The Art of Drawing the Penis Essay Example For Students

The Art of Drawing the Penis Essay Uncouples in the Satirical and Luscious in Metamorphoses are each put in the role of outsiders on the fringes of society and are enabled to act as observers and commentators. Although they are viewed as outcasts and deal with the same types of scenarios, Uncouples and Luscious live in two completely different worlds. Uncouples and Luscious respond to their societies and the people they encounter in their own individual ways. Firstly, discussing Uncouples and his background will begin our knowledge on how he and Luscious differ. Uncouples in the Satirical lives in a world where he is instantly tempted by sex. We will write a custom essay on The Art of Drawing the Penis specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now The former gladiator and newly arriving student is involved in a sexual relationship with his sixteen. Year old lover and slave. Boy, Citing. Throughout the novel, Uncouples struggles with staying faithful to his lover. Uncouples is enticed more than once throughout the novel by some sort of sexual pleasure that leads to him being unfaithful to Citing. On top of being a faithless lover, Uncouples has a criminal background. The book speaks of him stealing and even murdering a man. Being unfaithful and having a criminal background shows a little bit of the type to person Uncouples was. Secondly, we will review Luscious and his background in Metamorphoses. Luscious, a man to good birth and a mentor, starts out his journey on the way to Thessaly where he hears a hard-to-believe tale that intrigues his curiosity about magic and myths. Throughout the first half of The Golden Ass, Luscious learns about a few literal and metaphorical tales that sparks his interests on the magic happening within Thessaly. He learns that the wife of the family he is staying with is a witch and tries to turn himself into a bird as he saw her do. Instead of turning into a bird, his curiously led him into changing into an ass. The novel continues with Luscious going on many journeys as an ass and learning and hearing even more stories relating to magic. After all of his hardships and journeys, Luscious eventually comes into contact With the goddess Isis and she changes him back into human form after joining her cult. NOW that we know a little behind the characters Of Uncouples and Luscious, we can compare the two to one another. Uncouples and Luscious are each the main characters and the narrators in their novels. Everything in Satirical and Metamorphoses is involved around the two. Uncouples and Luscious both deal with temptation. However, Uncouples struggles with sexual temptation and Luscious struggles with the temptation of magic. Luscious is a curious character and wants to learn about everything whereas Uncouples is more into pleasuring himself. They both relate in the way that Uncouples is a student and Luscious is a mentor. In Satirical, it tells how Uncouples is a new student and in The Golden Ass it tells how Luscious ran into a former student at the market hence, he is a mentor, As it has already been stated, Uncouples has a criminal background relating to burglary and murder, Luscious was thought to have killed three men in The Golden Ass but it ended up being wineskins, not men. Even though Luscious was thought to have murdered a few men, Luscious comes off as a peaceful character where as Uncouples comes off as a bit chaotic. All in all, Uncouples and Luscious handle their situations in very different ways. Uncouples allows temptation to take over and becomes vulnerable in scenarios whereas Luscious tries to think things through thoroughly and come up with a clever plan. Satirical and Metamorphoses shows the reader how two men coming from Roman novels react to climatic scenarios in completely different ways.

A Brief History of the KGB and Its Origins

A Brief History of the KGB and Its Origins If you grafted the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), added a few hefty tablespoons of paranoia and repression, and translated the whole megillah into Russian, you might wind up with something like the KGB. The Soviet Unions main internal and external security agency from 1954 until the breakup of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, the KGB wasnt created from scratch, but rather inherited much of its techniques, personnel, and political orientation from the greatly feared agencies that preceded it. Before the KGB: The Cheka, the OGPU  and the NKVD In the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin, the head of the newly formed U.S.S.R., needed a way to keep the population (and his fellow revolutionaries) in check. His answer was to create the Cheka, an abbreviation of The All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. During the Russian Civil War of 1918-1920, the Cheka - led by the one-time Polish aristocrat Felix - arrested, tortured, and executed thousands of citizens. In the course of this Red Terror, the Cheka perfected the system of summary execution used by subsequent Russian intelligence agencies: a single shot to the back of the victims neck, preferably in a dark dungeon. In 1923, the Cheka, still under Dzerzhinsky, mutated into the OGPU (the Joint State Political Directorate Under the  Council of Peoples Commissars  of the U.S.S.R. - Russians have never been good at catchy names). The OGPU operated during a relatively uneventful period in Soviet history (no massive purges, no internal deportations of millions of ethnic minorities), but this agency did preside over the creation of the first Soviet gulags. The OGPU also viciously persecuted religious organizations (including the Russian Orthodox Church) in addition to its usual duties of rooting out dissenters and saboteurs. Unusually for a director of a Soviet intelligence agency, Felix Dzerzhinsky died of natural causes, dropping dead of a heart attack after denouncing leftists to the Central Committee. Unlike these earlier agencies, the NKVD (The Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs) was purely the brainchild of Joseph Stalin. The NKVD was chartered around the same time Stalin orchestrated the murder of Sergei Kirov, an event he used as an excuse to purge the upper ranks of the Communist Party and strike terror into the populace. In the 12  years of its existence, from 1934 to 1946, the NKVD arrested and executed literally millions of people, stocked the gulags with millions more miserable souls, and relocated entire ethnic populations within the vast expanse of the U.S.S.R. Being an NKVD head was a dangerous occupation: Genrikh Yagoda was arrested and executed in 1938, Nikolai Yezhov in 1940, and Lavrenty Beria in 1953 (during the power struggle that followed the death of Stalin). The Ascension  of the KGB After the end of World War II  and before his execution, Lavrenty Beria presided over the Soviet security apparatus, which remained in a somewhat fluid state of multiple acronyms and organizational structures. Most of the time, this body was known as the MGB (The Ministry for State Security), sometimes as the NKGB (The Peoples Commissariat for State Security), and once, during the war, as the vaguely comical-sounding SMERSH (short for the Russian phrase smert shpionom, or death to spies). Only after the death of Stalin did the KGB, or Commissariat for State Security, formally come into being. Despite its fearsome reputation in the west, the KGB was actually more effective in policing the U.S.S.R. and its eastern European satellite states than in fomenting revolution in western Europe or stealing military secrets from the U.S. (The golden age of Russian espionage was in the years immediately following World War II, before the formation of the KGB, when the U.S.S.R. subverted western scientists in order to advance its own development of nuclear weapons.) The major foreign accomplishments of the KGB included suppressing the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968, as well as installing a Communist government in Afghanistan in the late 1970s; however, the agencys luck ran out in early 1980s Poland, where the anti-Communist Solidarity movement emerged victorious. All during this time, of course, the CIA and the KGB engaged in an elaborate international dance (often in third-world countries like Angola and Nicaragua),  involving agents, double agents, propaganda, disinformation, under-the-table arms sales, interference with elections, and nighttime exchanges of suitcases filled with rubles or hundred-dollar bills. The exact details of what transpired, and where, may never come to light; many of the agents and controllers from both sides are dead, and the current Russian government has not been forthcoming in declassifying the KGB archives. Inside the U.S.S.R., the attitude of the KGB toward suppressing dissent was largely dictated by government policy. During the reign of Nikita Khrushchev, from 1954 to 1964, a certain amount of openness was tolerated, as witnessed in the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyns Gulag-era memoir One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (an event that would have been unthinkable under the Stalin regime). The pendulum swung the other way with the ascension of Leonid Brezhnev in 1964, and, especially, the appointment of Yuri Andropov as the head of the KGB in 1967. Andropovs KGB hounded Solzhenitsyn out of the U.S.S.R. in 1974, turned the screws on the dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov, and generally made life miserable for any prominent figure even slightly dissatisfied with Soviet power. The Death (And Resurrection?) of the KGB In the late 1980s - partly because of the disastrous war in Afghanistan and partly because of an increasingly costly arms race with the U.S. - the U.S.S.R. began to fall apart at the seams, with rampant inflation, shortages of factory goods, and agitation by ethnic minorities. Premier Mikhail Gorbachev had already implemented perestroika (a restructuring of the economy and political structure of the Soviet Union) and glasnost (a policy of openness toward dissidents), but while this placated some of the population, it enraged hard-line Soviet bureaucrats who had grown accustomed to their privileges. As might have been predicted, the KGB was at the forefront of the counter-revolution. In late 1990,  then-KGB head Vladimir Kryuchkov recruited high-ranking members of the Soviet elite into a  tight-knit conspiratorial cell, which sprang into action the following  August after failing to convince Gorbachev to either resign in favor of its preferred candidate or declare a state of emergency. Armed combatants, some of them in tanks, stormed the Russian parliament building in Moscow, but Soviet President Boris Yeltsin held firm and the coup quickly fizzled out. Four months later, the U.S.S.R. officially disbanded, granting autonomy to the Soviet Socialist Republics along its western and southern borders and dissolving the KGB (along with all other Soviet governmental bodies). However, institutions like the KGB never really go away; they just assume different guises. Today, Russia is dominated by two security agencies, the FSB (The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) and the SVR (The Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation), which broadly correspond to the FBI and the CIA, respectively. More worrisome, though, is the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin spent 15 years in the KGB, from 1975 to 1990, and his increasingly autocratic rule shows that he has taken to heart the lessons he learned there. Its unlikely that Russia will ever again see a security agency as vicious as the NKVD, but a return to the darkest days of the KGB is clearly not out of the question.

Paper 2 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Paper 2 - Essay Example The government also guaranteed losses to the tune of $300 billion due to troubled assets of the Citibank. Subsequently, the restructuring exercise done by the management under the leadership of the newly joined CEO Vikram Pandit did turn the table. The bank showed profit in the last four figures is a testimony to the successful strategic actions taken by the management. Pandit in an address to the company employees listed the following objectives to spearhead the bank to old glories. 1. The focus is now on emerging markets. Citibank is well placed to tap the opportunities due to wide network of its offices throughout the world. Bank aims at remaining number one in emerging markets. 4. Bank would take great strides in the coming years by meeting financial needs of their clients from infrastructure to alternative energy to many development projects in the fastest growing economies in the world. The recent performance of Bank of America does not show much of a promise as BOA made losses to the tune of $8.8 billion in the second quarter this year. The biggest issue with BOA is $408 billion of mortgages that bank is holding in home equity. Banks future is linked with the recovery of housing market and that is not likely to show any sign of recovery because of the high unemployment rate prevailing in the US market. Depressed economy in US and high unemployment rate will keep housing market in a subdued state for quite a long time. For this reason, BOA remains a highly risky stock with not much of a hope of any dramatic improvement in coming years. Moreover, BOA is not active enough in the emerging markets and developing economies with a possibility of getting benefited like Citibank. From the above analysis it seems that though both the banks had worst period during the subprime crisis, Citibank is displaying required dynamism to come out of the crisis through