Why were they banned? They were, simply, totally free. They were financially free, and secure, not because of their means but because of their wants. Ironically by being beggars, they had the equivalent of f*** you money, the one we can more easily get by being at the lowest rung than by joining the income dependent class.
.. Benedict’s instruction manual aims explicitly at removing any hint of freedom in the monks under the principles of: stabilitate sua et conversatione morum suorum et oboedientia — “stability, conversion of manners, and obedience”.
.. In short, every organization wants a certain number of people associated with it to be deprived of a certain share of their freedom. How do you own these people? First, by conditioning and psychological manipulation; second by tweaking them to have some skin in the game, forcing them to have something significant to lose if they were to disobey authority –something hard to do with gyrovague beggars who flouted they scorn of material possessions.
.. So employees exist because they have significant skin in the game –and the risk is shared with them, enough risk for it to be a deterrent and a penalty for acts of undependability, such as failing to show up on time. You are buying dependability.
.. By having been employees they signal a certain type of domestication.
.. Someone who has been employed for a while is giving you the evidence of submission
Evidence of submission is displayed by having gone through years of the ritual of depriving himself of his personal freedom for nine hours every day, punctual arrival at an office, denying himself his own schedule
.. If the company man is, sort of, gone, he has been replaced by the companies person, thanks to both an expansion of the gender and a generalization of the function. For the person is no longer owned by a company but by something worse: the idea that he needs to be employable.
.. The employable person is embedded in an industry, with fear of upsetting not just their employer, but other potential employers. [2]
.. an employable person is the one that you will never find in a history book because these people are designed to never leave their mark on the course of events. They are, by design, uninteresting to historians.
.. In a world in which products are increasingly made by subcontractors with increasing degrees of specialization, employees are even more needed than before for special tasks.
.. Multinational companies created the expat category, a sort of diplomat with a higher standard of living representing the firm far away and running its business there. A bank in New York sends a married employee with his family to a foreign location, say a tropical county with cheap labor, with perks and privileges such as country club membership, a driver, a nice company villa with a gardener, a yearly trip back home with the family in first class, and keep him there for a few years, enough to be addicted. He earns much more than the “locals”, in a hierarchy reminiscent of colonial days.
.. Because the further from headquarters an employee is located, the more autonomous his unit, the more you want him to be a slave so he does nothing strange on his own.
.. there was some people in a company who weren’t slaves.
.. One type is the salesperson whose resignation would cause the loss of business, and, what’s worse, he can benefit a competitor by take some of the firm’s client there.
.. The other one was the trader about whom only one thing mattered: the profits and losses, or P/L.
.. My days, nobody cursed in public except for gang members and those who wanted to signal that they were not slaves
.. So cursing today is a status symbol, just as oligarchs in Moscow wear blue jeans at special events to signal their power.
.. ironically the highest status, that of free-man, is usually indicated by voluntarily adopting the mores of the lowest class[5]
.. Consider that the English “manners” isn’t something that applies to the aristocracy; it is a middle class thing and the entire manners of the English are meant for the domestication of those who need to be domesticated.
.. Clearly, except for Putin, all the others need to calibrate every single statement to how it could be misinterpreted the least by the press.
.. In such a confrontation Putin looks and acts as a free citizen confronting slaves who need committees, approval, and of course feel like they have to fit their decisions to an immediate rating.
.. It is much easier to do business with the owner of the business than some employee who is likely to lose his job next year; likewise it is easier to trust the word an autocrat than a fragile elected official.
Is Putin playing Trump like he did Berlusconi?
Putin’s friendship with the Italian may simply demonstrate that the Russian leader has a natural chemistry with a rich, politically incorrect businessman.
.. “Putin is very strategic. He would focus on people’s vulnerabilities — whether their vanity or greed or financial needs.”
.. Putin, drawing from his background as an intelligence officer, had made a “calculated” overture to Trump early in the presidential campaign, “playing upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him,” and turning Trump into an “unwitting agent” of Russia.
Asked about Trump in December, Putin described the New Yorker as “bright and talented,” words that clearly pleased Trump: “It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond,” the mogul told reporters soon after... Berlusconi holidayed at Putin’s dacha on the Black Sea, while the Russian stayed at the Italian leader’s villa in Sardinia.
.. At various times Berlusconi defended Putin’s military incursion into the republic of Georgia, which the U.S. and much of Europe strongly denounced. He praised Putin’s leadership style.
.. “In reality, what he was doing was pushing Putin’s agenda with no real guarantee that Putin would ever compromise on our agenda,” says the U.S. official, who spoke to POLITICO. “I see a similar trend with Trump.”
.. the former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder joined the board of the Russian energy giant Gazprom, and in 2014 he attended a lavish 70th birthday party thrown for him by a Gazprom subsidiary in St. Petersburg
Putin’s incredible shrinking circle
on the 12th it was announced that Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov, was leaving his position as head of the Presidential Administration (AP) and taking up the new and rather less pivotal job of presidential representative for transport and the environment. In his place, Putin elevated one of Ivanov’s deputies, the essentially-unknown 44-year old Anton Vaino. Whatever Vaino’s strengths, this points to the way Putin is hollowing out his inner elite, surrounding himself with fewer but also less substantial peers, who are unlikely to challenge his worldview and opinions.
.. A shrewd and polished operator, Ivanov seemed at once ambitious and indispensable (asked whom he trusted back in 1999, Putin’s immediate response: “Sergei Ivanov”).
.. But his departure could also be part of Putin’s clearing of the old guard in advance of the 2018 presidential elections. The Kremlin was caught by surprise when the rigged presidential elections in 2011 led to the “Bolotnaya protests”. This time, although they do not seem to know quite what to expect, there is a clear intention to be ready, come what may
.. Putin, less trusting of the elite, is taking the opportunity to install a new cadre of officials who are younger and have more to prove and less to lose.
.. he is recruiting disproportionately from the people he knows. Given his cloistered lifestyle, that often means bodyguards, personal assistants, and the like. Vaino, for example, was head of his personal protocol office (and even memorably carried his umbrella from time to time).
.. The inexorable logic of Putin’s personalised, de-institutionalised and essentially ruthless regime is that he must periodically devour his favourites — where Yakunin and Ivanov go, other past cronies such as Rosneft head Igor Sechin and deputy prime minister Igor Shuvalov may well follow — as they become tiresome, embarrassing or a threat.
.. What makes this iteration more noteworthy and worrying than most, though, is that it takes place at a volatile time when Putin himself is increasingly willing to sacrifice the immediate interests of the Russian people for his vision of a powerful, “sovereign” Russia and his own historical legacy. In their own self-interested and sometimes wrong-headed way, the boyars are one of the few checks and balances.
I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton.
I found her to be prepared, detail-oriented, thoughtful, inquisitive and willing to change her mind if presented with a compelling argument.
.. her understanding that diplomacy can be effective only if the country is perceived as willing and able to use force if necessary
.. During the early debates about how we should respond to the Syrian civil war, she was a strong proponent of a more aggressive approach, one that might have prevented the Islamic State from gaining a foothold in Syria.
.. When some wanted to delay the Bin Laden raid by one day because the White House Correspondents Dinner might be disrupted, she said, “Screw the White House Correspondents Dinner.”
.. the character traits he has exhibited during the primary season suggest he would be a poor, even dangerous, commander in chief.These traits include his obvious need for self-aggrandizement, his overreaction to perceived slights, his tendency to make decisions based on intuition, his refusal to change his views based on new information, his routine carelessness with the facts, his unwillingness to listen to others and his lack of respect for the rule of law... President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated...ignoring that he has killed and jailed journalists and political opponents, has invaded two of his neighbors and is driving his economy to ruin. Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests — endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States...This position, which so clearly contradicts the foundational values of our nation, plays into the hands of the jihadist narrative that our fight against terrorism is a war between religions... Our nation will be much safer with Hillary Clinton as president.