Wrong Allegations Quotes

I give the victim the benefit of the doubt when it comes to allegations of rape and sexual abuse. I choose to err on that side of caution. This does not mean I am unsympathetic to the wrongly accused, but if there are sides to be chosen, I am on the side of the victim.

My darling, patient friends tell me that I'm still single only because I'm picky, and because I haven't met the right person yet. This would feel truer if I hadn't been shut down by quite so many wrong people that I, despite my allegedly high standards, chased after.

If human nature were not base, but thoroughly honourable, we should in every debate have no other aim than the discovery of truth; we should not in the least care whether the truth proved to be in favour of the opinion which we had begun by expressing, or of the opinion of our adversary. That we should regard as a matter of no moment, or, at any rate, of very secondary consequence; but, as things are, it is the main concern. Our innate vanity, which is particularly sensitive in reference to our intellectual powers, will not suffer us to allow that our first position was wrong and our adversary’s right. The way out of this difficulty would be simply to take the trouble always to form a correct judgment. For this a man would have to think before he spoke. But, with most men, innate vanity is accompanied by loquacity and innate dishonesty. They speak before they think; and even though they may afterwards perceive that they are wrong, and that what they assert is false, they want it to seem thecontrary. The interest in truth, which may be presumed to have been their only motive when they stated the proposition alleged to be true, now gives way to the interests of vanity: and so, for the sake of vanity, what is true must seem false, and what is false must seem true.

The allegation of some progressives that America is an evil empire is not simply wrong—it is obscene.

War crimes, you say? No matter how many policies you put on paper, in reality, there are no rights and wrongs in war. War itself is a crime. War cannot be justified. I believe, the only people, in this world, whose opinions matter, are the ones who go the extra mile to help other people expecting nothing in return. Soldiers who fight fiercely for their country, the doctors in Sri Lanka's public hospitals attending to hundreds of patients at a time for no extra pay , the nuns who voluntarily teach English and math to children of refugee camps in the north, the monks who collect food to feed entire villages during crises, they are the people worth listening to, their opinion matters. So find me one of them who will say: they wish the war didn't end in 2009, that they wish Sri Lanka was divided into two parts. Find me one of them who agrees with the international war crime allegations against Sri Lanka, and I will listen. But I will not listen to the opinions of those who are paid to find faults in a war they were never a part of, a war they never experienced themselves. I will not listen to the opinions of those who watched the war on tv or read about it on the internet or were moved by a documentary on Al Jazeera. The war is over. The damage is done. Let Sri Lanka move on. So our children will never have to see what we've seen.

This would feel truer if I hadn’t been shut down by quite so many wrong people that I, despite my allegedly high standards, chased after. In any case, it’s a nice thought.

an allegation of abuse makes a trio of claims: This happened. It was wrong. It matters.

I mean, we're grown-ups now. Allegedly. And we feel things less than we did when we were kids, because we've grown so much scar tissue, or our senses have dulled. I think it's probably healthy. I mean, little kids don't have to make decisions, unless something's very wrong. Maybe you can't make up your mind as easily, if you feel too much. You know?

The revolution had been slow and ponderous, but it had weight, and that weight built up a momentum, and when that momentum finally broke forth, it was with a great and accumulated force. This force washed out the monsters who worked in public spaces, allegedly for the public, but it carried farther, into the homes and schools. It touched everyone; it made change. People started by believing the victims, and once this was apparent that it was safe to report monsters now, more and more people did so. The monsters always tried to apologize when they were caught, using the same slippery words that had worked for them before. They thought it would be enough, that some time would pass and they would be welcomed back as if nothing had happened. They were wrong.

Atticus had urged them to accept the state's generosity in allowing them to plead Guilty to second-degree murder and escape with their lives, but they were Haverfords, in Maycomb County a name synonymous with jackass. The Haverfords had dispatched Maycomb's leading blacksmith in a misunderstanding arising from the alleged wrongful detention of a mare, were imprudent enough to do it in the presence of three witnesses, and insisted that the son-of-a-bitch-had-it-coming-to-him was a good enough defence for anybody.

Despite being discredited, the studies by Kanin and McDowell named above are still routinely cited on numerous websites dedicated to advancing the notion that American society suffers from an epidemic of spurious rape allegations by malicious women, resulting in the wrongful conviction of many thousands of innocent men.

It is difficult to bear with women who talk like me, Sita. It becomes easier if I accept that I have made a mistake. Then there is atonement for every sin. If I argue that I have not made any mistake, they will take pity on me. They will take my side, seeing me as the victim of an unjust allegation. But if I say, “Right or wrong, it’s my business, what has it to do with you? Who gave you the right or authority to judge”, then nobody will be able to tolerate it.’ ‘Are you saying that even Maharshi Gautama does not have that authority?’ Sita was unable to understand Ahalya. ‘Society gave him that authority. I didn’t. Till I give it, no one can have that authority over me.’ ‘But he has disowned you.’ ‘Pity, that’s his loss.’ ‘And you … they say you lived like a lifeless stone for years.’ ‘That’s what you think. I have spent all these years thinking about my identity in this universe. I have learned how the world runs—on what morals and laws, and what their roots are. I have gained a lot of wisdom.

The Haverfords had dispatched Maycomb’s leading blacksmith in a misunderstanding arising from the alleged wrongful detention of a mare, were imprudent enough to do it in the presence of three witnesses, and insisted that the son-of-a-bitch-had-it-coming-to-him was a good enough defence for anybody.

A longtime, well-respected Republican election lawyer, Ben Ginsberg, explained what the scores of lawsuits had concluded—that Trump was wrong. Twenty-two federal judges appointed by Republican presidents, including 10 appointed by President Trump himself, and at least 24 elected or appointed Republican state judges dismissed Trump’s claims. As Ginsberg pointed out, dozens of courts had analyzed the underlying factual allegations and ruled against Trump and his allies: In all the cases that were brought—I have looked at the more than 60 that include more than 180 counts… the simple fact is that the Trump campaign did not make its case.… And in no instance did a court find that the charges of fraud were real.

but the insanity of punishing someone physically for getting an answer wrong. It is terrifying how much of this deeply unkind, utterly pointless, in fact, mind-bogglingly COUNTERPRODUCTIVE kind of behaviour was meted out to children over the centuries by half-witted, power-crazed zombies like this heinous old bat—a large proportion of such psychopaths allegedly acting in the name of an all-loving God

Rape and sexual assault are unusual, if not quite unique, in that often, the only real evidence of a crime is the victim's testimony. Physical evidence might demonstrate that a sexual encounter took place between two people, but even cuts and bruises can't definitively prove lack of consent on one person's part. Especially if the accused is the alleged victim's friend, lover or spouse, or someone with whom they freely chose to leave a party. Ultimately, in the absence of photographic or video evidence, it comes down to one person's word against another's. The most obvious tragic result of this fact is that nearly half of rapes are never reported, fewer are prosecuted, and even fewer lead to a felony conviction. Victims wonder what the point of reporting uncorroborated sexual violence is, and they're not wrong.

At the very same time that we witnessed the explosion of white celebrity moms, and the outpouring of advice to a surveillance of middle-class mothers, the welfare mother, trapped in a "cycle of dependency," became ubiquitous in our media landscape, and she came to represent everything wrong with America. She appeared not in the glossy pages of the women's magazines but rather as the subject of news stories about the "crisis" in the American family and the newly declared "war" on welfare mothers. Whatever ailed America--drugs, crime, loss of productivity--was supposedly her fault. She was portrayed as thumbing her nose at intensive mothering. Even worse, she was depicted as bringing her kids into the realm of market values, as putting a price on their heads, by allegedly calculating how much each additional child was worth and then getting pregnant to cash in on them. For middle-class white women in the media, by contrast, their kids were priceless, these media depictions reinforced the divisions between "us" (minivan moms) and "them" (welfare mothers, working-class mothers, teenage mothers), and did so especially along the lines of race. For example, one of the most common sentences used to characterize the welfare mother was, "Tanya, who has_____ children by ______ different men" (you fill in the blanks). Like zoo animals, their lives were reduced to the numbers of successful impregnations by multiple partners. So it's interesting to note that someone like Christie Brinkley, who has exactly the same reproductive MO, was never described this way. Just imagine reading a comparable sentence in Redbook. "Christie B., who has three children by three different men." But she does, you know.

Nothing is more demoralizing than to be wronged and then to be told that one’s injury is an illusion. To be betrayed by the central pillars of society—government, employer, university—leaves a lasting bitterness and alienation. Furthermore, unlike nonwhites, who have well-funded organizations that spring to the defense of alleged victims, the disappearance of white solidarity means that a white man is entirely on his own.870*

A system of justice does not need to pursue retribution. If the purpose of drug sentencing is to prevent harm, all we need to do is decide what to do with people who pose a genuine risk to society or cause tangible harm. There are perfectly rational ways of doing this; in fact, most societies already pursue such policies with respect to alcohol: we leave people free to drink and get inebriated, but set limits on where and when. In general, we prosecute drunk drivers, not inebriated pedestrians. In this sense, the justice system is in many respects a battleground between moral ideas and evidence concerning how to most effectively promote both individual and societal interests, liberty, health, happiness and wellbeing. Severely compromising this system, insofar as it serves to further these ideals, is our vacillation or obsession with moral responsibility, which is, in the broadest sense, an attempt to isolate the subjective element of human choice, an exercise that all too readily deteriorates into blaming and scapegoating without providing effective solutions to the actual problem. The problem with the question of moral responsibility is that it is inherently subjective and involves conjecture about an individuals’ state of mind, awareness and ability to act that can rarely if ever be proved. Thus it involves precisely the same type of conjecture that characterizes superstitious notions of possession and the influence of the devil and provides no effective means of managing conduct: the individual convicted for an offence or crime considered morally wrong is convicted based on a series of hypotheses and probabilities and not necessarily because he or she is actually morally wrong. The fairness and effectiveness of a system of justice based on such hypotheses is highly questionable particularly as a basis for preventing or reducing drug use related harm. For example, with respect to drugs, the system quite obviously fails as a deterrent and the system is not organised to ‘reform’ the offender much less to ensure that he or she has ‘learned a lesson’; moreover, the offender does not get an opportunity to make amends or even have a conversation with the alleged victim. In the case of retributive justice, the justice system is effectively mopping up after the fact. In other words, as far as deterrence is concerned, the entire exercise of justice becomes an exercise based on faith, rather than one based on evidence.

Writers acquire the hedge habit to conform to the bureaucratic imperative that’s abbreviated as CYA, which I’ll spell out as Cover Your Anatomy. They hope it will get them off the hook, or at least allow them to plead guilty to a lesser charge, should a critic ever try to prove them wrong. It’s the same reason that lawsuit-wary journalists drizzle the words allegedly and reportedly throughout their copy, as in The alleged victim was found lying in a pool of blood with a knife in his back.

The Haverfords had dispatched Maycomb’s leading blacksmith in a misunderstanding arising from the alleged wrongful detention of a mare, were imprudent enough to do it in the presence of three witnesses, and insisted that the-son-of-a-bitch-had-it-coming-to-him was a good enough defense for anybody. They persisted in pleading Not Guilty to first-degree murder, so there was nothing much Atticus could do for his clients except be present at their departure, an occasion that was probably the beginning of my father’s profound distaste for the practice of criminal law.

Every American should own a Koran. There are no excuses. Every day you can switch on the television or the radio or open a newspaper and hear or read pronouncements about what Islam is and“what the Koran says. Most of it is wrong—very wrong. You owe it to yourself, your family, and all the Americans killed on 9/11 and since to know the truth. Do not take anyone’s word for it. Find out for yourself by reading the actual Koran. One of the most reliable and recognized versions is the The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. Once you have a Koran and start to read it, take care to note the enormous differences between the half reportedly communicated to Mohammed in the beginning in Mecca, when he was weak and without followers, and the latter half, allegedly written after he returned from Medina with thousands of followers, the leader of a mighty military force. It is the post-Medina chapters of the Koran that are naturally favored by groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. They are not in fact perverting religious texts but skillfully applying those alleged revelations that best support their cause.

Our capitalistic society emphasizes pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps and making one’s own way to the top of the economic ladder, or as high as one can possibly reach. While there is nothing inherently wrong with making a legitimate and honest living, the emphasis on individuality that pervades our society often causes people to overlook the plight of the poor or even to believe that the poor owe their impoverished state to their own purported laziness. While this may be true of some of the poor, it is not fair to make sweeping judgments that allege all of the poor to be slothful parasites who live off taxpayers’ hard-earned money.

The sour old cow gave me a sum much more difficult than any I had encountered before: say, a four-digit number divided by a three-digit number. I guessed how to do it, and got it wrong. Without offering help, she told me to do it again. I failed a second time; she warned me to try hard; I did; I failed again; and she told me to hold my hand out and, grasping it firmly, she caned the palm three times, hard. My first reaction was astonishment: none of my kindergartens had been Catholic establishments, so I was unprepared for this kind of assault. Then it hurt, a lot! My precious palm! When I first started having therapy twenty-five years later, this was one of the first traumas I recalled, and I was astonished at the power of the feelings that came flooding back: anger—no, fury; self-pity; humiliation; a deep, deep sense of hurt; and a pure indignation at not so much the unfairness, but the insanity of punishing someone physically for getting an answer wrong. It is terrifying how much of this deeply unkind, utterly pointless, in fact, mind-bogglingly COUNTERPRODUCTIVE kind of behaviour was meted out to children over the centuries by half-witted, power-crazed zombies like this heinous old bat—a large proportion of such psychopaths allegedly acting in the name of an all-loving God. (A

And whereas Soviet soldiers in the Great Patriotic War did wrong, according to Solzhenitsyn, because they did not allow the enemy to defeat them and because they successfully defended their country and liberated the people of Europe, our enemies, in his book, were endowed with every imaginable virtue. Among them were the traitors - Vlasov and his followers - who pointed their guns at their own people. By joining the Wehrmacht they, too, allegedly 'strove to assert themselves and to tell the world about their formidable experience: that they also are a small part of Russia and want to play a role in its future' (A. Solzhenitsyn. Gulag Archipelago, Paris, 1973, pp.266)

That Modi, Erdoğan, Abe and Chinese president Xi Jinping all bet their careers on economic growth testifies to the almost religious status growth has managed to acquire throughout the world. Indeed, it may not be wrong to call the belief in economic growth a religion, because it now purports to solve many, if not most, of our ethical dilemmas. Since economic growth is allegedly the source of all good things, it encourages people to bury their ethical disagreements and adopt whichever course of action maximises long-term growth. Thus Modi’s India is home to thousands of sects, parties, movements and gurus, yet though their ultimate aims may differ, they all have to pass through the same bottleneck of economic growth, so why not pull together in the meantime? The credo of ‘more stuff’ accordingly

The revolution had been slow and ponderous, but it had weight, and that weight built up a momentum, and when that momentum finally broke forth, it was with a great and accumulated force. This force washed out the monsters who worked in public spaces, allegedly for the public, but it carried farther, into the homes and schools. It touched everyone; it made change. People started by believing the victims, and once this was apparent that it was safe to report monsters now, more and more people did so. The monsters always tried to apologize when they were caught, using the same slippery words that had worked for them before. They thought it would be enough, that some time would pass and they would be welcomed back as if nothing had happened. They were wrong. There was no twisting away from the repercussions that the angels brought, justice rising like a sun over the hill in a loud morning.

What’s the most frightening thing to a child? The pain of being the outsider, of looking ridiculous to others, of being teased or picked on in school. Every child burns with fear at the prospect. It’s a primal instinct: to belong. McDonald’s has surely figured this out—along with what specific colors appeal to small children, what textures, and what movies or TV shows are likely to attract them to the gray disks of meat. They feel no compunction harnessing the fears and unarticulated yearnings of small children, and nor shall I. “Ronald has cooties,” I say—every time he shows up on television or out the window of the car. “And you know,” I add, lowering my voice, “he smells bad, too. Kind of like … poo!” (I am, I should say, careful to use the word “alleged” each and every time I make such an assertion, mindful that my urgent whisperings to a two-year-old might be wrongfully construed as libelous.) “If you hug Ronald … can you get cooties?” asks my girl, a look of wide-eyed horror on her face. “Some say … yes,” I reply—not wanting to lie—just in case she should encounter the man at a child’s birthday party someday. It’s a lawyerly answer—but effective. “Some people talk about the smell, too… I’m not saying it rubs off on you or anything—if you get too close to him—but…” I let that hang in the air for a while. “Ewwww!!!” says my daughter. We sit in silence as she considers this, then she asks, “Is it true that if you eat a hamburger at McDonald’s it can make you a ree-tard? I laugh wholeheartedly at this one and give her a hug. I kiss her on the forehead reassuringly. “Ha. Ha. Ha. I don’t know where you get these ideas!” I may or may not have planted that little nugget a few weeks ago, allowing her little friend Tiffany at ballet class to “overhear” it as I pretended to talk on my cell phone.

This means, a woman might think, that the law will treat her fairly in employment disputes if only she does her part, looks pretty, and dresses femininely. She would be dangerously wrong, though. Let’s look at an American working woman standing in front of her wardrobe, and imagine the disembodied voice of legal counsel advising her on each choice as she takes it out on its hanger. “Feminine, then,” she asks, “in reaction to the Craft decision?” “You’d be asking for it. In 1986, Mechelle Vinson filed a sex discrimination case in the District of Columbia against her employer, the Meritor Savings Bank, on the grounds that her boss had sexually harassed her, subjecting her to fondling, exposure, and rape. Vinson was young and ‘beautiful’ and carefully dressed. The district court ruled that her appearance counted against her: Testimony about her ‘provocative’ dress could be heard to decide whether her harassment was ‘welcome.’” “Did she dress provocatively?” “As her counsel put it in exasperation, ‘Mechelle Vinson wore clothes.’ Her beauty in her clothes was admitted as evidence to prove that she welcomed rape from her employer.” “Well, feminine, but not too feminine, then.” “Careful: In Hopkins v. Price-Waterhouse, Ms. Hopkins was denied a partnership because she needed to learn to ‘walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely,’ and ‘wear makeup.’” “Maybe she didn’t deserve a partnership?” “She brought in the most business of any employee.” “Hmm. Well, maybe a little more feminine.” “Not so fast. Policewoman Nancy Fahdl was fired because she looked ‘too much like a lady.’” “All right, less feminine. I’ve wiped off my blusher.” “You can lose your job if you don’t wear makeup. See Tamini v. Howard Johnson Company, Inc.” “How about this, then, sort of…womanly?” “Sorry. You can lose your job if you dress like a woman. In Andre v. Bendix Corporation, it was ruled ‘inappropriate for a supervisor’ of women to dress like ‘a woman.’” “What am I supposed to do? Wear a sack?” “Well, the women in Buren v. City of East Chicago had to ‘dress to cover themselves from neck to toe’ because the men at work were ‘kind of nasty.’” “Won’t a dress code get me out of this?” “Don’t bet on it. In Diaz v. Coleman, a dress code of short skirts was set by an employer who allegedly sexually harassed his female employees because they complied with it.

The erosion of trust in public school systems has had catastrophic consequences, and will take decades to put right. As we’ve seen, attempts to make schools ‘more accountable’ for their test scores leave teachers torn between what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls ‘doing the right thing and doing the required thing’. The right thing is to teach students through personalised, flexible methods, according to their needs, interests and aspirations; the required thing is to ‘turnaround’ test scores, by ‘teaching to the test’ or, worse, ‘gaming’ the system.  Successive US federal administrations have sought to improve school standards through high accountability. The pressure this puts upon schools at risk of closure and teachers – with test scores linked to pay rates – is intense. During 2011/12 a series of allegations emerged of inner-city schools in New York, Washington DC, Atlanta and Philadelphia ‘cheating’ on student test scores in order to hit accountability targets. Undoubtedly a case of fear producing wrong figures. The result of doing the required thing, above the right thing, is what Schwartz describes as a ‘de-moral-ised’ profession. The double tragedy is that, in addition to the pressure put on teachers – 50 percent of new teachers in the US leave the profession within their first five years – there’s growing evidence that the over-reliance on standardised testing fails to improve academic learning anyway.

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

the greatest inspiration for institutional change in American law enforcement came on an airport tarmac in Jacksonville, Florida, on October 4, 1971. The United States was experiencing an epidemic of airline hijackings at the time; there were five in one three-day period in 1970. It was in that charged atmosphere that an unhinged man named George Giffe Jr. hijacked a chartered plane out of Nashville, Tennessee, planning to head to the Bahamas. By the time the incident was over, Giffe had murdered two hostages—his estranged wife and the pilot—and killed himself to boot. But this time the blame didn’t fall on the hijacker; instead, it fell squarely on the FBI. Two hostages had managed to convince Giffe to let them go on the tarmac in Jacksonville, where they’d stopped to refuel. But the agents had gotten impatient and shot out the engine. And that had pushed Giffe to the nuclear option. In fact, the blame placed on the FBI was so strong that when the pilot’s wife and Giffe’s daughter filed a wrongful death suit alleging FBI negligence, the courts agreed. In the landmark Downs v. United States decision of 1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals wrote that “there was a better suited alternative to protecting the hostages’ well-being,” and said that the FBI had turned “what had been a successful ‘waiting game,’ during which two persons safely left the plane, into a ‘shooting match’ that left three persons dead.” The court concluded that “a reasonable attempt at negotiations must be made prior to a tactical intervention.” The Downs hijacking case came to epitomize everything not to do in a crisis situation, and inspired the development of today’s theories, training, and techniques for hostage negotiations. Soon after the Giffe tragedy, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) became the first police force in the country to put together a dedicated team of specialists to design a process and handle crisis negotiations. The FBI and others followed. A new era of negotiation had begun. HEART

But nothing in my previous work had prepared me for the experience of reinvestigating Cleveland. It is worth — given the passage of time — recalling the basic architecture of the Crisis: 121 children from many different and largely unrelated families had been taken into the care of Cleveland County Council in the three short months of the summer of 1987. (p18) The key to resolving the puzzle of Cleveland was the children. What had actually happened to them? Had they been abused - or had the paediatricians and social workers (as public opinion held) been over-zealous and plain wrong? Curiously — particularly given its high profile, year-long sittings and £5 million cost — this was the one central issue never addressed by the Butler-Sloss judicial testimony and sifting of internal evidence, the inquiry's remit did not require it to answer the main question. Ten years after the crisis, my colleagues and I set about reconstructing the records of the 121 children at its heart to determine exactly what had happened to them... (p19) Eventually, though, we did assemble the data given to the Butler-Sloss Inquiry. This divided into two categories: the confidential material, presented in camera, and the transcripts of public sessions of the hearings. Putting the two together we assembled our own database on the children each identified only by the code-letters assigned to them by Butler-Sloss. When it was finished, this database told a startlingly different story from the public myth. In every case there was some prima fade evidence to suggest the possibility of abuse. Far from the media fiction of parents taking their children to Middlesbrough General Hospital for a tummy ache or a sore thumb and suddenly being presented with a diagnosis of child sexual abuse, the true story was of families known to social services for months or years, histories of physical and sexual abuse of siblings and of prior discussions with parents about these concerns. In several of the cases the children themselves had made detailed disclosures of abuse; many of the pre-verbal children displayed severe emotional or behavioural symptoms consistent with sexual abuse. There were even some families in which a convicted sex offender had moved in with mother and children. (p20)

I didn’t think we were being quiet, particularly. High heels may have looked dainty, but they didn’t sound that way on a tile floor. Maybe it was just that my dad was so absorbed in the convo on his cell phone. For whatever reason, when we emerged from the kitchen into the den, he started, and he stuffed the phone down by his side in the cushions. I was sorry I’d startled him, but it really was comical to see this big blond manly man jump three feet off the sofa when he saw two teenage girls. I mean, it would have been funny if it weren’t so sad. Dad was a ferocious lawyer in court. Out of court, he was one of those Big Man on Campus types who shook hands with everybody from the mayor to the alleged ax murderer. A lot like Sean, actually. There were only two things Dad was afraid of. First, he wigged out when anything in the house was misplaced. I won’t even go into all the arguments we’d had about my room being a mess. They’d ended when I told him it was my room, and if he didn’t stop bugging me about it, I would put kitchen utensils in the wrong drawers, maybe even hide some (cue horror movie music). No spoons for you! Second, he was easily startled, and very pissed off afterward. “Damn it, Lori!” he hollered. “It’s great to see you too, loving father. Lo, I have brought my friend Tammy to witness out domestic bliss. She’s on the tennis team with me.” Actually, I was on the tennis team with her. “Hello, Tammy. It’s nice to meet you,” Dad said without getting up or shaking her hand or anything else he would normally do. While the two of them recited a few more snippets of polite nonsense, I watched my dad. From the angle of his body, I could tell he was protecting that cell phone behind the cushions. I nodded toward the hiding place. “Hot date?” I was totally kidding. I didn’t expect him to say, “When?” So I said, “Ever.” And then I realized I’d brought up a subject that I didn’t want to bring up, especially not while I was busy being self-absorbed. I clapped my hands. “Okay, then! Tammy and I are going upstairs very loudly, and after a few minutes we will come back down, ringing a cowbell. Please continue with your top secret phone convo.” I turned and headed for the stairs. Tammy followed me. I thought Dad might order me back, send Tammy out, and give me one of those lectures about my attitude (who, me?). But obviously he was chatting with Pamela Anderson and couldn’t wait for me to leave the room. Behind us, I heard him say, “I’m so sorry. I’m still here. Lori came in. Oh, yeah? I’d like to see you try.” “He seems jumpy,” Tammy whispered on the stairs. “Always,” I said. “Do you have a lot of explosions around your house?” I glanced at my watch. “Not this early.

The sensational event of the ancient world was the mobilisation of the underworld against the established order. This enterprise of Christianity had no more to do with religion than Marxist socialism has to do with the solution of the social problem. The notions represented by Jewish Christianity were strictly unthinkable to Roman brains. The ancient world had a liking for clarity. Scientific research was encouraged there. The gods, for the Romans, were familiar images. It is some what difficult to know whether they had any exact idea of the Beyond. For them, eternal life was personified in living beings, and it consisted in a perpetual renewal. Those were conceptions fairly close to those which were current amongst the Japanese and Chinese at the time when the Swastika made its appearance amongst them. It was necessary for the Jew to appear on the scene and introduce that mad conception of a life that continues into an alleged Beyond! It enables one to regard life as a thing that is negligible here below—since it will flourish later, when it no longer exists. Under cover of a religion, the Jew has introduced intolerance in a sphere in which tolerance formerly prevailed. Amongst the Romans, the cult of the sovereign intelligence was associated with the modesty of a humanity that knew its limits, to the point of consecrating altars to the unknown god. The Jew who fraudulently introduced Christianity into the ancient world—in order to ruin it—re-opened the same breach in modern times, this time taking as his pretext the social question. It's the same sleight-of-hand as before. Just as Saul was changed into St. Paul, Mardochai became Karl Marx. Peace can result only from a natural order. The condition of this order is that there is a hierarchy amongst nations. The most capable nations must necessarily take the lead. In this order, the subordinate nations get the greater profit, being protected by the more capable nations. It is Jewry that always destroys this order. It constantly provokes the revolt of the weak against the strong, of bestiality against intelligence, of quantity against quality. It took fourteen centuries for Christianity to reach the peak of savagery and stupidity. We would therefore be wrong to sin by excess of confidence and proclaim our definite victory over Bolshevism. The more we render the Jew incapable of harming us, the more we shall protect ourselves from this danger. The Jew plays in nature the rôle of a catalysing element. A people that is rid of its Jews returns spontaneously to the natural order. In 1925 I wrote in Mein Kampf (and also in an unpublished work) that world Jewry saw in Japan an opponent beyond its reach. The racial instinct is so developed amongst the Japanese therefore compelled to act from outside. It would be to the considered interests of England and the United States to come to an understanding with Japan, but the Jew will strive to prevent such an understanding. I gave this warning in vain. A question arises. Does the Jew act consciously and by calculation, or is he driven on by his instinct? I cannot answer that question. The intellectual élite of Europe (whether professors of faculties, high officials, or whatever else) never understood anything of this problem. The élite has been stuffed with false ideas, and on these it lives. It propagates a science that causes the greatest possible damage. Stunted men have the philosophy of stunted men. They love neither strength nor health, and they regard weakness and sickness as supreme values. Since it's the function that creates the organ, entrust the world for a few centuries to a German professor—and you'll soon have a mankind of cretins, made up of men with big heads set upon meagre bodies.

With any other woman, he would have touched her cheek at that point and slowly backed her into her room, but she was not any other woman. She was allegedly impossible to flirt with, Sir Lyndon had said. Martin was quite sure he had already proven that claim grossly inaccurate. And after speaking with her on the ship tonight, he was beginning to see the inaccuracy of many other things as well- his own previous impressions of her included. She was not a cold fish. She was simply repressed, with her lid on too tight, and in great danger of boiling over. He wondered why. Did she not want joy? Did she think it wrong?

The Duchess of Omnium was not the most discreet woman in the world. That was admitted by her best friends, and was the great sin alleged against her by her worst enemies. In her desire to say sharp things, she would say the sharp thing in the wrong place, and in her wish to be good-natured she was apt to run into offences.

In response to any act of alleged wickedness that the atheist points to, we can reasonably ask, what’s wrong with that?

Legal and political theory have committed much mischief by failing to pinpoint physical invasion as the only human action that should be illegal and that justifies the use of physical violence to combat it." In the law of torts, "harm" is generally treated as physical invasion of person or property. The outlawing of defamation (libel and slander) has always been a glaring anomaly in tort law. Words and opinions are not physical invasions. Analogous to the loss of property value from a better product or a shift in consumer demand, no one has a property right in his "reputation." Reputation is strictly a function of the subjective opinions of other minds, and they have the absolute right to their own opinions whatever they may be. Hence, outlawing defamation is itself a gross invasion of the defamer's right of freedom of speech, which is a subset of his property right in his own person. An even broader assault on freedom of speech is the modern Warren-Brandeis-inspired tort of invasion of the alleged right of "privacy," which outlaws free speech and acts using one's own property that are not even false or "malicious." In the law of torts, "harm" is generally treated as physical invasion of person or property and usually requires payment of damages for "emotional" harm if and only if that harm is a consequence of physical invasion. Thus, within the standard law of trespass — an invasion of person or property — "battery" is the actual invasion of someone else's body, while "assault" is the creation by one person in another of a fear, or apprehension, of battery. To be a tortious assault and therefore subject to legal action, tort law wisely requires the threat to be near and imminent. Mere insults and violent words, vague future threats, or simple possession of a weapon cannot constitute an assault18; there must be accompanying overt action to give rise to the apprehension of an imminent physical battery. Or, to put it another way, there must be a concrete threat of an imminent battery before the prospective victim may legitimately use force and violence to defend himself. Physical invasion or molestation need not be actually "harmful" or inflict severe damage in order to constitute a tort. The courts properly have held that such acts as spitting in someone's face or ripping off someone's hat are batteries. Chief Justice Holt's words in 1704 still seem to apply: "The least touching of another in anger is a battery." While the actual damage may not be substantial, in a profound sense we may conclude that the victim's person was molested, was interfered with, by the physical aggression against him, and that hence these seemingly minor actions have become legal wrongs. (2/2)

Instincts were to be trusted above the teachings of an allegedly polite society. If she felt something was wrong, then something was probably wrong.

There are people who do wrong, unspeakable, bad, hurtful , shameful, disgusting things when they are drunk. Most of the time. They do or say things that will hurt themselves or other people . Half of the things, they won't remember when they are sober. Worse part of this is. They are not taking accountability and responsibility for their mistakes, but they are shifting the blame and blaming other people every time, but themselves. It is always someone's fault. When you regret what you did when you were drunk. It does not mean someone should be punished for it. Drinking responsible would save them and their lives from this. Too much Alcohol is bad for everyone and It will finish you or your life. Know your limits.

But International Match’s financial statements contained a second, more fundamental, warning. If International Match did not exist before 1923, how could it have had income during 1922 and 1921? Perhaps Ivar had included income from some predecessor companies. Perhaps the numbers were from American Kreuger & Toll, the failed effort led by Anders Jordahl that had focused more on being close to Broadway theaters than on negotiations with the American match industry. Investors could not tell which of Ivar’s other companies might have been responsible for International Match’s alleged income. Instead, they were led to believe that International Match had consistently been making money since 1921, more than a year before Ivar had sailed to New York to meet Donald Durant. Anyone who checked the dates would have known those numbers were wrong.

That was the irony; men feared false accusations, but survivors were the ones being wrongly smeared. No matter how much evidence there was to support an allegation, for months afterwards accusers were demanded to #ThinkFirst

Pickens told the army man about “the whole plan and secret of the Southern conspiracy,” admitting that “the South had never been wronged, and that all their pretenses of grievance in the matter of tariffs, or anything else, were invalid. ‘But,’ said [Pickens], ‘we must carry the people with us; and we allege these things, as all statesmen do many things that they do not believe, because they are the only instruments by which the people can be managed.’ He then and there declared that the two sections of

It is also striking and worth noting that this apocalyptic message comes to be toned down, and then virtually eliminated, and finally preached against (allegedly by Jesus!) in our later sources. And it is not hard to figure out why. If Jesus predicted that the imminent apocalypse would arrive within his own generation, before his disciples had all died, what was one to think a generation later when in fact it had not arrived? One might conclude that Jesus was wrong. But if one wanted to stay true to him, one might change the message that he proclaimed so that he no longer spoke about the coming apocalypse. So it is no accident that our final canonical Gospel, John, written after that first generation, no longer has Jesus proclaim an apocalyptic message. He preaches something else entirely. Even later, in a book like the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus preaches directly against an apocalyptic point of view (sayings 2, 113). As time went on, the apocalyptic message came to be seen as misguided, or even dangerous. And so the traditions of Jesus’s preaching were changed. But in our earliest multiply attested sources, there it is for all to see.

The progressives pose as the champions not only of fairness and social justice but also of compassion. They are the ones who insist on our obligation to those from whom we have allegedly stolen. Let’s leave aside for the moment whether they are right about the theft. What we do know for sure is that progressives assert there has been a theft. They further acknowledge that they are among the beneficiaries of it. Based on this, they would seem to have a clear obligation to return the stolen goods that they are currently enjoying. We might expect, from this analysis, to discover that progressives are the most generous people in America. We can anticipate that they contribute the highest portion of their incomes and time to help their wronged and less fortunate fellow men and women. The truth, however, is that progressives are the least generous people in America. I saw this personally with Obama, who unceasingly declares that “we are our brother’s keeper” even as he refuses to help his own half brother, George, who lives in a hut in the Huruma slum of Nairobi. I met George in early 2012 when I interviewed him for my film 2016: Obama’s America. A few months after that, when I was back in America, George called me from Kenya to ask me to give him $1,000 because his baby son was sick. Surprised, I asked him, “Why are you calling me? Isn’t there someone else you can call?” He said, “No.” So I sent him the money. I guess on that occasion it was I, not Obama, who proved to be his brother’s keeper. And besides George, the president has other relatives in dire need—his aunt Hawa Auma, for example, sells charcoal on the roadside in rural Kenya, and desperately needs money to get her rotting teeth fixed. Although Obama is aware of their plight, he refuses to help them.

Critics of this school allege that they are looking for something for which there is not sufficient evidence. They warn that it is misleading to apply criteria to a totalitarian state that have been developed in examining how people interact in a free society. In sum, they are barking up the wrong tree: what we should really be trying to get at is the responsibility of various actors, high and low, for their behaviour. A culturalist might respond that that will only become clear when we have built up a full picture of the whole society: i.e. the doings of every subject and actor.

To be sure, policing is a difficult and often dangerous job. The tragic shooting deaths by a mentally ill assailant of two New York City police officers, allegedly in retaliation for Michael Brown’s death, underscored that reality. In the demonstrations following Michael Brown’s death some news outlets reported that some protesters explicitly called for violence and police officers’ deaths. It should hardly seem necessary for people with legitimate concerns about police misconduct to have to condemn the deeds of individuals who advocate or perpetrate violence against police officers. But while it is wrong for protesters to use incendiary language that calls for violence against police, it is also wrong to blame peaceful protestors, responsibly exercising their First Amendment rights, for violence against police. All law enforcement officers do not use excessive force against African Americans, and most protesters are not irresponsible in their exercise of their First Amendment rights. However, a culture within police departments of silence among good officers about excessive force on the part of other police officers, tears at the fabric of the relationship between law enforcement and the communities they police. Likewise, a failure by those protesting police brutality to condemn and distance themselves from calls for violence against police, compromises their protest.

Writing surrogate letters wasn’t quite so easily justified; there was something slightly but definitely dishonest about it. To get one placed, you had to sound like the real thing, but not so much that you discredited your own position or insulted the intelligence of the supporter whose name you were hoping to attach to it. You had to start the letter off with some sassy stock phrase or rhetorical question: “Representative So-and-so just doesn’t get it” or “Which constitution is Senator So-and-so reading?” Then you’d make your case without sounding like you knew too much about the topic. That’s where surrogate letters sometimes went wrong. They would refer to specific revenue numbers or to the names of subcommittees or explain the difference between house and senate versions of bills. Average people didn’t know these things, and if a surrogate letter used them, it sounded like what it was, and editors wouldn’t run them. I spent a day writing these wretched things. It wasn’t worth it unless you produced ten or fifteen; newspapers likely wouldn’t print a letter taking a certain view if they got only one, but if they got a handful they’d feel bound to run one or two. It was a mind-numbing exercise: each one had to sound clumsy but not stupid; each had to approach the question from a different angle; and none could use the same vocabulary. We sent them out to the ostensible authors, and over the next two weeks or so I would see my little creations pop up in a variety of newspapers. Sometimes a few words had been changed by the surrogates, but by and large they slapped their names on the letters and forwarded them to their hometown newspapers. I felt the whole exercise was pointless, but perhaps the letters did contribute in a small way to the sense that Knotts’s allegations had been grossly unfair and that the governor had acted properly. Had he? I thought so at the time, but enough time has passed that I can admit I don’t know. One of the melancholy facts of political life is that your convictions tend to align with your paycheck.

When Whites feel wrongly accused, they may respond with anger and engage in a counterattack when a racial topic arises. It appears that anger in race talk stems from two sources: (1) feeling unfairly accused (defensiveness) and/or (2) being told their substance, stance, or position taken is wrong. When back talk occurs, many Whites may feel offended and perceive the allegations as a provocation or an attack that requires retaliation.

To try am fully, evil needs to victories, not one. The first victory happens when an evil deed is perpetrated; the second victory, when evil is returned." 9 "in the Christian tradition, condemnation is an element of reconciliation, not an isolated independent judgment, even when reconciliation cannot be achi Pp ved. So we condemn most properly in the act of forgiving, and the act of separating the doer from the deed. That is how God in Christ condemned all wrongdoing." 15 "...unhealthy dreams and misdirected labors often become broken realities." 42 "...the story (of Christianity) frames what it means to remember rightly, and the God of this story makes remembering rightly possible." 44 "...peace can be honest and lasting only if it rests on the foundation of truth and justice." 56 "Seekers or truth, as distinct from alleged possessors of truth, will employ 'double vision'- they will give others the benefit of the doubt, they will inhabit imaginatively the world of others, and they will endeavor to view events in question from the perspective of others, not just their own." 57 "Those who love do not remember a persons evil deeds without also remembering her good deeds; they do not remember a person'a vices without also being mindful of their own failings. Thus the full story of wrongdoing becomes clear through the voice of love..."64 "...the highest aim of lovingly truthful memory seeks to bring about the repentance, forgiveness, and transformation of wrongdoers, and reconciliation between wrongdoers and their victims." 65 "And healing of the wrong without involving the wrong tour, therefore, can only be partial. To complete the healing, The relationship between the two needs to be mended. For Christians, this is what reconciliation is all about. Reconciliation with the wrongdoer completes the healing of the person who suffered the wrong. 84 Page 113: "Christ suffered in solidarity...what happened to him will also happen to him." "The dangers of this memory reside in its orientation not just to the past but also to the future." 113 "But let us beware that some accounts of what it means for Christ to have died on behalf of the ungodly...negates the notion of his involvement as a third party." 113 "Christian churches are communities that keep themselves alive- more precisely, that God keeps alive- by keeping alive the memories of the exodus and the passion." 126 "...but often they (churches) simply fail to incorporate right remembering of wrong suffered into the celebration of holy Communion. And even when they do incorporate such remembrance, they often keep it neatly sequestered from the memory of the passion. That memory becomes simply the story of what God has done for us wrongdoers or for a suffers, while remaining mute about how we ourselves remember the wrongs. With such stopping short, suffered wrongs are remembered only for God to comfort us in our pain and lend religious legitimacy to whatever uses we want to put those memories. No wonder we sometimes find revenge celebrating its victory under the mantle of religiously sanctioned struggle for the faith, for self protection, for national preservation, for our way of life- all in the name of God and accompanied by celebration of the self sacrificial love of Christ!" 127 "Communities of sacred memory are, at their best, schools of right remembering - remembering that is truthful and just, that heals individuals without injuring others, that allows the past to motivate a just struggle for justice and the grace-filled work of reconciliation." 128 Quoting Kierkegaard: "no part of life out to have so much meaning for a person that he cannot forget it at any moment he wants to; on the other hand, every single part of life ought to have so much meaning for a person that he can remember it at any moment." 166

The controversy highlighted the way wildlife is prioritized. Steve and I believed that in the modern age, wildlife competes for headlines with politics and sports. Watching wildlife on the long lens (“See that little dot on the center of that iceberg?”) just won’t work anymore. It won’t put wildlife into people’s hearts or give them a priority in the press, which is where they have to be to have any chance of survival. Steve had such genuine love for wildlife and was so skilled and gifted, he was able to share the animals’ beauty without using restraining devices. For example, whales spend a tenth of their lives at the surface of the ocean. Whale watching doesn’t harm whales. But it is highly effective in getting people to take whales into their hearts. More than that, Steve wanted everyone watching to feel like they were sharing the experience and not just viewing it. “I want you in there with me, mate,” Steve told his audiences. “I’m taking you right in there with me.” He wanted everyone to come with him on his journey of discovery and to connect with wildlife as he did. In the end, the investigation determined that Steve had done nothing wrong on the Antarctic documentary trip. Once again, the thoughts and prayers of ordinary people around the world who believed in Steve sustained us. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had thrown it all in. “I’m closing the gates,” he could have said. “I’m going to quit struggling.” But he wasn’t willing to give up or give in. Steve kept fighting, but not since he’d lost his mother had I seen him so low. He had taken two hits in quick succession: first Baby Bob, then the Antarctica allegations. “Crocodiles are easy,” Steve said. “They try to kill and eat you. People are harder. Sometimes they pretend to be your friend first.

The alleged music preached of the wrongs democracy had perpetrated on the people and how to protest against the causes of their pain, which would be, according to the fascist propagandists, the police, the military, the rich and the current American government. His ballads were to call for youth and the downtrodden to unite and fight against poverty, injustice and social ills — by destroying the American way of life. Radio

IN BRAZIL, where the state collects a hefty 36% of GDP in taxes and offers mediocre public services in return, tax-dodging is a national sport. The latest scam unearthed by police, treasury and finance-ministry sleuths sets a record. On March 26th they revealed that over the past ten years the government had been cheated of at least 5.7 billion reais ($1.8 billion) in back taxes and fines from firms, and perhaps as much as 19 billion reais. That would be enough to pay three-quarters of the bill for last year’s football World Cup. It is nearly twice the suspicious payments in a separate corruption scheme involving Petrobras, a state-controlled oil company. Unlike the petrolão, the tax imbroglio does not implicate top politicians. It centres instead on the Administrative Council of Fiscal Resources (CARF), part of the finance ministry, which hears appeals by firms that feel wronged by the tax collectors. Some of its 216 councillors, who decide cases in teams of six, allegedly promised to slash companies’ bills for various taxes, including sales and industrial tax, or make them disappear altogether. In exchange they apparently received 1-10% of the value of the forgone revenue. The bribes were paid in the form of bogus consulting contracts with law firms. To deflect suspicion, the conspirators used firms that do not specialise in tax law. The identity of the suspects remains secret for now. But leaks published in the press suggest that some of Brazil’s biggest firms, in industries ranging from banking to manufacturing, are involved. So, apparently, are a handful of multinationals. There is also much speculation that the dimensions of the scandal will grow: CARF has 105,000 cases pending, with a total value of 520 billion reais.

As the philosopher Tzvetan Todorov has observed, even though no one wants to be a victim, the position does confer certain advantages. Groups that gain recognition as victims of past injustices obtain “a bottomless line of moral credit,” he has written. “The greater the crime in the past, the more compelling the rights in the present—which are gained merely through membership in the wronged group.” Conversely, the grandchildren of the alleged perpetrators aspire to absolve their ancestors of guilt and, by association, of a link to Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust.

The understanding of time and place that L'Arche represents, which is a challenge to the speed and placelessness of modernity, helps us understand part of the problem we face as the church today. Having lost the power and status we had in societies we thought we had Christianized, we Christians now find ourselves most often on the wrong side of the "progressive" forces of human history. In response, many Christians want to identify with the alleged humanisms produced by speed and placelessness. So the church finds herself saying constantly, "Oh, yes, we support that too! Oh, yes, we think these developments are wonderful." Who can be against knowing more and more about the genome in order to help us become well before we become sick? It's a deep temptation for the church to say, "Hey, we're on the side of historical progress, too!" Of course, if you say that L'Arche knows it cannot welcome everyone who has a mental handicap and seeks to offer not a solution but a sign, that doesn't sound like good news in a world built on speed and placelessness. The question then becomes, "Well, does that mean you are against trying to cure cancer?" After all, "progress" we assume means eliminating what threatens to kill us or at least slow us down. But you can cure cancer without eliminating the patient. You cannot "cure" the mentally handicapped without eliminating the patient. L'Arche stands as a reminder that "progress" should not mean eliminating all that threatens us. After all, even if you cure cancer, you are going to die of some other ailment. L'Arche dares in the face of death and by so doing transforms what we mean by "progress.

So, what do you do when you’ve invested heavily in an endeavor and then begin to realize that you may have backed the wrong horse? Simple. What did Rhodes and Oppenheimer of De Beers do after they cornered the market on diamonds, then realized they’d found so many that the stones were practically worthless? Lie. You lie and you try to make that lie real by making everyone else believe it. It’s called PR. Whether the story is about the alleged scarcity of diamonds or the boundless treasures of the New World, it’s all about good old-fashioned spin.

A well-known saying is quoted, allegedly from Hegel, but which, after the above utterances, doubtless stems from Schelling: ‘Only one of my pupils understood me, and even he unfortunately understood me wrongly’.

Neither did the biblio...worthies themselves allege much tangible objection against the work offered to their acceptance,--which they yet seemed unanimous in rejecting; excepting that there was something new and queer about "the thing" they did not like! They could not say exactly what it was--but it was not written in the way Lady This, That, or the Other (it was the time of the supremacy of fashionable slip-slop) "wrote things!

Sometimes I utilize a form of bibliomancy, or dictionariomancy, to give me a clue as to what in the foggy blue hell is going to happen next. My method is this: I make myself a pot of Evening in Missoula tea, pretend that I’m in Missoula, where I’ve never been. I light a wand of Nag Champa incense, pretend that I’m uncountable, which is the meaning of Nag Champa. I light whatever candle is handy. I am alone when I do this, not only out of respect for Pollux’s sensibilities. I would be embarrassed for anybody else to know that this is how I make rational decisions. It was a warm winter day, so Hetta and Pollux were out strolling with Jarvis, who was bundled and wrapped like a tiny mummy. The time was now. In an aura of ceremonial gravity, I set the dictionary down on the coffee table. I cleared my mind. I closed my eyes, opened up the dictionary, and let my finger drift until it touched down on a word. Divination n. 1. The art or act of foretelling future events or revealing occult knowledge by means of augury or alleged supernatural agency. 2. An inspired guess or a presentiment. 3. That which has been divined. My source confirmed my instinct and my finger landed on exactly what I was doing. My augur told me that something was coming. But I was annoyed. I thought the dictionary got it wrong because that something, the wraith of Flora, was already here. I was wrong. Something else was definitely on its way.

Reformists and Capacianists definitely believe in their own ideologies. I mean, we even made names for those movements. However, both of us— and yes, I admit that us Reformists do it, too—have not directed our potentials to acknowledge one another’s capabilities. I swear, I will try to change the name Reformation, and hopefully, Capacianists won’t replicate the same intolerance we showed them in the past. You know what? I wouldn’t be surprised if the person who suggested the enforcement of African education bans and the Triangular Slave Trade to the Museum of Recreation did this because of intolerance. I mean, in 2999, rights for people of color were so intense that gaining rights for people of color meant diminishing the rights of Caucasians! Everyone had this preconceived notion that Caucasians were racists, and they even arrested Caucasians simply by alleging that they were being racist without even giving them a fair trial, which is like the equivalent of wrongfully accusing Black people of being criminals. I am saying this as a person of color! If only Reformists will tolerate Capacianists, Capacianists will tolerate Reformists, and people of all races and colors will tolerate one another!

Some spent years undermining Pfeiffer’s theory, and others—among them many of the most brilliant scientists of the era—took off after other alleged villains, spending untold thousands of man-hours in the crucially important but thankless task of proving themselves wrong.

What do you know about him? Is he secretly pining after anyone? Does he have an allegedly straight best friend who’s going to show up magically addicted to sucking cock now? Tell me how this could go wrong so I can prepare myself for the disappointment ahead of time.

The church would’ve been able to bully a publisher into deleting unsubstantiated allegations, but they’d lost the power to bully Kevin into silence in his daily life. What if he blabbed his suspicions to the wrong person?

What you get from that are individuals who look at the job as just that, a job; not a career. They want the good benefits and the allegedly great hours, but not the responsibilities and accountability that go with an occupation that deals with human beings physically and mentally at risk on a daily basis. Don’t get me wrong; I personally have no problem with this mandate, as long as the best-qualified individuals from all ethnic groups and genders are chosen. I’m just setting the stage for why it took me so long to get on the department.

The Uruguayan kid was well-spoken and intelligent; he was a 21-year-old Rasta kid from Montevideo. His name was Cristobal. He seemed really interested in the products and wanted to find a job, saying that if he did not find one soon he would have to leave his girlfriend behind in Barcelona and go back to Uruguay. He had a gorgeous Spanish girlfriend; he showed me a picture, I had met her once. She was so hot, I did not even know how he had gotten close to her. So, I thought the kid had the right motives and the necessary motivation to do this job. His situation was not really that different from mine. He was kind and soft-spoken; he had innocent eyes. You could tell by his voice that he was a good person and would not do anything wrong, not even if he was forced to. I was sure he was not a Silvio-like Spaniard thief who would dare go wild stealing orders and collecting full money for half-delivered products. Silvio might even have involved the store owners, the alleged clients, in the scam to squeeze more products out of poor fool Adam, „The Goof-Proof.

- So what do you want me to do, Adam? I cannot be everywhere at the same time. I already have to be in three places at once, not just two. My Spanish is much better than it was half a year ago, but I am not native, Adam - I am not Catalan, I am not Spanish. - Alright, alright, alright. Jesus. - What do you mean, Boss Jesus? I am Tomas, the king of the Goys, not the Jews. - HAHAHA. Get serious now. This costs me money. - You’re kidding. You don’t even pay me a salary and my girlfriend is crazy about it. How do you want me to make over 10,000 Euros in net traffic a month if you are sending me to the same Estanco stores that never order and barely have any traffic, just wasting my time, Adam? - Mario made a lot of business with Estancos. - Bullshit, Boss. Mario, Mister Jerk Twister made monkey-business with a handful of Estancos. He sold a set of twelve crumble-cards with a free display in 2012 Spring and he never showed up again, they said. Was he even in Spain, Adam? - That’s not the point. - OK. So what is the point? - Mario made a lot of business. - Would you like to show me the total sum of wholesale figures Mario allegedly made in 2012, Boss? - No. - Because Mario didn’t make 10 000 Euros traffic in an entire year, Boss. Monkey-business. - You are spending 140 Euros on these two kids for the two catalogs and wasting time here with Rachel. - So do you want Rachel to stay here all night to laminate all this by herself, or may I help her so that we can give the catalogs to the two kids and we at least triple our potential tomorrow, so they can do sales, Adam, so they could go and visit all the Estancos as you wish? - Yeah, sure. - Thank you. Adam the tiny Estancos are seasonal and some of them don’t even keep our kinds of products they rely soley on tobacco sales, elder Catalan people. Clubs are opening at every corner, Adam and they need us to supply them with products. They won’t be so seasonal, they cannot rely on the tourism by law they cannot register walk-ins. - Cccc. They register anyone, what are you talking about? - No. Which club? - Club Alfalfa. The custom card client, Mario and Tom made in 2012. - Yeah, the marijuana club where there were two Police razzias both found cocaine twice behind the booth, so far. - But they are open again. Selling weed. - For how long Adam? How many times can they re-open after the Police had shut the club down twice already because of cocaine? How many members or employees they arrested, Adam? Would you bail me out if I go inside the wrong door one day, representing you?

I still don't know to this day how she managed to climb the 94 stairs; she was dying from an overdose. The gate at the bottom of the stairwell did not make a sound when she entered the building, being so ill and alone. It was odd. Where could she have been? Almost as if she had been dropped off at my doorstep like a package silently by a (Polish) giant. She was pale and could barely open the door with her keys. When she entered, she fell into my arms; she was drunk and high, her legs buckling so that she couldn't stand. I tried to figure out what she had taken and what she had drunk, but she could barely talk; her eyes were rolling back in her skull. She was crying with her head in the toilet bowl, unable to stop the cramps running through her insides and her entire body shaking. - What did you drink? - Two … beers. - I am not your father. What did you take? Where have you been? - Beers and tequila - she mumbled, saliva drooling out of her mouth and her head hanging down like she was dead already. Then I asked her what else she had taken. She still wouldn't answer, so I repeated. - Answer me Martina, who gave it to you?! - I shouted. - Where have you been?! But she didn't answer, and her condition was critical, so I had to rush her to the hospital in my arms as she was about to lose consciousness. I had to grab her and take her to the closest hospital across Parallel, two blocks away. This was the first time I had taken her to the hospital since she'd split her chin by falling off my bicycle allegedly before, although it wasn't the last. Interestingly, whenever she got involved with a new group of criminals, she wound up in the hospital both times, and both times I took her there. She had no energy to lift her head out of the toilet bowl. As soon as I entered the hospital with her, the staff and I had to put her in a wheelchair. They took her inside and 20 minutes later when I was sitting by her bed, she already felt better with an IV dripping slowly into her vein, but she was unable to move; she was lying in her hospital bed, barely able to open her eyes to look at me. She was between life and death, or between real life and just a dream. I remembered less than a year earlier she was so full of life and happy and healthy when I put her up on that set of chairs that night when we took off the 'for sale' sign. The doctors told me after she fell asleep that they wanted to rinse her stomach, but she didn't authorize that. I was not fully aware that she was on drugs time to time or all the time and with what kind of people she was associated with. She almost only showed up at home in September 2014 when she overdosed. I was in love and worried for her so much, so I filled out the forms while they treated her in the hospital. I prayed to God to save her, asking for Him to show her the Truth. All I had was a prayer—50/50 if it worked. And I remembered that two years before, I had prayed for the life of our kitten Sabrina was playing with, making friends. This time, however, I had to rush to the hospital, not the vet, with my 20-year-old girlfriend who would soon be 21 in October 2014. And I felt like Sabrina, trying to make friends again but by the wrong people was the reason why I, an atheist, was praying for a puppy or a kitten or a bunny's life this time again. I didn't know that lies and secrets were eating away at her from deep inside once in a while as well, it wasn't just the drugs that were killing her insides like cancer. Just like her brother's intestines silently began to consume him and her, unbeknownst to them, but I could almost sense it like a dog if I could not see it, smell it inside them like X-ray. They were unaware of what my eyes had seen, as I watched their vibrations and faces silently change.

In my experience with Blackie - and earlier with allegedly incompetent recruits at Camp Colt - is rooted my enduring conviction that far too often we write off a backward child as hopeless, a clumsy animal as worthless, a worn-out field as beyond restoration. This we do largely out of our own lack of willingness to take the time and spend the effort to prove ourselves wrong: to prove that a difficult boy can become a fine man, that an animal can respond to training, that the field can regain its fertility.

To make a long story short, there is no way to devise an objective and non-arbitrary measure for comparing the overall complexity of any two given languages. It's not simply that no one has bothered to do it--it's inherently impossible even if one tried. So where does all this leave the dogma of equal complexity? When Joe, Piers, and Tom claim that "primitive people speak primitive languages," they are making a simple and eminently meaningful statement, which just happens to be factually incorrect. But the article of faith that linguists swear by is even worse than wrong--it is meaningless. The alleged central finding of the discipline is nothing more than a hollow mouthful of air, since in the absence of a definition for the overall complexity of a language, the statement that "all languages are equally complex" makes about as much sense as the assertion that "all languages are equally cornflakes".

7 Who are you to complain about anything? Do you claim to have been mistreated? Do you claim to have suffered needlessly? Who has not suffered? Whose suffering was more or less “necessary” than the rest? How many have suffered far more than you? Most have, have they not? To weep and bemoan your fate is ingratitude, self-absorption, and weakness. You abase yourself with every gripe and alleged grievance. Your obligation is to improve yourself as best as you are able in the time you are allotted—and never forget that you know not how long it is. This is not accomplished by whining and hurling accusations. Get on with it! No one can possibly have abused, wronged, or victimized you a fraction as often as you have done these things to yourself. You waste your time and energy on nonsense.

And of course, [Boris Johnson will] never get questioned like this over at the BBC while the political editor remains a fully paid-up member of the Boris Johnson Admiration Society. So how does he get away with it? Andrew points out that factory resets obviously weren't covered in the technology lessons that Boris Johnson received from Jennifer Arcuri. Again, it's a funny joke. It's a good line, but he was the Prime Minister, and everyone knew he was a liar. Is it all about that guy that rang in when Donald Trump was here. That I always remember saying ‘but you must know he's lying’. Donald Trump was giving a speech in London about the size of the crowds outside the building he was in. And we had a camera outside the building he was in. We were looking at no crowds. And that simple juxtaposition of rhetorical claim by a politician with observable reality was chilling. It was spine tingling. I can claim that there are huge crowds, huge crowds, the biggest crowds, the greatest crowds outside this building. And I said, ‘how does it work? How does that happen?’ And someone rang me and said, ‘I know he's a liar, but it really upsets people like you and Sadiq Khan.’ And at the time I laughed but maybe that's all there is. Maybe your life - and sorry this is going to sound quite rude - but maybe your life is so weird, and your personality is so twisted that you find the frustration of people who care about the truth the closest you ever get to feeling joy. Is that it? Nadine Dorries watches Boris Johnson lie and claims that he's the most trustworthy person on the planet. What is wrong with her? It's not really a question about what's wrong with him; what's wrong with her? Whatever transpires at this inquiry or whatever emerges during these hours of evidence, I can tell you this: there will be a significant number of people who think that Boris Johnson has done nothing wrong or that he is somehow the victim of another witch hunt. You remember? It was a witch hunt when he was caught banged to rights by a parliamentary committee containing a majority of conservatives after even Chris Bryant had stepped down to avoid any accusations or allegations - false allegations – really, of impartiality. And they still called it a witch hunt. It would have been a witch unless the committee consisted entirely of 14 Nadine Dorries clones. That's the only circumstances in which those people would have claimed that he could receive a fair trial. Where do you even begin today? Do you begin with the 5,000 WhatsApp messages that a man who was in charge of the nuclear code somehow doesn't understand and can't find? I don't know. So, what is your theory now because I don't think I've got one any more. I watch him now, and I feel something very new, very different to what I thought when he was in power because when he was in power there is an urgency to the situation. There is a desperate need to share with the population the awfulness that they apparently can't see. Just now that he's not in power any more, it's almost as if I've allowed the full horror of what he represents to bubble to the surface. It’s now that he can't actually break anything, it's a retrospective reflection upon the abject awfulness of him. I mean the unbelievable awfulness of this man, the things that he's done. You can begin with Brexit. The lies that he's told, the damage that he's done. The contempt in which he holds all the things we're raised to believe are important: rules, obligations, standards, behaviours, fidelity, honesty, kindness, friendship, loyalty, all of these things we teach our children matter. And Boris Johnson teaches us that you can become the most powerful person in the country by treating all of those things with absolute contempt.

a ring of jailhouse informants-- or 'snitches'--... allegedly received lenient sentences as well as food, drugs, sex and special privileges from detectives... It's not difficult to imahine why a prisoner-informant would lie about overhearing a confession when it means real material benefits... [and] prosecutors are often motivated to make those informants sound believable to a judge. Testimony from a single jailhouse informant is enough to convict a person for a charge as serious as murder... [Snitch] testimony [is] the leading cause of wrongful convictions in US capital cases." -- Aaron Miguel Cantu