Fraud Family Quotes

Soon after the completion of his college course, his whole nature was kindled into one intense and passionate effervescence of romantic passion. His hour came,—the hour that comes only once; his star rose in the horizon,—that star that rises so often in vain, to be remembered only as a thing of dreams; and it rose for him in vain. To drop the figure,—he saw and won the love of a high-minded and beautiful woman, in one of the northern states, and they were affianced. He returned south to make arrangements for their marriage, when, most unexpectedly, his letters were returned to him by mail, with a short note from her guardian, stating to him that ere this reached him the lady would be the wife of another. Stung to madness, he vainly hoped, as many another has done, to fling the whole thing from his heart by one desperate effort. Too proud to supplicate or seek explanation, he threw himself at once into a whirl of fashionable society, and in a fortnight from the time of the fatal letter was the accepted lover of the reigning belle of the season; and as soon as arrangements could be made, he became the husband of a fine figure, a pair of bright dark eyes, and a hundred thousand dollars; and, of course, everybody thought him a happy fellow. The married couple were enjoying their honeymoon, and entertaining a brilliant circle of friends in their splendid villa, near Lake Pontchartrain, when, one day, a letter was brought to him in that well-remembered writing. It was handed to him while he was in full tide of gay and successful conversation, in a whole room-full of company. He turned deadly pale when he saw the writing, but still preserved his composure, and finished the playful warfare of badinage which he was at the moment carrying on with a lady opposite; and, a short time after, was missed from the circle. In his room,alone, he opened and read the letter, now worse than idle and useless to be read. It was from her, giving a long account of a persecution to which she had been exposed by her guardian's family, to lead her to unite herself with their son: and she related how, for a long time, his letters had ceased to arrive; how she had written time and again, till she became weary and doubtful; how her health had failed under her anxieties, and how, at last, she had discovered the whole fraud which had been practised on them both. The letter ended with expressions of hope and thankfulness, and professions of undying affection, which were more bitter than death to the unhappy young man. He wrote to her immediately: I have received yours,—but too late. I believed all I heard. I was desperate. I am married, and all is over. Only forget,—it is all that remains for either of us." And thus ended the whole romance and ideal of life for Augustine St. Clare. But the real remained,—the real, like the flat, bare, oozy tide-mud, when the blue sparkling wave, with all its company of gliding boats and white-winged ships, its music of oars and chiming waters, has gone down, and there it lies, flat, slimy, bare,—exceedingly real. Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.

Not at me, Inej. I’d never lay down good coin to be told my future by anyone – fraud or holy man.” “Fate has plans for us all, Kaz.” “Was it fate that took you from your family and stuck you in a pleasure house in Ketterdam? Or was it just very bad luck?” “I’m not sure yet,” she’d said coldly.

It didn't take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn't no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds. But I never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it's the best way; then you don't have no quarrels, and don't get into no trouble. If they wanted us to call them kings and dukes, I hadn't no objections, 'long as it would keep peace in the family; and it warn't no use to tell Jim, so I didn't tell him. If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I learnt that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way.

God forces us to quantify our religious tenants by measuring them against the family problems they solve. If your religious beliefs aren't solving family problems then something is broke--and it can be fixed. pg iv

The Shulamite lives by a different set of values. One of the most horrible frauds perpetrated on western couples is 'trust your feelings' or 'follow your heart.' Solomon's family must never be left to whims. A wise Shulamite does not make life decisions based on feelings, alone. She takes God's point-of-view: 'He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool; But whoso walketh wisely, he shall be delivered.' --Pr 28:26 For young couples, a hard lesson to learn is: Their hearts will lie to them. pg 3

People show you who they are, not by what they say, but by what they do.

We're a family in shock, still reeling. Mother was the songbird, the smile, the spirit of our house. In her absence, none of us knew how to fill the void. Father tries, but after two minutes of small talk, out comes his pocket watch, and off he goes, mumbling, leaving the conversation half done.

Some men do not know the father of 'their' children.

Shock doesn't hit all at once. I have learned.

When people show you who they are, believe them.

In the controversy that followed the prince's remarks, his most staunch defender was professor John Taylor, a scholar whose work I had last noticed when he gave good reviews to the psychokinetic (or whatever) capacities of the Israeli conjuror and fraud Uri Geller. The heir to the throne seems to possess the ability to surround himself—perhaps by some mysterious ultramagnetic force?—with every moon-faced spoon-bender, shrub-flatterer, and water-diviner within range.

Bad things always happen in three.

Blay found himself envying the couple a little. Not about the familial estrangement, for sure. But God ... to be able to be seen with your mate in public, show your love for them, have your relationship respected by everyone else? Heterosexual couples took that for granted because they never knew anything different. Their unions were sanctioned by the glymera, even if the pairs were not in love, or were cheating on each other or were otherwise a fraud. Two males? Hah.

Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line. There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.

There is something magical about young love, when you still think that the world is your oyster and you have your whole life ahead of you.

You discover something so awful, so life-changing, the only way you can cope is to jump straight into denial.

Either the Silverstein family is clairvoyant, or they knew exactly what was planned that day.

You will never climb Career Mountain and get to the top and shout, "I made it!" You will rarely feel done or complete or even successful. Most people I know struggle with that complicated soup of feeling slighted on one hand and like a total fraud on the other. Our ego is a monster... Ambivalence can help tame the beast. Remember, your career is a bad boyfriend. It likes it when you don't depend on it. It will reward you every time you don't act needy. It will chase you if you act like other things (passion, friendship, family, longevity) are more important to you. If your career is a bad boyfriend, it is healthy to remember you can always leave and go sleep with somebody else.

Plotting covetousness and deliberate contrivance, in order to compass a selfish end, are nowhere abundant but in the world of the dramatist: they demand too intense a mental action for many of our fellow-parishioners to be guilty of them. It is easy enough to spoil the lives of our neighbors without taking so much trouble; we can do it by lazy acquiescence and lazy omission, by trivial falsities for which we hardly know a reason, by small frauds neutralized by small extravagances, by maladroit flatteries, and clumsily improvised insinuations. We live from hand to mouth, most of us, with a small family of immediate desires; we do little else than snatch a morsel to satisfy the hungry brood, rarely thinking of seed-corn or the next year's crop. Mr.

I grew up with very normal, stable people,” Brooke continued. “We acted normal all day long in my family. So normal I wanted to stab my eyes out. So I’m like an expert. And you? You are not normal. You should think about getting help for it, is what I’m saying.

Freethought Today, publication of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, every month presents two full pages of criminal cases involving scores of clergy and other religious leaders, hypocritical keepers of heterosexual family values, who are charged with sexual assault, rape, statutory rape, sodomy, coerced sex with parishioners and minors, indecent liberties with minors, molestation and sexual abuse of children (of both sexes), marriage or cohabitation with underage girls, financial embezzlement, fraud, theft, and other crimes.

In the three years after Obamacare was signed into law in 2010, the costs did not go down $2,500 per family as promised. They went up $2,581 a family. Yes, inflation would have pushed the costs of insurance coverage up regardless of Obamacare, but not that much, nor that quickly.

People were growing resentful of bureaucrats whose first mission in life seemed to be protecting their own jobs by keeping expensive programs alive long after their usefulness had expired. They were losing respect for politicians who kept voting for open-ended welfare programs riddled with fraud and inefficiency that kept generation after generation of families dependent on the dole. And they were growing mistrustful of the self-appointed intellectual elite back in Washington who claimed to know better than the people of America did how to run their lives, their businesses, and their communities.

What Hurts the People There are five things that hurt the people: There are local officials who use public office for personal benefit, taking improper advantage of their authority, holding weapons in one hand and people’s livelihood in the other, corrupting their offices, and bleeding the people. There are cases where serious offenses are given light penalties; there is inequality before the law, and the innocent are subjected to punishment, even execution. Sometimes serious crimes are pardoned, the strong are supported, and the weak are oppressed. Harsh penalties are applied, unjustly torturing people to get at facts. Sometimes there are officials who condone crime and vice, punishing those who protest against this, cutting off the avenues of appeal and hiding the truth, plundering and ruining lives, unjust and arbitrary. Sometimes there are senior officials who repeatedly change department heads so as to monopolize the government administration, favoring their friends and relatives while treating those they dislike with unjust harshness, oppressive in their actions, prejudiced and unruly. They also use taxation to reap profit, enriching themselves and their families by exactions and fraud. Sometimes local officials extensively tailor awards and fines, welfare projects, and general expenditures, arbitrarily determining prices and measures, with the result that people lose their jobs. These five things are harmful to the people, and anyone who does any of these should be dismissed from office.

She would talk to him in the car, ask him something, then turn on the radio and find her question answered by the lyrics of a song; pick up a book and turn to a random page, to find the words that were exactly what she needed to hear. There is no such thing as coincidence, she would think, blowing a kiss of thanks to the heavens.

things, on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied, and feel right and kind towards the others. It didn't take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn't no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds. But I never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it's the best way; then you don't have no quarrels, and don't get into no trouble. If they wanted us to call them kings and dukes, I hadn't no objections, 'long as it would keep peace in the family; and it warn't no use to tell Jim, so I didn't tell him. If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I learnt that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way.

Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did. In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did, because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.

She is more than just a liar; she and her husband Bill are corrupt and known to be corrupt, going back to their Arkansas days. Just prior to leaving the White House, the Clintons pardoned a notorious fugitive who had fled the country to escape prosecution on racketeering and tax fraud. Pardons don’t come free—the man’s family and friends poured millions of dollars into the Clinton coffers in exchange.

It was at that moment that Markisha decided to apply for CalWORKs. She’d rented a room in an apartment she shared with a barber in her neighborhood, and she needed some help paying for it. CalWORKs meant three hundred dollars a month, plus food stamps. So she went to the local welfare office—a “Family Resource Center,” known as an FRC—and walked inside. She was barely sober, emotionally a wreck, literally penniless, and her entire ambition in life was to keep and maintain a room and a half in a rundown section of west San Diego without having to sell her body to pay the rent. This is the kind of person at whom the weight of the state’s financial fraud prosecution apparatus tends to be trained in America. Markisha entered the financial fraud patrol zone when she walked through those doors at the FRC. For three hundred dollars a month, she was about to become more heavily scrutinized by the state than any twelve Wall Street bankers put together. The amounts of money spent in these kinds of welfare programs are very small, but the levels of political capital involved are mountainous. You can always score political points banging on black welfare moms on meth. And the bureaucracy she was about to enter reflects that intense, bitterly contemptuous interest.

I could barely even say Will's name. And listening to their tales of family relationships, of thirty-year marriages, shared houses, lives, children, I felt like a fraud. I had been a carer for someone for six months. I'd loved him, and watched him end his life. How could these strangers possibly understand what Will and I had been to each other during that time? How could I explain the way we had so swiftly understood each other, the shorthand jokes, the blunt truths and raw secrets? How could I convey the way those short months had changed the way I felt about everything? The way he had skewed my world so totally that it made no sense without him in it?

Goldman Sachs hoards rice, wheat, corn, sugar and livestock and jacks up commodity prices around the globe so that poor families can no longer afford basic staples and literally starve. Goldman Sachs is able to carry out its malfeasance at home and in global markets because it has former officials filtered throughout the government and lavishly funds compliant politicians—including Barack Obama, who received $1 million from employees at Goldman Sachs in 2008 when he ran for president. These politicians, in return, permit Goldman Sachs to ignore security laws that under a functioning judiciary system would see the firm indicted for felony fraud. Or, as in the case of Bill Clinton, these politicians pass laws such as the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that effectively removed all oversight and outside control over the speculation in commodities, one of the major reasons food prices have soared. In 2008 and again in 2010 prices for crops such as rice, wheat and corn doubled and even tripled, making life precarious for hundreds of millions of people. And it was all done so a few corporate oligarchs, the 1 percent, could make personal fortunes in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. Despite a damning 650-page Senate subcommittee investigation report, no individual at Goldman Sachs has been indicted, although the report accuses Goldman of defrauding its clients.319

Seeing people insult, scream, and sometimes physically fight was just a part of our life. After a while, you didn’t even notice it. I always thought it was how adults spoke to one another. When Lori married Dan, I learned of at least one exception. Mamaw told me that they never screamed at each other because Dan was different. As we got to know Dan’s entire family, I realized that they were just nicer to each other. They didn’t yell at each other in public. I got the distinct impression that they didn’t yell at each other much in private, either. I thought they were frauds. My aunt saw it differently. “I just assumed they were really weird. I knew they were genuine. I just figured they were genuinely odd.

The behavior “anchor baby” refers to is the fraud of illegal aliens giving birth at U.S. hospitals, thus anchoring an entire extended family to the United States by virtue of the child’s auto-citizenship. There’s no logical reason for the whole family to come here, but we get wails of You’re trying to separate us from our American citizen child! No one ever considers the possibility that the family could also stay together by going back to their own country. This is the way immigration law is abused with “family reunification” policies, also known as “chain migration”—or as the Times would put it, “a derisive term” to describe remote villages relocating to America on the basis of a single villager’s U.S. citizenship.

Plotting covetousness and deliberate contrivance, in order to compass a selfish end, are nowhere abundant but in the world of the dramatist: they demand too intense a mental action for many of our fellow-parishioners to be guilty of them. It is easy enough to spoil the lives of our neighbors without taking so much trouble; we can do it by lazy acquiescence and lazy omission, by trivial falsities for which we hardly know a reason, by small frauds neutralized by small extravagances, by maladroit flatteries and clumsily improvised insinuations. We live from hand to mouth, most of us, with a small family of immediate desires; we do little else than snatch a morsel to satisfy the hungry brood, rarely thinking of seed-corn or the next year's crop.

VaR has been called “potentially catastrophic,” “a fraud,” and many other things not fit for a family book about statistics like this one. In particular, the model has been blamed for the onset and severity of the financial crisis. The primary critique of VaR is that the underlying risks associated with financial markets are not as predictable as a coin flip or even a blind taste test between two beers. The false precision embedded in the models created a false sense of security. The VaR was like a faulty speedometer, which is arguably worse than no speedometer at all. If you place too much faith in the broken speedometer, you will be oblivious to other signs that your speed is unsafe. In contrast, if there is no speedometer at all, you have no choice but to look around for clues as to how fast you are really going.

Too often, out of the best of intentions, we do the very thing guaranteed to make matters worse: We hector, lecture, bully, plead, or threaten. Anthony Pratkanis, a social psychologist who investigated how scammers prey on old people, collected heartbreaking stories of family members pleading with relatives who had been defrauded: “Can’t you see the guy is a thief and the offer is a scam? You’re being ripped off!” “Ironically, this natural tendency to lecture may be one of the worst things a family member or friend can do,” Pratkanis says. “A lecture just makes the victim feel more defensive and pushes him or her further into the clutches of the fraud criminal.” Anyone who understands dissonance knows why. Shouting “What were you thinking?” will backfire because it means “Boy, are you stupid.” Such accusations cause already embarrassed victims to withdraw further into themselves and clam up, refusing to tell anyone what they are doing.

I know that my success comes from hard work, help from others, and being at the right place at the right time. I feel a deep and enduring sense of gratitude to those who have given me opportunities and support. I recognize the sheer luck of being born into my family in the United States rather than one of the many places in the world where women are denied basic rights. I believe that all of us - men and women alike - should acknowledge good fortune and thank the people who have helped us. No one accomplishes anything all alone. But I also know that in order to continue to grow and challenge myself, I have to believe in my own abilities. I still face situations that I fear are beyond my capabilities. I still have days when I feel like a fraud. And I still sometimes find myself spoken over and discounted while men sitting next to me are not. But now I know how to take a deep breath and keep my hand up. I have learned to sit at the table.

Emotional Neglect Questionnaire Do You: Sometimes feel like you don’t belong when with your family or friends Pride yourself on not relying upon others Have difficulty asking for help Have friends or family who complain that you are aloof or distant Feel you have not met your potential in life Often just want to be left alone Secretly feel that you may be a fraud Tend to feel uncomfortable in social situations Often feel disappointed with, or angry at, yourself Judge yourself more harshly than you judge others Compare yourself to others and often find yourself sadly lacking Find it easier to love animals than people Often feel irritable or unhappy for no apparent reason Have trouble knowing what you’re feeling Have trouble identifying your strengths and weaknesses Sometimes feel like you’re on the outside looking in Believe you’re one of those people who could easily live as a hermit Have trouble calming yourself Feel there’s something holding you back from being present in the moment At times feel empty inside Secretly feel there’s something wrong with you Struggle with self-discipline Look back over your circled (YES) answers.

The family had been reasonably prosperous until “the Enclosures.” These were a series of acts of Parliament that enclosed land that had previously been open. Until the Enclosure Acts, local people had been able to use this common land for grazing animals and collecting firewood. More than a fifth of the land in England was enclosed by these acts to bring it into more productive use by farmers and landowners. Whole villages that had previously been self-sufficient were driven into poverty as a result. The impoverishment of Witheridge by the Enclosure Acts rendered most of Mr. Willcocks’s usual customers unable to afford new footwear. After this, everyone in the village fell on hard times, except for the squire, who benefited from the land enclosure.

Psychic’ gets 10-year sentence in giant fraud 83 words WEST PALM BEACH, — Convicted “psychic” swindler Rose Marks was sentenced to just over 10 years in federal prison Monday for defrauding clients of her family’s fortune-telling businesses out of more than $17.8 million. Marks, 62, of Fort Lauderdale, sobbed as she apologized to her victims, her family and everyone she hurt, saying her former clients had been some of her best and closest friends. Marks has been locked up since September when a jury found her guilty of 14 charges after a bizarre monthlong trial.

Today, in the wake of the credit-card party of the eighties, it has become fashionable to live beyond one’s means. The nouveaux riches (new rich) are distinguished from old money families by their ostentatiousness and their colorful display of newfound status. But to live beyond one’s means, one must actually charge items for which one does not expect to pay. Oh, sure, there is the realization that the company will not let the bill go forever, but we will enjoy it now and worry later. This, too, is a form of theft. The creditor assumes that when we charge something, we intend to pay off the debt; but if that responsibility is not assumed by the debtor, there is a breech of contract—fraud, or, if you will, theft. It is not really our hard-earned cash that paid for the item, but the money loaned to us by the creditor. To default on our loans, of course, does not mean merely that we fail to pay for the item, but that we are requiring someone else to pay for it.

Sixty years ago, Einstein spoke with the voice of God. Thirty years ago, Walter Cronkite every day told us “the way it is,” and the New York Times delivered to our doorsteps “All the news that’s fit to print.” Twenty years ago, Alan Greenspan applied infallible formulas to ensure our prosperity. When I was a boy and factual disputes arose in my family, they were settled by consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. Back then, the world of information was shaped like a pyramid. Those at the top decided signal from noise, knowledge from fraud, certainty from uncertainty. The public and mass media embraced this arrangement. All things being equal, authority was trusted and relied on. Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning. That world-transforming tidal wave of information has disproportionately worsened the noise-to-signal ratio. According to Taleb, “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”67 And the more you know, the less you trust, as the gap between reality and the authorities’ claims of competence becomes impossible to ignore. If the IPCC climatologists fear a dispute with skeptics, how can they be believed? If the Risk Commission seismologists can’t warn us about catastrophic risk, who will? As I tried to show in this chapter, the public has lost faith in the people on whom it relied to make sense of the world—journalists, scientists, experts of every stripe. By the same process, the elites have lost faith in themselves.

Vengeance is as old as violence, and many white southerners can trace their moral genealogy through family feuds and gentlemen's duels, across rivers and oceans all the way back to medieval courts and biblical dynasties. Theirs was a society that not so long ago had written theft into legal treaties with Native Americans and bondage into legal deeds on the lives of African Americans; a society that until recently had believed the law elastic enough to bend without breaking, exempting lynching from the category of homicide.

My bad choices had destroyed my identity, my family and my career. The surgeon’s knife and resulting amputation had not changed me from a man into a woman. I now knew that. The surgery was a complete fraud, a fraud which required a willing participant, me. I realized that it was impossible for any surgeon to completely change anyone’s birth gender through surgery.

The one thing he has no intention of doing, however, is investing the $10 million check so that it can generate money to cover hardworking union members’ pensions in the years to come. He pours it into the river of cash that nourishes his fraud and benefits his family, as he has done so many times before.

Judge Chin found no mitigating factors. “In a white-collar fraud case such as this, I would expect to see letters from family and friends and colleagues. But not a single letter has been submitted attesting to Mr. Madoff’s good deeds or good character or civic or charitable activities. The absence of such support is telling.” Given Madoff’s age, Judge Chin acknowledged that any sentence above twenty years was effectively a life sentence.

the Democrats’ tactics of intimidation, bribery, and fraud gave the party control of elective offices across the state. In

While Fred kept churning out projects and solidifying his status as a “postwar master builder,” he was fattening his wallet with taxpayer money by skimming off the top and allegedly committing so much tax fraud that four of his children would continue to benefit from it for decades. While the rubes focused on the salacious details Donald kept generating for the tabloids, he was building a reputation for success based on bad loans, bad investments, and worse judgment.

We give up on ourselves. Our homes. Find ourselves cut off from family support. Many of us quit school and accept employment that is neither financially nor intellectually commensurate with our abilities. There is deep shame in knowing so very much about so very much, bursting with complicated, nuanced things … and constantly falling short anyway. To our parents, teachers, friends, spouses, and employers, we are confounding disappointments. To ourselves, we are fearful frauds, sure that our ineptitude is as obvious to others as to ourselves.

Income volatility can also interfere with the existing social safety net. Some welfare programs require beneficiaries to work a certain number of hours each week, assuming that the number of hours worked is under the control of the employee, rather than the employer.53 Qualification for programs like food stamps and health insurance subsidies is based on an average monthly income threshold. But of course volatile incomes mean that families bounce in and out of eligibility.54 Bouncing in and out of Medicaid ineligibility causes interruptions in care for chronic conditions, particularly in places where the doctors who accept Medicaid and private insurance don’t overlap.55 There can also be severe penalties for “fraud” in these programs, receiving benefits when your income is too high. But households subject to volatile incomes may not, themselves, know when or whether they will cross thresholds of eligibility. For instance, as of 2016, the Pennsylvania Medicaid Application asks whether anyone in the household has a hard time predicting their income, but in the very next question requires applicants to do exactly that—for the next twenty-four months—in order to establish eligibility.

There is no old age like anxiety,” said one of the monks I met in India. “And there is no freedom from old age like the freedom from anxiety.” In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place. Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that’s not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement. You don’t necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Without seeing Sicily one cannot get a clear idea of what Italy is. “No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws,” Plato wrote, “when its citizens…do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love.” In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real. The idea that the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one’s humanity. You should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. They break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life. The Zen masters always say that you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water. Your treasure—your perfection—is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. Balinese families are always allowed to eat their own donations to the gods, since the offering is more metaphysical than literal. The way the Balinese see it, God takes what belongs to God—the gesture—while man takes what belongs to man—the food itself.) To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. Practice tonight at hotel. Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious, you make you sick. You can calling the good energy with a smile. The word paradise, by the way, which comes to us from the Persian, means literally “a walled garden.” The four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. Once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.

Vengeance is as old as violence, and many white southerners can trace their moral genealogy through family feuds and gentlemen’s duels, across rivers and oceans all the way back to medieval courts and biblical dynasties.

money make the world and your family turn

Yet this honesty demanded emotional deception, fraud in a virtuous cause, a sacred duplicity. He was telling MI6 every secret truth he could find while lying to his colleagues and his bosses, his family, his best friend, his estranged wife and his new lover.

A rival politician countered that he too supported the dissection of those who were sucking the public teat dry. He proposed starting with the royal family.

Srivastava first found the fraud committed by Shumana Sen by illegally granting a reimbursement of Rs.1.46 crores ($325,000[11]) to NDTV by fudging the accounts and Tax Returns of NDTV. He then found a series of favors she received from NDTV for hushing up fudging in accounts by the TV channel, which employed her husband at an exorbitant salary of more than Rs.15 lakhs per annum in 2005, while most of the prominent journalists were getting around half of that. Many favors were granted to Shumana Sen including all expenses paid foreign vacations with entire family [affidavit of Ms. Shumana Sen and her partner-in-fraud Ashima Neb before Delhi High Court, Writ Petition (C) No.1373 of 2011 titled as “Shumana Sen and Anr. Vs. S K Srivastava and Ors.”, para 3.43]. Srivastava also found that Ashima Neb was part of this racket and had actively colluded and conspired with Shumana Sen and Abhisar Sharma in facilitating NDTV frauds and had shared the spoils of the grand fraudulent exercise for laundering the illegal black money of NDTV through evasion of Income Tax.

Prannoy Roy was appointing sons, daughters, in-laws, nephews and nieces of top officials and politicians in NDTV as journalists.  This show of nepotism in journalism changed the style of journalism as access to corridors of power became easy for media houses. Not only bureaucrats, several kith and kin and siblings of top police and military officials too became journalists in NDTV, as and when the organization needed largesse from the system.  This unholy recruitment of journalists completely changed the character of India’s journalism. In those days the joke in Delhi was that all siblings of the powerful, not-so-good-in-academics can become journalists through NDTV. Still, when you look at the family details of many journalists in NDTV, you can see their links with IAS, IPS, IRS, Military top brass uncles, fathers, and in- laws.

She watched the others looking at Louis, animated, handsome and the centre of attention. He was a sham, she thought angrily, he was a fraud and a con trick. Why had she wasted her life on him? Why was she not back in Lough Glass where she belonged with her family, with her children who needed her? What was she doing in this ridiculous house in London, working her guts out for an employment agency up the road, drinking a toast to Ivy and Ernest in a roomful of people she hardly knew? This was a Saturday night, she should be at home in Lough Glass. A terrible emptiness took hold of her. At home in Lough Glass doing what?

In a callous response to this complaint, one politician argued that supplying bodies for research was the least the poor could do. After all, look at all the free meals and medical care they’d enjoyed on the public dime during their lives. (A rival politician countered that he too supported the dissection of those who were sucking the public teat dry. He proposed starting with the royal family.)

Tax-Evasion of Rs.200 crores by fraudulently claiming that signals beamed by NDTV in Delhi to Hong Kong (STAR TV) by NDTV was export and claim tax benefits on that when no goods was taken away from India to a place outside India and nothing crossed Custom barrier of India; by bribing corrupt IRS officer Shumana Sen, in a quid pro quo, and who was given an “all-expenses paid free yearly vacation abroad with her entire family” which cost about Rs.1 crore for each of such several trips abroad.

What got Artie, however, was that even though everyone knew Michael Romanoff was a fraud, he was still paid to consult on pictures about the Russian Imperial family. It was an ouroboros of bullshit: a man who built his artifice from movie fantasies became the authority legitimizing and propagating those fantasies. They weren’t remotely realistic, but then again, what kind of masochist enjoys realism? Realism is everywhere. It stinks. Artie had emigrated from Europe to escape all that dour realism. If Manhattan critics privileged with Anglo surnames and Ivy League pedigrees fetishized realism, it was because they resided in realms more artificial than any Artie conjured

don’t even know why you have such a chip on your shoulder when it comes to your family. You only got your column in the first place because of your parents’ friend. On your own, you are nothing.

The work was demanding and her pay was paltry, but it was still an income their family couldn’t afford to give up, not with debt hanging over their heads like a guillotine blade.

Just be careful, yeah? If your little Fraud Squad gets exposed, Timothy and Anya have their family wealth as a safety net, but you’re on your own.

It just sucks to always be living in Albert Kingston’s shadow. That’s why I want a chance to establish myself apart from my family.

But few gain sufficient experience in Wall Street to command sucess until they reach that period of life in which they have one foot in the grave. When this time comes these old veterans of the Street usually spend long intervals of repose at their comfortable homes, and in times of panic, which recur sometimes oftener than once a year, these old fellows will be seen in Wall Street, hobbling down on their canes to their brokers' office. Then they always buy good stocks to the extent of their bank balances, which have been permitted to accumulate for just such an emergency. The panic usually rages until enough of these cash purchases of stock is made to afford a big "rake in." When the panic has spent its force, these old fellows, who have been resting judiciously on their oars in expectation of the inevitable event, which usually returns with the regularity of the seasons, quickly realize, deposit their profits with their bankers, or the overplus thereof, after purchasing more real estate that is on the upgrade, for permanent investment, and retire for another season to the quietude of their splendid homes and the bosoms of their happy families. If young men had only the patience to watch the speculative signs of the times, as manifested in the periodical egress of these old prophetic speculators from their shells of security, they would make more money at these intervals than by following up the slippery "tips" of the professional "pointers" of the Stock Exchange all the year round, and they would feel no necessity for hanging at the coat tails, around the hotels, of those specious frauds, who pretend to be deep in the councils of the big operations and of all the new "pools" in process of formation. I say to the young speculators, therefore, watch the ominous visits to the Street of these old men. They are as certain to be seen on the eve of a panic as spiders creeping stealthily and noiselessly from their cobwebs just before rain.

Proper rich people don’t encounter these rooms, these borders, these problems. For them the world is as it is when seen from space, without boundary, without limitation, full of fluid possibility and whispering wonder. Often the principles that need to be employed for the majority are already enjoyed by the elites: They support one another; they sell state assets to the businesses their friends own; when their banks collapse because of irresponsibility or misfortune, they bail their pals out. They know it’s the right thing to do; it’s how they treat their friends and family; they just don’t want it for the rest of us. I’m aware that now, due to my good fortune, I am a member of the 1 percent. That now I am a tourist in poverty, when on occasion I’ve found myself in cuffs or in cells or cowed by authority, I know I can afford lawyers, I know I am privileged now. I know too with each word I type I am building a bridge of words that leads me back to the poverty I’ve come from, that by decrying this inequality, I will have to relinquish the benefits that this system has given me. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t frighten me. Anyone who’s been poor and gets rich is stalked by guilt and fear. Guilt because you know it isn’t fair, that life hasn’t changed for everyone, and fear because you feel like a fraud, that one day there’ll be a knock on the door or a tap on the shoulder or a smack in the mouth and they’ll take it back. It’s not like I’m gonna pay voluntary tax to our corrupt government, as suggested by that honey-glazed chump Boris Johnson; donations aren’t the answer, especially not to that cartel of Etonian skanks. Systemic change on a global scale is what’s required, and because I know that is happening, that it is inevitable, that we are awakening, I will, when I know how, sever the gilded chains. “Oh, yeah, mate? When?” you could crow with legitimate suspicion. Well, I suppose, like every aspect of this project, we’ll work that out together.

That said, it so happens that much of this president’s collusion may in fact be criminal. The particular forms of collusion in which Trump, members of his family who are also political advisers, and his presidential campaign engaged may include aiding and abetting or conspiracy connected to electoral fraud, computer crimes, bribery, and money laundering, as well as acts of witness tampering, making false statements, obstruction of justice, and much more. Conspiracy occurs when two or more persons have a “meeting of the minds” and set as their ambition the commission of a criminal act; the federal conspiracy statute is violated when the parties take an “act in furtherance” of the commission of the intended crime. But the crime does not have to be committed for a violation of the conspiracy statute to be found.

That said, it so happens that much of this president’s collusion may in fact be criminal. The particular forms of collusion in which Trump, members of his family who are also political advisers, and his presidential campaign engaged may include aiding and abetting or conspiracy connected to electoral fraud, computer crimes, bribery, and money laundering, as well as acts of witness tampering, making false statements, obstruction of justice, and much more. Conspiracy occurs when two or more persons have a “meeting of the minds” and set as their ambition the commission of a criminal act; the federal conspiracy statute is violated when the parties take an “act in furtherance” of the commission of the intended crime. But the crime does not have to be committed

The seventies were crazy everywhere, but crazier in Los Angeles. It was the era of freewheeling drugs and sex, the rag end of the sixties. I refer to sprees, to strange couplings and triplings, to nights that started with beer and wine and ended with cocaine and capsules, to debaucheries too various to chronicle. In a sense, we were all Robert Mitchum, smoking rope in bed with two girls while the sun was still noon high. We thought it was normal. You would walk into a house for a pool party, and there, on the cocktail table in the center of the living room, as if it were nuts or cooked shrimp, would be a platter of cocaine. We did it because we were stupid, because we did not know the danger. When I talk about my drug years, I am talking about twenty-four months in the middle of the seventies. I was in the rock and roll world, which meant I was around the stuff all the time. Of course, it was more than mere proximity. I was fun when I was high, talkative and all-encompassing. I could go forever, never be done talking. To some extent, I was really self-medicating, using the drugs to skate over issues in my own life. The fact is, money and success had come so fast, while I was away doing something else, not paying attention, that, when I finally realized where I was and just what I had, I could not understand it. There was this voice in my head, saying, Who do you think you are? What do you think you did? You are a fraud! You don’t deserve any of this! I tortured myself, and let the anxiety well up, then beat back the anxiety with the drugs, on and on, until one day, I stood up and said, “Screw it. That’s over. I’m done.” No rehab, no counseling, nothing like that. Just a moment of clarity, in which I saw myself from the outside, the mess I was making, the waste. I was slipping, not working as hard as I used to. I started leaving the office early on Fridays, then skipping Fridays altogether. Then I started leaving early on Thursdays, then arriving late on Mondays. I was letting myself go. Then one day, I just decided, It has to stop. I threw away the pills and bottles, took a cold shower, had a barbershop shave, and stepped into the cool of Sunset Boulevard, and began fresh. Maybe it had to do with my family situation. I was a father again.

The triangle of fraud . . .” “What’s that?” He started, as if I’d woken him. “Oh—incentive, opportunity, and rationalization.” He stuck out three fingers and began counting them off. “The first leg, incentive, is pressure to commit the crime. A person is looking for a way to solve their financial issues due to an inability to pay their bills, drug and/or alcohol addiction, or simply status, wanting to have a bigger house or drive a fancier car.” He counted off another finger. “The second leg is perceived opportunity, where the individual identifies ways to commit fraud with the lowest amount of risk, like lying about the number of hours worked, inflated sales or productivity to garner higher pay, creating false invoices for products never purchased and pocketing the money, or selling proprietary company information to competitors.” He counted off the last finger. “The third leg of the triangle, and this is an important one, is where individuals persuade themselves into believing that they’re doing the right thing. They convince themselves that they’re just borrowing the money or feel entitled to it through perceived low pay, uncompensated hours, lack of respect, or trying to provide for their family.” “Okay, but what pushes two men whom we assume are relatively upright individuals into going so far as to kill someone?” “A lot of money.” I laughed.

They’ll be illiterates, many of them will be black, and they’ll all want to settle in Miami. “The great risk these people will pose is that they’ll introduce into Miami life the political corruption that seems to infect all Hispanic government: bribery of officials, fraud in elections, nepotism in political appointments, and invariably putting the interests of one’s family members ahead of the general welfare. These characteristics are already surfacing in Miami, and with a constant influx of new arrivals the problem will worsen.

Another similar story is the recent Theranos scandal, where the company’s CEO, Elizabeth Holmes (at the time of writing, on trial for wire fraud), managed to bilk unbelievable amounts of money from investors such as Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family (of Walmart fame), and many more, becoming America’s youngest and richest self-made female billionaire. Her company’s devices, which ostensibly could diagnose many health conditions from a tiny drop of blood, never actually worked. But the investors, who wanted to get in at the start of what might’ve been the next Facebook or Uber in terms of its transformative technological effect, managed to miss or ignore the obvious flaws. The story is told by the investigative journalist John Carreyrou in his unputdownable Bad Blood, John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018).

Mental Piece (The Sonnet) In the west you call me humanitarian scientist, Somewhere in the middle you call me pragmatist. In the middle-east you call me sufi or dervish, In the east you call me advaitin or nondualist. No matter how you see me, you all are my own, Each of you is family, each of you is my home. Then there are those who ardently call me fraud, Which also is a sign of love, but yet unknown. I am not a person, prison or path, for I am vicdan, I'm saadet, my friend, I am the spirit of unification. Call the sun as you like, it still brightens the world, In the domain of realization, to label is desecration. All labels are equally right yet equally incomplete. In a world full of showpiece I am but a mental piece.

We must consider the infinite varieties of Mexican food in the United States as part of the Mexican family—not a fraud, not a lesser sibling, but an equal.

(Marty Adler: matrimonial fraud, nine years; married to three women simultaneously, CEO of three family businesses concurrently)

(A rival politician countered that he too supported the dissection of those who were sucking the public teat dry. He proposed starting with the royal family.)

I feel like a fucking idiot now. I can’t believe I wanted to drive you home and even called you to check on your mom and ask if I should send my family doctor over. I can’t believe I cared so much when you were just stringing me along. You were probably laughing at my naivety the whole time.

Sixty years ago, Einstein spoke with the voice of God. Thirty years ago, Walter Cronkite every day told us “the way it is,” and the New York Times delivered to our doorsteps “All the news that’s fit to print.” Twenty years ago, Alan Greenspan applied infallible formulas to ensure our prosperity. When I was a boy and factual disputes arose in my family, they were settled by consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. Back then, the world of information was shaped like a pyramid. Those at the top decided signal from noise, knowledge from fraud, certainty from uncertainty. The public and mass media embraced this arrangement. All things being equal, authority was trusted and relied on. Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning. That world-transforming tidal wave of information has disproportionately worsened the noise-to-signal ratio. According to Taleb, “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”67 And the more you know, the less you trust, as the gap between reality and the authorities’ claims of competence becomes impossible to ignore. If

Show the people that our Old Nobility is not noble, that its lands are stolen lands - stolen either by force or fraud; show people that the title-deeds are rapine, murder, massacre, cheating, or court harlotry; dissolve the halo of divinity that surrounds the hereditary title; let the people clearly understand that our present House of Lords is composed largely of descendants of successful pirates and rogues; do these things and you will shatter the Romance that keeps the nation numb and spellbound while privilege picks its pocket.

Bad choices are rarely fully internalized. An absentee father's actions affect his kids, and a culture that is affirming toward men who abandon their families will end up with more of them. The men are arguably freer, but is the society better off? As good libertarians, we know better than to ask the state to solve these sorts of problems, but we don't have to pretend they aren't real. To say that a good society just is a free society and a good life just is a free life is to miss all of that. Greater freedom from force and fraud is always a positive thing. Greater freedom from cultural constraints may not be.

At the end of the day, I think it’s fair to wonder how Wells could be ninety percent certain of anything, but perhaps the professor knew more than he was letting on. After all, he’d studied the portrait’s underbelly test results. Why weren’t the rest of us allowed to see those test results? After a four-hundred-year parade of frauds, were we really being asked to take the word of Alec Cobbe that his family owned a priceless Shakespeare?