army in Spain, to get to Vienna in a month . . . In fact, my mere presence in Paris will reduce Austria to her usual irrelevance.’1 He did not know at that stage that Austria had already received a large British subsidy to persuade her to fight what would become the War of the Fifth Coalition. Archduke Charles had been putting all able-bodied men between eighteen and forty-five into uniform in the new Landwehr militia, some of whose units were indistinguishable from the regular army.

There is a quality in the people of Dover that may well be the key to the coming German disaster. They are incorrigibly, incorruptibly unimpressed. The German, with his uniform and his pageantry and his threats and plans, does not impress these people at all. The Dover man has taken perhaps a little more pounding than most, not in great blitzes, but in every-day bombing and shelling, and still he is not impressed. Jerry is like the weather to him. He complains about it and then promptly goes on with what he was doing...Weather and Jerry are alike in that they are inconvenient and sometimes make messes. Surveying a building wrecked by a big shell, he says, "Jerry was bad last night," as he would discuss a windstorm.

Dennis Tueller, a Salt Lake City police officer and firearms instructor (since retired), asked just this question.  Uniformed officers are routinely faced with impact weapon bearing suspects.  So it’s natural for Tueller to wonder how far away a suspect can be and still use an impact weapon against an officer before he could defend himself. To answer his question, Tueller ran a bunch of empirical studies.  Which is just a fancy way of saying he ran a bunch of students through the exercise that would later become the Tueller Drill. Tueller learned that most officers can get a service pistol out of a holster and engage a threat with center-mass hits within 1.5 seconds.  So the question then becomes, how much distance can a bad guy cross in 1.5 seconds?  Timing a great many students running from a standing start, Tueller learned that someone can go about 21 feet in 1.5 seconds.  So 21 feet became the “Tueller distance,” or the maximum distance from a police officer a person can use an impact weapon against the officer before the officer can shoot them.  The Tueller Drill is often referred to as the “21 foot rule,” or the “7 yard rule.”  This really obscures the real take-home message of the Tueller Drill.  The value is not some particular distance.  What matters is your “Tueller distance.” People’s draw speeds vary.  Your Tueller distance will be greater or less than 21 feet depending on your ability to get the gun unholstered and pointed center-mass. The real lesson of the Tueller Drill is that someone armed with an impact weapon has the opportunity to use it at a far greater distance than most think—and certainly much greater distances than a juror might have otherwise thought.  If you imagine the length of typical American parking space, and add another three paces, you’ll be right about at 21 feet.

[A Tibetan Legend] "There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. Barbarian powers have arisen. Although they waste their wealth in preparations to annihilate each other, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable devastation and technologies that lay waste the world. It is now, when the future of all beings hangs by the frailest of threads, that the kingdom of Shambhala emerges. "You cannot go there, for it is not a place. It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors. But you cannot recognize a Shambhala warrior by sight, for there is no uniform or insignia, there are no banners. And there are no barricades from which to threaten the enemy, for the Shambhala warriors have no land of their own. Always they move on the terrain of the barbarians themselves. "Now comes the time when great courage is required of the Shambhala warriors, moral and physical courage. For they must go into the very heart of the barbarian power and dismantle the weapons. To remove these weapons, in every sense of the word, they must go into the corridors of power where the decisions are made. "The Shambhala warriors know they can do this because the weapons are manomaya, mind-made. This is very important to remember, Joanna. These weapons are made by the human mind. So they can be unmade by the human mind! The Shambhala warriors know that the dangers that threaten life on Earth do not come from evil deities or extraterrestrial powers. They arise from our own choices and relationships. So, now, the Shambhala warriors must go into training. "How do they train?" I asked. "They train in the use of two weapons." "The weapons are compassion and insight. Both are necessary. We need this first one," he said, lifting his right hand, "because it provides us the fuel, it moves us out to act on behalf of other beings. But by itself it can burn us out. So we need the second as well, which is insight into the dependent co-arising of all things. It lets us see that the battle is not between good people and bad people, for the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. We realize that we are interconnected, as in a web, and that each act with pure motivation affects the entire web, bringing consequences we cannot measure or even see. "But insight alone," he said, "can seem too cool to keep us going. So we need as well the heat of compassion, our openness to the world's pain. Both weapons or tools are necessary to the Shambhala warrior.

Achievement ceremonies are revealing about the need of the powerful to punish women through beauty, since the tension of having to repress alarm at female achievement is unusually formalized in them. Beauty myth insults tend to be blurted out at them like death jokes at a funeral. Memories of these achievement ceremonies are supposed to last like Polaroid snapshots that gel into permanent colors, souvenirs to keep of a hard race run; but for girls and young women, the myth keeps those colors always liquid so that, with a word, they can be smeared into the uniform shades of mud. At my college graduation, the commencement speaker, Dick Cavett—who had been a “brother” of the university president in an allmale secret society—was confronted by two thousand young female Yale graduates in mortarboards and academic gowns, and offered them this story: When he was at Yale there were no women. The women went to Vassar. There, they had nude photographs taken in gym class to check their posture. Some of the photos ended up in the pornography black market in New Haven. The punch line: The photos found no buyers. Whether or not the slur was deliberate, it was still effective: We may have been Elis but we would still not make pornography worth his buying. Today, three thousand men of the class of 1984 are sure they are graduates of that university, remembering commencement as they are meant to: proudly. But many of the two thousand women, when they can think of that day at all, recall the feelings of the powerless: exclusion and shame and impotent, complicit silence. We could not make a scene, as it was our parents’ great day for which they had traveled long distances; neither could they, out of the same concern for us. Beauty pornography makes an eating disease seem inevitable, even desirable, if a young woman is to consider herself sexual and valuable: Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr in Face Value found in 1984 that “among college women, ‘modern’ definitions of beauty—health, energy, self-confidence”—prevailed. “The bad news” is that they all had “only one overriding concern: the shape and weight of their bodies. They all wanted to lose 5–25 pounds, even though most [were] not remotely overweight. They went into great detail about every flaw in their anatomies, and told of the great disgust they felt every time they looked in the mirror.” The “great disgust” they feel comes from learning the rigid conventions of beauty pornography before they learn their own sexual value; in such an atmosphere, eating diseases make perfect sense.

American Baseball It's for real, not for practice, and it's televised, not secret, the way you'd expect a civilized country to handle delicate things, it's in color, it's happening now in Florida, "This Is American Baseball" the announcer announces as the batter enters the box, we are watching, and it could be either of us standing there waiting for the pitch, avoiding the eye of the pitcher as we take a few practice cuts, turning to him and his tiny friends in the outfield, facing the situation, knowing that someone behind our backs is making terrible gestures, standing there to swing and miss the way I miss you, wanting to be out of uniform, out of breath, in your car, in love again, learning all the signals for the first time, they way we learned the rules of night baseball as high-school freshman: first base, you kiss her, second base, her breasts, third, you're in her pants, and home is where the heart wants to be all the time, but seldom can reach past the obstacle course of space, the home in our perfect future we wanted so badly, and want more than ever since we learned we won't live there, which happens to lovers in civilized countries all the time, and happens too in American baseball when you strike out and remember what the game really meant.

We lived in a safe, family-friendly area, but parts of London were rough, as you’d expect from any large city. Mark had a knack for attracting muggers. One time, we were in a train station and a little kid--no more than about eight years old--came up to him: “Oi, mate, give me your phone.” We always carried the cool Nokia phones with the Snake game on them, and they were the hot item. It was like inviting trouble carrying one around, but we didn’t care. Mark thought the mini-mugger was crazy: “Are you kidding me? No way.” Then he looked over his shoulder and realized the kid wasn’t alone; he had a whole gang with him. So Mark handed over his phone and the kid ran off. I never let him live down the fact that an eight-year-old had mugged him. I had my own incident as well, but I handled it a little differently. I got off the train at Herne Hill station and noticed that two guys were following me. I could hear their footsteps getting closer and closer. “Give us your backpack,” they threatened me. “Why? All I have is my homework in here,” I tried to reason with them. They had seen me on the train with my minidisc player and they knew I was holding out on them. “Give it,” they threatened. My bag was covered with key chains and buttons, and as I took it off my shoulder, pretending to give it to them, I swung it hard in their faces. All that hardware knocked one of them to the ground and stunned the other. With my bag in my hand, I ran the mile home without ever looking back. Not bad for a skinny kid in a school uniform.

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, South Carolina. After serving four years in the army in World War II, where he had earned a battle star, he had received an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard asked the white driver if he could go to the restroom and a brief argument ensued. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw white police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in the head with a billy club, then continued to beat him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just four and a half hours after the soldier’s military discharge. At twenty-six, Woodard would never see again.83 There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence that had been deployed continuously against Black Americans for decades since the end of Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the racially egalitarian spirit of post–Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, Black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from

While they fought for the privilege of carrying him on their shoulders along the steep escarpment by the cliffs, men and women became aware for the first time of the desolation of their streets, the dryness of their courtyards, the narrowness of their dreams as they faced the splendor and beauty of their drowned man. They let him go without an anchor so that he could come back if he wished and whenever he wished, and they all held their breath for the fraction of centuries the body took to fall into the abyss. They did not need to look at one another to realize that they were no longer all present, that they would never be. But they also knew that everything would be different from then on, that their houses would have wider doors, higher ceilings, and stronger floors so that Esteban's memory could go everywhere without bumping into beams and so that no one in the future would dare whisper the big boob finally died, too bad, the handsome fool has finally died, because they were going to paint their house fronts gay colors to make Esteban's memory eternal and they were going to break their backs digging for springs among the stones and planting flowers on the cliffs so that in future years at dawn the passengers on great liners would awaken, suffocated by the smell of gardens on the high seas, and the captain would have to come down from the bridge in his dress uniform, with his astrolabe, his pole star, and his row of war medals and, pointing to the promontory of roses on the horizon, he would say in fourteen languages, look there, where the wind is so peaceful now that it's gone to sleep beneath the beds, over there, where the sun's so bright that the sunflowers don't know which way to turn, yes, over there, that's Esteban's village.

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, South Carolina. After serving four years in the army in World War II, where he had earned a battle star, he had received an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard asked the white driver if he could go to the restroom and a brief argument ensued. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw white police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in the head with a billy club, then continued to beat him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just four and a half hours after the soldier’s military discharge. At twenty-six, Woodard would never see again.83 There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence that had been deployed continuously against Black Americans for decades since the end of Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the racially egalitarian spirit of post–Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, Black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from mainstream American life—a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.84

TOTALITARIANISM: People are interested in ants because they think they have managed to create a successful totalitarian system. Certainly, the impression we get from the outside is that everyone in the anthill works, everyone is obedient, everyone is ready to sacrifice themselves and everyone is the same. And for the time being, all human totalitarian systems have failed. That is why we thought of copying social insects (like Napoleon, whose emblem was the bee). The pheromones that flood the anthill with global information have an equivalent in the planetary television of today. There is a widespread belief that if the best is made available to all, one day we will end up with a perfect human race. That is not the way of things. Nature, with all due respect to Mr Darwin, does not evolve in the direction of the supremacy of the best (according to which criteria, anyway?). Nature draws its strength from diversity. It needs all kinds of people, good, bad, mad, desperate, sporty, bed-ridden, hunchbacked, hare-lipped, happy, sad, intelligent, stupid, selfish, generous, small, tall, black, yellow, red and white. It needs all religions, philosophies, fanaticisms and wisdom. The only danger is that any one species may be eliminated by another. In the past, fields of maize artificially designed by men and made up of clones of the best heads (the ones that need least water, are most frost-resistant or produce the best grains) have suddenly succumbed to trivial infections while fields of wild maize made up of several different strains, each with its own peculiar strengths and weaknesses, have always managed to survive epidemics. Nature hates uniformity and loves diversity. It is in this perhaps that its essential genius lies. Edmond Wells Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. •  •  • When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

You’re having a bad day. You mess up a few lines. You’re distracted. You’ve had this look about you all afternoon, like you’re not quite there. “Christ, Cunningham, get it together,” Hastings says, running his hands down his face. “If you can’t handle being Brutus—” “Fuck you.” You cut him off. “Don’t act like you’re perfect.” “I don’t make rookie mistakes,” Hastings says. “Maybe if you weren’t so preoccupied with trying to screw the new girl, you might—” BAM. You shut him up mid-sentence with a punch to the face, your fist connecting hard, nearly knocking him off his feet. He stumbles, stunned, as you go at him again, grabbing the collar of his uniform shirt and yanking him to you. “Shut your fucking mouth.” People come between the two of you, forcing you apart. Hastings storms out, shouting, “I can’t deal with him!” Drama Club comes to a screeching halt. You stand there for a moment, fists clenched at your side, calming down. You flex your hands, loosening them as you approach the girl. She’s watching you in silence, expression guarded. You sit down near her. There’s an empty seat between you today. It’s the first time you’ve not sat right beside her in weeks. You’re giving her space. It doesn’t take long before Hastings returns, but he isn’t alone. The administrator waltzes in behind him. The man heads for you, expression stern. “Cunningham, give me one good reason why I shouldn’t expel you.” “Because my father gives you a lot of money.” “That’s what you have to say?” “Is that not a good reason?” “You punched a fellow student!” “We were just acting,” you say. “I’m Brutus. He’s Caesar. It’s to be expected.” “Brutus stabs him. He doesn’t throw punches.” “I was improvising.” The girl laughs when you say that. She tries to stop herself, but the sound comes out, and the administrator hears it, his attention shifting to her. “Look, it won’t happen again,” you say, drawing the focus back to you. “Next time, I’ll stab him and be done with it.” “You better watch yourself,” the administrator says, pointing his finger in your face. “One more incident and you’re gone for good. Understand?” “Yes, sir.” “And rest assured, your father will be hearing about this

Raphael pulled out a paperback and handed it to me. The cover, done back in the time when computer-aided imagine manipulation had risen to the level of art, featured an impossibly handsome man, leaning forward, one foot in a huge black boot resting on the carcass of some monstrous sea creature. His hair flowed down to his shoulders in a mane of white gold, in stark contrast to his tanned skin and the rakish black patch hiding his left eye. His white, translucent shirt hung open, revealing abs of steel and a massive, perfectly carved chest graced by erect nipples. His muscled thighs strained the fabric of his pants, which were unbuttoned and sat loosely on his narrow hips, a touch of a strategically positioned shadow hinting at the world’s biggest boner. The cover proclaimed in loud golden letters: The Privateer’s Virgin Mistress, by Lorna Sterling. “Novel number four for Andrea’s collection?” I guessed. Raphael nodded and took the book from my hands. “I’ve got the other one Andrea wanted, too. Can you explain something to me?” Oh boy. “I can try.” He tapped the book on his leather-covered knee. “The pirate actually holds this chick’s brother for ransom, so she’ll sleep with him. These men, they aren’t real men. They’re pseudo-bad guys just waiting for the love of a ‘good’ woman.” “You actually read the books?” He gave me a chiding glance. “Of course I read the books. It’s all pirates and the women they steal, apparently so they can enjoy lots of sex and have somebody to run their lives.” Wow. He must’ve had to hide under his blanket with a flashlight so nobody would question his manliness. Either he really was in love with Andrea or he had a terminal case of lust. “These guys, they’re all bad and aggressive as shit, and everybody wets themselves when they walk by, and then they meet some girl and suddenly they’re not uber-alphas; they are just misunderstood little boys who want to talk about their feelings.” “Is there a point to this dissertation?” He faced me. “I can’t be that. If that’s what she wants, then I shouldn’t even bother.” I sighed. “Do you have a costume kink? French maid, nurse . . .” “Catholic school girl.” Bingo. “You wouldn’t mind Andrea wearing a Catholic school uniform, would you?” “No, I wouldn’t.” His eyes glazed over and he slipped off to some faraway place. I snapped my fingers. “Raphael! Focus.” He blinked at me. “I’m guessing—and this is just a wild stab in the dark—that Andrea might not mind if once in a while you dressed up as a pirate. But I wouldn’t advise holding her relatives for ransom nookie. She might shoot you in the head. Several times. With silver bullets.

Lieutenant Smith was asked by Mister Zumwald to get him a drink,” Wilkes said. “She responded with physical violence. I counseled her on conduct unbecoming of an officer and, when she reacted with foul language, on disrespect to a superior officer, sir, and I’ll stand by that position. Sir.” “I agree that her actions were unbecoming, Captain,” Steve said, mildly. “She really should have resolved it with less force. Which I told her as well as a strong lecture on respect to a superior officer. On the other hand, Captain, Mister Zumwald physically accosted her, grabbing her arm and, when she protested, called her a bitch. Were you aware of that, Captain?” “She did say something about it, sir,” Wilkes said. “However… ” “I also understand that you spent some time with Mister Zumwald afterwards,” Steve said. “Rather late. Did you at any time express to Mister Zumwald that accosting any woman, much less an officer of… what was it? ‘The United States Naval services’ was unacceptable behavior, Captain?” “Sir,” Wilkes said. “Mister Zumwald is a major Hollywood executive… ” “Was,” Steve said. “Excuse me, sir?” Wilkes said. “Was a major Hollywood executive,” Steve said. “Right now, Ernest Zumwald, Captain, is a fucking refugee off a fucking lifeboat. Period fucking dot. He’s given a few days grace, like most refugees, to get his headspace and timing back, then he can decide if he wants to help out or go in with the sick, lame and lazy. And in this case he’s a fucking refugee who thinks it’s acceptable to accost some unknown chick and tell him to get him a fucking drink. Grab her by the arm and, when she tells him to let go, become verbally abusive. “What makes the situation worse, Captain, is that the person he accosted was not just any passing young hotty but a Marine officer. He did not know that at the time; the Marine officer was dressed much like other women in the compartment. However, he does not have the right to grab any woman in my care by the fucking arm and order them to get him a fucking drink, Captain! Then, to make matters worse, following the incident, Captain, you spent the entire fucking evening getting drunk with a fucktard who had physically and verbally assaulted a female Marine officer! You dumbshit.” “Sir, I… ” Wilkes said, paling. “And not just any Marine officer, oh, no,” Steve said. “Forget that it was the daughter of the Acting LANTFLEET. Forget that it was the daughter of your fucking rating officer, you retard. I’m professional enough to overlook that. I really am. There’s personal and professional, and I do actually know the line. Except that it was, professionally, a disgraceful action on your part, Captain. But not just any Marine officer, Captain. No, this was a Marine officer that, unlike you, is fucking worshipped by your Marines, Captain. This is a Marine officer that the acting Commandant thinks only uses boats so her boots don’t get wet walking from ship to ship. This is a Marine officer who is the only fucking light in the darkness to the entire Squadron, you dumbfuck! “I’d already gotten the scuttlebutt that you were a palace prince pogue who was a cowardly disgrace to the Marine uniform, Captain. I was willing to let that slide because maybe you could run the fucking clearance from the fucking door. But you just pissed off every fucking Marine we’ve got, you idiot. You incredible dumbfuck, moron! “In case you hadn’t noticed, you are getting cold-shouldered by everyone you work with while you were brown-nosing some fucking useless POS who used to ‘be somebody.’ ‘Your’ Marines are spitting on your shadow and that includes your fucking Gunnery Sergeant! Captain, am I getting through to you? Are you even vaguely recognizing how badly you fucked up? Professionally, politically, personally?

The other cops were almost evenly divided between being scared by what they’d seen and being so impressed that it was almost worse, because I wasn’t sure what they’d expect me to be able to do next time. Aimes hadn’t been the only one who saw the white-shadowed outline of wings. I told them it was an answer to prayer, not me personally. I finally told one overly solicitous uniform, ‘Trust me, I’m no angel.’ Nicky started laughing and couldn’t seem to stop. ‘Yuk it up, lion boy.’ That made him laugh harder, until he had to lean against the wall with tears trailing down from his eye. At least his laughing stopped any more weird theological questions; they just couldn’t seem to talk about angels with this big, muscled bad-ass guy laughing his ass off beside me.

One is wearing a uniform of green-and-gray camouflage, as if he were hunting deer in the woods. The other is wearing a uniform of brown-and-beige camouflage, as if he were hunting insurgents in the desert. These two clowns are standing in the driveway of a suburban home, about fifteen minutes from downtown, in a well-developed city of a million people, and they’re wearing camouflage. The sad and scary thing about this image is that these guys have no idea how stupid they look. Instead, they’re proud, arrogant. They’re on display, tough guys fighting bad guys. One of their brethren has been hit, wounded, fallen in the line of duty, and they’re pissed about it. They scowl at the neighbors across the street. One wrong word, and they might start shooting. Their fingers are on the triggers.

Her uniform tightly hugged every curve of her voluptuous figure. Too bad, she was a psychopathic Nazi bigot.

Most of them [the soldiers—Warriors in New Pentagon Speak—of the all-volunteer military] come from small towns in the South or the rustbelt of the Midwest or the big city ghettoes. Many are following a family heritage of military service that has made veterans of past wars a relatively privileged class, enjoying special access to higher education, jobs, and a nationwide system of socialized medicine. But so many of them are so very young, enticed or strong-armed by smartly uniformed recruiters who work the corridors and classrooms of America's most impoverished and thoroughly militarized high schools. So many are badly educated, knowing nothing of the world and how it operates. So many are immigrants, risking their lives for a fast track to citizenship. So many are poor and short on promise. So many have such a slim chance of another job, another line of work [like the one who tells the author "where else can I get a job doing the stuff I love? . . . Shootin' people. Blowin' shit up. It's fuckin' fun. I fuckin' love it."], let alone a decent wage or a promotion. And because the Pentagon lowered standards to fill the ranks of the volunteer army, so many are high school dropouts, or gangbangers, or neo-Nazi white supremacists, or drug addicts, or convicted felons with violent crimes on their record. In just three years following the invasion of Iraq, the military issued free passes—so called "moral waivers"—to one of every five recruits, including more than 58,000 convicted drug users and 1,605 with "serious" felony convictions for offenses including rape, kidnapping, and murder. When the number of free passes rose in the fourth year, the Pentagon changed the label to "conduct waiver.

Experience had taught her that an enthusiastic officer was a bad thing; an enthusiastic idiot in a captain’s uniform was a

The 10 best things about the future is that... ... 1. tomorrow it's all in the past 2. we'll get to wear cool uniforms (if we're the bad guys) 3. we'll catch up on our laundry 4. if I accidentally swallow my iPhone I can shit it out with the corn niblets 5. I'll be able to 3D-print my next ex-girlfriend 6. the world will be decimated by nuclear apocalypse and my penis will glow in the dark 7. we'll drive flying cars (and Allstate still won't pay our insurance claims) 8. marijuana will be legal everywhere and tobacco and alcohol will be banned 9. immersive virtual reality technologies will replace bitches, whores and the dollar menu at McDonalds 10. if things don't go as planned, well we can always look forward to the future

Her hostess shuddered. ‘Ugh. A young woman has a duty to make the best of herself.’ As they went into the building, she said, ‘You’ll have to wear a uniform if you’re accepted. It’s rather dull, all the young women dressing alike. Still, the white pinafores and caps brighten the blue dresses up, and look quite smart and professional, considering.’ Phoebe wondered what white pinafores would look like when they were worn to help nurse men with bad wounds. They didn’t sound very practical. The secretary stood up to greet them. ‘Good morning, Lady Potherington. How nice to see you again! Miss Rufford is expecting you. I’ll show you in.’ ‘I do wish you’d at least call me Lady P,’ Beaty grumbled. ‘You know how I hate that name.’ ‘It wouldn’t be right. This way.’ Phoebe hid a smile. Rosemary Rufford was almost as beautiful as Beaty, and just as elegantly dressed. But she spoke far more crisply and her gaze was shrewd. After introducing them, Beaty left Phoebe to speak for herself. After only ten minutes of searching questions, Miss Rufford leant back and smiled at her. ‘You’re clearly a very suitable candidate, and we’ll be

The dangers of this ratchet effect to society are multiple. It pits groups one against another in the struggle for protection, it hinders the working of the price system, and it affects our attitude toward risk. At the end of the book, it becomes clear why trying to maintain people at their current level of income was such a bad policy. When the war ended, there was going to be a massive reallocation of resources as the economy shifted from a war foot- ing to peacetime, in the face of which it was important “that we should all be ready to adapt ourselves quickly to a very much changed world, that no considerations for the accustomed standard of particular groups must be allowed to obstruct this adaptation, and that we learn once more to turn all our resources to wherever they contribute most to make us richer . . . Let a uniform minimum be secured to everyone by all means; but let us admit at the same time that with this assurance of a basic minimum all claims for a privileged security of particular classes must lapse” (215). Thus the fear of policies likely to be undertaken after the war was at least in part responsible for Hayek’s distinction between the two types of security. He was willing to grant a basic minimum, but feared the outcome if those who pushed for more were successful.

As Karen returned from the restroom, the gate agent explained the order of boarding: People with disabilities or in wheelchairs, people over the age of 100, people who act like they’re over the age of 100, families with children (children are two-year olds and younger, not fifteen-year olds), in-uniform military personnel, first class, business class, platinum frequent flyer members, gold members, silver members, bronze members, associate members, people who just applied for the airline’s credit card five minutes ago, group 1, groups 2 through 10 in that order, and finally, anyone too clueless to figure out how to get into one of the groups already called. We had “group 8” boarding passes. We felt smug as we pushed our way past the five remaining passengers who were lower on the boarding list than us. I don’t like being trapped in a small place, such as an airplane, with a large cross-section of humanity. I think airlines should announce before every flight, “Listen up people. We’re all sealed in here together for the next four hours, so try not to be annoying until the flight is over. Once you exit the plane, then you can whistle, hum, fart, snore, talk baby talk, take your shoes off and put on as much bad perfume as you want.” I think this would make air travel more bearable. We arrived in El Paso with enough time to pick up the rental car, have dinner (at Carlos and Mickey’s) and buy groceries for the week: peanut butter, jelly, bread, water, blue corn chips, peppermint patties, animal crackers and beer.

The bureaucracy of a big company like Citi often led to bad policies. Such a large firm is basically forced to make decisions for a whole organization that don’t necessarily apply well to the individual business units. Is it better, one wonders, to have uniformity of authority in decision making at the expense of flexibility? It was a demonstration of the challenges of size, the difficulty of managing a large business with hundreds of disparate units. In the mid-2000s, for example, the firm developed new rules for air travel, insisting that employees reach their destinations on the cheapest fares available, even if that meant multiple connections to get to smaller cities. Saving money was not a bad inclination in an industry notorious for profligacy, but there was no flexibility in the rule, and so my assistant, Angela Murray, was engaged in frequent battles to make sure I could arrive at out-of-town meetings on time. If I had a ten o’clock morning meeting in Omaha to discuss a deal with a potential $6 million fee, Citi still insisted on saving a few hundred bucks by booking me on a flight that arrived in the afternoon, which meant I would miss the meeting unless I traveled the day before. And because those cheaper flights often required an overnight stay, more work hours were wasted as well as any potential savings, since the firm would have to pay for a hotel and meals. I knew for a fact that the policy was revenue-negative.

She ran into a problem at the tunnel exit, though. Her father chose one of the exits with a ladder up to the sky, where a Wingwatcher stood guard at the bottom. Ivy crouched behind a bench carved out of the rock. Her heart was pounding. She’d never been this close to this exit before — certainly never without permission. It smelled different here. She didn’t think she was imagining that. “Hello, Holly!” Heath boomed cheerfully as he approached the bottom of the ladder. “It’s Foxglove, sir,” the Wingwatcher said. Ivy didn’t know her very well, although Foxglove had left school only a couple of years ago to train with the Wingwatchers. Her hair was shaved into a close dark fuzz over her head and her forest-green uniform was neat and unwrinkled. Most interestingly, Foxglove’s expression was hard to read. It wasn’t the usual adoring gaze Ivy’s father got all over Valor. She looked calm, focused … unimpressed. Ivy smushed her face around, trying to imitate her. Violet and Daffodil would be so startled if Ivy could make a cool “I don’t care” expression like that. “Any dragon sightings today?” Heath asked, ignoring the name correction. “No, sir.” “Too bad, too bad.” He cracked his knuckles. “Can’t wait to meet another dragon with the pointy end of this guy.” He patted the sword at his waist with a grin. Foxglove raised her eyebrows but said nothing. “Well, I’ll be back soon,” Heath said. He put one hand on the ladder.

What we cannot allow are frames that deny the existence of other frames (the sole exception to the idea that there are no bad frames). Uniformity of mental models is what crushes human progress. It makes people no wiser than automata that perpetuate the past because they cannot see beyond the present. If our frames cannot coexist, how can we?

Yes, sir. I understand. Of course, sir,' Ridley was saying into his cell phone. 'I will.' He stood in the living room, his back to me. he still wore the Överste uniform with the silver epaulets on the shoulder. When he hung up the phone, he ran a hand through his hair and let out a heavy sigh. 'Who was that?' I asked. 'Holy crap, Bryn!' Ridley turned around to face me, and his surprise was immediately replaced by relief as he rushed over to me. 'What are you doing here?' 'Your back door was unlocked.' I motioned to it behind me. He pushed back the hood of the parka so he could see me more clearly, and he grimaced when he saw my eye, which had to be blackening by now. 'Oh, Bryn.' 'How bad is it?' 'I'm not if you're asking about your eye or the situation,' he said. 'But the situation is not good. I just got home from work and the head of the Högdragen called to tell me that you'd been arrested for treason, escaped from prison, and then murdered Kasper Abbott and the Skojare Prince before going on the run again.

Yes, sir. I understand. Of course, sir," Ridley was saying into his cell phone. "I will." He stood in the living room, his back to me. he still wore the Överste uniform with the silver epaulets on the shoulder. When he hung up the phone, he ran a hand through his hair and let out a heavy sigh. "Who was that?" I asked. "Holy crap, Bryn!" Ridley turned around to face me, and his surprise was immediately replaced by relief as he rushed over to me. "What are you doing here?" "Your back door was unlocked." I motioned to it behind me. He pushed back the hood of the parka so he could see me more clearly, and he grimaced when he saw my eye, which had to be blackening by now. "Oh, Bryn." "How bad is it?" "I'm not if you're asking about your eye or the situation," he said. "But the situation is not good. I just got home from work and the head of the Högdragen called to tell me that you'd been arrested for treason, escaped from prison, and then murdered Kasper Abbott and the Skojare Prince before going on the run again.

you do have to admit SEAL Team Six has the better name. Infinitely more bad ass, right? Green Beret? Really? I get that your little hats are the distinguishing part of your uniform. But did they really have to name the entire unit after them? I mean, was the name Pink Unicorns already taken?” he finished, bursting into laughter at his own joke.

The next morning everybody was wearing the official school uniform. The boys had on light blue shirts, blue pants, and blue ties. The girls had on blue skirts with stripes on them. I looked like a dork. But everybody looked like a dork, so I didn’t feel so bad.

It’s also becoming clear that we can’t treat genes and the environment as two distinct forces that act independently of each other. Each one influences the other. In 2003, Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia and his colleagues gave a twist to the standard studies on twins. To calculate the heritability of intelligence, they decided not to just look at the typical middle-class families who were the subject of earlier studies. They looked for twins from poorer families, too. Turkheimer and his colleagues found that the socioeconomic class determined how heritable intelligence was. Among children who grew up in affluent families, the heritability was about 60 percent. But twins from poorer families showed no greater correlation than other siblings. Their heritability was close to zero. It may seem weird that the environment itself can change heritability. We tend to think of genes as rigid purveyors of destiny, the inescapable agents of heredity. But biologists have always known that the two are intimately linked together. If you raise corn in uniformly healthy soil, with the same level of abundant sunlight and water, the variation in their height will largely be the product of the variation in their genes. But if you plant them in a bad soil, where they may or may not get enough of some vital nutrient, the environment will be responsible for more of their differences. Turkheimer’s study hints that something similar happens to intelligence. By focusing their research on affluent families—or on countries such as Norway, where people get universal health care—intelligence researchers may end up giving too much credit to heredity. Poverty may be powerful enough to swamp the influence of variants in our DNA.

Japanese paranoia stemmed partly from xenophobia rooted in racism. This combination wasn’t peculiar to Japan, as the Nazis were demonstrating in Germany. In the United States, the 1924 Exclusion Act remained in force, prohibiting all immigration from Asia. Some Western states didn’t think the Exclusion Act went far enough, because it hadn’t gotten rid of the Japanese who had immigrated before the United States slammed the door. Xenophobes argued that these immigrants were now breeding more Japanese, who were recognized, outrageously, as American citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. Farmers in California and Arizona were especially hostile. Even before the Exclusion Act, these states had passed Alien Land Laws severely restricting the property rights of Japanese. Then in 1934 a group of farmers in Arizona’s Salt River Valley began agitating to kick Japanese farmers out, alleging that they had flooded into the region and were depriving farmland from deserving whites who were already hurting from the Depression. They also demanded that white landowners stop leasing acreage to Japanese farmers. The white farmers and their supporters held rallies and parades, blaring their message of exclusion. In the fall of that year, night riders began a campaign of terrorism. They dynamited irrigation canals used by Japanese farmers and threw dynamite bombs at their homes and barns. The leaders of the Japanese community tried to point out that only 700 Japanese lived in the valley and most had been there for more than twenty years. Three hundred fifty of them were American citizens, and only 125 worked in agriculture, mostly for American farmers. Facts made no impression on the white farmers’ racist resentments. Some local officials exploited the bigotry for political gain. The Japanese government protested all this. Hull didn’t want a few farmers to cause an international incident and pushed the governor of Arizona to fix the problem. The governor blamed the terrorism on communist agitators. Dynamite bombs continued to explode on Japanese farms through the fall of 1934. The local and state police maintained a perfect record—not a single arrest. In early February 1935 the Arizona legislature began considering a bill that would forbid Japanese immigrants from owning or leasing land. If they managed to grow anything, it could be confiscated. Any white farmer who leased to a Japanese would be abetting a crime. (Japan had similar laws against foreigners owning farmland.) American leaders and newspapers quickly condemned the proposed law as shameful, but farmers in Arizona remained enthusiastic. Japanese papers covered the controversy as well. One fascist group, wearing uniforms featuring skulls and waving a big skull flag, protested several times at the US embassy in Tokyo. Patriotic societies began pressuring Hirota to stand up for Japan’s honor. He and Japan’s representatives in Washington asked the American government to do something. Arizona politicians got word that if the bill passed, millions of dollars in New Deal money might go elsewhere. Nevertheless, on March 19 the Arizona senate passed the bill. On March 21 the state house of representatives, inspired more by fears of evaporating federal aid than by racial tolerance, let the bill die. The incident left a bad taste all around.

when a man puts that uniform on that he is the paid protector of things of the present time. he is here to see that things stay the way they are. if you like the way things are, then all cops are good cops. if you don’t like the way things are, then all cops are bad cops.

As he shifted from one foot to the other, he recalled the fully mechanized saloon, he, Finnerty, and Shepherd had designed when they'd been playful young engineers. To their surprise, the owner of a restaurant chain had been interested enough to give the idea a try. They'd set up the experimental unit about five doors down from where Paul now stood, with coin machines and endless belt to do the serving, with germicidal lamps cleaning the air, with uniform, healthful light, with continuous soft music from a tape recorder, with seats scientifically designed by an anthropologist to give the average man the absolute maximum in comfort. The first day had been a sensation, with a waiting line extending blocks. Within a week of the opening, curiosity had been satisfied, and it was a book day when five customers stopped in. Then this place had opened up almost next door, with a dust-and-germ trap of a Victorian bar, bad light, poor ventilation, and an unsanitary, inefficient, and probably dishonest bartender. It was an immediate and unflagging success

You will perhaps have heard something of a disreputable Brawl occurring in Boston in March of three Years past, which I have often seen in Newspaper and Broadside called a “Massacre,” most irresponsibly—and most inaccurately, to one who has been privy to the actual Occurrence. I was not present myself, but have spoken to numerous of the Officers and Soldiers who were. If they speak truly, and I believe they do, such a View as is given by the Boston Press of the Matter has been monstrous. Boston is by all Accounts a perfect Hellhole of republican Sentiment, with so-called “Marching Societies” at large in the Streets in every Weather, these being no more than an Excuse for the Assembly of Mobs, whose chief Sport is the tormenting of the Troops quartered there. Higgins tells me that no Man would dare go out alone in Uniform, for fear of these Mobs, and that even when in greater Numbers, harassment from the public soon drove them back to their Quarters, save when compelled by Duty to persist. A Patrol of five Soldiers was so beset one Evening, pursued not only by insults of the grossest Nature, but by hurled Stones, Clods of Earth and Dung, and other such Rubbish. Such was the Press of the Mob around them that the Men feared for their Safety, and thus presented their Weapons, in hopes of discouraging the raucous Attentions rained upon them. So far from accomplishing this Aim, the Action provoked still greater Outrages from the Crowd, and at some Point, a Gun was fired. No one can say for sure whether the Shot was discharged from the Crowd, or from one of the Soldier’s Weapons, let alone whether it were by Accident or in Deliberation, but the Effect of it … well, you will have sufficient Knowledge of such Matters to imagine the Confusion of subsequent Events. In the End, five of the Mob were killed, and while the Soldiers were buffeted and badly handled, they escaped alive, only to be made Scapegoats by the malicious Rantings of the mob’s Leaders in the Press, these so styled as to make it seem a wanton and unprovoked Slaughter of Innocents, rather than a Matter of Self-defense against a Mob inflamed by Drink and Sloganeering. I confess that my Sympathies must lie altogether with the Soldiers; I am sure so much is obvious to you. They were brought to Trial, where the Judge discovered Three to be Innocent, but no Doubt felt it would be Dangerous to his own Situation to free them all.

Karly- Look- at this old photo from- Nevaeh town, and her mother from the past. The uniformed man motioned lazily, not paying attention. Olivia accelerated, edging around him, and heading for the gate. He shouted something at us, All the same, and all, held his ground, waving frantically to keep the next car from following our bad example. The man at the gate wore a matching uniform. As we approached him, the throngs of tourists passed, crowding the sidewalks, staring curiously at the pushy, flashy Porsche. The guard stepped into the middle of the street before us. Olivia angled the car carefully before she came to a full stop. The sun beat against my window that I was now looking out, and she was in shadow. She swiftly reached behind the seat and grabbed something from her bag. The guard came around the car with an irritated expression and tapped on her window angrily. She rolled the window down halfway, and I watched him do a double-take when he saw the face behind the dark glass. ‘I'm sorry, only tour buses allowed in the city today, miss,’ he said in English, with a heavy accent. He was apologetic to both of us, now, as if he wished he had better news for the strikingly beautiful woman such as us. ‘It's a private tour,’ Olivia said, flashing an alluring cute flirty smile. Then and there, she reached her hand out of the window, into the sunlight. I froze some until, at that moment, I realized she was wearing an elbow-length, tan glove. She took his hand, still raised from tapping her window, and pulled it into the car some. She put something into his palm and folded his fingers around it, saying there you go. His face was dazed as he retrieved his hand and stared at the thick roll of money he now held. The outside bill was a thousand-dollar bill. ‘Is this a joke?’ He mumbled. Olivia's smile was blinding. ‘Only if you think it's funny.’ He looked at her, his eyes staring wide. I glanced nervously at the clock on the dash. If Marcel stuck to his plan, we had only five minutes left.

You might think the alien worlds in the original Star Trek look fake. You might think the blinky lights on those old sets are silly. You might not love those oh-so-tight 1960s velour uniforms. But nobody thinks Spock’s pointed ears look bad. The ears are legit. It’s one of those classic Hollywood tricks that should be hugely impressive but somehow isn’t praised enough. Whether the stoic Vulcan is played by Leonard Nimoy, Zachary Quinto, or Ethan Peck, the applause for the most famous fake alien ears is mostly absent. And that’s because the ears work. Praising Spock’s ears would be like praising James Bond’s tailor; you expect Spock to look that way. The believability of Spock’s ears allowed the characters—and by extension the earliest Star Trek—to prevent the entire series from becoming, as Leonard Nimoy had worried in 1964, “a bad sci-fi joke.

I want to be judged, but not too harshly. I want you to call me a baby-killer, but not to my face. I want the veteran identity to be surgically extracted from my body, but I want you to buy me a beer so we can talk about the war, and the good times, and the bad times, and the rotten culture of the military, and the feeling of being young and in uniform and sexy and structured and free and a slave. I want you to get me to admit that I miss it.

General?" I wasn't listening as I finished the final inspection of the Living quarters. "I don't like this." They kept muttering while I continued to check their weapon maintenance and uniforms. "I'm scared." "If you're scared of the general's smile, I think you'll shit your pants to see him laugh." Maxus taunted the younger recruits. "But none of that is as bad as when you disrespect him, so shut the fuck up!

The award-winning American TV series Breaking Bad has a scene in its second season set in the murder capital of Ciudad Juárez. In this episode, American and Mexican agents are lured to a patch of desert just south of the border looking for an informant. They discover the informant’s head has been cut off and stuck on the body of a giant turtle. But as they approach, the severed cranium, turned into an IED, explodes, killing agents. The episode was released in 2009. I thought it was unrealistic, a bit fantastic. Until July 15, 2010. In the real Ciudad Juárez on that day, gangsters kidnapped a man, dressed him in a police uniform, shot him, and dumped him bleeding on a downtown street. A cameraman filmed what happened after federal police and paramedics got close. The video shows medics bent over the dumped man, checking for vital signs. Suddenly a bang rings out, and the image shakes vigorously as the cameraman runs for his life. Gangsters had used a cell phone to detonate twenty-two pounds of explosives packed into a nearby car. A minute later, the camera turns back around to reveal the burning car pouring smoke over screaming victims. A medic lies on the ground, covered in blood but still moving, a stunned look on his face. Panicked officers are scared to go near him. The medic dies minutes later along with a federal agent and a civilian. I’m not suggesting that Breaking Bad inspired the murders. TV shows don’t kill people. Car bombs kill people. The point of the story is that the Mexican Drug War is saturated with stranger-than-fiction violence. Mexican writer Alejandro Almazán suffered from a similar dilemma. As he was writing his novel Among Dogs, he envisioned a scene in which thugs decapitate a man and stick a hound’s head on his corpse. It seemed pretty out there. But then in real life some gangsters did exactly that, only with a pig’s head. It is just hard to compete with the sanguine criminal imagination. Cartel thugs have put a severed head in a cooler and delivered it to a newspaper; they have dressed up a murdered policeman in a comedy sombrero and carved a smile on his cheeks; and they have even sewn a human face onto a soccer ball.

mean, yeah, we catch the occasional kid selling black market candy out of their backpack or someone giving face tattoos in the bathroom with a marker, but it’s never anything really BAD. Just a bunch’a shenanigans and never anything we can’t handle. Well, except for that one time… But other than the rare mini-dumpster fire, being a Hall Monitor is totally awesome! Well, MOST of it is. Look, I’m not gonna lie – there IS one major downside to it – when you’re a Hall Monitor, nobody’s exactly lining up to be friends with you. They’re forever thinking you’re gonna bust them or something, even when you’re NOT in uniform. Some kids just have trust issues, I guess. But don’t worry about me because it’s not like I have ZERO friends. There’s another dude on the force named Chad Schulte, who I consider my BEST friend even though we never kick it OUTSIDE of school together. I think me and Chad hit it off so well

The humanistic beliefs, then, of most secular people should be recognized as exactly that—beliefs. They cannot be deduced logically or empirically from the natural, material world alone. If there is no transcendent reality beyond this life, then there is no value or meaning for anything.64 To hold that human beings are the product of nothing but the evolutionary process of the strong eating the weak, but then to insist that nonetheless every person has a human dignity to be honored—is an enormous leap of faith against all evidence to the contrary. Even Nietzsche, however, cannot escape his own scalpel. He blasted secular liberals for being inconsistent and cowardly. He believed that calls for social bonding and benevolence for the poor and weak meant “herd-like uniformity, the ruin of the noble spirit, and the ascendency of the masses.”65 He wanted to turn from the “banal creed” of modern liberalism to the tragic, warrior culture (the “Ubermensch” or “Superman”) of ancient times. He believed the new “Man of the Future” would have the courage to look into the bleakness of a universe without God and take no religious consolation. He would have the “noble spirit” to be “superbly self-fashioning” and not beholden to anyone else’s imposed moral standards.66 All of these declarations by Nietzsche compose, of course, a profoundly moral narrative. Why is the “noble spirit” noble? Why is it good to be courageous, and who says so? Why is it bad to be inconsistent? Where did such moral values come from, and what right does Nietzsche have, by his own philosophy, to label one way of living noble or good and other ways bad?67 In short, he can’t stop doing what he tells everyone else to stop doing. Thus, Eagleton observes, Nietzsche’s “Man of the Future” has not abolished God at all. “Like the Almighty, he rests upon nothing but himself.” We see that there is no truly irreligious human being. Nietzsche is calling people to worship themselves, to grant the same faith and authority to themselves that they once put in God. Even Nietzsche believes. “The autonomous, self-determining Superman is yet another piece of counterfeit theology.”68 We have seen that the secular humanism Nietzsche despised lacks a good grounding for its moral values.69 However, the even greater dangers of Nietzsche’s antihumanism are a matter of historical record. Peter Watson details how Nietzsche’s views were important inspirations in the twentieth century to totalitarian figures of both the Left and Right, of both Nazism and Stalinism.70

The sovereign power [or soft despot] extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules . . . it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America

The best answer I could come up with was the simplest one. Yes, these kids had been dealt a bad hand. Role models like Orlando Montoya were few. Their schools were almost uniformly lacking. Violence was often endemic in their neighborhoods. All that played a role, but above it all was the power to belonging. Gang membership entails certain obligations: Only kids willing to be badasses need apply. But gangs also gave them the definition and meaning they hungered for, and prison by those terms was less a punishment than a badge of honor.