Author: Sean Kerrigan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781530989522
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
In contemporary America, schoolchildren can be charged with battery for throwing a piece of candy at a friend or threatened with expulsion for making a "gun" gesture with their index finger. They can also be imprisoned for cutting class and placed in solitary confinement or made to share prison cells with hardened adult criminals. In the workplace, our jobs are more monotonous, repetitious and rule-ridden and less secure than ever before. We are made to answer to uncaring and even sadistic bosses, teachers and police, all of whom care much more about following rules than about helping people. Every year federal and state legislatures and bureaucracies pump out thousands of pages of new laws and regulations-enough to make every American into an accidental criminal. By and large, America's bureaucracies are plumbing the depths of mass insanity. In Bureaucratic Insanity, journalist and social critic Sean Kerrigan documents this disturbing trend toward absolutist and authoritarian behavior by dissecting the psychology of obsessive, rule-focused bureaucrats. He traces the development of bureaucracy from its origins in the early industrial revolution to the modern information age. He also examines ways of avoiding being victimized by bureaucracy gone mad.
Author: Jennifer S. Kain
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030263304
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
This book examines the policy and practice of the insanity clauses within the immigration controls of New Zealand and the Commonwealth of Australia. It reveals those charged with operating the legislation to be non-psychiatric gatekeepers who struggled to match its intent. Regardless of the evolution in language and the location at which a migrant’s mental suitability was assessed, those with ‘inherent mental defects’ and ‘transient insanity’ gained access to these regions. This book accounts for the increased attempts to medicalise border control in response to the widening scope of terminology used for mental illnesses, disabilities and dysfunctions. Such attempts co-existed with the promotion of these regions as ‘invalids’ paradises’ by governments, shipping companies, and non-asylum doctors. Using a bureaucratic lens, this book exposes these paradoxes, and the failings within these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australasian nation-state building exercises.
Author: Stan Flemming
Publisher: Archway Publishing
ISBN: 1480814792
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
William Weston is a senior ranking army officer on a mission. As he cons his way through military and government bureaucracy to have his deployment paperwork signed, no one knows that he has accessed top military secrets, stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Pentagon, and is wanted in eleven states. A short time later, Dr. Weston arrives in Kosovo as the chief of psychiatry in the midst of a brutal war. It has been a long year for the soldiers who have endured attacks propagated by infiltrating Serb units who line the border region near Camp Bondsteel. As Brigadier General Thomas Moore welcomes a new task force that includes Dr. Weston, he has no idea that very soon Weston will undermine his leaders, direct soldiers to disregard orders, and claim he is the commander of the detachment. When his fraudulent credentials are finally exposed, a massive cover-up ensues to protect innocent military and congressional leaders. Now only time will tell if two officers who dare to follow their beliefs and hold true to the army values will pay the price for doing the right thing. In this suspenseful military tale based on a true story, all hell breaks loose in the United States Army leadership ranks during the Kosovo War after a senior medical officer is discovered to be a fraud.
Author: Søren Jakobsen
Publisher: Lindhardt og Ringhof
ISBN: 8726741717
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Early in the morning in Copenhagen a petrol tanker, hijacked by a young girl, is set on fire, melting the high-voltage cables carrying electricity, blacking out Copenhagen and causing total chaos on the roads. The resultant confusion is used by a motorcycle gang who carry out seven bank robberies and escape with the money. The power failure also means that a passenger plane from the Soviet fails to make a stopover at Copenhagen Airport and flies directly to Heathrow, arriving an hour ahead of schedule... Meanwhile, on Heathrow conditions are also chaotic. A threat to bomb Terminal 2 makes it necessary for the police to X-ray passengers' luggage. This could be disastrous for one of the Russians on the place, a diamond courier from the Soviet Almaz concern... In Denmark, the police struggle to clear up the bank robberies without knowing that they are simply a part of the world's biggest diamond theft masterminded by the defectors... A Brilliant Coup indeed! Søren Jakobsen is an award-winning Danish journalist and author. Together with his colleague Jakob Andersen, Søren Jakobsen won the Cavling Prize in 1977 for a series of articles about the Defense Intelligence Service's illegal use of espionage. In 1981 he received the Poe Prize for his crime novel "A Brilliant Coup". In addition to his critically acclaimed detective stories, Søren Jakobsen has published the documentary books "Danish Dynasties" (2007) and "The LEGO Legacy" (2008).
Author: Larry Gonick
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620972832
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
PAPERBACK ORIGINAL From the bestselling cartoonist of The Cartoon History of the Universe comes an explosive graphic takedown of capitalism Bestselling “overeducated cartoonist” Larry Gonick has delighted readers for years with sharp, digestible, and funny accounts of everything from the history of the universe to the intricacies of calculus. Now Gonick teams up with psychologist and scholar Tim Kasser to create an accessible and pointed cartoon guide to how global, privatizing, market-worshiping hypercapitalism threatens human well-being, social justice, and the planet. But Gonick and Kasser don’t stop at an analysis of how the economic system got out of whack—they also point the way to a healthier future. A primer for the post-Occupy generation, Hypercapitalism draws from contemporary research on values, well-being, and consumerism to describe concepts (corporate power, free trade, privatization, deregulation) that are critical for understanding the world we live in, and movements (voluntary simplicity, sharing, alternatives to GDP, protests) that have developed in response to the system. Gonick and Kasser’s pointed and profound cartoon narratives provide a deep exploration of the global economy and the movements seeking to change it, all rendered in clear, graphic—and sometimes hilarious—terms.
Author: R. J. Rushdoony
Publisher: Chalcedon Foundation
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Witchcraft, occultism, paranormal science, and mysticism are growing like plagues in the Western world. These phenomena have baffled modern educators and conventional rationalists, since such activities seem to be completely opposed to everything that the public schools have taught for over a hundred years. Worst of all in the minds of conventional secularists, all this discussion of demonic forces may lead to an even more appalling conclusion: the idea that God, also a supernatural force, may reappear in the modern, "post-Christian" world. At all costs, a God who can make himself felt in time and on earth must be avoided. Mysticism is one thing—totally internalized—but supernatural forces are not supposed to have any impact on external, so-called phenomenal affairs. Occultism is another form of humanism. It is the product of the quest for power apart from God and His law-order. It was not a major force in the so-called "Dark Ages." Not until the fifteenth century did witchcraft become a serious problem in Europe, and it was the Renaissance, not medievalism, which sparked the great explosion of demonism and magic in the sixteenth century. During the period of the early Middle Ages (A.D. 500-1000), there were practically no signs of witchcraft in Europe. Only with the revival of ancient Gnosticism and the invasion of Middle Eastern dualism did signs of widespread witchcraft reappear. Occultism and humanism are not sworn enemies; they are first cousins. It was only the influence of Christian principles, which laid such stress on the orderliness of God's universe, that made possible the confidence of modern rationalists in denying the influence of supernatural forces. As the confidence in creation-law has waned in this century, "rational" humanism has become increasingly unsuccessful in retarding the expansion of occult humanism. This Journal of Christian Reconstruction offers readers the necessary evidence for a refutation of the familiar charge that occultism and religion necessarily go together, and that only a hard-headed rationalism can restrain the forces of spiritual anarchy. Far from retarding occultism, modern rationalism's blindness to the reality of occult forces is now creating a perverse inquisitiveness on the part of modernism's children, who have learned to be critical of everything, including old-fashioned rationalism. The philosophy of the "open universe"—closed to God—has produced the new occult experimentalism. If anything except Christian orthodoxy might be true, why not find out through personal observation and experiment? Since 1965, the Western world has faced the greatest explosion of occultism that it has seen in three hundred years. This time no one can blame orthodox Christianity: it has been the secularists who have wielded the power.
Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Armed Services
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 1410
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Book Description
Author: Donaldo Macedo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429978804
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Literacies of Power illustrates the many ways American schools, media, and other social institutions perpetuate ignorance. In this new, expanded edition, Donaldo Macedo shows why so-called common culture literacy is a form of dominant cultural reproduction that undermines independent thought and goes against the best interests of our students. Offering a wide-ranging counterargument, Macedo shows why cultural literacy cannot be restricted to the acquisition of Western heritage values, which sustain an ideology that systematically negates the cultural experiences of many members of society—not only minorities but also anyone who is poor or disenfranchised. Macedo calls on his own experience as a Cape Verdean immigrant from West Africa who had to surmount the barriers imposed by the world’s most entrenched monolingual system of higher education. His eloquence in this book is testimony to the very idea that critical thinking and good education are not and must not be culturally or linguistically bounded. A new concluding chapter by the author critically challenges the crucial role of schools in “the manufacture of consent” for the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act, and the “charitable racism” that is too often evident in the field of ESL. In essays new to this edition, well-known and respected educators Joe Kincheloe, Peter McLaren, and Shirley Steinberg share their insights on Macedo’s message, complementing Paulo Freire’s foreword to the original edition.
Author: Oliver Bullough
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465074979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
Russia is dying from within. Oligarchs and oil barons may still dominate international news coverage, but their prosperity masks a deep-rooted demographic tragedy. Faced with staggering population decline—and near-certain economic collapse—driven by toxic levels of alcohol abuse, Russia is also battling a deeper sickness: a spiritual one, born out of the country’s long totalitarian experiment. In The Last Man in Russia, award-winning journalist Oliver Bullough uses the tale of a lone priest to give life to this national crisis. Father Dmitry Dudko, a dissident Orthodox Christian, was thrown into a Stalinist labor camp for writing poetry. Undaunted, on his release in the mid-1950s he began to preach to congregations across Russia with little concern for his own safety. At a time when the Soviet government denied its subjects the prospect of advancement, and turned friend against friend and brother against brother, Dudko urged his followers to cling to hope. He maintained a circle of sacred trust at the heart of one of history’s most deceitful systems. But as Bullough reveals, this courageous group of believers was eventually shattered by a terrible act of betrayal—one that exposes the full extent of the Communist tragedy. Still, Dudko’s dream endures. Although most Russians have forgotten the man himself, the embers of hope that survived the darkness are once more beginning to burn. Leading readers from a churchyard in Moscow to the snow-blanketed ghost towns of rural Russia, and from the forgotten graves of Stalin’s victims to a rock festival in an old gulag camp, The Last Man in Russia is at once a travelogue, a sociological study, a biography, and a cri de coeur for a dying nation—one that, Bullough shows, might yet be saved.
Author: Gene Kim
Publisher: IT Revolution
ISBN: 1942788770
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 499
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Book Description
The Phoenix Project wowed over a half-million readers. Now comes the Wall Street Journal Bestselling Wall Street Journal bestselling The Unicorn Project! “The Unicorn Project is amazing, and I loved it 100 times more than The Phoenix Project…”—FERNANDO CORNAGO, Senior Director Platform Engineering, Adidas “Gene Kim does a masterful job of showing how … the efforts of many create lasting business advantages for all.”—DR. STEVEN SPEAR, author of The High-Velocity Edge, Sr. Lecturer at MIT, and principal of HVE LLC. “The Unicorn Project is so clever, so good, so crazy enlightening!”––CORNELIA DAVIS, Vice President Of Technology at Pivotal Software, Inc., Author of Cloud Native Patterns This highly anticipated follow-up to the bestselling title The Phoenix Project takes another look at Parts Unlimited, this time from the perspective of software development. In The Unicorn Project, we follow Maxine, a senior lead developer and architect, as she is exiled to the Phoenix Project, to the horror of her friends and colleagues, as punishment for contributing to a payroll outage. She tries to survive in what feels like a heartless and uncaring bureaucracy and to work within a system where no one can get anything done without endless committees, paperwork, and approvals. One day, she is approached by a ragtag bunch of misfits who say they want to overthrow the existing order, to liberate developers, to bring joy back to technology work, and to enable the business to win in a time of digital disruption. To her surprise, she finds herself drawn ever further into this movement, eventually becoming one of the leaders of the Rebellion, which puts her in the crosshairs of some familiar and very dangerous enemies. The Age of Software is here, and another mass extinction event looms—this is a story about rebel developers and business leaders working together, racing against time to innovate, survive, and thrive in a time of unprecedented uncertainty...and opportunity. “The Unicorn Project provides insanely useful insights on how to improve your technology business.”—DOMINICA DEGRANDIS, author of Making Work Visible and Director of Digital Transformation at Tasktop ——— “My goal in writing The Unicorn Project was to explore and reveal the necessary but invisible structures required to make developers (and all engineers) productive, and reveal the devastating effects of technical debt and complexity. I hope this book can create common ground for technology and business leaders to leave the past behind, and co-create a better future together.”—Gene Kim, November 2019
