Inheritance Is Not Just Money Quotes

Someone told me once that fortunes like this one–at a certain point, it's not about the money, because you couldn't spend billions if you tried It's about the power." I looked down. "And I just don't think anyone should have power like that, certainly not me.

Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief. Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this:—one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul. For the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is this the doom written within our nature? If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe that leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword. A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

When my sister was released from the mental hospital, she came to live with me in the tilting and crumbling one-bedroom house I'd bought with the small amount of money I inherited when our parents died. She arrived one afternoon unannounced in a taxi. She must have known instinctively that I'd take her in. I don't know how or why they released her. Probably due to overcrowding, and they had her scratch her name on a form then pushed her out the door. Or maybe she just slipped away when no one was looking (who'd notice in a place like that?)--she never did tell me and I didn't ask her. I was so happy to have her with me again that the last thing I wanted to do was break the spell by letting reality intrude. Ever since they'd dragged her away weeping with laughter and reaching out for me with our parents' blood still coating her hands with shiny red gloves, I'd felt amputated, like they'd pulled her kicking and screaming and insane out of my guts.

Hi Mom. I just wanted to let you know I’m okay. I don’t know if you watch the news but it looks like I inherited like a billion dollars in drug money or something. Can you find a lawyer? Just tell him I’m in danger of getting murdered or going to jail for having a bunch of heroin warehouses and mafia money that I didn’t even ask for, so whatever he can do to fix that would be great—SHUT UP! Sorry, I wasn’t talking to you, Arthur’s robot toilet is hassling me. Oh also my bodyguard shot a guy last night, hope that’s okay. He had super powers, they all do. I don’t know what’s up with that. Anyway, call me.” Well, that should set her mind at ease.

He was at a crossroads in his life, having inherited a large sum of money, and was at the center of a philosophical standoff, equidistant between the spiritual and the material.

Georgie, I've got it," she said. "I've guessed what it means." Now though Georgie was devoted to his Lucia, he was just as devoted to inductive reasoning, and Daisy Quantock was, with the exception of himself, far the most powerful logician in the place. "What is it, then?" he asked. "Stupid of me not to have thought of it at once," said Daisy. "Why, don't you see? Pepino is Auntie's heir, for she was unmarried, and he's the only nephew, and probably he has been left piles and piles. So naturally they say it's a terrible blow. Wouldn't do to be exultant. They must say it's a terrible blow, to show they don't care about the money. The more they're left, the sadder it is. So natural. I blame myself for not having thought of it at once...

Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief. Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind's mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this: -- one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is this the entropy written in our nature? If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers [sic] races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword. A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living. Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere. I hear my father-in-law's response. 'Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don't tell me about justice! Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the red-necks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell 'em their imperial slaves' rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium's! Oh, you'll grow hoarse, poor & grey in caucuses! You'll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified! Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!' Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

Q: What are in your eyes the major defects in the West? A: The West has come to regard the values of freedom, the yardstick of human rights, as something Western. Many of them [westerns] specially in Europe take the values and the institutions on freedom, the institutions on science, curiosity, the individual, i mean, the rule of law and they’ve come to take that all for granted that they are not aware of the threat against it and not aware of the fact that you have to sustain it day by day as with all man made things. I mean, a building for example, the roof will leak, the paint will fall and you have to repaint it, you have to maintain it all the time it seems that people have forgotten that and perhaps part of the reason is because the generation that is now enjoying all the freedoms in the West is not the generations that built it; these are generations that inherited and like companies, family companies, often you’ll see the first generation or the second generation are almost always more passionate about the brand and the family company and name and keeping it all int he family and then the third generation live, use, take the money and they are either overtaken by bigger companies, swallowed up or they go bankrupt and I think there is an analogy there in that the generations after the second world war living today in Europe, United States may be different but I’m here much too short to say anything about it, is that there are people who are so complacent, they’ve always been free, they just no longer know what it is that freedom costs and for me that would be making the big mistake and you can see it. The education system in Europe where history is no longer an obligatory subject, science is no longer an obligatory subject, school systems have become about, look at Holland, our country where they have allowed parents, in the name of freedom, to build their own schools that we now have schools founded on what the child wants so if the child wants to play all day long then that is an individual freedom of the child and so it’s up to the child to decide whether to do math or to clay and now in our country in Holland, in the name of freedom of education, the state pays for these schools and I was raving against muslim schools and i thought about this cuz i was like you know ok in muslin schools at least they learn to count.

While the exact changes Muhammad made to this tradition are far too complex to discuss in detail here, it is sufficient to note that women in the Ummah were, for the first time, given the right both to inherit the property of their husbands and to keep their dowries as their own personal property throughout their marriage. Muhammad also forbade a husband to touch his wife’s dowry, forcing him instead to provide for his family from his own wealth. If the husband died, his wife would inherit a portion of his property; if he divorced her, the entire dowry was hers to take back to her family. As one would expect, Muhammad’s innovations did not sit well with the male members of his community. If women could no longer be considered property, men complained, not only would their wealth be drastically reduced, but their own meager inheritances would now have to be split with their sisters and daughters—members of the community who, they argued, did not share an equal burden with the men. Al-Tabari recounts how some of these men brought their grievances to Muhammad, asking, “How can one give the right of inheritance to women and children, who do not work and do not earn their living? Are they now going to inherit just like men who have worked to earn that money?” Muhammad’s response to these complaints was both unsympathetic and shockingly unyielding. “Those who disobey God and His Messenger, and who try to overstep the boundaries of this [inheritance] law will be thrown into Hell, where they will dwell forever, suffering the most shameful punishment” (4:14). If Muhammad’s male followers were disgruntled about the new inheritance laws, they must have been furious when, in a single revolutionary move, he both limited how many wives a man could marry and granted women the right to divorce their husbands.

The ship you promised would come from Africa with money and an entourage has not arrived. The legacy hunters, just about cleaned out, have diminished their giving. Either I am mistaken, or the bill for our rare good fortune is about to arrive with interest.” * All beneficiaries of my will, except for my freedmen, may inherit under this condition: that they cut my body into pieces and eat it with all the townspeople watching. * We know that certain nations maintain the custom of relatives devour­ing their dead. In fact, the sick are often scolded for the deterioration of their flesh. For these reasons, I admonish my dear friends not to deny my request, but to eat my body with the same eagerness with which they prayed for it to die

I was the bitch who sat behind a desk and ignored you when you walked into the gallery, a pouty knockout wearing indecipherably cool avant-garde outfits. I was told to play dumb if anyone asked a question. Evade, evade. Never hand over a price list. Natasha paid me just $22,000 a year. Without my inheritance, I would have been forced to find a job that paid more money. And I would probably have had to live in Brooklyn, with roommates. I was lucky to have my dead parents’ money, I knew, but that was also depressing. Natasha’s star artist was Ping Xi, a pubescent-looking twenty-three-year-old from Diamond Bar, California. She thought he was a good investment because he was Asian American and had been kicked out of CalArts for firing a gun in his studio. He would add a certain cachet. “I want the gallery to get more cerebral,” she explained.

He has, let us say, been in the service of the Empress for, perhaps, four years. He will leave in another two years. He has no inherited morals, and four years are not sufficient to drive toughness into his fibre, or to teach him how holy a thing is his Regiment. He wants to drink, he wants to enjoy himself — in India he wants to save money — and he does not in the least like getting hurt. He has received just sufficient education to make him understand half the purport of the orders he receives, and to speculate on the nature of clean, incised, and shattering wounds. Thus, if he is told to deploy under fire preparatory to an attack, he knows that he runs a very great risk of being killed while he is deploying, and suspects that he is being thrown away to gain ten minutes’ time. He may either deploy with desperate swiftness, or he may shuffle, or bunch, or break, according to the discipline under which he has lain for four years.

We have to find a way to push them together,” Minerva said. “You know perfectly well that if Oliver marries, Gran will forget this ridiculous idea of hers about the rest of us marrying. She just wants him to produce an heir” Hetty’s eyebrows shot high. Her granddaughter had a big surprise coming down the road. “And you’re willing to throw him under the wheels of the coach to save yourself, is that it?” Jarret quipped. “No!” Her voice softened. “You and I both know he needs someone to drag him out of himself. Or he’s just going to get scarier as he gets older.” She paused. “Did you tell him about Miss Butterfield’s being an heiress?” That certainly arrested Hetty’s attention. She hadn’t dreamed that the girl had money. “Yes, but I fear that might have been a mistake-when I suggested that he marry her for her fortune, he got angry.” Of course he got angry, you fool, Hetty thought with a roll of her eyes. Honestly, did her grandson know nothing about his brother? “For goodness sake, Jarret, you weren’t supposed to suggest that. You were supposed to get him concerned that she might fall prey to fortune hunters.” At least Minerva had a brain. “Damn,” Jarret said. “Then I probably shouldn’t have exaggerated the amount.” “Oh, Lord.” Minerva sighed. “By how much?” “I kind of…tripled it.” Minerva released an unladylike oath. “Why did you do that? Now he won’t go near her. Haven’t you noticed how much he hates talk of marrying for money?” “Men say things like that, but in the end they’re practical.” “Not Oliver! You’ve just ruined everything!” “Don’t be so dramatic,” Jarret said. “Besides, I have a plan-I laid the seeds for it before I even left Oliver’s study. Come, let’s go talk to the others. It will take all of us working together.” His voice receded as the two of them apparently left the room. “If we merely…” Hetty strained to hear, but she lost the thread of the conversation. Not that it mattered. A smile tugged at her mouth. It appeared she would not have to carry off this match alone. All she need do was sit back and watch Jarret work on Oliver. In the meantime, she would let Minerva go on thinking that finding Oliver a wife would solve their dilemma. That would spur the girl to try harder. In the end, it didn’t matter why or how they managed it, as long as they did. Thank God her grandchildren had inherited her capacity for scheming. It made her proud. So Oliver thought he was going to get around her this time, did he? Well, he was in for a shock. This time he had more than just her to worry about. And with every one of the Sharpe children on Miss Butterfield’s side? She laughed. Poor Oliver didn’t stand a chance.

In a physician's office in Kearny Street three men sat about a table, drinking punch and smoking. It was late in the evening, almost midnight, indeed, and there had been no lack of punch. The gravest of the three, Dr. Helberson, was the host—it was in his rooms they sat. He was about thirty years of age; the others were even younger; all were physicians. "The superstitious awe with which the living regard the dead," said Dr. Helberson, "is hereditary and incurable. One needs no more be ashamed of it than of the fact that he inherits, for example, an incapacity for mathematics, or a tendency to lie." The others laughed. "Oughtn't a man to be ashamed to lie?" asked the youngest of the three, who was in fact a medical student not yet graduated. "My dear Harper, I said nothing about that. The tendency to lie is one thing; lying is another." "But do you think," said the third man, "that this superstitious feeling, this fear of the dead, reasonless as we know it to be, is universal? I am myself not conscious of it." "Oh, but it is 'in your system' for all that," replied Helberson; "it needs only the right conditions—what Shakespeare calls the 'confederate season'—to manifest itself in some very disagreeable way that will open your eyes. Physicians and soldiers are of course more nearly free from it than others." "Physicians and soldiers!—why don't you add hangmen and headsmen? Let us have in all the assassin classes." "No, my dear Mancher; the juries will not let the public executioners acquire sufficient familiarity with death to be altogether unmoved by it." Young Harper, who had been helping himself to a fresh cigar at the sideboard, resumed his seat. "What would you consider conditions under which any man of woman born would become insupportably conscious of his share of our common weakness in this regard?" he asked, rather verbosely. "Well, I should say that if a man were locked up all night with a corpse—alone—in a dark room—of a vacant house—with no bed covers to pull over his head—and lived through it without going altogether mad, he might justly boast himself not of woman born, nor yet, like Macduff, a product of Cæsarean section." "I thought you never would finish piling up conditions," said Harper, "but I know a man who is neither a physician nor a soldier who will accept them all, for any stake you like to name." "Who is he?" "His name is Jarette—a stranger here; comes from my town in New York. I have no money to back him, but he will back himself with loads of it." "How do you know that?" "He would rather bet than eat. As for fear—I dare say he thinks it some cutaneous disorder, or possibly a particular kind of religious heresy." "What does he look like?" Helberson was evidently becoming interested. "Like Mancher, here—might be his twin brother." "I accept the challenge," said Helberson, promptly. "Awfully obliged to you for the compliment, I'm sure," drawled Mancher, who was growing sleepy. "Can't I get into this?" "Not against me," Helberson said. "I don't want your money." "All right," said Mancher; "I'll be the corpse." The others laughed. The outcome of this crazy conversation we have seen.

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined. On the terrace of the Bundesterrasse is a striking view: the river Aare below and the Bernese Alps above. A man stands there just now, absently emptying his pockets and weeping. Without reason, his friends have abandoned him. No one calls any more, no one meets him for supper or beer at the tavern, no one invites him to their home. For twenty years he has been the ideal friend to his friends, generous, interested, soft-spoken, affectionate. What could have happened? A week from this moment on the terrace, the same man begins acting the goat, insulting everyone, wearing smelly clothes, stingy with money, allowing no one to come to his apartment on Laupenstrasse. Which was cause and which effect, which future and which past? In Zürich, strict laws have recently been approved by the Council. Pistols may not be sold to the public. Banks and trading houses must be audited. All visitors, whether entering Zürich by boat on the river Limmat or by rail on the Selnau line, must be searched for contraband. The civil military is doubled. One month after the crackdown, Zürich is ripped by the worst crimes in its history. In daylight, people are murdered in the Weinplatz, paintings are stolen from the Kunsthaus, liquor is drunk in the pews of the Münsterhof. Are these criminal acts not misplaced in time? Or perhaps the new laws were action rather than reaction? A young woman sits near a fountain in the Botanischer Garten. She comes here every Sunday to smell the white double violets, the musk rose, the matted pink gillyflowers. Suddenly, her heart soars, she blushes, she paces anxiously, she becomes happy for no reason. Days later, she meets a young man and is smitten with love. Are the two events not connected? But by what bizarre connection, by what twist in time, by what reversed logic? In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world? In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective. Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their résumés, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

Of course, in the end a sense of mutual understanding isn’t enough. After all, talk is cheap; like any value, empathy must be acted upon. When I was a community organizer back in the eighties, I would often challenge neighborhood leaders by asking them where they put their time, energy, and money. Those are the true tests of what we value, I’d tell them, regardless of what we like to tell ourselves. If we aren’t willing to pay a price for our values, if we aren’t willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all. By these standards at least, it sometimes appears that Americans today value nothing so much as being rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less of our time. And yet a part of us knows better. We hang on to our values, even if they seem at times tarnished and worn; even if, as a nation and in our own lives, we have betrayed them more often than we care to remember. What else is there to guide us? Those values are our inheritance, what makes us who we are as a people. And although we recognize that they are subject to challenge, can be poked and prodded and debunked and turned inside out by intellectuals and cultural critics, they have proven to be both surprisingly durable and surprisingly constant across classes, and races, and faiths, and generations. We can make claims on their behalf, so long as we understand that our values must be tested against fact and experience, so long as we recall that they demand deeds and not just words. To do otherwise would be to relinquish our best selves.

When the time comes, & I hope it comes soon, to bury this era of moral rot & the defiling of our communal, social, & democratic norms, the perfect epitaph for the gravestone of this age of unreason should be Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley's already infamous quote: "I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing... as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.” Grassley's vision of America, quite frankly, is one I do not recognize. I thought the heart of this great nation was not limited to the ranks of the plutocrats who are whisked through life in chauffeured cars & private jets, whose often inherited riches are passed along to children, many of whom no sacrifice or service is asked. I do not begrudge wealth, but it must come with a humility that money never is completely free of luck. And more importantly, wealth can never be a measure of worth. I have seen the waitress working the overnight shift at a diner to give her children a better life, & yes maybe even take them to a movie once in awhile - and in her, I see America. I have seen the public school teachers spending extra time with students who need help & who get no extra pay for their efforts, & in them I see America. I have seen parents sitting around kitchen tables with stacks of pressing bills & wondering if they can afford a Christmas gift for their children, & in them I see America. I have seen the young diplomat in a distant foreign capital & the young soldier in a battlefield foxhole, & in them I see America. I have seen the brilliant graduates of the best law schools who forgo the riches of a corporate firm for the often thankless slog of a district attorney or public defender's office, & in them I see America. I have seen the librarian reshelving books, the firefighter, police officer, & paramedic in service in trying times, the social worker helping the elderly & infirm, the youth sports coaches, the PTA presidents, & in them I see America. I have seen the immigrants working a cash register at a gas station or trimming hedges in the frost of an early fall morning, or driving a cab through rush hour traffic to make better lives for their families, & in them I see America. I have seen the science students unlocking the mysteries of life late at night in university laboratories for little or no pay, & in them I see America. I have seen the families struggling with a cancer diagnosis, or dementia in a parent or spouse. Amid the struggles of mortality & dignity, in them I see America. These, & so many other Americans, have every bit as much claim to a government working for them as the lobbyists & moneyed classes. And yet, the power brokers in Washington today seem deaf to these voices. It is a national disgrace of historic proportions. And finally, what is so wrong about those who must worry about the cost of a drink with friends, or a date, or a little entertainment, to rephrase Senator Grassley's demeaning phrasings? Those who can't afford not to worry about food, shelter, healthcare, education for their children, & all the other costs of modern life, surely they too deserve to be able to spend some of their “darn pennies” on the simple joys of life. Never mind that almost every reputable economist has called this tax bill a sham of handouts for the rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans & the future economic health of this nation. Never mind that it is filled with loopholes written by lobbyists. Never mind that the wealthiest already speak with the loudest voices in Washington, & always have. Grassley’s comments open a window to the soul of the current national Republican Party & it it is not pretty. This is not a view of America that I think President Ronald Reagan let alone President Dwight Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt would have recognized. This is unadulterated cynicism & a version of top-down class warfare run amok. ~Facebook 12/4/17

Now, I don’t want to be reductive, but I’ll bet half of you are here so you can someday wheedle money out of people—torts people, there’s nothing to be ashamed of!—and the other half of you are here because you think you’re going to change the world. You’re here because you dream of arguing before the Supreme Court, because you think the real challenge of the law lies in the blank spaces between the lines of the Constitution. But I’m here to tell you—it doesn’t. The truest, the most intellectually engaging, the richest field of the law is contracts. Contracts are not just sheets of paper promising you a job, or a house, or an inheritance: in its purest, truest, broadest sense, contracts govern every realm of law. When we choose to live in a society, we choose to live under a contract, and to abide by the rules that a contract dictates for us—the Constitution itself is a contract, albeit a malleable contract, and the question of just how malleable it is, exactly, is where law intersects with politics—and it is under the rules, explicit or otherwise, of this contract that we promise not to kill, and to pay our taxes, and not to steal. But in this case, we are both the creators of and bound by this contract: as citizens of this country, we have assumed, from birth, an obligation to respect and follow its terms, and we do so daily. “In this class, you will of course learn the mechanics of contracts—how one is created, how one is broken, how binding one is and how to unbind yourself from one—but you will also be asked to consider law itself as a series of contracts. Some are more fair—and this one time, I’ll allow you to say such a thing—than others. But fairness is not the only, or even the most important, consideration in law: the law is not always fair. Contracts are not fair, not always. But sometimes they are necessary, these unfairnesses, because they are necessary for the proper functioning of society. In this class you will learn the difference between what is fair and what is just, and, as important, between what is fair and what is necessary. You will learn about the obligations we have to one another as members of society, and how far society should go in enforcing those obligations. You will learn to see your life—all of our lives—as a series of agreements, and it will make you rethink not only the law but this country itself, and your place in it.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a girl ditch Darius like that,” an amused voice came from behind me and I turned to find a guy looking at me from a seat at a table in the corner. He had dark hair that curled in a messy kind of way, looking like it had broken free of his attempts to tame it. His green eyes sparkled with restrained laughter and I couldn’t help but stare at his strong features; he looked almost familiar but I was sure I’d never met him before. “Well, even Dragons can’t just get their own way all of the time,” I said, moving closer to him. Apparently that had been the right thing to say because he smiled widely in response to it. “What’s so great about Dragons anyway, right?” he asked, though a strange tightness came over his posture as he said it. “Who’d want to be a big old lizard with anger management issues?” I joked. “I think I’d rather be a rabbit shifter - at least bunnies are cute.” “You don’t have a very rabbity aura about you,” he replied with a smile which lit up his face. “I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or not.” “It is. Although a rabbit might be exactly the kind of ruler we need; shake it up from all these predators.” “Maybe that’s why I can’t get on board with this fancy food. It’s just not meant for someone of my Order... although I’m really looking for a sandwich rather than a carrot,” I said wistfully. He snorted a laugh. “Yeah I had a pizza before I came to join the festivities. I’m only supposed to stay for an hour or so anyway... show my face, sit in the back, avoid emotional triggers...” He didn’t seem to want to elaborate on that weird statement so I didn’t push him but I did wonder why he’d come if that was all he was going to do. “Well, I didn’t really want to come at all so maybe I can just hide out back here with you?” I finished the rest of my drink and placed my glass on the table as I drifted closer to him. Aside from Hamish, he was the first person I’d met at this party who seemed at least halfway genuine. “Sure. If you don’t mind missing out on all the fun,” he said. “I’m sorry but am I talking to Roxanya or Gwendalina? You’re a little hard to tell apart.” I rolled my eyes at those stupid names. “I believe I originally went by Roxanya but my name is Tory.” “You haven’t taken back your royal name?” he asked in surprise. “I haven’t taken back my royal anything. Though I won’t say no to the money when it comes time to inherit that. You didn’t give me your name either,” I prompted. You don’t know?” he asked in surprise. “Oh sorry, dude, are you famous? Must be a bummer to meet someone who isn’t a fan then,” I teased. He snorted a laugh. “I’m Xavier,” he said. “The Dragon’s younger brother.” “Oh,” I said. Well that was a quick end to what had seemed like a pleasant conversation. “Actually... I should probably go... mingle or something.” I started to back away, searching the crowd for Darcy. I spotted her on the far side of the room, engaged in conversation with Hamish and a few of his friends. The smile on her face was genuine enough so I was at least confident she didn’t need rescuing. (Tory)

Indian Express (Indian Express) - Clip This Article at Location 721 | Added on Sunday, 30 November 2014 20:28:42 Fifth column: Hope and audacity Ministers, high officials, clerks and peons now report for duty on time and are no longer to be seen taking long lunch breaks to soak in winter sunshine in Delhi’s parks. Reform is needed not just in economic matters but in every area of governance. Does the Prime Minister know how hard it is to get a passport? Tavleen Singh | 807 words At the end of six months of the Modi sarkar are we seeing signs that it is confusing efficiency with reform? I ask the question because so far there is no sign of real reform in any area of governance. And, because some of Narendra Modi’s most ardent supporters are now beginning to get worried. Last week I met a man who dedicated a whole year to helping Modi become Prime Minister and he seemed despondent. When I asked how he thought the government was doing, he said he would answer in the words of the management guru Peter Drucker, “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” We can certainly not fault this government on efficiency. Ministers, high officials, clerks and peons now report for duty on time and are no longer to be seen taking long lunch breaks to soak in winter sunshine in Delhi’s parks. The Prime Minister’s Office hums with more noise and activity than we have seen in a decade but, despite this, there are no signs of the policy changes that are vital if we are to see real reform. The Planning Commission has been abolished but there are many, many other leftovers from socialist times that must go. Do we need a Ministry of Information & Broadcasting in an age when the Internet has made propaganda futile? Do we need a meddlesome University Grants Commission? Do we need the government to continue wasting our money on a hopeless airline and badly run hotels? We do not. What we do need is for the government to make policies that will convince investors that India is a safe bet once more. We do not need a new government that simply implements more efficiently bad policies that it inherited from the last government. It was because of those policies that investors fled and the economy stopped growing. Unless this changes through better policies, the jobs that the Prime Minister promises young people at election rallies will not come. So far signals are so mixed that investors continue to shy away. The Finance Minister promises to end tax terrorism but in the next breath orders tax inspectors to go forth in search of black money. Vodafone has been given temporary relief by the courts but the retroactive tax remains valid. And, although we hear that the government has grandiose plans to improve the decrepit transport systems, power stations and ports it inherited, it continues to refuse to pay those who have to build them. The infrastructure industry is owed more than Rs 1.5 lakh continued... crore in government dues and this has crippled major companies. No amount of efficiency in announcing new projects will make a difference unless old dues are cleared. Reform is needed not just in economic matters but in every area of governance. Does the Prime Minister know how hard it is to get a passport? Does he know that a police check is required even if you just want to get a few pages added to your passport? Does he know how hard it is to do routine things like registering property? Does he know that no amount of efficiency will improve healthcare services that are broken? No amount of efficiency will improve educational services that have long been in terminal decline because of bad policies and interfering officials. At the same time, the licence raj that strangles private investment in schools and colleges remains in place. Modi’s popularity with ordinary people has increased since he became Prime Minister, as we saw from his rallies in Kashmir last week, but it will not la

In a letter written to the play's director, Peter Wood, on 30th March 1958, just before the start of rehearsals, Pinter rightly refused to add extra lines explaining or justifying Stanley's motives in withdrawing from the world into a dingy seaside boarding-house: 'Stanley cannot perceive his only valid justification - which is he is what he is - therefore he certainly can never be articulate about it.' But Pinter came much closer than he usually does to offering an explanation of the finished work: We've agreed: the hierarchy, the Establishment, the arbiters, the socio- religious monsters arrive to affect censure and alteration upon a member of the club who has discarded responsibility (that word again) towards himself and others. (What is your opinion, by the way, of the act of suicide?) He does possess, however, for my money, a certain fibre - he fights for his life. It doesn't last long, this fight. His core being a quagmire of delusion, his mind a tenuous fuse box, he collapses under the weight of their accusation - an accusation compounded of the shit- stained strictures of centuries of 'tradition'. This gets us right to the heart of the matter. It is not simply a play about a pathetic victim brainwashed into social conformity. It is a play about the need to resist, with the utmost vigour, dead ideas and the inherited weight of the past. And if you examine the text, you notice how Pinter has toughened up the original image of the man in the Eastbourne digs with 'nowhere to go'. Pinter's Stanley Webber - a palpably Jewish name, incidentally - is a man who shores up his precarious sense of self through fantasy, bluff, violence and his own manipulative form of power-play. His treatment of Meg initially is rough, playful, teasing: he's an ersatz, scarpegrace Oedipus to her boardinghouse Jocasta. But once she makes the fateful, mood-changing revelation - 'I've got to get things in for the two gentlemen' - he's as dangerous as a cornered animal. He affects a wanton grandeur with his talk of a European concert tour. He projects his own fear on to Meg by terrorising her with stories of nameless men coming to abduct her in a van. In his first solo encounter with McCann, he tries to win him over by appealing to a shared past (Maidenhead, Fuller's tea shop, Boots library) and a borrowed patriotism ('I know Ireland very well. I've many friends there. I love that country and I admire and trust its people... I think their policemen are wonderful'). At the start of the interrogation he resists Goldberg's injunction to sit down and at the end of it he knees him in the stomach. And in the panic of the party, he attempts to strangle Meg and rape Lulu. These are hardly the actions of a supine victim. Even though Stanley is finally carried off shaven, besuited, white-collared and ostensibly tamed, the spirit of resistance is never finally quelled. When asked how he regards the prospect of being able to 'make or break' in the integrated outer world, he does not stay limply silent, but produces the most terrifying noises.

As your cash flow grows, you can indulge in some luxuries. An important distinction is that rich people buy luxuries last, while the poor and middle class tend to buy luxuries first. The poor and the middle class often buy luxury items like big houses, diamonds, furs, jewelry, or boats because they want to look rich. They look rich, but in reality they just get deeper in debt on credit. The old-money people, the long-term rich, build their asset column first. Then the income generated from the asset column buys their luxuries. The poor and middle class buy luxuries with their own sweat, blood, and children’s inheritance.

… This was chronicled in a harsher book and McCaslin, fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, had seen it and the boy himself had inherited it as Noah’s grandchildren had inherited the Flood although they had not been there to see the deluge: that dark corrupt and bloody time while three separate people had tried to adjust not only to one another but to the new land which they had created and inherited too and must live in for the reason that those who had lost it were no less free to quit it than those who had gained it were: – those upon whom freedom and equality had been dumped overnight and without warning or preparation or any training in how to employ it or even just endure it and who misused it not as children would nor yet because they had been so long in bondage and then so suddenly freed, but misused it as human beings always misused freedom, so that he thought Apparently there is a wisdom beyond even that learned through suffiring necessary for a man to distinguish between liberty and license; those who had fought for four years and lost to preserve a condition under which that franchisement was anomaly and paradox, for the old reasons for which man (not the generals and politicians but man) has always fought and died in wars: to preserve a status quo or to establish a better future one to endure for his children; and lastly, as if that were not enough for bitterness and hatred and fear, that third race even more alien to the people whom they resembled in pigment and in whom even the same blood ran, than to the people whom they did not, – that race threefold in one and alien even among themselves save for a single fierce aged Quartermaster lieutenants and Army sutlers and contractors in military blankets and shoes and transport mules, who followed the battles they themselves had not fought and inherited the conquest they themselves had not helped to gain, sanctioned and protected even if not blessed, and left their bones and in another generation would be engaged in a fierce economic competition of small sloven farms with the black men they were supposed to have freed and the white descendants of fathers who had owned no slaves anyway whom they were supposed to have disinherited and in the third generation would be back once more in the little lost country seats as barbers and garage mechanics and deputy sheriffs and mill- and gin-hands and power-plant firemen, leading, first in mufti then later in an actual formalized regalia of hooded sheets and passwords and fiery Christian symbols, lynching mobs against the race their ancestors had come to save: and of all that other nameless horde of speculators in human misery, manipulators of money and politics and land, who follow catastrophe and are their own protection as grasshoppers are and need no blessing and sweat no plow or axe-helve and batten and vanish and leave no bones, just as they derived apparently from no ancestry, no mortal flesh, no act even of passion or even of lust: and the Jew who came without protection too since after two thousand years he had got out of the habit of being or needing it, and solitary, without even the solidarity of the locusts and in this a sort of courage since he had come thinking not in terms of simple pillage but in terms of his great-grand-children, seeking yet some place to establish them to endure even though forever alien: and unblessed: a pariah about the face of the Western earth which twenty centuries later was still taking revenge on him for the fairy tale with which he had conquered it. …

...as if his bank account wasn't about to see numbers it would have to take a remedial math course just to identify.

They had been men generally built in the same mould, inheriting each from his father the same virtues and the same vices, — men who would have lived, each, as his father had lived before him, had not the new ways of the world gradually drawn away with them, by an invisible magnetism, the upcoming Dale of the day, — not indeed in any case so moving him as to bring him up to the spirit of the age in which he lived, but dragging him forward to a line in advance of that on which his father had trodden. They had been obstinate men; believing much in themselves; just according to their ideas of justice; hard to their tenants but not known to be hard even by the tenants themselves, for the rules followed had ever been the rules on the Allington estate; imperious to their wives and children, but imperious within bounds, so that no Mrs Dale had fled from her lord’s roof, and no loud scandals had existed between father and sons; exacting in their ideas as to money, expecting that they were to receive much and to give little, and yet not thought to be mean, for they paid their way, and gave money in parish charity and in county charity.

Liberal critics, like the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, worried that the country was in danger of being transformed from a democracy into a plutocracy, or worse, an oligarchy like Russia, where a handful of extraordinarily powerful businessmen bent the government into catering to them at the expense of everyone else. “We are on the road not just to a highly unequal society, but to a society of an oligarchy. A society of inherited wealth,” Krugman warned. “When you have a few people who are so wealthy that they can effectively buy the political system, the political system is going to tend to serve their interests.

Physical Invasion The normative principle I am suggesting for the law is simply this: No action should be considered illicit or illegal unless it invades, or aggresses against, the person or just property of another. Only invasive actions should be declared illegal, and combated with the full power of the law. The invasion must be concrete and physical. There are degrees of seriousness of such invasion, and hence, different proper degrees of restitution or punishment. "Burglary," simple invasion of property for purposes of theft, is less serious than "robbery," where armed force is likely to be used against the victim. Here, however, we are not concerned with the questions of degrees of invasion or punishment, but simply with invasion per se. If no man may invade another person's "just" property, what is our criterion of justice to be? There is no space here to elaborate on a theory of justice in property titles. Suffice it to say that the basic axiom of libertarian political theory holds that every man is a selfowner, having absolute jurisdiction over his own body. In effect, this means that no one else may justly invade, or aggress against, another's person. It follows then that each person justly owns whatever previously unowned resources he appropriates or "mixes his labor with." From these twin axioms — self-ownership and "homesteading" — stem the justification for the entire system of property rights titles in a free-market society. This system establishes the right of every man to his own person, the right of donation, of bequest (and, concomitantly, the right to receive the bequest or inheritance), and the right of contractual exchange of property titles. Legal and political theory have committed much mischief by failing to pinpoint physical invasion as the only human action that should be illegal and that justifies the use of physical violence to combat it. The vague concept of "harm" is substituted for the precise one of physical violence. Consider the following two examples. Jim is courting Susan and is just about to win her hand in marriage, when suddenly Bob appears on the scene and wins her away. Surely Bob has done great "harm" to Jim. Once a nonphysical-invasion sense of harm is adopted, almost any outlaw act might be justified. Should Jim be able to "enjoin" Bob's very existence? Similarly, A is a successful seller of razor blades. But then B comes along and sells a better blade, teflon-coated to prevent shaving cuts. The value of A's property is greatly affected. Should he be able to collect damages from B, or, better yet, to enjoin B's sale of a better blade? The correct answer is not that consumers would be hurt if they were forced to buy the inferior blade, although that is surely the case. Rather, no one has the right to legally prevent or retaliate against "harms" to his property unless it is an act of physical invasion. Everyone has the right to have the physical integrity of his property inviolate; no one has the right to protect the value of his property, for that value is purely the reflection of what people are willing to pay for it. That willingness solely depends on how they decide to use their money. No one can have a right to someone else's money, unless that other person had previously contracted to transfer it to him. "Legal and political theory have committed much mischief by failing to pinpoint physical invasion as the only human action that should be illegal and that justifies the use of physical violence to combat it.

Reconstructing family life amid the chaos of the cotton revolution was no easy matter. Under the best of circumstances, the slave family on the frontier was extraordinarily unstable because the frontier plantation was extraordinarily unstable. For every aspiring master who climbed into the planter class, dozens failed because of undercapitalization, unproductive land, insect infestation, bad weather, or sheer incompetence. Others, discouraged by low prices and disdainful of the primitive conditions, simply gave up and returned home. Those who succeeded often did so only after they had failed numerous times. Each failure or near-failure caused slaves to be sold, shattering families and scattering husbands and wives, parents and children. Success, moreover, was no guarantee of security for slaves. Disease and violence struck down some of the most successful planters. Not even longevity assured stability, as many successful planters looked west for still greater challenges. Whatever the source, the chronic volatility of the plantation took its toll on the domestic life of slaves. Despite these difficulties, the family became the center of slave life in the interior, as it was on the seaboard. From the slaves' perspective, the most important role they played was not that of field hand or mechanic but husband or wife, son or daughter - the precise opposite of their owners' calculation. As in Virginia and the Carolinas, the family became the locus of socialization, education, governance, and vocational training. Slave families guided courting patterns, marriage rituals, child-rearing practices, and the division of domestic labor in Alabama, Mississippi, and beyond. Sally Anne Chambers, who grew up in Louisiana, recalled how slaves turned to the business of family on Saturdays and Sundays. 'De women do dey own washing den. De menfolks tend to de gardens round dey own house. Dey raise some cotton and sell it to massa and git li'l money dat way.' As Sally Anne Chambers's memories reveal, the reconstructed slave family was more than a source of affection. It was a demanding institution that defined responsibilities and enforced obligations, even as it provided a source of succor. Parents taught their children that a careless word in the presence of the master or mistress could spell disaster. Children and the elderly, not yet or no longer laboring in the masters' fields, often worked in the slaves' gardens and grounds, as did new arrivals who might be placed in the household of an established family. Charles Ball, sold south from Maryland, was accepted into his new family but only when he agreed to contribute all of his overwork 'earnings into the family stock.' The 'family stock' reveals how the slaves' economy undergirded the slave family in the southern interior, just as it had on the seaboard. As slaves gained access to gardens and grounds, overwork, or the sale of handicraft, they began trading independently and accumulating property. The material linkages of sellers and buyers - the bartering of goods and labor among themselves - began to knit slaves together into working groups that were often based on familial connections. Before long, systems of ownership and inheritance emerged, joining men and women together on a foundation of need as well as affection.

As your cash flow grows, you can indulge in some luxuries. An important distinction is that rich people buy luxuries last, while the poor and middle class tend to buy luxuries first. The poor and the middle class often buy luxury items like big houses, diamonds, furs, jewelry, or boats because they want to look rich. They look rich, but in reality they just get deeper in debt on credit. The old-money people, the long-term rich, build their asset column first. Then the income generated from the asset column buys their luxuries. The poor and middle class buy luxuries with their own sweat, blood, and children’s inheritance

Pharmaceutical companies became very interested in using siRNAs as potential new drugs. Theoretically, siRNA molecules could be used to knock down expression of any protein that was believed to be harmful in a disease. In the same year that Fire and Mello were awarded their Nobel Prize, the giant pharmaceutical company Merck paid over one billion US dollars for a siRNA company in California called Sirna Therapeutics. Other large pharmaceutical companies have also invested heavily. But in 2010 a bit of a chill breeze began to drift through the pharmaceutical industry. Roche, the giant Swiss company, announced that it was stopping its siRNA programmes, despite having spent more than $500 million on them over three years. Its neighbouring Swiss corporation, Novartis, pulled out of a collaboration with a siRNA company called Alnylam in Massachusetts. There are still plenty of other companies who have stayed in this particular game, but it would probably be fair to say there’s a bit more nervousness around this technology than in the past. One of the major problems with using this kind of approach therapeutically may sound rather mundane. Nucleic acids, such as DNA and RNA, are just difficult to turn into good drugs. Most good existing drugs – ibuprofen, Viagra, anti-histamines – have certain characteristics in common. You can swallow them, they get across your gut wall, they get distributed around your body, they don’t get destroyed too quickly by your liver, they get taken up by cells, and they work their effects on the molecules in or on the cells. Those all sound like really simple things, but they’re often the most difficult things to get right when developing a new drug. Companies will spend tens of millions of dollars – at least – getting this bit right, and it is still a surprisingly hit-and-miss process. It’s so much worse when trying to create drugs around nucleic acids. This is partly because of their size. An average siRNA molecule is over 50 times larger than a drug like ibuprofen. When creating drugs (especially ones to be taken orally rather than injected) the general rule is, the smaller the better. The larger a drug is, the greater the problems with getting high enough doses into patients, and keeping them in the body for long enough. This may be why a company like Roche has decided it can spend its money more effectively elsewhere. This doesn’t mean that siRNA won’t ever work in the treatment of illnesses, it’s just quite high risk as a business venture.

In China the egalitarian movement came not just from Zhu's vision, but also the Taoist ideas of balance, as Zhu would always point out. In Travancore it rose out of the Buddhist idea of compassion, in Yingzhou from the Hodenosaunee idea of the equality of all, in Firanja from the idea of justice before God. Everywhere the idea existed, but the world still belonged to a tiny minority of rich; wealth had been accumulating for centuries in a few hands, and the people lucky enough to be born into this old aristocracy lived in the old manner, with the rights of kings now spread among the wealthy of the Earth. Money had replaced land as the basis of power, and money flowed according to its own gravity, its laws of accumulation, which though divorced from nature, were nevertheless the laws ruling most countries on Earth, no matter their religious or philosophical ideas of love, compassion, charity, equality, goodness, and the like. Old Zhu had been right: humanity's behavior was still based on old laws, which determined how food and land and water and surplus wealth around, how the labor of the eight billions was owned. If these laws did not change, the living shell of the earth might well be wrecked, and inherited by seagulls and ants and cockroaches.

Hello all, Why must we be confused by all this online scammers when we all know that there has never been any other oracle apart from the the great spell casters called lama lama oracle temple, The great oracle and also i my self called kuq ya that is greatest of all, Kuq ya means GREATEST AMONG ALL THE SPELL CASTERS. This oracle has been in existence for so many years even before i was born i inherited it from my great grand father. Since we have been existing we have never failed in solving any kind of problem anyone must have been having cos we know the spirits that we serve we never lets us down, We perform various sacrifice to this spirits from time to time to make our powerful and doings effective. This temple is out on the internet to tell all of you that is wasting your time and also your hard earned money dealing with all this hungry souls that called themselves spell casters by bring cause to themselves by claiming to be what they are not, We advise you all that you should stop it as it is not right to do such, Because those spell casters that called themselves different names / temples are scammers,You will do this greatest oracle good by doing that.They are scammers and all those testimony there are posted by them also and not the people they have help,They are doing all this to get money to fed there-self and there family members !!! BE WARNED ALL OF YOU THAT NEED HELP FROM SPELL CASTERS AS IT IS BECAUSE OF ALL OF YOU WE HAVE DECIDED TO COME ONLINE TO REDUCE AND STOP ALL THIS FAKE SPELL CASTERS, AS WE GOT PERMISSION FROM THE FBI !!.. I have made so many of them online that are spoiling this great temple good work go back to the sea and some blind. I am Dr Kuq Ya the messenger to the great oracle of Nigeria,Indian,Indonesia,Singapore,UK,USA,Uganda,japan,Spain,Germany,Paris,Dubai,South Africa. To mention but a few..We are know well there as the great temple that has helped them get many of there ANCESTRAL problems solve in recent times. But we are also extending this great offer to those that have any kind of problem, when i mean any kind of problem i mean any problem at all you might be having in this life,Such as getting your lover back,you want to be rich, you feel like using charms on someone to get something you like from him or her or getting your scam many back, wining a lottery, to mention but a few. KUQ YA IS HERE FOR YOUR SERVICES AND PLEASE STOP DEALING WITH THOSE SO CALLED SPELL CASTERS THAT HAVE REALLY MESSED UP THIS WORK ONLINE. I HAVE NEVER BEEN ONLINE,BUT THE PRESIDENTS OF THE ABOVE COUNTRIES CALLED ME ON PHONE AND ALSO PERSONALLY HOLD A MEETING AND THEY ASK ME THE MESSENGER TO START ADVERTING AND TELL ALL ABOUT THIS GREATEST ORACLE THAT IS SO DURABLE, PERFECT, MARVELOUS, AND GOOD WORKS TO AVOID THIS SCAMMING THAT IS GOING ON ONLINE. I WILL BE ENDING HERE NOW, IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING BOTHERING YOUR MIND AND YOU NEED PERMANENT SOLUTION TO IT WITHOUT ANY SIDE EFFECT OR HARM, KINDLY SEND AN EMAIL TO THE FOLLOWING EMAIL ADDRESS: great.spellcaster@yahoo.com Thanks and may the spirits guide you to read and understand what i said and also we will be awaiting response from you all that have problems that want it solve at once.Thanks for your patronage as you come. To enhance fast communication, Kindly send down your Name : Country: State: Address: More about the kind of help you want here: Phone number: Age: Gender : Job: and any other information's you know it will be so helpful on the kind of work and help you wish for here. Because we solve any kind of problem in this life. NOTE : MY GMAIL ACCOUNT IS NOW BAD AS YOU CAN ONLY GET ME ON THIS EMAIL : great.spellcaster@yahoo.com. So don't contact me via me gmail account. And also our spell casting here has no side effect, As it is just to grant you your heart desires without any problem.

The following story is a little different from the usual stories concerning gold…. In 1599, Don Francisco Manzo de Contreras was sent to Cuba as King Phillip II’s Chief Justice, with a directive to stop the smuggling of gold and other valuables. He settled in the town of Remedios in Villa Clara Province, near the northern coast seaport town of Caibarién, and over time, he became very wealthy doing exactly what he had been sent to stop! He filled his chests with gold bullion, but the heavy, bulky gold is not something that can easily be taken with you! In 1776, his heirs were three Catholic nuns, who had stashed six chests of gold into the walls of the Santa Clara Convent. Being afraid of pirates, they commissioned their nephew Joseph Manzo de Contreras to take the gold across the Atlantic to be deposited in the Bank of England in London. Being an obedient nephew, according to him, he took the gold to England and followed his aunts’ instructions to the letter. Many years later, the half-forgotten fortune was handed down to Angel Contreras, who claimed that his great-grandfather, Joseph Manzo, once had a receipt for it. The receipt was handed down through the family and when his uncle took possession of this valuable paper, he hid it, attempting to protect the family treasure. Ultimately, he was murdered when he refused to tell the thieves where it was. Unfortunately, the receipt is now lost, and although the family has searched high and low for it, it has never been found. Angel lived in Majagua, Cuba, where his family worked at a candy factory. He claimed they looked everywhere for it, but the receipt was definitely gone! With almost six decades of communistic control, the family decided to lay low and do nothing more to find it. They feared that the State would take whatever inheritance was rightfully theirs, and they probably would be right. Some of the Manzo family have since left Cuba and now live in Florida. They staged protests at the British Consulate in Miami, accusing the Queen of having reached a deal with the Cuban government. They stated that what should have been their money, was sent to Fidel Castro. During these demonstrations, nine members of the family were arrested for causing disturbances but not much else came of their claim. The Bank of England stated that the story of lost gold is just a myth, and that they have no record of it. Although this is the sad ending to the story for now, the family is continuing with their claim. However without a receipt, it seems unlikely that they have much of a case! "They put him in a madhouse," Angel said, "and then they killed him. All for greed... they wanted the money." Angel Contreras, referring to what had happened to his uncle….

instead of investing a stream of savings, you have just inherited a lump sum of money at age 25 from Uncle Fred that is large enough to fund your retirement at age 65

Conservatives have consistently voted to cut taxes on the rich. Current proposals for a “flat tax” would mean cutting taxes on the rich. The arguments are often versions of the Moral Hierarchy principle, that the rich are just better people than the poor: they have earned their money through hard work; the poor just haven’t worked hard enough and so deserve to be poor. Hmmm . . . Corporate CEOs tend to make about two hundred times as much as their average employees—they can’t be working two hundred times as hard. And many of the rich have inherited their money not earned it through work. Another

In the same interview, Koch described, without any self-consciousness, how he had recently promoted his son, Chase, to the presidency of Koch Fertilizer and how at “every step, he’s done it on his own.” The possibility that his son, like he and his brothers, Richard Mellon Scaife, Dick DeVos, and the Bechtel boys, to name just a few in his network, might have benefited from a job in the family’s business or a huge inheritance, rather than having been “condemned…to a lifetime of dependency and hopelessness,” because “somebody” had given “them something,” seemed not to have crossed his mind.

The normative principle I am suggesting for the law is simply this: No action should be considered illicit or illegal unless it invades, or aggresses against, the person or just property of another. Only invasive actions should be declared illegal, and combated with the full power of the law. The invasion must be concrete and physical. There are degrees of seriousness of such invasion, and hence, different proper degrees of restitution or punishment. "Burglary," simple invasion of property for purposes of theft, is less serious than "robbery," where armed force is likely to be used against the victim. Here, however, we are not concerned with the questions of degrees of invasion or punishment, but simply with invasion per se. If no man may invade another person's "just" property, what is our criterion of justice to be? There is no space here to elaborate on a theory of justice in property titles. Suffice it to say that the basic axiom of libertarian political theory holds that every man is a selfowner, having absolute jurisdiction over his own body. In effect, this means that no one else may justly invade, or aggress against, another's person. It follows then that each person justly owns whatever previously unowned resources he appropriates or "mixes his labor with." From these twin axioms — self-ownership and "homesteading" — stem the justification for the entire system of property rights titles in a free-market society. This system establishes the right of every man to his own person, the right of donation, of bequest (and, concomitantly, the right to receive the bequest or inheritance), and the right of contractual exchange of property titles. Legal and political theory have committed much mischief by failing to pinpoint physical invasion as the only human action that should be illegal and that justifies the use of physical violence to combat it. The vague concept of "harm" is substituted for the precise one of physical violence. Consider the following two examples. Jim is courting Susan and is just about to win her hand in marriage, when suddenly Bob appears on the scene and wins her away. Surely Bob has done great "harm" to Jim. Once a nonphysical-invasion sense of harm is adopted, almost any outlaw act might be justified. Should Jim be able to "enjoin" Bob's very existence? Similarly, A is a successful seller of razor blades. But then B comes along and sells a better blade, teflon-coated to prevent shaving cuts. The value of A's property is greatly affected. Should he be able to collect damages from B, or, better yet, to enjoin B's sale of a better blade? The correct answer is not that consumers would be hurt if they were forced to buy the inferior blade, although that is surely the case. Rather, no one has the right to legally prevent or retaliate against "harms" to his property unless it is an act of physical invasion. Everyone has the right to have the physical integrity of his property inviolate; no one has the right to protect the value of his property, for that value is purely the reflection of what people are willing to pay for it. That willingness solely depends on how they decide to use their money. No one can have a right to someone else's money, unless that other person had previously contracted to transfer it to him. Legal and political theory have committed much mischief by failing to pinpoint physical invasion as the only human action that should be illegal and that justifies the use of physical violence to combat it. (1/2)

One of the things Clovis had been most afraid of was being forced to ride. He had seen the horses in the stables, and they looked large and twitchy. If Sir Aubrey put him in the saddle, Clovis meant to confess straightaway and take the money Finn had given him to run away to his foster mother. But the week after he arrived at Westwood, Sir Aubrey asked Clovis to come into the library because he had some bad news for him. “Now I want you to be brave about this, my boy. I want you to take this like a man and a Taverner.” Clovis’s heart began to thump. Could someone have died--Maia perhaps, or his foster mother--and if so, how did Sir Aubrey know? Or was it just that he had been found out?” “I won’t hide from you the fact that the Basher--your aunt Joan, I mean--disagrees with me. She was all ready to teach you. She had picked out a fine mettlesome filly to start you on; nothing sluggish or second rate. A real Thoroughbred. You’d be going over jumps in a couple of weeks. But I’m afraid I cannot allow it.” “Can’t allow what, sir?” asked Clovis. “Can’t allow you to ride. Can’t allow you to go on a horse. You can imagine what it cost me to come to this decision; the Taverner children have always been up in the saddle from when they were two years old. But after Dudley’s terrible accident…” Tears came into Sir Aubrey’s eyes. He turned away. “If there was anyone else to inherit Westwood, I would let you take your chance, but with Bernard and Dudley both gone…” He pressed Clovis’s shoulder. “You’re taking this very well, my boy. Very well indeed. You’re taking it like a man. I confess I expected arguments, even tantrums.” “Well, it is a disappointment,” said Clovis, wondering whether to break down and cry, a thing all actors learn to do at the drop of a hat. But in the end he just gave a brave gulp instead. “I had, of course, been looking forward…” He looked out of the window to where the Basher, mounted on a bruising chestnut, was galloping across a field. “But I do understand. One must always think of Westwood.

Lyssa had known about Ah Ma's gold and money because she had often declared that, when she died, Lyssa would inherit none of it. She had said it just before she slipped on the floor mat and knocked her head against the staircase railing. Now Lyssa wondered if Ah Ma regretted her words.

Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping. This is what we’ve done: We’ve tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. Convince them that burning alive is better than leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. We’ve boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we made for them, the one they’ve inherited. And we’re either involved and have a hand in each one of their deaths, just like I did with my brother, or we’re absent, which is still involvement, just like silence is not just silence but is not speaking up. I’m in suicide prevention now. I’ve had fifteen relatives commit suicide over the course of my life, not counting my brother. I had one community I was working with recently in South Dakota tell me they were grieved out. That was after experiencing seventeen suicides in their community in just eight months. But how do we instill in our children the will to live? At these conferences. And in the offices. In the emails and at the community events, there has to be an urgency, a do-whatever-at-any-cost sort of spirit behind what we do. Or fuck the programs, maybe we should send the money to the families themselves, who need it and know what to do with it, since we all know what that money goes toward, salaries and conferences like this one. I’m sorry. I get paid outta that shit too, and actually, shit, I’m not sorry, this issue shouldn’t be met with politeness or formality. We can’t get lost in the career advancements and grant objectives, the day-to-day grind, as if we have to do what we do. We choose what we do, and in that choice comes the community. We are choosing for them. All the time. That’s what these kids are feeling. They have no control. Guess what kinda control they do have? We need to be about what we’re always saying we’re about. And if we can’t, and we’re really just about ourselves, we need to step aside, let somebody else from the community who really cares, who’ll really do something, let them come in and help. Fuck all the rest.

Mom shrugs. "He married outside the county." It's something you can't miss if you're raised here. Most of us don't have money, but that doesn't take away a certain element of pride that goes along with being part of this place, right down to the literal sense that your ancestors actually are in the dirt that grew the crops that you'll have for dinner. When I've gone out with a girl more than once or twice, Mom and Dad have filled me in on her biological heritage, maybe just to reassure themselves that we're not related. But if you step outside the county line it's like you're taking your chances, rolling the dice to see what kind of inheritance you might be marrying into. Not from here is one of the most damning insults that can be tossed, carrying with it the eternal question mark of what an outsider might be carrying inside of them, a mental or biological dark passenger that will rear up and bite your ass years down the road. And I realize maybe that's what I'm actually asking.

When we started Nalanda in 2007, there was a lot of buzz around a company called Eicher Motors led by a young, dynamic guy called Siddhartha Lal. Lal had inherited a hodgepodge of poor-quality businesses from his father in 2004. They manufactured motorcycles, footwear, garments, tractors, trucks, auto components, and a few other products, and none was an industry leader. In a remarkably bold strategic move, Lal decided to divest thirteen of the fifteen businesses to focus on just two products: trucks and motorcycles.30 Almost every analyst was gung ho about the future of Eicher; they were all taken in by its dynamic leader who was aggressively culling businesses, something that Indian firms rarely did. However, in 2007, this was a turnaround story with no empirical evidence of success. The company’s biggest hit, the Enfield Classic motorcycle, was launched only in 2010. We decided not to invest in the business. By the 2010s, the company’s motorcycles had taken on cult status in the Indian consumer’s mind. Sales exploded from just 52,000 units in 2009 to 822,000 units in 2019: a sixteen-fold growth. If you had listened to what we had to say about the business, you would not have invested. Your opportunity loss? Seventy times your money from 2007 until 2021. Tesla and Eicher Motors are the kinds of type II error we will inevitably commit because we reject highly indebted businesses, rapidly evolving industry landscapes, and turnarounds.

That's your solution? To stay? For money?" She shakes her head, as if I don't understand. "It's not just the money. What you said is protection; she can never hurt us again. Any time she tries to piss us off, sublet our flats, refuse to pay our tuition fees, we just mention the shed." Here eyes are luminous. "Don't you see? This is our inheritance.

Crowley started painting in 1919 while in Greenwich Village, New York, Alesiter had extravagant tastes. By the time, he was a thirty-year-old, he had spent his inheritance. Nevertheless, he purchased the best quality oil paints that money could buy, for his new project, just as he always purchased the most expensive paper on which to write his written works. Crowley's image of Lam appeared as part of the Dead Souls art exhibition show of Crowley's art work in Greenwich Village, New York in 1919".

Racism is not just hatred. Racism is a system. A system that dehumanizes humans in order to keep them down and, most often, to make money off of them. -- Adam Gidwitz, The Inheritance

The Last Boomer, oh, who really cares? Just because the fame and the fortune of this “last Boomer standing” prize, maybe just sitting, for goodness sake. Even if the winner can’t enjoy the moolah, their family descendants will inherit millions. I don’t know what that much money means anymore. It just sounds like a big sad joke.

It’s not just the location that makes a place a digital hothouse, it’s also the living arrangements. In recent years there has been a resurgence in communal living among ambitious young tech entrepreneurs. This is not just a matter of saving money before they strike it rich, it’s about cross-fertilization of ideas and the opportunity to inspire each other.

yet to the very end he persisted in hoping that he would get that three thousand, that the money would somehow come to him of itself, as though it might drop from heaven. That is just how it is with people who, like Dmitri, have never had anything to do with money, except to squander what has come to them by inheritance without any effort of their own, and have no notion how money is obtained.

At the street level, Sugar Fair welcomed customers into a bright, child-like fantasy. The architecturally designed enchanted forest was awash in jewel tones, and gorgeous smells, and the waterfall of free-flowing chocolate. But it was the Dark Forest downstairs that had proved an unexpected money-spinner, an income stream that had helped keep them afloat through the precarious first year. Four nights a week, through a haze of purple smoke and bubbling cauldrons, Sylvie taught pre-booked groups how to make concoctions that would tease the senses, delight the mind... and knock people flat on their arse if they weren't careful. High percentage of alcohol. It was a mixology class with a lot of tricks and pyrotechnics. It had been Jay's idea to get a liquor license. "Pleasures of the mouth," he'd said at the time. "The holy trinity--- chocolate, coffee, and booze." With even her weekends completely blocked out, Sylvie had almost made a crack about forfeiting certain other pleasures of the mouth, but Jay had inherited a puritanical streak from his mother. Both their mouths looked like dried cranberries if someone made a sex joke. The sensuous, moody haven in the basement was a counterbalance to the carefully manufactured atmosphere upstairs. There were, after all, reasons to shy away from relentless cheer. Perhaps someone had just been through a breakup, or a family reunion. A really distressing haircut. Maybe they'd logged on to Twitter and realized half the population were a bunch of pricks. Or maybe the'd picked up the Metropolitan News and found Dominic De Vere indirectly thrashing their entire business aesthetic in a major London daily. Whatever the reason--- feeling a little stressed? A bit peeved? Annoyed as fuck? Welcome to the Dark Forest. Through the bakery, turn left, down the stairs.

Do you realize the cost they paid when they surrendered to their new Lord? No money, no job, no understandable future. They had just hurt the one person they had been trained all their lives to honor and whom they never wanted to bruise—their father. They left him to finish the fishing. They left him with no inheritance. But something in their hearts said, “Go.” So they left all they knew to become something that their minds could not comprehend.

Someone told me once that fortunes like this one—at a certain point, it’s not about the money, because you couldn’t spend billions if you tried. It’s about the power.” I looked down. “And I just don’t think anyone should have power like that, certainly not me.

As an accomplished entrepreneur with a history that spans more than fourteen years, Annette Wise is constantly looking for ways to give back to her community. Using enterprising efforts, she qualified for $125,000 in startup funding to develop a specialized residential facility that allows developmentally disabled adults to live in the community after almost a lifetime of living in a state institution. In doing so, she has provided steady employment in her community for the last thirteen years. After dedicating years to her residential facility, Annette began to see clearly the difficulty business owners face in planning for retirement successfully. Searching high and low to find answers, she took control of financial uncertainty and in less than 2 years, she became a Full Life Agent, licensed Registered Representative, Investment Advisor Representative and Limited Principal. Her focus is on building an extensive list of clients that depend on her for smart retirement guidance, thorough college planning, detailed business continuation, and business exit strategies. Clients have come to rely on Annette for insight on tax advantaged savings and retirement options. Annette’s primary goal is to help her clients understand more than just concepts, but to easily understand how money works, the consequences of their decisions and how they work in conjunction with their desires and goal. Ever the curious soul who is always up for a challenge, Annette is routinely resourceful at finding sensible means to a sometimes-challenging end. She believes in infinite possibilities as well as in sharing her knowledge with others. She is the go-to source for “Smart Wealth Solutions.” Among Annette’s proudest accomplishments are her two wonderful sons, Michael III and Matthew. As a single mom, they have been her inspiration and joy. She is forever grateful to the greatest brothers in the world- Andrew and Anthony Wise, for assistance in grooming them into amazing young men.