Outer Banks Quotes

The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we … kill those people. "Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real." It's just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok … But it doesn't matter, because it's just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.

To all the ships at sea, and all the ports of call. To my family and to all friends and strangers. This is a message, and a prayer. The message is that my travels taught me a great truth. I already had what everyone is searching for and few ever find. The one person in the world who I was born to love forever. A person, like me, of the outer banks and the blue Atlantic mystery. A person rich in simple treasures. Self-made. Self-taught. A harbor where I am forever home. And no wind, or trouble or even a little death can knock down this house. The prayer is that everyone in the world can know this kind of love and be healed by it. If my prayer is heard, there will be an erasing of all guilt and all regret and an end to all anger. Please, God. Amen.

You were fine," she said, a smile quirking up at the corner of her mouth. "I was fantastic.

What had transpired that day in 1903, in the stiff winds and cold of the Outer Banks in less than two hours time, was one of the turning points in history, the beginning of change for the world far greater than any of those present could possibly have imagined. With their homemade machine, Wilbur and Orville Wright had shown without a doubt that man could fly and if the world did not yet know it, they did. Their flights that morning were the first ever in which a piloted machine took off under its own power into the air in full flight, sailed forward with no loss of speed, and landed at a point as high as that from which it started.

How you think and create your inner world that you gonna become in your outer world. Your inner believe manifest you in the outside

Humans need each other for equilibrium and support. But writers must pull aside to take a quiet walk alone, not just for the sake of serenity but to hear the Voice inside. That is how the storyteller connects with with others--listen, write, share.

Everything about it and the fierce old coast around it, had the ring and taste and feel of utter rightness to me. Its peace and loneliness crept into my veins and ran there, its wildness called out to the deep buried wildness in my heart.

Because of sorrow, my awareness of life's pulse is strongly detectable. It is syncopation while I journey, a lap of ocean in the eyes of every person I meet. This awareness informs the flesh of my stories. Grief has been an odd companion, at first a terror, but now I am all the better having accepted it for its intrinsic worth.

...for we have found that by excluding we grow thin inside even though we may have an enormous bank account outside.

When we finally let go... that's when the real fun begins." The Second Most Exotic Marigold Hotel

the outer banks swing out from the coast of North Carolina like the bony curve of a woman's hip

Outer Banks people were still pretty “set in their ways,” Tate added. “We believed in a good God, a bad Devil, and a hot Hell, and more than anything else we believed that same God did not intend man should ever fly.

Yes. Kissing. Overrated." "I could change your mind," Zach said, surprising the hell out of them both. Why would he take something as simple as this banter as a challenge? "I don't know that I want to, but I feel right sure I could." "How arrogant. How typically male." "I suppose." He shrugged and reached for the wine bottle. "More?" She nodded, frowning now. "How do you know you could change my mind? It's been a long time since you... well—" "Over two years." The pain was there, an ache in his chest he imagined he would feel every time he thought of Hannah. And he thought of her every day. Dreamed of her about as often. But lately, maybe only in the past week, he'd begun to realize that his life had not ended with his wife's. He either had to die or start living again.

What had transpired that day in 1903, in the stiff winds and cold of the Outer Banks in less than two hours time, was one of the turning points in history, the beginning of change for the world far greater than any of those present could possibly have imagined.

When I describe for my far-away friends the Northwest’s subtle shades of weather — from gloaming skies of ‘high-gray’ to ‘low-gray’ with violet streaks like the water’s delicate aura — they wonder if my brain and body have, indeed, become water-logged. Yet still, I find myself praising the solace and privacy of fine, silver drizzle, the comforting cloaks of salt, mold, moss, and fog, the secretive shelter of cedar and clouds. Whether it’s in the Florida Keys, along the rocky Maine coast, within the Gulf of Mexico’s warm curves, on the brave Outer Banks; or, for those who nestle near inland seas, such as the brine-steeped Great Salk Lake or the Midwest’s Great Lakes — water is alive and in relationship with those of us who are blessed with such a world-shaping, yet abiding, intimate ally. Every day I am moved by the double life of water — her power and her humility. But most of all, I am grateful for the partnership of this great body of inland sea. Living by water, I am never alone. Just as water has sculpted soil and canyon, it also molds my own living space, and every story I tell. …Living by water restores my sense of balance and natural rhythm — the ebb and flow of high tides and low tides, so like the rise and fall of everyday life. Wind, water, waves are not simply a backdrop to my life, they are steady companions. And that is the grace, the gift of inviting nature to live inside my home. Like a Chambered Nautilus I spin out my days, drifting and dreaming, nurtured by marine mists, like another bright shell on the beach, balancing on the back of a greater body.

The change from the crowded, stifling hot, noisy confines of the workspace at Dayton to the open reaches of sea and sky on the Outer Banks could hardly have been greater or more welcome. They loved Kitty Hawk. “Every year adds to our comprehension of the wonders of this place,” wrote Orville to Katharine soon after arrival.

And so I sit on the dunes in my carefully mismatched clothes, hour after hour, day after day, frozen in my looking back. 'Do not look behind you...lest you be swept away.' That is what scripture say. Only there is nowhere for me to look but back. No future. No redemption. Like Lot's wife, I am turned to salt, my tired eyes trained on the blue-gray horizon, where sea meets sky, where my yesterday's met my tomorrows, a ragtag eccentric, watching and waiting for something that never comes.

Facing the sagging middle when writing a novel, while inevitable, may be overcome by pre-planning. I divide my collection of proposed scenes into three acts, each scene inciting tension that builds toward the final crisis in Act Three. If by Act Two the emotional river isn't spilling over the banks, I reassess the plot so that once the writing is flowing I don't slide into a dry creek. The central character should be struggling to navigate life well into the end of Act One, even if her fiercest antagonist is only from within.

The central character is an incomplete package of yearning that takes the length of the novel to complete. Completion, though, is not to be confused with perfection.

No good deed goes unpunished,

The conflict each day is whether to immerse in books or writing. I can't do one without the other, but I can't do both at the same time. It is the writer's paradox.

Others as well had come to see them as more than mere eccentrics. Life on the Outer Banks was harsh. Making ends meet was a constant struggle. Hard workers were greatly admired and in the words of John T. Daniels, the Wrights were “two of the workingest boys” ever seen, “and when they worked, they worked. . . . They had their whole heart and soul in what they were doing.

While writing the first draft is an exercise in shutting down all of the things we think we know so that the story features come tumbling out, the revision is the end of the joy ride. We pull on the gloves and sort of poke around inside the body. Is that a tumor? Will that limb need amputation? I nearly second-guessed myself into heart failure while learning to self-edit.

I started out hoping to remind people at some point in the novel that we should be loving and kind. But then the theme usurped my life, spilling over into my novels until love was no longer a small voice, but now my purpose as a writer.

They are love, those rare blinding early friendships. Not everyone has them, and almost no one gets more than one. The others, the later ones, are not the same. These first grow in a soil found only in the country of the young and are possible only there, because their medium is unbroken time and proximity and discovery. Later, there is not enough of any of those for the total, ongoing immersions that these friendships are...These friendships may continue past first youth, but I don't think they often do. Their primary strength is that fire of exploration and validation. The friend becomes a cicerone, to go with you down to the bottom of your deepest depths and out to the farthest crannies of your being. All your senses are open, all your reservoirs fill up at a prodigious rate, all your motors hum.

The confessional writer will treat her story like a wailing wall. She kneels, and her story spills out, messy, improper. It isn’t a protest or even graffiti, but her story is an offering of things that she overlooked or notices that others have overlooked. She is in danger of exposure but she remembers when she lived in hiding and that was worse. She cannot turn back now because this is how life has spun out of her, part vexing passage and part prayer.

There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the labour of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of our own personality: we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly, that furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to auction; an improved taste in upholstery scorns it; and is not the striving after something better and better in our surrounding, the grand characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute - or, to satisfy a scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the British man from the foreign brute? But heaven knows where that striving might lead us, if our affections had not a trick of twining round those old inferior things - if the loves and sanctities of our life had no deep immovable roots in memory. One's delight in an elderberry bush overhanging the confused lea age of a hedgerow bank, as a more gladdening sight than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself on the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable preference to a nursery-gardener, or to any of those severely regulated minds who are free from the weakness of any attachment that does not rest on a demonstrable superiority of qualities. And there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory - that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid.

There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the labor of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of our own personality; we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly, that furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to auction; an improved taste in upholstery scorns it; and is not the striving after something better and better in our surroundings the grand characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute, or, to satisfy a scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the British man from the foreign brute? But heaven knows where that striving might lead us, if our affections had not a trick of twining round those old inferior things; if the loves and sanctities of our life had no deep immovable roots in memory. One's delight in an elderberry bush overhanging the confused leafage of a hedgerow bank, as a more gladdening sight than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself on the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable preference to a nursery-gardener, or to any of those regulated minds who are free from the weakness of any attachment that does not rest on a demonstrable superiority of qualities. And there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory; that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and color, but the long companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid.

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' lazy at the sea, There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me; For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say: "Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!" Come you back to Mandalay, Where the old Flotilla lay: Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay ? On the road to Mandalay, Where the flyin'-fishes play, An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay! 'Er petticoat was yaller an' 'er little cap was green, An' 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat - jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen, An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot, An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on an 'eathen idol's foot: Bloomin' idol made o' mud Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed 'er where she stud! On the road to Mandalay... When the mist was on the rice-fields an' the sun was droppin' slow, She'd git 'er little banjo an' she'd sing "Kulla-lo-lo! With 'er arm upon my shoulder an' 'er cheek agin my cheek We useter watch the steamers an' the hathis pilin' teak. Elephints a-pilin' teak In the sludgy, squdgy creek, Where the silence 'ung that 'eavy you was 'arf afraid to speak! On the road to Mandalay... But that's all shove be'ind me - long ago an' fur away An' there ain't no 'busses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay; An' I'm learnin' 'ere in London what the ten-year soldier tells: "If you've 'eard the East a-callin', you won't never 'eed naught else." No! you won't 'eed nothin' else But them spicy garlic smells, An' the sunshine an' the palm-trees an' the tinkly temple-bells; On the road to Mandalay... I am sick o' wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones, An' the blasted English drizzle wakes the fever in my bones; Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand, An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand? Beefy face an' grubby 'and - Law! wot do they understand? I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land! On the road to Mandalay... Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst; For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea; On the road to Mandalay, Where the old Flotilla lay, With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay! O the road to Mandalay, Where the flyin'-fishes play, An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay !

I've been through Irene. I went through Isabelle," said Bill Motley, who works at Ace Hardware in Nags Head has lived on the Outer Banks for 13 years. "I'm not even worried about this one. I'm more worried about my tomato plants. With the wind coming, if we get a 50-mph gust, it will knock over my tomato plants.

Words had failed us that night, and I'd welcomed the silence. Words had escaped me the next morning as well but in a different way, when I came to realize that I was married to a fisherman for the rest of my days."--Abigail Whimble, Return to the Outer Banks House

To this day, long gone to earth in my own much-loved house by the sea some eight hundred miles north of it, I still dream of Ginger Fowler’s house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Everything about it, and the fierce old coast around it, had the ring and taste and feel of utter rightness to me. Its peace and loneliness crept into my veins and ran there, its wildness called out to the deep-buried wildness in my heart. I, who had never found earth beneath my feet that called “home” up to me, here found home raging through my entire body like an ague.

I’ve

One of these bright spits was the homecoming of General J. Bryan Grimes. To quote the August 19, 1880, issue of the Tarboro Southerner, the general was “a brave officer, a hard fighter, a trusted leader of General Lee and emblazoned North Carolina’s history with glory and heroism. He participated in all the important battles fought in Virginia and surrendered at Appomattox. It was there, when the negotiations for the surrender had been inaugurated, a charge and rebel yell was heard at the front. General Lee turned to an aide and asked, ‘Who is that charging?’ ‘General Grimes’ Division of North Carolinians,’ was the reply. General Lee exclaimed: ‘God bless the North Carolinians—they are the first and last in every charge!

Also in Edenton was a young seaman named John Paul Jones. In spite of his youth, he was a capable captain, and it is thought that he commanded many of Hewes’ vessels on trips to Ocracoke and Portsmouth Island, as well as to the West Indies. There was much coming and going between Edenton and North Carolina’s Outer Banks even in those days. When war finally came, young John Paul Jones applied for a commission in the fighting ships of the colonists. There were two problems with his application. In the first place, it was thought that he did not have the experience or the skill for such an important position. In the second, the colonists had no navy, as such, with which to fight the British fleet—at that time the strongest in the world. Observing these problems, Jones’ friend and erstwhile employer came to the aid of both his protégé and his country. Incredible as it may seem, Joseph Hewes made a gift of all his ships to his country and thus helped to form the nucleus of the Yankee fleet. It is said that this magnanimous gesture, coupled with urgings from Hewes, persuaded the Continental Congress to name young John Paul Jones as a first lieutenant of the Continental Navy. History has proved the wisdom of this decision. The young lieutenant became what one historian has called “the greatest fighting naval commander America ever had.” His spirited “Sir, I’ve not yet begun to fight” is one of the proudest traditions of the United States Navy.

Ghosts, like nuggets of gold, are where you find them. There seems to be no particular habitat or locality where ghosts abound. It does seem to be the rule, though, that the older the town or community, the greater the likelihood of running across ghost stories. There are literally hundreds of stories about ghosts of the long ago and ghosts in far-off places, but the accounts are usually frank hearsay and impossible to verify. It is a most unusual circumstance when one is able to document a tale of supernatural occurrences. It is even more rare to find hard-headed, practical businessmen who will look you square in the eye and tell you, not only that they have seen a ghost, but when and where and under what circumstances the sighting occurred.

Savage also protested his innocence to the end, but unlike Parker, he coupled his protests with a threat. If he were hanged, he said, his spirit would never rest until his innocence was proved, and terrible things would happen to each of the descendants of his killers to the third and fourth generation. The only way for those descendants to avoid the curse, he said, would be for each of them to come to that holly tree in the dark of the moon and there call upon Savage’s spirit and apologize for the act of his ancestors. Although it is said that one of the members of the hanging party lost his mind and died completely mad from worrying over these threats, it is not known exactly who the other members of the party were. Some of the young people of the area claim to be worried lest the curse apply to them. To avoid it, they have gone to the tree in the dark of the moon and there apologized to the Savage spirit just in case some of their ancestors had been involved. They vow that in each such case they have seen lights moving around in that holly tree and have heard moans and groans coming from the heart of the thick branches, but not one of them has ever been harmed. They keep returning and apologizing, year after year. Their parents call it “just kid foolishness,” but those kids continue to brave the darkness and the weird lights and sounds just to be on the safe side. Why they keep going back is another question. Your guess is as good as mine.

The tide, you see, is a fickle thing: stealing in, sliding away, always, always turning. She comes when you're not looking, a silent, liquid thief, only to rush away again, retreating from the shore like a coward. She gives sometimes too, though in fleeting, unexpected moments, yielding up her treasures and her dead--but never, ever her secrets.

It is not so difficult to be oneself. It is not so difficult to walk in someone else's shoes. The truly difficult thing is to approach all people and cultures as an alien from another planet would and judge them equally - without empathy.

demise

In answer to an inquiry Wilbur sent to the United States Weather Bureau in Washington about prevailing winds around the country, they were provided extensive records of monthly wind velocities at more than a hundred Weather Bureau stations, enough for them to take particular interest in a remote spot on the Outer Banks of North Carolina called Kitty Hawk, some seven hundred miles from Dayton. Until then, the farthest the brothers had been from home was a trip to Chicago for the Columbian Exposition of 1893. And though they had “roughed it” some on a few camping trips, it had been nothing like what could be expected on the North Carolina coast. To be certain Kitty Hawk was the right choice, Wilbur wrote to the head of the Weather Bureau station there, who answered reassuringly about steady winds and sand beaches. As could be plainly seen by looking at a map, Kitty Hawk also offered all the isolation one might wish for to carry on experimental work in privacy. Still further encouragement came when, on August 18, 1900, the former postmaster at Kitty Hawk, William J. Tate, sent a letter saying: Mr. J. J. Dosher of the Weather Bureau here has asked me to answer your letter to him, relative to the fitness of Kitty Hawk as a place to practice or experiment with a flying machine, etc. In answering I would say that you would find here nearly any type of ground you could wish; you could, for instance, get a stretch of sandy land one mile by five with a bare hill in center 80 feet high, not a tree or bush anywhere to break the evenness of the wind current. This in my opinion would be a fine place; our winds are always steady, generally from 10 to 20 miles velocity per hour. You can reach here from Elizabeth City, N.C. (35 miles from here) by boat . . . from Manteo 12 miles from here by mail boat every Mon., Wed., & Friday. We have telegraph communication & daily mails. Climate healthy, you could find good place to pitch tent & get board in private family provided there were not too many in your party; would advise you to come anytime from September 15 to October 15. Don’t wait until November. The autumn generally gets a little rough by November. If you decide to try your machine here and come, I will take pleasure in doing all I can for your convenience and success and pleasure, and I assure you you will find a hospitable people when you come among us. That decided the matter. Kitty Hawk it would be.

I can do all things through Him who strengthens me,

I mean, the Bible says that He created the heavens and the earth and humans and animals, but it doesn’t say anything about UFOs.

How can science ask society to conserve that which it doesn’t fully understand? When I first began learning about red wolves, this was the question that kept coming back to me. It was intriguing enough that I decided to commit a significant amount of my time to documenting what red wolves are today; exploring how the wild population is managed; and understanding the contradictory concepts of the species’ origins, its past history in the East, and what its main conservation challenges are heading into the future. The morning after my beach stroll, I set out to meet a red wolf biologist named Ryan Nordsven. He had agreed to show me Sandy Ridge, which is a secure facility where the recovery program holds wild red wolves that are sick or being held for other reasons. A few wolves that are part of the captive breeding program are also kept there permanently. But the facility’s location is somewhat of a secret, and I was supposed to go first to the FWS’s Red Wolf Recovery Program headquarters in the small town of Manteo. Manteo is on Roanoke Island, a low and narrow, kidney-bean-shaped island wedged in the sounds between the Albemarle Peninsula and the Outer Banks. It is smothered in live oaks, and its perimeter is bordered by thick marsh grasses. From Manteo, the red wolf biologists make tracks across the whole peninsula. As I drove through the marsh and into town, my hope was that Ryan or one of the other biologists might let me tag along as they worked with the world’s only population of wild C. rufus. Little did I know then how deep Ryan and the others would ultimately take me into the secret world of red wolves.

That’s how the world is divided now: the places that still function, and the places that don’t. Florida doesn’t. Their local governments are dissolving, their infrastructure crumbling. Louisiana is fading, too. The Outer Banks of North Carolina are gone entirely. The Bahamas. Indonesia. More will follow.

Everything is alive. Everything is a form of everything. A human body consists of many things and the same goes for the sky. A body contains water; a thing is named by its outer shell. A body doesn’t die; it’s shell just turns into another form. If a body is burned it turns into ashes, which turns into another form of life.

told her.  “So, the phone you found on the beach was exactly the same as Trin's?” he

But it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat, like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence. The counterstance refutes the dominant culture’s views and beliefs, and, for, this, is proudly defiant. All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against. Because the counterstance stems from a problem with authority — outer as well as inner — it’s a step towards liberation from cultural domination. But it is not a way of life. At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. Or perhaps, we will decide to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off altogether as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory. Or we might go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

Once my locale was decided upon, the choice of my hero became automatic. The most popular breed of dogs along the Outer Banks (and at Life Boat Stations in general, for that matter) is the Chesapeake retriever, or the Chesapeake Bay dog, as he is also frequently called. The Chesapeake is probably the finest performer in the water of any breed. They are tremendously powerful swimmers, and no surf will daunt them or make their courage fail.

The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 5:8 that when we’re absent from our bodies, we’re present with the Lord.

Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgement.

You like to quote God, don’t you?” said Sydney. “I do,” the captain replied. “His Bible gives me the words, and I just speak them aloud.

Praise our God! His deeds are wonderful, too marvelous to describe.

winter days, but distantly. Like very old ghosts.

The Cop. She has a steel grid in front of her mind, and for anything in the outer world to reach her it first has to squeeze through the bars of that grid. Information has to be broken into small cubes; information and data packaged in two-dimensional squares are preferable to three-dimensional cubes however: they pass through the grid more quickly and once they reach the Cop’s mind take up less space there.

What is it in the Nehru-Gandhi family that compels them to anoint only immediate family members as alter egos or heirs apparent? Obviously, their secrets regarding their political and financial misdeeds are such that there is no substitute for immediate family when it comes to trust and protection. The keys to the treasury must always be held by them, the keys to secret cupboards containing their corruption files must never be lost—be it the Bofors case, foreign bank accounts, or smuggling of antiquities, to name a few. Hence, the need for an inner circle of family confidants, a second circle of trusted coteries, and an outer circle of sycophants and hangers-on, who are given blandishments and retainers to keep the inner circle protected and take the blame; or do a cover-up job whenever the need arises. When not in power, these coteries and sycophants must engineer and activate cover-up networks, to hush up or obfuscate any exposures. Dynasty converts all the resources and tools of democracy towards achieving these ends, and perpetuate its continuance, while fooling the nation through homilies on transparency and zero tolerance to corruption.