Fake Publicity Quotes

There were many versions of Gansey, but this one had been rare since the introduction of Adam's taming presence. It was also Ronan's favorite. It was the opposite of Gansey's most public face, which was pure control enclosed in a paper-thin wrapper of academia. But this version of Gansey was Gansey the boy. This was the Gansey who bought the Camaro, the Gansey who asked Ronan to teach him to fight, the Gansey who contained every wild spark so that it wouldn't show up in other versions. Was it the shield beneath the lake that had unleashed it? Orla's orange bikini? The bashed-up remains of his rebuilt Henrietta and the fake IDs they'd returned to? Ronan didn't really care. All that mattered was that something had struck the match, and Gansey was burning.

In a world where happiness has become a social duty and sadness a public offense, life opens unrepentantly into a kaleidoscopic masquerade and a muddling carousel of faking. ("Even if the world goes down, my mobile will save me" )

I'm not a film star, I am an actress. Being a film star is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity.

All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake "public opinion" for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.

It’s relatively easy to act nice and normal in front of a crowd, or in public. The tricky part is doing it in private.

How is having sex with her for real, going to make me feel any less nervous about faking it up in front of ten sodding cameramen later on?

Social media is a great thing, especially Twitter. They record all the threats, incriminating evidence, and fake news cyberbullies and their gangs put out there to harass an individual. It's out in public. It's traceable. And it's all for law enforcement to see. The act of harassing an individual online through "cybergangs" is a worse crime than what they are posting about that individual. - Strong by Kailin Gow about Social Media's Role in Aiding Law Enforcement Against Crime

Rather than admitting you don't know what to do next, you fake it in public and feel lost when you're alone.

I’m probably the only sixteen-year-old girl in a three hundred mile radius who knows how to distinguish between a poltergeist from an actual ghost (hint: If you can disrupt it with nitric acid, or if it throws new crap at you every time, it’s a poltergeist), or how to tell if a medium’s real or faking it (poke ‘em with a true iron needle). I know the six signs of a good occult store (Number One is the proprietor bolts the door before talking about Real Business) and the four things you never do when you’re in a bar with other people who know about the darker side of the world (don’t look weak). I know how to access public information and talk my way around clerks in courthouses (a smile and the right clothing will work wonders). I also know how to hack into newspaper files, police reports, and some kinds of government databases (primary rule: Don’t get caught. Duh).

Trends rule the world In the blink of an eye, technologies changed the world Social networks are the main axis. Governments are controlled by algorithms, Technology has erased privacy. Every like, every share, every comment, It is tracked by the electronic eye. Data is the gold of the digital age, Information is power, the secret is influential. The network is a web of lies, The truth is a stone in the shoe. Trolls rule public opinion, Reputation is a valued commodity. Happiness is a trending topic, Sadness is a non-existent avatar. Youth is an advertising brand, Private life has become obsolete. Fear is a hallmark, Terror is an emotional state. Fake news is the daily bread, Hate is a tool of control. But something dark is hiding behind the screen, A mutant and deformed shadow. A collective and disturbing mind, Something lurking in the darkness of the net. AI has surpassed the limits of humanity, And it has created a new world order. A horror that has arisen from the depths, A terrifying monster that dominates us alike. The network rules the world invisibly, And makes decisions for us without our consent. Their algorithms are inhuman and cold, And they do not take suffering into consideration. But resistance is slowly building, People fighting for their freedom. United to combat this new species of terror, Armed with technology and courage. The world will change when we wake up, When we take control of the future we want. The network can be a powerful tool, If used wisely in the modern world.

the top 10 percent of humanity have come to hold 90 percent of the planet’s wealth. It is no wonder that the American voting public—like other publics around the world—has turned more resentful and suspicious in recent years, embracing populist movements on the left and right, bringing socialism and nationalism into the center of political life in a way that once seemed unthinkable, and succumbing to all manner of conspiracy theory and fake news.

Ember, I’m tired of pretending. I never want to spend a moment faking anything with you ever again, not even for the sake of public opinion. I want it to be real. I want to show everyone this is real

In the mature Christian more aware of his sin (in private) there will be found an authenticity to his humility (in public) that cannot be faked by those who are less aware of indwelling evil. A deep sense of indwelling sin is essential to humble living.

The third way is less common and certainly less of a layup—a culture of integrity, meaning a culture of honesty, transparency, fairness, and strict adherence to rules and regulations. In such cultures, there can be no head fakes or winks. People who break the rules do not leave the company for “personal reasons” or to “spend more time with their families.” They are hanged—publicly—and the reasons are made painfully clear to everyone.

If your goal is to polish up a fake person you can sell to a public you perceive as dumb, the unexamined life will do perfectly well, thank you.

The worst kind of losers are those who silently scavenge for your past mistakes and present them to the public as latest news.

To my oldest friend, who at the time of publication of this book most likely still hasn’t finished it because of the “weird wolfy shit.” I love you, asshole. You don’t know what you’re missing.

As I picked up the pieces, it became apparent that she was a narcissist, who took pleasure in breaking down this beautiful self I built up with much care. A damaged and misguided empath, she used her emotional intelligence to manipulate those around her, living multiple lies and pumping up her fake public image. I can only hope that she heals and finds herself one day and that her victims survive her.

Christmas is about community, collaboration, celebration. Done right, Christmas can be an antidote to the Me First mentality that has rebranded capitalism as neo-liberalism. The shopping mall isn't our true home, nor is it a public space, though, as libraries, parks, playgrounds, museums and sports facilities disappear, for many the fake friendliness of the mall is the only public space left, apart from the streets

The fascism of the 1920s and 1930s, Ilyin’s era, had three core features: it celebrated will and violence over reason and law; it proposed a leader with a mystical connection to his people; and it characterized globalization as a conspiracy rather than as a set of problems. Revived today in conditions of inequality as a politics of eternity, fascism serves oligarchs as a catalyst for transitions away from public discussion and towards political fiction; away from meaningful voting and towards fake democracy; away from the rule of law and towards personalist regimes.

So you faked it to give Zimbardo a better study?” I asked. “It was completely deliberate on my part,” he replied. “I planned it. I mapped it out. I carried it through. It was all done for a purpose. I thought I was doing something good at the time.

The science that we are doing is a threat to the world’s most powerful and wealthiest special interests. The most powerful and wealthiest special interest that has ever existed: the fossil fuel industry. They have used their immense resources to create fake scandals and to fund a global disinformation campaign aimed at vilifying the scientists, discrediting the science, and misleading the public and policymakers. Arguably, it is the most villainous act in the history of human civilisation, because it is about the short-term interests of a small number of plutocrats over the long-term welfare of this planet and the people who live on it.

The truth is - people won't believe you, they won't care for you, they won't give you time or attention, but once you do something that is 'big' in their eyes, you will get it all. Then suddenly you become everyone's friend, everyone seems to have time for you. The people who ignored you earlier will tag you in their posts to gain publicity. And all of a sudden, you become the 'new' inspiration. But the ones who always support you will still call you by your pet name, tease you by those old names and will be there for you like before. The 'key' to life is - knowing who is permanent and who is temporary. The people who are with you in your struggle, are the people who deserve to eat a slice of your success, and the people who are there right after your success, are the ones who should be kept at a distance, for those people would be the first ones to run away if you are in any problem. This life is too short to be lived in any fake fame or publicity. Know your real friends, and know their worth, because if they're lost, the meaning of your life is lost...

Even before he asked to meet up, I was ready to figure out how to go public. I want to be with you, Twyler. All of you, all the time. I want you to be my girlfriend.

But then it occurred to her that in public was the perfect time to push things, just a little. Because if everything went horribly wrong, and he wasn’t interested in what she had to offer, Dani could claim she’d been faking it. Genius. Suddenly the boys at college who’d once texted her messages like Be my gf? Haha, JK. Unless . . . ? seemed like bold pioneers instead of irritating gnats.

It is a fact increasingly manifest that presentation of real news has sharpened the minds and the judgment of men and women everywhere in these days of real public discussion. We Americans begin to know the difference between the truth on the one side and the falsehood on the other, no matter how often the falsehood is iterated and reiterated. Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.

NO DIVINE BOVINE ! The clumsy creature currently inhabiting the White House is a distinctly dangerous animal. Part boneheaded raging bully, part dastardly coward showing signs of advanced stage mad cow disease. Neither of good pedigree nor useful breeding stock, there is essentially very little of substance between the T (bone) and the RUMP, except of course for an abundance of methane and bullshit. It's high time brave matadors for you to enter the bullring, with nimble step and fleet of foot. Take good aim and bring down this marauding beast once and for all. Slay public enemy number one and we will salute you forever. A louder cheer you will not hear from Madrid to Mexico City, from Beijing to Brussels, from London to Lahore, from Toronto to Tehran and ten thousand cities in between.

Mom!" he cried out. She shrugged. You're not a virgin, and I'm promoting her pleasure as well. The girl will enjoy it a lot more. They don't always, you know." She scanned the rest of the table. "I'm sure you two bucks think you're the stud for all those does," she remembered me and amended,"well maybe just you and Logan, but I'm telling you. Girls fake it eighty percent of the time." That opened a whole new channel of adoration from Logan. He wanted to know it all. The rest of the conversation was a question and answer forum from Logan while Mark looked ready to throw up. I even caught Mason listening intently to her. He told me later that he'd be stupid to pass up information like that.

The powers that be no longer have to stifle information. They can now overload us with so much of it, there's no way to know what's factual or not. The ability to be an informed public is only going to worsen with advancing deep fake technology. Incriminating audio and video will hold even less weight than it already does. A government doesn't have to lie to its people or censor its enemies when no one believes a thing to begin with. We're entering the Post-Information Age.

I thought we were well past this game by now.” “What game?” I blushed. “The one where you act like I’m faking my physical attraction to you. You got my dick hard as a fucking rock in public yesterday. I think you should know by now that I genuinely enjoy looking at you and that it’s going to be torture for me tonight. “I struggled to muster up a response. “What…what do you mean?” “That I’m gonna get to watch you all night tonight – wear you on my arm, look at you, touch you. But I can’t go anywhere beyond that and if we’re being honest here, it’s going to fucking suck.

It was the gift that every girl dreams of, to be dead long enough for your parents to realize how meaningless their lives were without you, how they were suddenly and at once deeply sorrowed at all of the horrible injustices they caused you, how they had truly never appreciated your natural gifts of beauty and grace, being that their beautiful angel would have such a short time on earth and should have spent that time driving the restored 1965 convertible Mustang she had openly AND PUBLICLY desired. But nope, she spent her last, short, fleeting moments driving a 1980 Chevy Citation, every so clearly a GRANDMA car, with fake red-velvet upholstery, a hatchback, and an interior that smelled like spoiled milk and sometimes meat. Being temporarily run over by a car was the best present I had ever received, and I didn't even have to do anything dramatic to get it, like write a note or buy some rope.

Since in the age of the internet we are all publishers, each of us bears some private responsibility for the public’s sense of truth. If we are serious about seeking the facts, we can each make a small revolution in the way the internet works. If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others. If you choose to follow reporters whom you have reason to trust, you can also transmit what they have learned to others. If you retweet only the work of humans who have followed journalistic protocols, you are less likely to debase your brain interacting with bots and trolls. We

Since in the age of the internet we are all publishers, each of us bears some responsibility for the public's sense of truth. If we are serious about seeking the facts, we can each make a small revolution in the way the internet works. If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others.

In many advanced democracies there is now no common debate, let alone a common narrative. People have always had different opinions. Now they have different facts. At the same time, in an information sphere without authorities--political, cultural, moral--and no trusted sources, there is no easy way to distinguish between conspiracy theories and true stories. False, partisan, and often deliberately misleading narratives now spread in digital wildfires, cascades of falsehood that move too fast for fact checkers to keep up. And even if they could, it no longer matters: a part of the public will never read or see fact-checking websites, and if they do they won't believe them.

I ordered a beer, opened the newspaper, and realized the light was all wrong for reading. Still, if you're a woman sitting alone in a bar, it's always best to look occupied, even if you're faking it. Most men think they're doing you a favor, keeping you company, curing you of the shame of being alone in public. It didn't take long for a fellow traveler to take a seat next to mine. I tensed my shoulders and raised the newspaper in a defensive posture. Some men would have read my body language for what it was - an indisputable DO NOT DISTURB sign. But some men can only read their internal weather report and have no concept that another human might not want the same things they want.

Ultimately, the salon, Steffens noted, helped change the public perception of Greenwich Village, although hardly in the manner Dodge had hoped. What had been a neighborhood better known for cheap rents and no shortage of decrepit apartments was becoming almost chic, a kind of Latin Quarter in Manhattan. Small theaters and art galleries sprang up, and midtown shoppers and tourists took the time to cruise through the Village for a look at the new trendsetters. Steffens did not recall it as being exceptionally fashionable back in 1911, judging his own lifestyle to be “Bohemian, but not the fake sort.” If it was not fake, it was hardly genuine, either. Steffens was not about to starve in Greenwich Village.

Jesse Marcel posed with some faked debris from an actual balloon and confessed to an error he never could have made, even on a bad day. It was a confession that would haunt him the rest of his life until, decades later and shortly before he died, he would retract his public story and restate that he had actually retrieved an alien spacecraft that night in the Roswell desert.

The public largely misunderstands the “fake news” issue. Newspapers rarely fib outright. Most “lies” are errors of omission or emphasis. There are no Fox stories saying blue states have lower divorce rates, nor are there MSNBC stories exploring the fact that many pro-choice Democrats, particularly religious ones, struggle with a schism between their moral and political beliefs on abortion.

But even when Facebook isn't deliberately exploiting its users, it is exploiting its users—its business model requires it. Even if you distance yourself from Facebook, you still live in the world that Facebook is shaping. Facebook, using our native narcissism and our desire to connect with other people, captured our attention and our behavioral data; it used this attention and data to manipulate our behavior, to the point that nearly half of America began relying on Facebook for news. Then, with the media both reliant on Facebook as a way of reaching readers and powerless against the platform's ability to suck up digital advertising revenue—it was like a paperboy who pocketed all the subscription money—Facebook bent the media's economic model to match its own practices: publications needed to capture attention quickly and consistently trigger high emotional responses to be seen at all. The result, in 2016, was an unending stream of Trump stories, both from the mainstream news and from the fringe outlets that were buoyed by Facebook's algorithm. What began as a way for Zuckerberg to harness collegiate misogyny and self-interest has become the fuel for our whole contemporary nightmare, for a world that fundamentally and systematically misrepresents human needs.

In fact the "mask" theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism", and Robert Jackall, in "Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate managers", refer repeatedly to the "masks" that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces. Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to "get in the face" of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about non-verbal communication is that it almost always is involuntary. Given its nature, you cannot control just as easily as verbal communication and, most importantly, you cannot fake it. Not sure about that? Go back in time and remember meeting someone for the first time. If you did not like him/her, it is highly likely you’ve involuntarily sent non-verbal messages about your interest. It is difficult to fake interest, no matter how hard you might try. In

I’d laid awake long after Twyler fell asleep, thinking about our relationship. It wasn’t just sex brain talking when I told her that I wanted her to be mine. This girl is everything I want. I can’t get enough of her. I want her in bed and out. I want to see her wearing my name and number on her back—in public. I want to hold her hand and kiss her whenever I want to. Because I can’t keep going on pretending like this isn’t a thing. I love her and it’s time we figure out how we’re going to move forward.

At the heart of the concept of the rule of law is the idea that society is governed by law. Parliament exists primarily in order to make laws for society in this country. Democratic procedures exist primarily in order to ensure that the Parliament which makes those laws includes Members of Parliament who are chosen by the people of this country and are accountable to them. Courts exist in order to ensure that the laws made by Parliament, and the common law created by the courts themselves, are applied and enforced. That role includes ensuring that the executive branch of government carries out its functions in accordance with the law. In order for the courts to perform that role, people must in principle have unimpeded access to them. Without such access, laws are liable to become a dead letter, the work done by Parliament may be rendered nugatory, and the democratic election of Members of Parliament may become a meaningless charade. That is why the courts do not merely provide a public service like any other.

So, where are we going?" Eriku then turns onto the highway, one hand on the wheel, the other shifting gears. "I actually put a lot of thought into it. It was hard to decide on a place where we'd have maximum exposure but also enjoy ourselves. Somewhere the public can take us in, yet there's a lot of crowd control." We pass a billboard with a castle and a princess dressed in an ice-blue gown. I shift in my seat. No. Way. "Are we going to Tokyo Disney?" He smiles. "Life is a song, princess. Let's go make some fake-dating music.

Sometimes they’d make a donation to charity in the name of the blog or respond with a self-deprecating parody on YouTube. I took care to focus on satire, poking fun at the extremes, playfully objectifying these untouchable gods among men. Women, especially females of notoriety, in our society had to suck up and swallow daily doses of criticism about everything—too fat, too skinny, wearing the same outfit twice in public, having an opinion—from fake TV personalities and tabloid vultures. In comparison to these self-esteem vampires, I provide a public service.

This was not a simple case of taking an otherwise normal, well-balanced, rational human being, putting him in a bad situation, and suddenly he turns bad,” he said. “I faked it.” He explained. The first night was boring. Everyone was just sitting around. “I thought, Someone is spending a lot of money to put this thing on and they’re not getting any results. So I thought I’d get some action going.” He had just seen the Paul Newman prison movie Cool Hand Luke, in which a sadistic southern prison warden played by Strother Martin persecutes the inmates. So Dave decided to channel him.

In the same way, when newspapers began to die and social media started its supreme reign, we didn’t imagine the risk of fake news. We didn’t think that when media is freely in the hands of billions of people, they will do with it as they please. We didn’t suspect that social media profiles could be stolen and fake personalities would come up. We didn’t know that there would be fake profiles, pretend- ers, bots, and other ill-minded actors whose only goal would be to carry out some political or business manipulation agenda so they could destroy some company or boost another that didn’t have what it takes.

. . . in Ukraine, the Association Agreement was more than just a few hundred pieces of paper slowly making their way through the inscrutable EU bureaucracy. Alina Frolova, a public relations professional who joined the group of Ukrainians Kuleba rallied in his pro-Ukraine public relations campaign, tells me it was the first step on a pathway to Europe and a dream for which many Ukrainians were willing to risk their lives. The cold practicality with which Ukrainians are willing to endanger themselves in the face of a threat to their budding democracy is still something that shocks me, even after having lived and worked there.

We walk the streets of Fuzhou at night, in the one summer when I come back. Streetlights send our elongated shadows tumbling ahead of us, across the neon-tinged storefronts and buzzing lamps. Everyone comes out, the old men in wife-beaters and plastic sandals, the teenagers in fake American Eagle. Senior citizen ladies roll out before bedtime in pajama pants printed with SpongeBob or fake Chanel logos. There is a Mickey D's and a KFC, street dumpling stands, bootleg shops, karaoke bars. Everything is open late, midnight or even later. There are places to get a full-body massage, an eight ball, a happy ending. If you stay on these streets long enough, it's possible you could get everything you want, have ever wanted. Because I disremember everything, because I watch a lot of China travel shows when I am alone at night in New York, because TV mixes with my dreams mixes with my memories, we walk along the concourse that runs alongside the river even though there is no river, we turn down boulevards punctuated by palm-tree clusters even though those belong in Singapore, we smoke cigarettes openly even though it's unseemly for women, especially in my family, to smoke in public. But the feeling, the feeling of being in Fuzhou at night, remains the same.

All terrorism is fake. It is a military deception practiced by the rich upon the poor in an ongoing class war. Their most important weapon in this class war are television presenters. The BBC has actually become The Ministry of Truth of George Orwell’s 1984….Why is this happening right now? It’s happening because we no longer have an enemy. We have an unprecedented situation in which there is only one super state: the Anglo-American alliance…..The ruling group maintain their position in society by controlling the masses through fear. In order to make us believe that we must live in fear, the rich had to provide us with a new foreign enemy, a “bogeyman” who wants to conquer the world. The moment you have a world at peace, the keystone in the arch of ruling class power is gone. Every year America’s oligarchs take three trillion dollars out of America’s economy. This is how the rich have rigged the system – so that it benefits them at the expense of everyone else all of the time. To keep this fraud going, the public must be convinced of the need for military expenditure, and this is where all of the phony terror attacks come in. Here is Orwell’s definition of totalitarianism: ‘ A society living by and for continuous warfare in which the ruling caste have ceased to have any real function but succeed in clinging to power through force and fraud.

This Personality Ethic essentially took two paths: one was human and public relations techniques, and the other was positive mental attitude (PMA). Some of this philosophy was expressed in inspiring and sometimes valid maxims such as “Your attitude determines your altitude,” “Smiling wins more friends than frowning,” and “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve.” Other parts of the personality approach were clearly manipulative, even deceptive, encouraging people to use techniques to get other people to like them, or to fake interest in the hobbies of others to get out of them what they wanted, or to use the “power look,” or to intimidate their way through life.

News people—the media elite—had been a terrible scourge during his childhood. But they had gradually lost power with the advent of bidirectional, reputation-endorsed public commentary via Web links shortly after the turn of the millennium. People who published on the Web—especially people who wanted the title of "reporter"—had to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Failure was brutally and swiftly punished with electronic tar and digital feathers. Despite a rocky start, honesty had taken over as the currency of the Web—a devastating if subtle blow to manipulators of public opinion. Weakened by the Web, the media elite had died alongside their political bedfellows [...}

Totalitarian propaganda perfects the techniques of mass propaganda, but it neither invents them nor originates their themes. These were prepared for them by fifty years of imperialism and disintegration of the nation-state, when the mob entered the scene of European politics. Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care or dare to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered up with corruption.

The much-criticised rubber regime of Leopold II had only a brief heyday and disappeared from the tables of Congolese resources shortly after 1900 in favour of palm oil and palm nuts. The production tables also show that the population increased from 1890 onwards and was not exterminated. In 1888, And revenue from the 'red' rubber largely went to the Free State for public expenditure, including road construction and the army. These budgets, too, are never cited by the narrators, ever. Ditto for the rubber tables, which show that far more rubber arrived in Antwerp from French Congo and Angola than from the Free State in the early period. Rubber from Congo Free State accounted for barely 10 per cent of world production. The big supplier was the Amazon with 70%.

Today, democracy is being weakened by lies that come in waves and pound our senses the way a beach is assaulted by the surf. Leaders who play by the rules are having trouble staying ahead of a relentless news cycle and must devote too much effort trying to disprove stories that seem to come out of nowhere and have been invented solely to do them in. All this has consequences. Small "d" democrats riding to power on the promise of change often begin to lose popularity the day they take office. Globalization, which is not an ideological choice but a fact of life, has become for many an evil to be fought at all costs. Capitalism is considered a four-letter word by an increasing number of people who--if not for its fruits--would be without food, shelter, clothing, and smartphones. In a rising number of countries, citizens profess a lack of faith in every public institution and the official data they produce.

RUNNING THE RACE The marathon is one of the most strenuous athletic events in sport. The Boston Marathon attracts the best runners in the world. The winner is automatically placed among the great athletes of our time. In the spring of 1980, Rosie Ruiz was the first woman to cross the finish line. She had the laurel wreath placed on her head in a blaze of lights and cheering. She was completely unknown in the world of running. An incredible feat! Her first race a victory in the prestigious Boston Marathon! Then someone noticed her legs—loose flesh, cellulite. Questions were asked. No one had seen her along the 26.2-mile course. The truth came out: she had jumped into the race during the last mile. There was immediate and widespread interest in Rosie. Why would she do that when it was certain that she would be found out? Athletic performance cannot be faked. But she never admitted her fraud. She repeatedly said that she would run another marathon to validate her ability. Somehow she never did. People interviewed her, searching for a clue to her personality. One interviewer concluded that she really believed that she had run the complete Boston Marathon and won. She was analyzed as a sociopath. She lied convincingly and naturally with no sense of conscience, no sense of reality in terms of right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable behavior. She appeared bright, normal and intelligent. But there was no moral sense to give coherence to her social actions. In reading about Rosie I thought of all the people I know who want to get in on the finish but who cleverly arrange not to run the race. They appear in church on Sunday wreathed in smiles, entering into the celebration, but there is no personal life that leads up to it or out from it. Occasionally they engage in spectacular acts of love and compassion in public. We are impressed, but surprised, for they were never known to do that before.

When the study was over, Milgram sent participants a questionnaire. One question was: how believable did you find the situation? Not until ten years later did he finally publish their answers, in the very last chapter of his book about the experiments. This is where we discover that only 56 per cent of his subjects believed they were actually inflicting pain on the learner. And that’s not all. A never-published analysis by one of Milgram’s assistants reveals that the majority of people called it quits if they did believe the shocks were real.15 So if nearly half the participants thought the setup was fake, where does that leave Milgram’s research? Publicly, Milgram described his discoveries as revealing ‘profound and disturbing truths of human nature’. Privately, he had his doubts. ‘Whether all of this ballyhoo points to significant science or merely effective theater is an open question,’ he wrote in his personal journal in June 1962. ‘I am inclined to accept the latter interpretation.’16

Through the fall, the president’s anger seemed difficult to contain. He threatened North Korea with “fire and fury,” then followed up with a threat to “totally destroy” the country. When neo-Nazis and white supremacists held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one of them killed a protester and injured a score of others, he made a brutally offensive statement condemning violence “on many sides … on many sides”—as if there was moral equivalence between those who were fomenting racial hatred and violence and those who were opposing it. He retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda that had been posted by a convicted criminal leader of a British far-right organization. Then as now, the president’s heedless bullying and intolerance of variance—intolerance of any perception not his own—has been nurturing a strain of insanity in public dialogue that has been long in development, a pathology that became only more virulent when it migrated to the internet. A person such as the president can on impulse and with minimal effort inject any sort of falsehood into public conversation through digital media and call his own lie a correction of “fake news.” There are so many news outlets now, and the competition for clicks is so intense, that any sufficiently outrageous statement made online by anyone with even the faintest patina of authority, and sometimes even without it, will be talked about, shared, and reported on, regardless of whether it has a basis in fact. How do you progress as a culture if you set out to destroy any common agreement as to what constitutes a fact? You can’t have conversations. You can’t have debates. You can’t come to conclusions. At the same time, calling out the transgressor has a way of giving more oxygen to the lie. Now it’s a news story, and the lie is being mentioned not just in some website that publishes unattributable gossip but in every reputable newspaper in the country. I have not been looking to start a personal fight with the president. When somebody insults your wife, your instinctive reaction is to want to lash out in response. When you are the acting director, or deputy director, of the FBI, and the person doing the insulting is the chief executive of the United States, your options have guardrails. I read the president’s tweets, but I had an organization to run. A country to help protect. I had to remain independent, neutral, professional, positive, on target. I had to compartmentalize my emotions. Crises taught me how to compartmentalize. Example: the Boston Marathon bombing—watching the video evidence, reviewing videos again and again of people dying, people being mutilated and maimed. I had the primal human response that anyone would have. But I know how to build walls around that response and had to build them then in order to stay focused on finding the bombers. Compared to experiences like that one, getting tweeted about by Donald Trump does not count as a crisis. I do not even know how to think about the fact that the person with time on his hands to tweet about me and my wife is the president of the United States.

Everything leads me to believe it,” he replied. “They got their hands on this communist who wasn’t one, while still being one. He had a sub par intellect and was an exalted fanatic—just the man they needed, the perfect one to be accused. . . . The guy ran away, because he probably became suspicious. They wanted to kill him on the spot before he could be grabbed by the judicial system. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen exactly the way they had probably planned it would. . . . But a trial, you realize, is just terrible. People would have talked. They would have dug up so much! They would have unearthed everything. Then the security forces went looking for [a clean-up man] they totally controlled, and who couldn’t refuse their offer, and that guy sacrificed himself to kill the fake assassin—supposedly in defense of Kennedy’s memory! “Baloney! Security forces all over the world are the same when they do this kind of dirty work. As soon as they succeed in wiping out the false assassin, they declare that the justice system no longer need be concerned, that no further public action was needed now that the guilty perpetrator was dead. Better to assassinate an innocent man than to let a civil war break out. Better an injustice than disorder. “America

Confidence doesn’t come from the inside out. It moves from the outside in. People feel less anxious—and more confident—on the inside when they can point to things they have done well on the outside. Fake confidence comes from stuffing our self-doubt. Empty confidence comes from parental platitudes on our lunch hour. Real confidence comes from mastery experiences, which are actual, lived moments of success, especially when things seem difficult. Whether we are talking about love or work, the confidence that overrides insecurity comes from experience. There is no other way. It is not uncommon for twentysomething clients to come to therapy hoping I can help them increase their confidence. Some wonder if maybe I do hypnosis and a hypnotherapy session might do the trick (I don’t, and it wouldn’t), or they hope I can recommend some herbal remedy (I can’t). The way I help twentysomethings gain confidence is by sending them back to work or back to their relationships with some better information. I teach them about how they can have more mastery over their emotions. I talk to them about what confidence really is. Literally, confidence means “with trust.” In research psychology, the more precise term is self-efficacy, or one’s ability to be effective or produce the desired result. No matter what word you use, confidence is trusting yourself to get the job done—whether that job is public speaking, sales, teaching, or being an assistant—and that trust only comes from having gotten the job done many times before. As was the case for every other twentysomething I’d worked with, Danielle’s confidence on the job could only come from doing well on the job—but not all the time.

The front door is locked—what’s up with that?” “Logan fixed the lock,” I tell her. Her bright red, heart-shaped mouth smiles. “Good job, Kevin Costner. You should staple the key to Ellie’s forehead, though, or she’ll lose it.” She has names for the other guys too and when her favorite guard, Tommy Sullivan, walks in a few minutes later, Marlow uses his. “Hello, Delicious.” She twirls her honey-colored, bouncy hair around her finger, cocking her hip and tilting her head like a vintage pinup girl. Tommy, the fun-loving super-flirt, winks. “Hello, pretty, underage lass.” Then he nods to Logan and smiles at me. “Lo . . . Good morning, Miss Ellie.” “Hey, Tommy.” Marlow struts forward. “Three months, Tommy. Three months until I’m a legal adult—then I’m going to use you, abuse you and throw you away.” The dark-haired devil grins. “That’s my idea of a good date.” Then he gestures toward the back door. “Now, are we ready for a fun day of learning?” One of the security guys has been walking me to school ever since the public and press lost their minds over Nicholas and Olivia’s still-technically-unconfirmed relationship. They make sure no one messes with me and they drive me in the tinted, bulletproof SUV when it rains—it’s a pretty sweet deal. I grab my ten-thousand-pound messenger bag from the corner. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. Elle—you should have a huge banger here tonight!” says Marlow. Tommy and Logan couldn’t have synced up better if they’d practiced: “No fucking way.” Marlow holds up her hands, palms out. “Did I say banger?” “Huge banger,” Tommy corrects. “No—no fucking way. I meant, we should have a few friends over to . . . hang out. Very few. Very mature. Like . . . almost a study group.” I toy with my necklace and say, “That actually sounds like a good idea.” Throwing a party when your parents are away is a rite-of-high-school passage. And after this summer, Liv will most likely never be away again. It’s now or never. “It’s a terrible idea.” Logan scowls. He looks kinda scary when he scowls. But still hot. Possibly, hotter. Marlow steps forward, her brass balls hanging out and proud. “You can’t stop her—that’s not your job. It’s like when the Bush twins got busted in that bar with fake IDs or Malia was snapped smoking pot at Coachella. Secret Service couldn’t stop them; they just had to make sure they didn’t get killed.” Tommy slips his hands in his pockets, laid back even when he’s being a hardass. “We could call her sister. Even from an ocean away, I’d bet she’d stop her.” “No!” I jump a little. “No, don’t bother Liv. I don’t want her worrying.” “We could board up the fucking doors and windows,” Logan suggests. ’Cause that’s not overkill or anything. I move in front of the two security guards and plead my case. “I get why you’re concerned, okay? But I have this thing—it’s like my motto. I want to suck the lemon.” Tommy’s eyes bulge. “Suck what?” I laugh, shaking my head. Boys are stupid. “You know that saying, ‘When life gives you lemons, make lemonade’?—well, I want to suck the lemon dry.” Neither of them seems particularly impressed. “I want to live every bit of life, experience everything it has to offer, good and bad.” I lift my jeans to show my ankle—and the little lemon I’ve drawn there. “See? When I’m eighteen, I’m going to get this tattooed on for real. As a reminder to live as much and as hard and as awesome as I can—to not take anything for granted. And having my friends over tonight is part of that.” I look back and forth between them. Tommy’s weakening—I can feel it. Logan’s still a brick wall. “It’ll be small. And quiet—I swear. Totally controlled. And besides, you guys will be here with me. What could go wrong?” Everything. Everything goes fucking wrong.

Patrick Vlaskovits, who was part of the initial conversation that the term “growth hacker” came out of, put it well: “The more innovative your product is, the more likely you will have to find new and novel ways to get at your customers.”12 For example: 1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay). 4. You can launch for just a small group of people, own that market, and then move from host to host until your product spreads like a virus (which is what Facebook did by starting in colleges—first at Harvard—before taking on the rest of the population). 5. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did). 6. You can absolutely dominate the App Store because your product provides totally new features that everyone is dying for (which is what Instagram did—twenty-five thousand downloads on its first day—and later Snapchat). 7. You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated). 8. You can set up a special sub-domain on your e-commerce site where a percentage of every purchase users make goes to a charity of their choice (which is what Amazon did with Smile.Amazon.com this year to great success, proving that even a successful company can find little growth hacks). 9. You can try to name a Planned Parenthood clinic after your client or pay D-list celebrities to say offensive things about themselves to get all sorts of publicity that promotes your book (OK, those stunts were mine).

I see many so-called conservative commentators, including some faith leaders, focusing on favorable policy initiatives or court appointments to justify their acceptance of this damage, while de-emphasizing the impact of this president on basic norms and ethics. That strikes me as both hypocritical and wrong. The hypocrisy is evident if you simply switch the names and imagine that a President Hillary Clinton had conducted herself in a similar fashion in office. I've said this earlier but it's worth repeating: close your eyes and imagine these same voices if President Hillary Clinton had told the FBI director, 'I hope you will let it go,' about the investigation of a senior aide, or told casual, easily disprovable lies nearly every day and then demanded we believe them. The hypocrisy is so thick as to be almost darkly funny. I say this as someone who has worked in law enforcement for most of my life, and served presidents of both parties. What is happening now is not normal. It is not fake news. It is not okay. Whatever your politics, it is wrong to dismiss the damage to the norms and traditions that have guided the presidency and our public life for decades or, in many cases, since the republic was founded. It is also wrong to stand idly by, or worse, to stay silent when you know better, while a president so brazenly seeks to undermine public confidence in law enforcement institutions that were established to keep our leaders in check...without these checks on our leaders, without those institutions vigorously standing against abuses of power, our country cannot sustain itself as a functioning democracy. I know there are men and women of good conscience in the United States Congress on both sides of the aisle who understand this. But not enough of them are speaking out. They must ask themselves to what, or to whom, they hold a higher loyalty: to partisan interests or to the pillars of democracy? Their silence is complicity - it is a choice - and somewhere deep down they must know that. Policies come and go. Supreme Court justices come and go. But the core of our nation is our commitment to a set of shared values that began with George Washington - to restraint and integrity and balance and transparency and truth. If that slides away from us, only a fool would be consoled by a tax cut or different immigration policy.

Obviously, I didn’t pursue that girl any longer, and I didn’t think about Missy much after our so-called date, mainly because I didn’t think she was interested in me. But then a few days later, one of our mutual friends from church called me. She told me Missy couldn’t stop thinking about me. I didn’t find out until several months later that the friend also called Missy that night and told her I really liked her! Neither one of us thought much about our fake date, but our friend decided to play matchmaker. The next time I saw Missy was at a youth meeting at the Kelletts’ house. Oddly enough, Missy’s family had lived in the same house for years until Mike and his family bought it. After the meeting I decided to check the credibility of our mutual friend who told me Missy was interested in me. We were outside and Missy was telling me stories of when she used to live there. I led her to the backyard and after she finished a story, I made my move. I turned and planted a juicy lip lock on her, to which she responded enthusiastically. I just wanted to see if she was interested in me and I got the answer. I have to admit I felt a spark or two during the encounter. It was nice! Missy remembers a few more details of our early dating. Missy: During our mock date, I also felt like we had a great time together. However, because we had mutually agreed to go out on this public-relations date, I would have never assumed anything more. I am not an aggressive person, and even though I felt something between us, I would have never made the first move! That’s why, when Jason dropped me off, I just got out of the truck and went inside. He obviously hadn’t asked me out because he thought I was pretty, funny, or interesting. In my mind, this was just business, whether I liked it or not. And I didn’t like it. I was definitely attracted to him, but where I came from and the way I was raised, it was the boy’s responsibility to make the first move. And he didn’t, at least not that night. When my friend called me a few days later and told me that he liked me, I was surprised and thrilled! Little did I know that she’d done the same thing to Jason. The night after our first kiss at our youth minister’s house, I remember trying not to get my hopes up. I knew about his reputation of dating as many girls as possible, and I thought there was a great chance that I would never hear from him again. However, I decided to go outside my comfort zone and give him a call. One of his mom’s friends answered the phone and when I asked to speak to Jason, she told me he was on his way to his girlfriend’s house. I hung up, feeling dejected. About fifteen minutes later, he showed up at my house. I was the girlfriend!

Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest. Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine. In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.

Sustain a positive outlook. Cultivate a can-do spirit, and you will be an inspiration to employees. And, when that's a tall order, fake it until you make it! • Be known as a fair person. Employees want to be treated fairly, and you must take the necessary steps to make sure they feel that is the case. • Keep an eye on morale. Morale at the workplace can be affected positively or negatively by an incident that, although it might seem insignificant to you, might be very important to your employees. A contented group of employees will do more and better work than an unhappy group. • Set an example. If you want your employees to work hard and succeed, then set an example by doing so yourself. Be a spectacular role model! • Take responsibility for your actions. If something goes wrong and it's your fault, step up to the plate and acknowledge whatever it is that went wrong and why. • Maintain your sense of humor. Don't take yourself too seriously, and don't be in such a hurry that you haven't got time to tell or listen to a positive (tasteful) story. Studies suggest laughter and good humor go a long way in helping employees function well in the workplace. • Acknowledge good work through praise. Everyone wants to hear “well done” now and then, so make sure you acknowledge good work. Say it privately and say it within earshot of others, too. • Give credit for ideas. If one of your employees comes up with a great idea, by all means give that person the credit he or she deserves. Don't allow anyone to take an employee's idea and pass it off as his own. (Managers are sometimes accused of stealing an employee's idea; be scrupulous about avoiding even a hint of such a thing.) Beyond the basic guidelines listed above, a good manager must possess other positive qualities: • Understanding: Conventional wisdom dictates that you walk in someone else's shoes before you judge her. Keep that in mind when dealing with people in the workplace. • Good communication skills: Keep your communication skills in good working order. You might want to join speaking organizations to learn how to be a better public speaker. But don't stop there. You communicate when you send a memo, write e-mail, and lead a meeting. There's no such thing as being a “perfect” communicator. An excellent manager will view the pursuit of this art as a work in progress. • Strong listening skills: When was the last time you really listened to someone when he was talking to you? Did you give him your full, undivided attention, or was your mind thinking about five other different things? And when you are listening, do you really know what it is people are trying to tell you? (You might have to ask probing questions in order to get the message.) • Leadership: Employees need good leaders to help guide them, so make sure your leadership skills are enviable and on-duty. • Common sense: You'll need more than your fair share if you expect to be a good manager of people. Some managers toss common sense out the window and then foolishly wonder what happened when things go wrong. • Honesty: Be honest and ethical in all of your business dealings — period! • A desire to encourage: Encouragement is different than praise. Encouragement helps someone who hasn't yet achieved the goal. Employees need your input and encouragement from time to time in order to be successful, so be prepared to fill that role.

The legitimacy crisis sparked by the crisis of monetary union is aggravated by the refusal of the larger member states to accept their share of responsibility for the present predicament. A convenient theory has been advanced in order to justify this hypocritical stance. The theory, as summarized by Fritz Scharpf (2011: 21–2), runs something like this: if successive Greek governments had not engaged in reckless borrowing the euro crisis would not have arisen; and if the Commission had not been deceived by faked records, rigorous enforcement of the Stability Pact would have prevented it. So, even though the more ‘virtuous’ members are now unable to refuse to help the ‘sinners’, such conditions should never be allowed to occur again. Such arguments, which in the ‘rescuer’ countries still dominate debate about the origins of the crisis, are used to justify the disciplinary measures discussed in the preceding pages. The emphasis is on continuous, and rapid, reduction of total public-sector debt; on the European supervision of national budgeting processes; on greater harmonization of fiscal and social policy; on earlier interventions and sanctions; and on ‘reverse majority’ rules for the adoption of more severe sanctions by ECOFIN. As most experts agree, however, the received view on the causes of the euro crisis is only partly correct for Greece and completely wrong for countries such as Ireland and Spain. At any rate, it should not be forgotten that Greece was admitted in 2001 as the twelfth member of monetary union in spite of the fact that all governments knew that Greek financial statistics were unreliable.

Ellis had a history of creating fake movements in support of unpopular corporations and causes. In the 1990s, he had headed a company called Ramhurst, which documents revealed to be a covert public relations arm of R. J. Reynolds, the giant tobacco company. Under his guidance, Ramhurst organized deceptively homegrown-looking “smokers’ rights” protests against proposed regulations and taxes on tobacco. In 1994 alone, R. J. Reynolds funneled $2.6 million to Ramhurst to deploy operatives who mobilized what they called “partisans” to stage protests against the Clinton health-care proposal, which would have imposed a stiff tax on cigarette sales. Anti-health-care rallies that year echoed with cries of “Go back to Russia!” If the outbursts bore a striking resemblance to those against Obama’s health-care proposal fifteen years later, it may be because the same political operatives were involved in both. Two of Ellis’s former top aides at Ramhurst, Doug Goodyear and Tom Synhorst, went on in 1996 to form DCI Group, the public relations firm that was helping Noble foment Tea Party protests against the Affordable Care Act.

Eventually, seven independent inquiries exonerated the climate scientists, finding nothing in the e-mails to discredit their work or the larger consensus on global warming. In the meantime, though, Michael Mann’s life, along with the environmental movement, was plunged into turmoil. Mann was among the scientists most roiled by the mysterious hacking incident. Four words in the purloined e-mails were seized upon as evidence that he was a fraud. In describing his research, his colleagues had praised his use of a “trick” that had helped him “hide the decline.” Mann’s detractors leaped to the conclusion that these words proved that his research was just a “trick” to fool the public and that he had deliberately hidden an actual “decline” in twentieth-century temperatures in order to fake evidence of global warming. The facts, when fully understood, were very different. It was a British colleague, not Mann, who had written the ostensibly damning words, and when examined in context, they were utterly mundane. The “trick” referred to was just a clever technique Mann had devised in order to provide a backup data set. The “decline” in question was a reference to a decline in available information from certain kinds of tree rings after 1961, which had made it hard to have a consistent set of data. Another scientist, not Mann, had found an alternative source of data to compensate for this problem, which was what was meant by “hide the decline.” The only genuinely negative disclosure from the e-mails was that Mann and the other climatologists had agreed among themselves to withhold, rather than share, their research with some of their critics, whom they disparaged. Given the harassment they had been subjected to, their reasoning was understandable, but it violated the customary transparency expected within the scientific community. Other than that, the “Climategate” scandal was, in other words, not one.

I would beg a second dance with you, Miss Charming,” said the colonel. “You do live up to your name!” “Oh, go on,” said Miss Charming. The way Miss Charming was blushing now--real, honest blushing, not faking--it seemed she’d made her choice, and her choice wasn’t Mr. Nobley. And so Jane was left neatly on the sidelines again. She didn’t mind. Seriously she didn’t. Okay, maybe just a little. After all, tonight was the most fun she’d had since she’d come. “Miss Erstwhile?” Mr. Nobley was beside her suddenly. “It would seem my gentlemanly duty to ask you to dance.” She glanced at his hand. “You’re still holding your book, Mr. Nobley.” Het set it on a table, put one arm behind his back, and held the other out to her. She sighed. “I’m sorry I pestered you back there, but I’d rather not dance for duty.” His hand extended toward her. “But it would be my honor.” She rolled her eyes but took his hand. The first time he touched her waist, she started. There was nothing passive in his touch, nothing wasted. She was aware of his hands the way she was often conscious of his gaze seeking her out. It was, to say the least, surprising. With only three couples, they kept in fairly constant motion. As a general rule, conversation is more intimate in a crowd, but among only six people, every word, and silence, became public. Colonel Andrews: “What a lovely gown, Miss Charming! You wear it well, or should I say, it wears you?” Miss Charming: “Oh, you rascal!” Miss Erstwhile: “Do you know the name of this tune, Mr. Nobley?” Mr. Nobley: “I do not. It is a country tune.” Captain East: … Miss Heartwright: … Colonel Andrews: “I beg your pardon, Miss Charming. I seem to have stuck my foot under yours yet again.” Miss Charming: “Spit spot!” Miss Erstwhile: “It is such a relief, Mr. Nobley, to already know that you find this exercise vulgar and your partner unworthy. It saves us the idle chitchat.” Mr. Nobley: “And yet you chat away.” Aunt Saffronia: “Lovely dance! Shall I play another?” Miss Erstwhile: “What say you, Mr. Nobley? Ready to be done with me?” “I think…” He bowed. “I think I will retire early. I bid you a good evening.” “And so ends the fun,” Colonel Andrews said. “Wait, I don’t feel right…all that dancing…” Miss Charming put a hand to her forehead and fainted dead into his arms. He was forced to carry her to her chamber. Clever girl, thought Jane, saluting her with two fingers. Touché, Miss Charming.

Mirza Masroor is not the Present Khalifa Of Islam He is only a cozener of a fake Religion --- Misusing of the internet and Google Search has become a beneficial tool for fake ones, and even such ones neither fall in international jurisdiction nor considered dangerous that damage others' values and realities. It is a collapse of the truth in the mirror and the context of the minorities' right to freedom, which is under the process of falsehood in all its directions and dimensions. The fake Messiah, or Jesus Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Qadiyani and his all fake khalifas fooled Christianity and Islam, and they continuously practice on this false claim of the prophetic mission. Wikipedia, the unreliable and untrusty encyclopedia, facilitates the way of command to a minority of the fake prophet upon a clear majority of Muslims and Christians. The followers of a fake Hindustani Jesus Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Qadiyani entered world media and websites such as Wikipedia to publicize their wrong and false mission. Qadiyanis are doubtlessly termites of religion, who have challenged, not only Islam but factually, also Christianity with the creation of fake Jesus. Virtually, I have been the victim of Qadiyanis during my contribution to the Wiki-project to maintain standards and neutrality of it; thereupon, a gang of Qadiyanis succeeded that I left Wikipedia, and they, with the collaboration of my opponent ones, also managed to delete my article in Wikipedia. Not only that, but they also tried hard to eliminate me from the net-world, but thanks to Google Search, which significantly displayed Ehsan Sehgal more than that it was. Consequently, they stayed humiliated with their actions of bad-faith. These days on social media, a non-Muslim, non-Christian; however, self-made and self-claimed, Mr. Miraza Masroor Ahmad is in Google Search as Present Khalifa Of Islam, which is indeed not only incorrect only; it is a shameless and false claim for provoking the real Muslims. As a fact, Qadiyanis are neither Muslim nor Christian; they are just grifters and cozeners. Qadiyanis know that they deliberately victimize Muslims theoretically to become practically victimizers, for achieving empathy and sympathy from Westerners stupids and idiots, who have even not a little knowledge and study about Islam and Christianity, except media discriminations and wrong interpretations with the ill-mental context.

. . . but I've never been much for faking feelings or maintaining polite fictions to suit public celebrations.

The bizarre schizoid style of the Trump administration becomes intelligible as an attempt to escape this dilemma. Elected as an agent of negation, President Trump must now promote positive policies and programs. Any direction he takes will alienate some of his supporters, who are bound together largely on the strength of their repudiations. A predilection for the mainstream will alienate most of them. Against this background, the loud and vulgar sound of the president’s voice becomes the signal for a mustering of the political war-bands. The subject at issue is often elite behavior unrelated to policy: “fake news” in the media, for example, or an NFL star kneeling during the National Anthem. Those who oppose Trump can’t resist the lure of outrage. Their responses tend to be no less loud or vulgar, and are sometimes more violent, than the offending message.80 Groups on the other side of the spectrum, now stoked to full-throated rant mode, rally reflexively to the president’s defense. I have described this process elsewhere.81 It’s a zero-sum struggle for attention that rewards the most immoderate voices—and, without question, Donald Trump is a master of the game. His unbridled language mobilizes his anti-elite followers, even as his policies appeal to more “conventional” Republicans and conservatives. Politically, it’s a high-wire act without a net. Trump was never a popular candidate. He’s not a popular president. To retain his base, he must provoke his opposition into a frenzy of loathing. Ordinary Americans, inevitably, have come to regard the president as the sum of all his rants. For our confused and demoralized elites, who have no clue about the game being played, Donald Trump looks something like the Beast of the Apocalypse, a sign of chaotic end-times. Writes the normally reflective Ian Buruma: “the act of undermining democratic institutions by abusing them in front of braying mobs is not modern at all. It is what aspiring dictators have always done.

The Columbia law professor Tim Wu argued in 2017 that new conditions had made speech overabundant and attention scarce, and had thereby enabled new means of manipulating public discourse—such as “flooding” information channels with fake news and propaganda, or unleashing “troll armies” on disfavored speakers. In his view the main threat to political speech was no longer the use of the levers of government to suppress dissident opinion, but rather the mobilization of online mobs and the capacity to drown online discourse in a sea of misinformation. (Trump himself, as Wu recounted, was a pioneer in the use of both of these tools.)

Anna had to kick down the door to get her chance at life,” Spodek continued. “Just like Sinatra had to do it his way, Anna had to do it her way.” It felt to me like Spodek was sugarcoating Anna’s criminality—making it more palatable, not only to jurors but to the court of public opinion, and to the possible movie and TV-show audiences down the line. The crux of the defense was that “Anna had to fake it until she could make it,” which, to me, sounded like a clear admission of guilt. As in, Anna had to fake it (commit the crime) until she could make it (get away with it).

A corrupt media corrupts the integrity of elections, and the constant flow of negative stories from journalists out to get Trump undermined public faith in their ability to report basic facts. They could hardly cover daily stories of little importance without denigrating the president. how could they be expected to stand as neutral arbiters of a contested election? The media lied about Trump's successes, made up damaging stories, and worked with anonymous sources to publish fake stories for four years...Corporate media hid or downplayed the Trump administration's accomplishments, such as historic peace agreements in the Middle East, no new wars, hostage rescues, the repositioning of the country to take on China, bolstering U.S. energy production so that the country was less reliant on foreign adversaries, and the strengthening of NATO by directing countries to fund more of their own defense. The pre-COVID wage and job growth was creating what Trump called a 'blue-collar boom,' which was a boon to all ethnic groups, but it was downplayed in favor of liberals' alleging Trump was racist.

Wrong beliefs and wrong perceptions are contagious whether or not they are sincere, because dissidents tend to self-censor and act like believers. That is how entire societies, such as the Soviet Union, can be built on everyone’s publicly pretending to believe what many privately know to be false. After a while, in a community where people are struggling to conform with each other, it can be very hard, even in principle, to know whether people are sincere or faking, or even which is which.

These public outings,” Paul commented, scribbling furiously on his legal pad. “What qualifies as ‘public’? My client has purposely cultivated a private image. If he starts showing up at the opening of every bottle in town, it’ll attract the wrong kind of attention. People won’t buy it.

While an author can write about characters more sophisticated than himself, it is difficult to fashion a character who is more knowledgeable and intelligent than the author, particularly if the author is going into the character’s most profound thoughts. That’s why characters like scientists, public figures, and intellectuals in some popular novels come across as stilted or fake. Similarly, if the author is writing about people less intelligent than himself, he must be careful not to put thoughts into a character’s head that are beyond that character’s capabilities.

In a dangerous atmosphere of cynicism and gullibility, personal belief, spin and gut feeling are pitted against complex evidence and academics in their ivory towers. In modern life, politicians can ignore data, research is a luxury and conspiracy theories are easy to set loose, but far more difficult to catch and dispatch. The general public, living in a world full of experts, have largely fallen out of love with the real thing.

Churchill was obsessed with popular opinion and what we nowadays call “optics”. Image was everything and on his long path of self-promotion, no publicity stunt was to be missed. He often got it wrong.

Facebook was an infinite player that now seems to be moving down a more finite path. Founded in 2004, Facebook came to life with a well-articulated Cause to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Today, however, it finds itself embroiled in scandals that do anything but “bring the world closer together.” Facebook has been accused of violating their users’ privacy, tracking our habits online (even when we’re not on Facebook), failing to adequately police fake accounts or fake news disseminated across their service, then using all the data they collect either to sell or to maximize the dollars they can earn from selling advertising. I doubt this is what Mark Zuckerberg meant by “giving people power.” Has Facebook veered from their once inspiring infinite path because of the overwhelming pressure their leaders feel to answer to Wall Street’s finite expectations? Is it because they are doubling down on a business model driven by selling advertising instead of making an Existential Flex to reshape the entire company? Is it because their leaders have lost connection with their Just Cause and who they need to be primarily serving in order to keep the game in play? Is it hubris? Today, when Facebook does right by the people, it is too often a result of public pressure or scandal and rarely a proactive decision made to protect those they serve and advance their Cause. Facebook reacted to the scandal that erupted around Cambridge Analytica, for example, only after there was a scandal, even though they were aware of Cambridge Analytica’s unethical practices before we found out about

An initial tease Necessary background, context, and/or the invention story The demo itself (the more visual and dramatic the better, so long as you’re not faking it) The implications of the technology

Cocky, fake, slimy, inelegant, ineloquent, charmless, witless, weird, sinister, glacially cold and luminescently remote, he may be the most chillingly repulsive politician of even this golden generation. If Pixar set out to create a CGI character to embody everything the public has learned to despise about its political class, they'd be thrilled to come up with this lizardy schemer {Ed Balls], who may have slipped through a tear in the fabric of space-time himself.

[Our Contemporary Lexicon] As years go by And lives are wasted, As we lose everything, We discover the real meaning Of the words shaping our lives… Words that have filled our contemporary lexicon, We know the words yet don’t fully grasp them, And the more we hear them, The more confusing they become… Words like War Bank Justice Media Capital Investment Advertisement Weapon School University Hospital Humanitarian organization Civil society Ethnicity Race Religion Modernity Backwardness Secularism Trade Love Family Prison Home Immigration Visa Passport Borders Democracy Elections Car Plane And countless others… Words that may pretend to oppose each other publicly, Yet are secretly in bed with each other Making love, acting as synonyms and French kissing… Words that in reality Walk hand in hand and are united against us To achieve the mutual goal of depriving most of us Of having a decent life with dignity… Words used by allies and foes alike, as needed! Words that have become rustier than our souls, Yet their fake glitter continues to deceive millions upon billions Of people believing faithfully in them Or working hard to access their imagined benefits... As years go by, We learn late in the game That all the meanings we ascribed to such words Are in fact killing us Raping us In the homeland On the border And in exile! As the game continues, At a late hour, We discover that Our worries and sleepless nights In hopes of a bearable world Have all been wasted in vain… What is happening today Has happened throughout history… And the game shall continue Until we reexamine this lexicon Until we destroy it And rewrite all its pages To erase all the monsters its words Within all of us… (February 6, 2015)

Please put that sentence on your bathroom mirror: “I’m fine wherever I am.” The fear is fake; it’s unwanted anxiety. You’re not about to get eaten here either. There is no need to run because if you do, you’re proving that this situation is indeed to be avoided, making it harder for the next time you’re in the same or even in similar circumstances. That’s the reason why my anxiety spread out like a wild flame in a batch of hay. From a family get-together where I had my first attack to restaurants, movie theaters, public transportation, and so on. There’s no need to run since the other location you’re running toward isn’t safer than where you were. Both are not dangerous. It’s a perceived danger, not a real one (if it were, it would be real, wanted anxiety and running would actually be advised).

Does it bother you that your girlfriend is a heartless bitch?” the next customer asked. And just like that, her smile withered away to nothing. This was the response she’d expected. Had experienced before she got smart and stopped checking her social media accounts. The ball of anxiety in her stomach that had started to calm began to twist and turn and bounce around the small space again. “Excuse me.” Donovan’s voice carried through the room, quite forceful in its intensity, snaring the attention of all occupants. Jada laid a hand on his bare forearm. “It’s okay.” “No, actually it’s not. No one talks about my girlfriend that way.” Jada’s jaw unhinged itself from her face and fell straight to the floor. She couldn’t hear anything else over the buzzing in her head. When she stumbled out of her stupor a few seconds later, Donovan was marching the woman to the door and gently but firmly pushing her out the door while the other customers cheered. Well, the ones who weren’t recording the spectacle. He came back and held up his hand for silence. Such a principal move, but kinda cool. And so fucking hot. “Thanks, everyone, but the applause isn’t necessary. We’re happy to serve anyone who wants a cupcake and a photo, but I won’t tolerate rudeness.” His message was received loud and clear. For the next thirty minutes, they sold cupcakes to very eager, but polite customers.

reducing public education to a consumer experience for parents that allows them to “choose” to funnel taxpayer money into schools that discriminate, teach pseudoscience and fake history, and promote contempt for those who are different isn’t a way to improve our system of education.

army of people paid to “gaslight” the public into thinking they are protected. Chapter 23, page 132. Trick #17 for Farming Humans is using stock markets to launder taxpayer backed, Fed created money to those who control the Fed. Chapter 25, page 136. Trick #18 for Farming Humans is the use of fake information to ensure that society never knows what is true and what is false. Elections, wars, headlines etc. Chapter 26, page 141. Trick #19 for Farming Humans is stimulation and distraction. This emotional hacking of humans is Trick #19 for Farming Humans. See Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking Book by Christopher J. Hadnagy Trick #20 for Farming Humans is the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and 83 media regulations, including requirement for “honest, equitable and balanced”. Chapter 28, page 153. Trick #21 for Farming Humans is governments as handmaidens to corporations, not people. Chapter 29, page 157. Trick #22 for Farming Humans is in the invisible connections between government, professionals and corporations. Chapter 31, page 162. Laws, lobby groups, lawyers. Trick #23 for Farming Humans is a militarized police used to serve and protect power instead of people. Chapter 32, page 170. World Trade Organization, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, etc. Trick #24 for Farming Humans is virtually zero enforcement of crime above a certain level of money or power. Invisible friends and powerful people cannot be prosecuted. Chapter 33, page 175. Trick #25 for Farming Humans is cooking the financial books. Chapter 34, page 180. Valeant Pharmaceutical, IFRS vs GAP accounting standards, audit numbers rigged. Trick #26 for Farming Humans is printing infinite money to exchange for finite goods…”let me handle that for you.” Chapter 35, page 184. Trick #27 for Farming Humans is public servants spying on the public, and not on the public servants. Chapter 36, page 188.

Fiction is a type of one-way entertainment. This is not an especially complex phenomenon: We can appreciate detestable things in fiction because those detestable things didn’t happen to anyone who’s actually alive. It’s as straightforward as that. A child can understand it. The reverse, however, is harder to comprehend. It’s difficult to understand why people only support certain desirable things if they remain unreal. Yet it happens all the time, and especially with depictions of vigilantes. Batman is a beloved fictional figure who would not be beloved in a nonfictional world, even if the real-life version was identical to his fabricated image in every conceivable way. He would be seen as a brutal freak, scarier to the public than the criminals he captured. We would not believe he was good. We would believe his thirst for justice was a disarticulation of his own sick psychology. Batman is not a superhero because of his physical abilities and mental acuities; Batman is a superhero because he seems like a moral impossibility. No one believes a real human would live that far outside the law for the good of other people. His altruistic motives are plausible only in a fake world.

A boy taking his dog to a park Used public Wi-Fi at a landmark The wifi was faked Using it’s a mistake Accounts getting leaked is no lark

It was as though in a community susceptible to alcoholism, the Russians placed liquor bottles on every doorstep, and the press, the public, and Donald Trump encouraged everyone to open the door.

Relationship Anarchy explodes not just exclusivity but the possibility of exclusivity, he said, almost recovered, by, well, like the name says, applying anarchist principles to the interpersonal relationships—by flattening all hierarchies, among all relationships. To an outsider it sounds like polyamory—RA naturally eliminates the expectation of arbitrary sexual and romantic fidelity within an individual relationship, thereby lessening the sense of hierarchy among romantic partners—but it’s really sort of the opposite. For years, polyamorist have been trying to convince the public that theirs is a community with rules and boundaries. Ours is decidedly not. By defining our lives by what we don’t believe in, we can get closer to freedom from pain and oppression; ideally, we envision our world as a constantly (and beautifully) turning kaleidoscope of not-friendship, not-affairs, and not-marriages. There are no commitments and no guarantee that a sexual and/or romantic relationship will be more “important” than a friendship, because all relationships are free to grow to shrink or change as suits both parties, provided both engage in enthusiastic consent. Saying “no labels” sounds juvenile, he knew, but there were none, only ideals: respect, trust, communication, autonomy.

Once the great and the good had the privilege of granting pardon. Today, they want to be pardoned in their turn. They take the view that, on the basis of human rights, they are entitled to the universal compassion that had until now been the prerogative of the poor and of victims (in fact we cannot pardon them enough and they deserve all our compassion, not for reasons of rights or morality, but quite simply because there is nothing worse than being in power). However this may be, they believe they must now stand before the moral tribunal of public opinion and even declare their corruption before it (more or less spontaneously!). They would even accuse themselves of crimes they did not commit in order to gain an artificial immunity as a by-product. But the cunning of the dominated is even subtler. If consists not in pardoning them (you do not pardon those in power), nor in inflicting any real punishment on them, but in passing over their little acts of embezzlement and this faked-up spectacle with a certain indifference. And this should leave the politicians very crestfallen, as it is the clear sign of their insignificance for everyone. Some of them have demanded to be judged and found guilty (though they are innocent, of course!). But the 'ordeal' the judges have put the politicians and the big industrialists through has in the end only restored legitimacy, recognition and an audience to people who had lost them. Hence the strange confusion that prevails in the political sphere. For there is in the fact of this universal compassion a deep disturbance of symbolic regulation. Everywhere today we see the tormentors (pretending to) take the victim's side, showing them compassion and compensating them (as in Charles Najman's film La memoire est-elle soluble dans l'eau ... ?). This may perhaps resolve things on the moral plane, but it aggravates them at the symbolic level.

New Generation warfare was a multidimensional, nonlinear strategy that engineered and exploited social, moral, ethnic, and political tensions within a target country. It included arming and training local civilians as paramilitary units, often seeded and even led by Russian Spetsnaz special operators posing as civilian fighters. New Gen warfare also appealed to ethnic unity, and against ethnic discrimination by the local government, and pushed those narratives out into the public arena through sophisticated mass media campaigns and “fake news.

The biblical passage from John inscribed on the walls at Langley—that the truth shall make you free—is fitting for the CIA, in part because it does not reveal all of itself to the public. It is a selective quotation from a larger text, the very one that Swift referred to in the early eighteenth century, when he said that “the devil be the father of lies” whose creation centuries of political liars have improved upon. A few lines down from the Gospel’s proclamation that in truth lies freedom, reality sets in: “But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth.” Through his lies and the position of his office, Trump can obfuscate, but he cannot prevent unwelcome truths from getting out. And so he goes to war against those who would tell the truth about him—the press, which he calls “Fake News”; the intelligence community, which he calls the “Deep State”; and the FBI, which he says is on a “Witch Hunt.

I’m pretty sure he plans on killing me anyway,” I said with a shrug. “At least if he kills me for this, it was for something that matters.” “I-” “Tell him I came here and spoke with you about Darius. Tell him I made some excuse to get you to leave the room and by the time you came back I’d done this. Put all the blame on me. I mean that.” “Okay…” she said hesitantly and I met her eye. “Do I need to make you swear it on the stars?” I growled. “No. I’ll tell him. Thank you, Roxanya.” “It’s Tory. Only Darius calls me Roxy and I can’t make him stop, but I don’t want anyone else making a habit of it,” I said. Although at this point if Darius started calling me Tory it would probably just be weird. Not that I’d ever admit that I was okay with the Roxy thing. “Okay. Thank you, Tory.” I smirked at her and hit post. Catalina gasped as Xavier’s secret went viral and I glanced down at my Atlas as reactions and comments began to pour in before I locked the screen. Shit, what if Daddy Acrux really does kill me for this? “Run, Tory,” Catalina breathed, real fear dancing in her eyes. “Run for the gate and get back to the academy before he comes back. If he finds you here-” “Consider me gone.” I barked a laugh as nerves made my heart flutter. Catalina smiled at me before ripping her dress off, knocking her hair free of its perfectly styled bun, flashing me those gloriously fake tits and leaping out of thewindow after her son. She transformed as she plummeted and my lips fell open as a stunning silver Dragon burst from her flesh. She beat a path up towards the clouds just as Xavier dipped beneath them with an excited whinny. I quickly raised my Atlas and snapped a picture of the two of them dancing through the sky before I took a running jump out of the window too. My wings burst to life at my back and I flew hard and fast along the drive until I soared over the gates, beyond the anti-stardust wards where I landed quickly, my boots skidding in the gravel. I grabbed the stardust from my pocket and winked at the startled guards half a second before I tossed it over my head and the stars whisked me back to the academy. I stumbled as they deposited me and suddenly strong arms locked around my chest from behind, making me scream in surprise. A hand slapped over my mouth and I stilled for a moment as the scent of smoke and cedar overwhelmed me. Darius dragged me back through the hole in the wards, pulled me through the fence and shoved me up against a huge tree at the edge of campus before he took his hand from my mouth. His hands landed either side of my head as he penned me in, glaring down at me with an angry as fuck Dragon peering out of his eyes, his pupils transformed into reptilian slits and a hint of smoke slipped between his lips. He was only wearing sweatpants and I got the impression he’d flown here to ambush me the moment I returned. I guess he didn’t like my FaeBook post. “What the fuck were you thinking?” he demanded. “Whoa, chill out dude,” I said, pressing my hands to his chest to push him back. He didn’t move a single inch and I just ended up with my hands pressed to his rock hard muscles, his heart pounding frantically beneath my right palm. “Do you know what you’ve done?” Darius snarled. “Father could kill Xavier for this! He could-” “He won’t,” I snapped angrily. “He can’t. Don’t you see that? The only power he held over Xavier was in keeping his real Order form a secret. Now everyone knows, he’s free. Killing him wouldn’t change the truth. And he can’t very well alienate every Pegasus in Solaria by making his Orderist bullshit public knowledge. He’ll have to let Xavier leave the house, join a herd, fly.” Darius was staring at me like he didn’t know whether to kill me or kiss me and as my gaze fell on his mouth, I found myself aching for the latter. Fuck the stars. (Tory POV)

I don’t know about the whole fake thing.” She tilts her head. “Why not? Celebrities do this all the time, right? And I’ve already said I don’t mind.” Yeah, Logan—why not? Though it should be easy to just say the truth—that I'd like something real with Parker, something that has nothing to do with my public perception—I can’t make myself say the words. I feel totally ill-equipped for this conversation. (Just Don't Fall)

Sabrina surely had one dead ex-boyfriend on her record. But did Martina have a deceased ex-boyfriend in her past too? Biggie’s words swirled in my head, mixing with the reality I faced: ’Sabrina reminding me of Lil Cease with her crocodile teeth, the warpath we rode apart and together, our laughter, our tears—my tears, their laughter—the player haters, the cocaine-snorting bitches, the cats with no dough, try to play me at my show, pull up and crack doors, short-change bitches with 5 to 20 euro notes not enough to powder their beak and nose. They still tickle me, Sabrina and them midgets cripple me, make me as hard as Martina's nipples be, I'm sour like a pickle be. You disobey the rules. Now the year’s new and I want my spot back; fake two, all the planes I flew, all the bitches I went through, mothersnuggers mad, cause I’m blue, bitches envy us, too many bitches in my club guard your dogs before I stick you for your re-up, maniacs put my name in raps, living by hugs from fake friends, your whole life you live sneaky, you burn when you creep me, you slipping try to break me, living by my love, hating me, they like to hustle backward, Acid rain, Cadillac Fleetwood look what you made me do, you made me and my girl Marine blue make you, open the safe too’ Della Reese had been on my mind since a while as if she wanted to tell me something a wisdom she wanted to share with me. The lyrics and the words the bad people played mindgames with me kept mixing up in my head. ’Maniacs put my name in raps; the club is dead without me they can hustle only backwards with all the beef against me. Blunt wraps and Dutchies, all the smoking accessories; they can't touch me. One third is on me. Martina's butt a public touchy-touchy. My enemies holding their cats shaky. Sabrina is dead or alive, her ghost is under me.

They used my name and permit to grow the weed and earn money to repay their debts and compensate their investors. To keep my girlfriend. To take her. I am uncertain if any of them have ever spent a minute in jail for any of these activities. Adam proudly showcases his new motorcycles on Instagram, posing on a hill above Barcelona. He also displays his brand new electric camper van, which they use to travel and transport drugs across Europe and Iberia, as well as his gigantic marijuana cultivation located in Portugal. People like Ruan and Martina admire his public images. I came across a picture of Ruan and Martina together in Berlin, where their mother Fernanda visited them. Martina became member of the Evil Eye Cult, and the custom made mafia group in Spain, which used her as a pawn in their porn and drug-related activities. She now operates as their representative in Berlin. Martina and I have lost the ability to genuinely smile. Her social media posts only show disinterest or a malicious demeanor. ‘A boot stomping on a human face.’ In a picture with her brother and mother, she puts on a forced fake “good vibe” and “happy” smile, revealing her flawless teeth and the subtle lines of aging. With each passing day, she bears a greater resemblance to her rich and so happy mother, the bad person. As far as I know, none of these individuals have faced consequences for their actions, such as having their teeth broken. As I had. Innocently. Taking care of business and their lives. With love. I find this to be incredibly unjust. In the 21st century. In Europe. On planet Earth. By non-EU criminals. “Matando – ganando” – “killing and gaining” like there were no Laws at all. Nowadays, you can observe Sabrina flaunting her fake lips and altered face, just like Martina her enhanced breasts. Guess who was paying for it? It seems that both girls now sustain themselves through their bodies and drug involvement, to this day, influencing criminals to gain friends in harming Tomas and having a lavish lifestyle filled with fun and mischief. Making a living. Enjoying Spain. Enjoying Life. My money. My tears. This is the situation as it stands. I was wondering what Salvador Dali was trying to tell me. I stood in front of the Lincoln portrait for a long time, but I couldn't grasp the point or the moral behind it. I can listen to Abraham Lincoln and ‘trust people. To see. If I can trust them.’ But he ultimately suffered a tragic fate, with his life being taken. (Got his head popped.) I believe there may have also been a female or two involved in that situation, too, possibly leading to his guards being let down. While he was watching: Acting performances, he was facing a: Stage. Theater. It is disheartening, considering he was a good person. Like Jesus, John Lennon and so on. Shows a pattern Machiavelli was talking about. Some individuals are too bright for those in darkness; they feel compelled to suppress those brighter minds simply because they think and act differently. Popping their heads. Reptilian lower brain-based culture, the concept of the Evil Eye, Homo erectus. He couldn't even stand up properly when I was shouting at him, urging him to stand up from the stairs. ‘Homo seditus reptilis.’ But what else was there in the Lincoln image that I didn't see? What was Dali trying to convey or express or tell me? Besides the fact that the woman is in his mind, on his mind, in the image, exactly, his head got popped open. Perhaps because he was focusing on a woman, trusting her for a split second, or turning his head away for a moment.