Owing People Money Quotes

No, I don't want your money. The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you. I don't like to owe anybody anything, so I keep to myself as much on the lending side as I can.

I could not understand how people could not like something as beautiful as the aerodrome. But I had lately become convinced that in general people were pretty boring. They liked to moan for hours on end about how hard it was to make ends meet, about the money they owed, the price of food, and other similar worries, but the minute some more brilliant or attractive subject come up, they were struck deaf.

To pay for my father's funeral I borrowed money from people he already owed money to. One called him a nobody. No, I said, he was a failure. You can't remember a nobody's name, that's why they're called nobodies. Failures are unforgettable.

(Golden Globe acceptance speech in the style of Jane Austen's letters): "Four A.M. Having just returned from an evening at the Golden Spheres, which despite the inconveniences of heat, noise and overcrowding, was not without its pleasures. Thankfully, there were no dogs and no children. The gowns were middling. There was a good deal of shouting and behavior verging on the profligate, however, people were very free with their compliments and I made several new acquaintances. Miss Lindsay Doran, of Mirage, wherever that might be, who is largely responsible for my presence here, an enchanting companion about whom too much good cannot be said. Mr. Ang Lee, of foreign extraction, who most unexpectedly apppeared to understand me better than I undersand myself. Mr. James Schamus, a copiously erudite gentleman, and Miss Kate Winslet, beautiful in both countenance and spirit. Mr. Pat Doyle, a composer and a Scot, who displayed the kind of wild behavior one has lernt to expect from that race. Mr. Mark Canton, an energetic person with a ready smile who, as I understand it, owes me a vast deal of money. Miss Lisa Henson -- a lovely girl, and Mr. Gareth Wigan -- a lovely boy. I attempted to converse with Mr. Sydney Pollack, but his charms and wisdom are so generally pleasing that it proved impossible to get within ten feet of him. The room was full of interesting activitiy until eleven P.M. when it emptied rather suddenly. The lateness of the hour is due therefore not to the dance, but to the waiting, in a long line for horseless vehicles of unconscionable size. The modern world has clearly done nothing for transport. P.S. Managed to avoid the hoyden Emily Tomkins who has purloined my creation and added things of her own. Nefarious creature." "With gratitude and apologies to Miss Austen, thank you.

Though liberal in his praise and always courteous and condescending to the shop-people, he was scarcely ever known to pay a bill and when he died, the amount of money owing to Brandy's was considerable. Mr. Brandy, a short-tempered, pinched-faced, cross little old man, was beside himself with rage about it. He died shortly afterwards, and was presumed by many people to have done so on purpose and to have gone in pursuit of his noble debtor.

For most people, their brains host their memories. But not me. I store all my nostalgia in my ducks, so even if I should die, my ducks will still know how much money you owe me.

Above all you must study hard. Very few in Pakistan have the opportunity you now have and you must take advantage of it. Never forget that the money it is costing to send you comes from the land, from the people who sweat and toil on those lands. You will owe a debt to them, a debt you can repay with God's blessing by using your education to better their lives.

God will not be tolerated. He instructs us to worship and fear Him. In our world, where hundreds of things distract us from God, we have to intentionally and consistently remind ourselves of Him. Because we don’t often think about the reality of who God is, we quickly forget that He is worthy to be worshiped and loved. We are to fear Him. The answer to each of these questions is simply this: because He’s God. He has more of a right to ask us why so many people are starving. As much as we want God to explain himself to us, His creation, we are in no place to demand that He give an account to us. Can you worship a God who isn’t obligated to explain His actions to you? Could it be your arrogance that makes you think God owes you an explanation? If God is truly the greatest good on this earth, would He be loving us if He didn’t draw us toward what is best for us (even if that happens to be Himself)? Doesn’t His courting, luring, pushing, calling, and even “threatening” demonstrate His love? If He didn’t do all of that, wouldn’t we accuse Him of being unloving in the end, when all things are revealed? Has your relationship with God actually changed the way you live? Do you see evidence of God’s kingdom in your life? Or are you choking it out slowly by spending too much time, energy, money, and thought on the things of this world? Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. Jesus’ call to commitment is clear: He wants all or nothing. Our greatest fear as individuals and as a church should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter. If life is a river, then pursuing Christ requires swimming upstream. When we stop swimming, or actively following Him, we automatically begin to be swept downstream. How could we think for even a second that something on this puny little earth compares to the Creator and Sustainer and Savior of it all? True faith means holding nothing back; it bets everything on the hope of eternity. When you are truly in love, you go to great lengths to be with the one you love. You’ll drive for hours to be together, even if it’s only for a short while. You don’t mind staying up late to talk. Walking in the rain is romantic, not annoying. You’ll willingly spend a small fortune on the one you’re crazy about. When you are apart from each other, it’s painful, even miserable. He or she is all you think about; you jump at any chance to be together. There is nothing better than giving up everything and stepping into a passionate love relationship with God, the God of the universe who made galaxies, leaves, laughter, and me and you. Do you recognize the foolishness of seeking fulfillment outside of Him? Are you ready and willing to make yourself nothing? To take the very nature of a servant? To be obedient unto death? True love requires sacrifice. What are you doing right now that requires faith? God doesn’t call us to be comfortable. If one person “wastes” away his day by spending hours connecting with God, and the other person believes he is too busy or has better things to do than worship the Creator and Sustainer, who is the crazy one? Am I loving my neighbor and my God by living where I live, by driving what I drive, by talking how I talk?” If I stop pursuing Christ, I am letting our relationship deteriorate. The way we live out our days is the way we will live our lives. What will people say about your life in heaven? Will people speak of God’s work and glory through you? And even more important, how will you answer the King when He says, “What did you do with what I gave you?

It was a Different Time. People were Friendly. We trusted each other. Hell, you could afford to get mixed up with wild strangers in those days -- without fearing for your life, or your eyes, or your organs, or all of your money, or even getting locked up in prison forever. There was a sense of possibility. People were not so afraid, as they are now. You could run around naked without getting shot. You could check into a roadside motel on the outskirts of Ely or Winnemucca or Elko where you were lost in a midnight rainstorm -- and nobody called the police on you, just to check out your credit and your employment history and your medical records and how many parking tickets you owed in California.

Depressing realization sets in. Writing was invented not by human beings but by accountants. Most of the early writing systems are records of how much crap people own, how much money they have, how much money they owe, and other lowering/boastful facts of human life.

He eventually became an executive for a firm. This meant that he actually executed persons with showers of legal documents proving that they owed him quantities of money which they did not have. 'Firm' actually means the manufacture of useless objects which people are foolish enough to buy. The firmer the firm the more senseless talk is needed to prevent anyone noticing the unsafe structure of the business. Sometimes these firms actually sell nothing at all for a lot of money, like 'Life Insurance', a pretense that it is a soothing and useful event to have a violent and painful death.

The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you.

It was not uncommon to see the letters G.T.T. painted or carved on the doorways of cabins in Tennessee and other parts of the country especially in the south. It was a sure sign that the occupants had picked up and were as they said "Gone to Texas". It was a popular expression for those people who had committed crimes or owed money or just did not want to be found.

New Rule: America must stop bragging it's the greatest country on earth, and start acting like it. I know this is uncomfortable for the "faith over facts" crowd, but the greatness of a country can, to a large degree, be measured. Here are some numbers. Infant mortality rate: America ranks forty-eighth in the world. Overall health: seventy-second. Freedom of the press: forty-fourth. Literacy: fifty-fifth. Do you realize there are twelve-year old kids in this country who can't spell the name of the teacher they're having sex with? America has done many great things. Making the New World democratic. The Marshall Plan. Curing polio. Beating Hitler. The deep-fried Twinkie. But what have we done for us lately? We're not the freest country. That would be Holland, where you can smoke hash in church and Janet Jackson's nipple is on their flag. And sadly, we're no longer a country that can get things done. Not big things. Like building a tunnel under Boston, or running a war with competence. We had six years to fix the voting machines; couldn't get that done. The FBI is just now getting e-mail. Prop 87 out here in California is about lessening our dependence on oil by using alternative fuels, and Bill Clinton comes on at the end of the ad and says, "If Brazil can do it, America can, too!" Since when did America have to buck itself up by saying we could catch up to Brazil? We invented the airplane and the lightbulb, they invented the bikini wax, and now they're ahead? In most of the industrialized world, nearly everyone has health care and hardly anyone doubts evolution--and yes, having to live amid so many superstitious dimwits is also something that affects quality of life. It's why America isn't gonna be the country that gets the inevitable patents in stem cell cures, because Jesus thinks it's too close to cloning. Oh, and did I mention we owe China a trillion dollars? We owe everybody money. America is a debtor nation to Mexico. We're not a bridge to the twenty-first century, we're on a bus to Atlantic City with a roll of quarters. And this is why it bugs me that so many people talk like it's 1955 and we're still number one in everything. We're not, and I take no glee in saying that, because I love my country, and I wish we were, but when you're number fifty-five in this category, and ninety-two in that one, you look a little silly waving the big foam "number one" finger. As long as we believe being "the greatest country in the world" is a birthright, we'll keep coasting on the achievements of earlier generations, and we'll keep losing the moral high ground. Because we may not be the biggest, or the healthiest, or the best educated, but we always did have one thing no other place did: We knew soccer was bullshit. And also we had the Bill of Rights. A great nation doesn't torture people or make them disappear without a trial. Bush keeps saying the terrorist "hate us for our freedom,"" and he's working damn hard to see that pretty soon that won't be a problem.

I busted him and he busted me. That's fair ain't it? No, I ain't forgettin about jail. You think because he arrested me that thows it off again I reckon? I don't. It's his job. It's what he gets paid for. To arrest people that break the law. And I didn't jest break the law, I made a livin at it. More money in three hours than any workin man makes in a week. Why is that? Because it's harder work? No, because a man who makes a livin doin somethin that has to get him in jail sooner or later has to be paid for the jail, has to be paid in advance not jest for his time breakin the law but for the time he has to build when he gets caught at it. So I been paid. Gifford's been paid. Nobody owes nobody. If it wadn't for Gifford, the law, I wouldn't of had the job I had blockadin and if it wadn't for me blockadin, Gifford wouldn't of had his job arrestin blockaders. Now who owes who?

Customers deposit money in a bank for interest; the bank lends that money to other people at a higher rate of interest. This isn't glamorous or interesting, but then banking is not supposed to resemble base jumping or hip-hop.

She had a confused, dreamy notion that, if the creditors were all paid, her plate and linen ought to come back to her; but she had an inbred perception that while people owed money they were unable to pay, they couldn’t rightly call anything their own.

I understand that it’s disheartening to pour effort and money into a work of art and find that others do not value it with the same intensity. I’ve been to this rodeo more than a few times, and yes, it’s painful and hard on the soul. It is also the sort of thing that grown-ups do every day. Anyone deluded enough to think they are owed monetary success because they bled for their art is in for some hard, hard knocks and buckets full of tears. There will be many cries of “unfair” and much jealousy and hatred. And to be fair, all authors go through this every time they watch their books ride the waves of bestseller charts and the ego torture chamber known as Goodreads reviews. Even the most well-adjusted of us watch that horrible piece of shit book beat our baby to pieces and gnash our teeth and shout at our monitors demanding to know what brain-donors are shopping on amazon.com these days. But holy Smart Bitch on a cracker, Batman, to write a post about how stupid readers are and worse to actually put it out there on the internet is so beyond the pale there’s a special hell for that kind of idiocy. Let me repeat: authors exist at the pleasure of readers. Without the people who buy and read my books, I am just another dizzy broad writing shit down. Readers aren’t just an author’s audience; they are her lifeblood. --

Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn. And for him, living in a certain society--owing to the need, ordinarily developed at years of discretion, for some degree of mental activity--to have views was just as indispensable as to have a hat. If there was a reason for his preferring liberal to conservative views, which were held also by many of his circle, it arose not from his considering liberalism more rational, but from its being in closer accordance with his manner of life. The liberal party said that in Russia everything is wrong, and certainly Stepan Arkadyevitch had many debts and was decidedly short of money. The liberal party said that marriage is an institution quite out of date, and that it needs reconstruction; and family life certainly afforded Stepan Arkadyevitch little gratification, and forced him into lying and hypocrisy, which was so repulsive to his nature. The liberal party said, or rather allowed it to be understood, that religion is only a curb to keep in check the barbarous classes of the people; and Stepan Arkadyevitch could not get through even a short service without his legs aching from standing up, and could never make out what was the object of all the terrible and high-flown language about another world when life might be so very amusing in this world. And with all this, Stepan Arkadyevitch, who liked a joke, was fond of puzzling a plain man by saying that if he prided himself on his origin, he ought not to stop at Rurik and disown the first founder of his family--the monkey. And so Liberalism had become a habit...Anna Karenina, Tolstoy.

As jobs disappear in a given area, declining home values trap people in certain neighborhoods. Even if you’d like to move, you can’t, because the bottom has fallen out of the market—you now owe more than any buyer is willing to pay. The costs of moving are so high that many people stay put. Of course, the people trapped are usually those with the least money; those who can afford to leave do so.

The Seventh Year In Deuteronomy 15, there was a law God gave the people of Israel that said every seventh year they had to release any Hebrew slaves. If you were Hebrew and owed another person money that you couldn’t repay, they could take you in as a slave and make you work full-time until you paid them back. But every seventh year, if you were a part of God’s chosen people, you had a special advantage. You got released. No matter

Humanistic propaganda screams at us everywhere we go. “You deserve better.” “There’s no one like you.” “Stand up for yourself.” And after a while we start believing the mantra. The most influential culture-shaping document in American history is the Declaration of Independence. And built into the ethos of American society are three inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I think the wording is ironic: the pursuit of happiness. It’s almost like the architects of modern democracy said, “We guarantee you life, and we promise you liberty. But happiness? Good luck.” America is a social experiment founded on the pursuit of happiness. Hundreds of millions of Americans are chasing down happiness. Money, materialism, sex, romance, religion, family, and fame are all pursuits of the same human craving—joy. But apart from Jesus, we never get there. People spend decades searching high and low for happiness and never land at joy. In an odd twist of fate, America, for all her life and liberty, is one of the most depressed nations in the world. And many of us are mad at God. Somehow we think God owes us. We deserve happiness. We deserve a good, comfortable life, free from pain and suffering. We have rights! Right? The scriptures present a totally different worldview that stands against the humanism of Western Europe. It is written, “By grace you have been saved.”[17] The word grace is (charis) in the Greek, which can be translated as “gift.” All of life is grace. All of life is a gift. Humans have no rights. Everything is a gift. Food, shelter, the clothes on our backs, the oxygen in our lungs—it’s all grace. The entire planet, the sky above us and the ground beneath our feet, is all on loan from the Creator God. We live under his roof, eat his food, and drink his water. We are guests. And we are blessed. A reporter once asked Bob Dylan if he was happy. Dylan’s response was, “These are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It’s not happiness or unhappiness. It’s either blessed or unblessed.”[18] I like that. We are blessed. When you reorient yourself to a biblical worldview, the only posture left to take is gratitude. If all of life is a gift, how could we help but thank God?

It’s amazing how gullible people are,” DeLoy continues. “But you have to remember what a huge comfort the religion is. It provides all the answers. It makes life simple. Nothing makes you feel better than doing what the prophet commands you to do. If you have some controversial issue that you’re dealing with—let’s say you owe a lot of money to somebody, and you don’t have the means to pay them—you go in and talk to the prophet, and he might tell you, ‘You don’t have to pay the money back. The Lord says it’s Okay.’ And if you just do what the prophet says, all the responsibility for your actions is now totally in his hands. You can refuse to pay the guy, or even kill somebody, or whatever, and feel completely good about it. And that’s a real big part of what holds this religion together: it’s not having to make those critical decisions that many of us have to make, and be responsible for your decisions.

In a democracy, the government is the people," Milo explained. "We're people, aren't we?" So we might just as well keep the money and eliminate the middleman. Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry. If we pay the government everything we owe it, we'll only be encouraging governmental control and discouraging other individuals from bombing their own men and planes. We'll be taking away their incentive.

Then why am I supposed to be giving you money I work my damn tail off for, huh?” Runner said, his voice bitter. “That’s what I never understand, this idea of handouts: alimony and child support and the government with its hands in my pockets. I barely can support myself, I don’t know why people think I need to take three extra jobs to give money to my wife, who has her own farm. Her own house on the farm. And four kids to help her out with it. I mean, I sure as hell didn’t grow up thinking my daddy owed me a living, my daddy oughta give me money for Nikes and college and dress shirts and …

Our capitalistic society emphasizes pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps and making one’s own way to the top of the economic ladder, or as high as one can possibly reach. While there is nothing inherently wrong with making a legitimate and honest living, the emphasis on individuality that pervades our society often causes people to overlook the plight of the poor or even to believe that the poor owe their impoverished state to their own purported laziness. While this may be true of some of the poor, it is not fair to make sweeping judgments that allege all of the poor to be slothful parasites who live off taxpayers’ hard-earned money.

Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn. And for him, living in a certain society—owing to the need, ordinarily developed at years of discretion, for some degree of mental activity—to have views was just as indispensable as to have a hat. If there was a reason for his preferring liberal to conservative views, which were held also by many of his circle, it arose not from his considering liberalism more rational, but from its being in closer accordance with his manner of life. The liberal party said that in Russia everything is wrong, and certainly Stepan Arkadyevitch had many debts and was decidedly short of money. The liberal party said that marriage is an institution quite out of date, and that it needs reconstruction; and family life certainly afforded Stepan Arkadyevitch little gratification, and forced him into lying and hypocrisy, which was so repulsive to his nature. The liberal party said, or rather allowed it to be understood, that religion is only a curb to keep in check the barbarous classes of the people; and Stepan Arkadyevitch could not get through even a short service without his legs aching from standing up, and could never make out what was the object of all the terrible and high-flown language about another world when life might be so very amusing in this world. And with all this, Stepan Arkadyevitch, who liked a joke, was fond of puzzling a plain man by saying that if he prided himself on his origin, he ought not to stop at Rurik and disown the first founder of his family—the monkey. And so Liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch's, and he liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain. He read the leading article, in which it was maintained that it was quite senseless in our day to raise an outcry that radicalism was threatening to swallow up all conservative elements, and that the government ought to take measures to crush the revolutionary hydra; that, on the contrary, "in our opinion the danger lies not in that fantastic revolutionary hydra, but in the obstinacy of traditionalism clogging progress," etc., etc. He read another article, too, a financial one, which alluded to Bentham and Mill, and dropped some innuendoes reflecting on the ministry. With his characteristic quickwittedness he caught the drift of each innuendo, divined whence it came, at whom and on what ground it was aimed, and that afforded him, as it always did, a certain satisfaction. But today that satisfaction was embittered by Matrona Philimonovna's advice and the unsatisfactory state of the household. He read, too, that Count Beist was rumored to have left for Wiesbaden, and that one need have no more gray hair, and of the sale of a light carriage, and of a young person seeking a situation; but these items of information did not give him, as usual, a quiet, ironical gratification. Having finished the paper, a second cup of coffee and a roll and butter, he got up, shaking the crumbs of the roll off his waistcoat; and, squaring his broad chest, he smiled joyously: not because there was anything particularly agreeable in his mind—the joyous smile was evoked by a good digestion.

It was hard to ask someone like Zara about that sort of thing directly, so the psychologist asked instead: “Why do you like your job?” “Because I’m an analyst. Most people who do the same job as me are economists,” Zara replied immediately. “What’s the difference?” “Economists only approach problems head-on. That’s why economists never predict stock market crashes.” “And you’re saying that analysts do?” “Analysts expect crashes. Economists only earn money when things go well for the bank’s customers, whereas analysts earn money all the time.” “Does that make you feel guilty?” the psychologist asked, mostly to see if Zara thought that word was a feeling or something to do with gold plating. “Is it the croupier’s fault if you lose your money at the casino?” Zara asked. “I’m not sure that’s a fair comparison.” “Why not?” “Because you use words like ‘stock market crash,’ but it’s never the stock market or the banks that crash. Only people do that.” “There’s a very logical explanation for why you think that.” “Really?” “It’s because you think the world owes you something. It doesn’t.” “You still haven’t answered my question. I asked why you like your job. All you’ve done is tell me why you’re good at it.” “Only weak people like their jobs.” “I don’t think that’s true.” “That’s because you like your job.” “You say that as if there’s something wrong with that.

You think because he arrested me that throws it off again I reckon? I don’t. It’s his job. It’s what he gets paid for. To arrest people that break the law. And I didn’t jest break the law, I made a livin at it. . . . More money in three hours than a workin man makes in a week. Why is that? Because it’s harder work? No, because a man who makes a livin doin something that has to get him in jail sooner or later has to be paid for the jail, has to be paid in advance not jest for his time breakin the law but for the time he has to build when he gets caught at it. So I been paid. Gifford’s been paid. Nobody owes nobody. If it wadn’t for Gifford, the law, I wouldn’t of had the job I had blockading and if it wadn’t for me blockading, Gifford wouldn’t of had his job arrestin blockaders. Now who owes who?

Lest you think that this pattern has occurred only in connection with Jewish moneylenders and the Knights Templar, let me remind you of Idi Amin’s expulsion of the East Indians from Uganda in 1972, the East Indians were highly represented in the banking business and of the treatment of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam in the 1970s, including their expulsion. Whenever you have an out-group to whom an in-group owes a lot of money, “Kill the Creditors” remains an available though morally repugnant way of cancelling your debts. Note: you need not resort to murder as such. If you make people run away very fast, they’ll leave all their stuff behind, and then you can grab it. And burn the debt records: that goes without saying. You’ll notice I got through this part without mentioning the Nazis. The point being that I didn’t have to. For they have not been alone.

Never pick up a friend by seeing the volume of wealth, power, followers, money or degree rather pick up one who has a great caring heart can sense your needs and can fill it. Our life span is too tiny, don’t be too greedy for more wealth, money, power rather be grateful for the love you earned and be a pauper of love making your life idyllic and happy. Today, we need more love-giver, peace-maker, owe soother rather than war-monger politician, bureaucrats, mighty military, lethal weapons, alms-punter cleric and hate-preacher. We are all one, if we can believe it, no longer we can harm, hate or ignore others anymore. I'm so much humbled and valued for the love of the people who touched the bottoms end of my heart at a time of delusion and despair for making my life smoothed, flourished and filled with love. Let's come and love people surrounded by you to uplift them from hell. They badly need your hug for a big leave from woes.

Y.T. is bored. She gets on her plank. The wheels blossom and become circular. She guides a tight wobbly course around the cars, coasts down into the street. The spotlight follows her for a moment, maybe picking up some stock footage. Videotape is cheap. You never know when something will be useful, so you might as well videotape it. People make their living that way -- people in the intel business. People like Hiro Protagonist. They just know stuff, or they just go around and videotape stuff. They put it in the Library. When people want to know the particular things that they know or watch their videotapes, they pay them money and check it out of the Library, or just buy it outright. This is a weird racket, but Y.T. likes the idea of it. Usually, the CIC won't pay any attention to a Kourier. But apparently Hiro has a deal with them. Maybe she can make a deal with Hiro. Because Y.T. knows a lot of interesting little things. One little thing she knows is that the Mafia owes her a favor.

In Germany, the Depression was the final nail in the coffin of the Weimar Republic. Germany needed loans to pay its reparations, but once the Depression hit, its funding dried up and hyperinflation ensued as the government printed more money in a desperate effort to come up with the funds to repay what it owed. The collapse of the Weimar Republic was a textbook case of what happens when democracy and capitalism fail; angry, desperate people became willing to go along with a suspension of the most basic civil liberties in the hope that order and prosperity would be restored. Parties and politicians embracing fascism—a philosophy animated by extreme nationalism that called for government control of virtually all aspects of political and economic life—gained ground in Germany, Italy, Austria, and Japan. By 1932, the Nazi Party had become the largest party in the German parliament; a year later, Adolf Hitler became chancellor. He quickly consolidated power, dismantled democratic protections, formalized harsh discrimination against Jews and others, and began rearming Germany. Hitler broke through the military constraints set by the Versailles Treaty. The absence of a French or British response taught Hitler the dangerous lesson that he could assert German rights as he saw them with little to fear.

[The citizens supporting democracy in the civil war in the city-state of Corcyra] captured and executed all their enemies whom they could find. . . . They then proceeded to the sanctuary of Hera and persuaded about fifty of the suppliants [from the opposing faction] who had sought sacred refuge there to agree to appear in court. The democrats thereupon condemned every last one of the erstwhile suppliants to death. When the other suppliants who had refused to go to trial comprehended what was going on, most of them killed each other right there in the sanctuary. Some hanged themselves from trees, while others found a variety of ways to commit suicide. [For a week] the members of the democratic faction went on slaughtering any fellow citizens whom they thought of as their enemies. They accused their victims of plotting to overthrow the democracy, but in truth they killed many people simply out of personal hatred or because they owed money to the victims. Death came in every way and fashion. And, as customarily occurs in such situations, the killers went to every extreme and beyond. There were fathers who murdered their sons; men were dragged out of the temples to be put to death or simply butchered on the very altars of the gods; some people were actually walled up in the temple of Dionysus and left there to die [of starvation].

A striking example from the history of writing is the origin of the syllabary devised in Arkansas around 1820 by a Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah, for writing the Cherokee language. Sequoyah observed that white people made marks on paper, and that they derived great advantage by using those marks to record and repeat lengthy speeches. However, the detailed operations of those marks remained a mystery to him, since (like most Cherokees before 1820) Sequoyah was illiterate and could neither speak nor read English. Because he was a blacksmith, Sequoyah began by devising an accounting system to help him keep track of his customers’ debts. He drew a picture of each customer; then he drew circles and lines of various sizes to represent the amount of money owed. Around 1810, Sequoyah decided to go on to design a system for writing the Cherokee language. He again began by drawing pictures, but gave them up as too complicated and too artistically demanding. He next started to invent separate signs for each word, and again became dissatisfied when he had coined thousands of signs and still needed more. Finally, Sequoyah realized that words were made up of modest numbers of different sound bites that recurred in many different words—what we would call syllables. He initially devised 200 syllabic signs and gradually reduced them to 85, most of them for combinations of one consonant and one vowel. As one source of the signs themselves, Sequoyah practiced copying the letters from an English spelling book given to him by a schoolteacher. About two dozen of his Cherokee syllabic signs were taken directly from those letters, though of course with completely changed meanings, since Sequoyah did not know the English meanings. For example, he chose the shapes D, R, b, h to represent the Cherokee syllables a, e, si, and ni, respectively, while the shape of the numeral 4 was borrowed for the syllable se. He coined other signs by modifying English letters, such as designing the signs , , and to represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively. Still other signs were entirely of his creation, such as , , and for ho, li, and nu, respectively. Sequoyah’s syllabary is widely admired by professional linguists for its good fit to Cherokee sounds, and for the ease with which it can be learned. Within a short time, the Cherokees achieved almost 100 percent literacy in the syllabary, bought a printing press, had Sequoyah’s signs cast as type, and began printing books and newspapers. Cherokee writing remains one of the best-attested examples of a script that arose through idea diffusion. We know that Sequoyah received paper and other writing materials, the idea of a writing system, the idea of using separate marks, and the forms of several dozen marks. Since, however, he could neither read nor write English, he acquired no details or even principles from the existing scripts around him. Surrounded by alphabets he could not understand, he instead independently reinvented a syllabary, unaware that the Minoans of Crete had already invented another syllabary 3,500 years previously.

He asked me innocently, what then had brought me to his home, and without a minutes hesitation I told him an astounding lie. A lie which was later to prove a great truth. I told him I was only pretending to sell the encyclopedia in order to meet people and write about them. That interested him enormously, even more than the encyclopedia. He wanted to know what I would write about him, if I could say. It's taken me twenty years to answer that question, but here it is. If you would still like to know, John Doe of the city of Bayonne, this is it. I owe you a great deal, because after that lie I told you, I left your house and I tore up the prospectus furnished me by The Encyclopedia Britannica and I threw it in the gutter. I said to myself I will never again go to people under false pretenses, even if is to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I have to starve. I am going home now and I will sit down and really write about people and if anybody knocks at my door to sell me something, I will invite him in and say "Why are you doing this?" and if he says it is because he needs to make a living I will offer him what money I have and beg him once again to think what he is doing. I want to prevent as many men as possible from pretending that they have to do this or that because they must earn a living. It is not true. One can starve to death, it is much better. Every man who voluntarily starves to death jams another cog in the automatic process. I would rather see a man take a gun and kill his neighbor in order to get the food he needs than keep up the automatic process by pretending that he has to earn a living. That's what I want to say, Mr John Doe.

Phid. In what then, pray, shall I obey you? Strep. Reform your habits as quickly as possible, and go and learn what I advise. Phid. Tell me now, what do you prescribe? Strep. And will you obey me at all? Phid. By Bacchus, I will obey you. Strep. Look this way then! Do you see this little door and little house? Phid. I see it. What then, pray, is this, father? Strep. This is a thinking-shop of wise spirits. There dwell men who in speaking of the heavens persuade people that it is an oven, and that it encompasses us, and that we are the embers. These men teach, if one give them money, to conquer in speaking, right or wrong. Phid. Who are they? Strep. I do not know the name accurately. They are minute philosophers, noble and excellent. Phid. Bah! They are rogues; I know them. You mean the quacks, the pale-faced wretches, the bare-footed fellows, of whose numbers are the miserable Socrates and Chaerephon. Strep. Hold! Hold! Be silent! Do not say anything foolish. But, if you have any concern for your father's patrimony, become one of them, having given up your horsemanship. Phid. I would not, by Bacchus, even if you were to give me the pheasants which Leogoras rears! Strep. Go, I entreat you, dearest of men, go and be taught. Phid. Why, what shall I learn? Strep. They say that among them are both the two causes—the better cause, whichever that is, and the worse: they say that the one of these two causes, the worse, prevails, though it speaks on the unjust side. If, therefore you learn for me this unjust cause, I would not pay any one, not even an obolus of these debts, which I owe at present on your account. Phid. I can not comply; for I should not dare to look upon the knights, having lost all my colour.

One of the greatest difficulties we human beings seem to have is to relinquish long-held ideas. Many of us are addicted to being right, even if facts do not support us. One fixed image we cling to, as iconic in today’s culture as the devil was in previous ages, is that of the addict as an unsavoury and shadowy character, given to criminal activity. What we don’t see is how we’ve contributed to making him a criminal. There is nothing more intrinsically criminal in the average drug user than in the average cigarette smoker or alcohol addict. The drugs they inject or inhale do not themselves induce criminal activity by their pharmacological effect, except perhaps in the way that alcohol can also fuel a person’s pent-up aggression and remove the mental inhibitions that thwart violence. Stimulant drugs may have that effect on some users, but narcotics like heroin do not; on the contrary, they tend to calm people down. It is withdrawal from opiates that makes people physically ill, irritable and more likely to act violently — mostly out of desperation to replenish their supply. The criminality associated with addiction follows directly from the need to raise money to purchase drugs at prices that are artificially inflated owing to their illegality. The addict shoplifts, steals and robs because it’s the only way she can obtain the funds to pay the dealer. History has demonstrated many times over that people will transgress laws and resist coercion when it comes to struggling for their basic needs — or what they perceive as such. Sam Sullivan, Vancouver’s quadriplegic mayor, told a conference on drug addiction once that if wheelchairs were illegal, he would do anything to get one, no matter what laws he had to break. It was an apt comparison: the hardcore addict feels equally handicapped without his substances. As we have seen, many addicts who deal in drugs do so exclusively to finance their habit. There is no profit in it for them.

As time passed, I learned more and more about the culture that comes with beign an injured veteran. There are a lot of really wonderful people and organizations to help veterans returning from war. Right about the time I started to really move forward in my recovery, two women came by and introduced themselves. They explained that they raise money to help injured veterans with various needs. They asked if there was anything I or my family needed. I said, “No thank you, I’m all good.” But my sisters piped up and said, “He needs clothes. He doesn’t have anything.” The women smiled and said they’d be back. They came back with some sweatpants and a shirt and then announced that they were taking us to the mall. This would be my first time leaving the campus of Walter Reed, my first real trip out of the hospital. We were all excited. Leaving the hospital was a big step for me but my poor sisters had been cooped up much of the time with me in there as well. I was a little nervous, but I owed it to them to push aside my anxiety. We decided that the electric wheelchair would be too heavy and too much trouble to get in and out of the car, so Jennifer wheeled me down to the front door where the ladies were waiting in their car. With very little assistance, Jennifer was able to get me for that chair into the car and we were off to the mall. When we arrived, my sisters pulled the wheelchair out of the trunk and placed it next to the car door. They opened the door and Jennifer leaned down and with one swift motion lifted me up like a nearly weightless child and placed me in the chair. I laughed it off. “My sister’s strong. She’s really strong,” I boasted on her behalf. Sara, Katherine, and Jennifer were laughing the whole time because I didn’t realize how scrawny I was, how much weight I had lost. Jennifer could pick me up with no problem because I practically weighed nothing at all. But through the laughter, I felt a pang of guilt. I am the brother of three sisters. It was my job to protect and care for them. Yet here I was, barely able to take care of myself.

Socrates: So now you won't acknowledge any gods except the ones we do--Chaos, the Clouds, the Tongue--just these three? Strepsiades: Absolutely-- I'd refuse to talk to any other gods, if I ran into them--and I decline to sacrifice or pour libations to them. I'll not provide them any incense... I want to twist all legal verdicts in my favor, to evade my creditors. Chorus Leader: You'll get that, just what you desire. For what you want is nothing special. So be confident--give yourself over to our agents here. Strepsiades: I'll do that--I'll place my trust in you. Necessity is weighing me down--the horses, those thoroughbreds, my marriage--all that has worn me out. So now, this body of mine I'll give to them, with no strings attached, to do with as they like--to suffer blows, go without food and drink, live like a pig, to freeze or have my skin flayed for a pouch-- if I can just get out of all my debt and make men think of me as bold and glib, as fearless, impudent, detestable, one who cobbles lies together, makes up words, a practiced legal rogue, a statute book, a chattering fox, sly and needle sharp, a slippery fraud, a sticky rascal, foul whipping boy or twisted villain, troublemaker, or idly prattling fool. If they can make those who run into me call me these names, they can do what they want--no questions asked. If, by Demeter, they're keen, they can convert me into sausages and serve me up to men who think deep thoughts. Chorus: Here's a man whose mind's now smart, no holding back--prepared to start. When you have learned all this from me you know your glory will arise among all men to heaven's skies. Strepsiades: And what will I get out of this? Chorus: For all time, you'll live with me a life most people truly envy. Strepsiades: You mean one day I'll really see that? Chorus: Hordes will sit outside your door wanting your advice and more-- to talk, to place their trust in you for their affairs and lawsuits, too, things which merit your great mind. They'll leave you lots of cash behind. Chorus Leader: [to Socrates] So get started with this old man's lessons, what you intend to teach him first of all--rouse his mind, test his intellectual powers. Socrates: Come on then, tell me the sort of man you are--once I know that, I can bring to bear on you my latest batteries with full effect. Strepsiades: What's that? By god, are you assaulting me? Socrates: No--I want to learn some things from you. What about your memory? Strepsiades: To tell the truth, it works two ways. If someone owes me something, I remember really well. But if it's poor me that owes the money, I forget a lot. Socrates: Do you have a natural gift for speech? Strepsiades: Not for speaking--only for evading debt. Socrates: ... Now, what do you do if someone hits you? Strepsiades: If I get hit, I wait around a while, then find witnesses, hang around some more, then go to court.

ASSERTIVE The Assertive type believes time is money; every wasted minute is a wasted dollar. Their self-image is linked to how many things they can get accomplished in a period of time. For them, getting the solution perfect isn’t as important as getting it done. Assertives are fiery people who love winning above all else, often at the expense of others. Their colleagues and counterparts never question where they stand because they are always direct and candid. They have an aggressive communication style and they don’t worry about future interactions. Their view of business relationships is based on respect, nothing more and nothing less. Most of all, the Assertive wants to be heard. And not only do they want to be heard, but they don’t actually have the ability to listen to you until they know that you’ve heard them. They focus on their own goals rather than people. And they tell rather than ask. When you’re dealing with Assertive types, it’s best to focus on what they have to say, because once they are convinced you understand them, then and only then will they listen for your point of view. To an Assertive, every silence is an opportunity to speak more. Mirrors are a wonderful tool with this type. So are calibrated questions, labels, and summaries. The most important thing to get from an Assertive will be a “that’s right” that may come in the form of a “that’s it exactly” or “you hit it on the head.” When it comes to reciprocity, this type is of the “give an inch/take a mile” mentality. They will have figured they deserve whatever you have given them so they will be oblivious to expectations of owing something in return. They will actually simply be looking for the opportunity to receive more. If they have given some kind of concession, they are surely counting the seconds until they get something in return. If you are an Assertive, be particularly conscious of your tone. You will not intend to be overly harsh but you will often come off that way. Intentionally soften your tone and work to make it more pleasant. Use calibrated questions and labels with your counterpart since that will also make you more approachable and increase the chances for collaboration. We’ve seen how each of these groups views the importance of time differently (time = preparation; time = relationship; time = money). They also have completely different interpretations of silence. I’m definitely an Assertive, and at a conference this Accommodator type told me that he blew up a deal. I thought, What did you do, scream at the other guy and leave? Because that’s me blowing up a deal. But it turned out that he went silent; for an Accommodator type, silence is anger. For Analysts, though, silence means they want to think. And Assertive types interpret your silence as either you don’t have anything to say or you want them to talk. I’m one, so I know: the only time I’m silent is when I’ve run out of things to say. The funny thing is when these cross over. When an Analyst pauses to think, their Accommodator counterpart gets nervous and an Assertive one starts talking, thereby annoying the Analyst, who thinks to herself, Every time I try to think you take that as an opportunity to talk some more. Won’t you ever shut up?

MT: Mimetic desire can only produce evil? RG: No, it can become bad if it stirs up rivalries but it isn't bad in itself, in fact it's very good, and, fortunately, people can no more give it up than they can give up food or sleep. It is to imitation that we owe not only our traditions, without which we would be helpless, but also, paradoxically, all the innovations about which so much is made today. Modern technology and science show this admirably. Study the history of the world economy and you'll see that since the nineteenth century all the countries that, at a given moment, seemed destined never to play anything but a subordinate role, for lack of “creativity,” because of their imitative or, as Montaigne would have said, their “apish” nature, always turned out later on to be more creative than their models. It began with Germany, which, in the nineteenth century, was thought to be at most capable of imitating the English, and this at the precise moment it surpassed them. It continued with the Americans in whom, for a long time, the Europeans saw mediocre gadget-makers who weren't theoretical or cerebral enough to take on a world leadership role. And it happened once more with the Japanese who, after World War II, were still seen as pathetic imitators of Western superiority. It's starting up again, it seems, with Korea, and soon, perhaps, it'll be the Chinese. All of these consecutive mistakes about the creative potential of imitation cannot be due to chance. To make an effective imitator, you have to openly admire the model you're imitating, you have to acknowledge your imitation. You have to explicitly recognize the superiority of those who succeed better than you and set about learning from them. If a businessman sees his competitor making money while he's losing money, he doesn't have time to reinvent his whole production process. He imitates his more fortunate rivals. In business, imitation remains possible today because mimetic vanity is less involved than in the arts, in literature, and in philosophy. In the most spiritual domains, the modern world rejects imitation in favor of originality at all costs. You should never say what others are saying, never paint what others are painting, never think what others are thinking, and so on. Since this is absolutely impossible, there soon emerges a negative imitation that sterilizes everything. Mimetic rivalry cannot flare up without becoming destructive in a great many ways. We can see it today in the so-called soft sciences (which fully deserve the name). More and more often they're obliged to turn their coats inside out and, with great fanfare, announce some new “epistemological rupture” that is supposed to revolutionize the field from top to bottom. This rage for originality has produced a few rare masterpieces and quite a few rather bizarre things in the style of Jacques Lacan's Écrits. Just a few years ago the mimetic escalation had become so insane that it drove everyone to make himself more incomprehensible than his peers. In American universities the imitation of those models has since produced some pretty comical results. But today that lemon has been squeezed completely dry. The principle of originality at all costs leads to paralysis. The more we celebrate “creative and enriching” innovations, the fewer of them there are. So-called postmodernism is even more sterile than modernism, and, as its name suggests, also totally dependent on it. For two thousand years the arts have been imitative, and it's only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that people started refusing to be mimetic. Why? Because we're more mimetic than ever. Rivalry plays a role such that we strive vainly to exorcise imitation. MT

But the man who owned the vineyard said to one of those workers, ‘Friend, I am being fair to you. You agreed to work for one coin. So take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same pay that I gave you. I can do what I want with my own money. Are you jealous because I am good to those people?’ “So those who are last now will someday be first, and those who are first now will someday be last.” (20:1–16 NCV) “Do you begrudge my generosity?” the landowner is saying. The answer, of course, is yes, they do. They begrudge it quite a bit. Even though it has no impact on them whatsoever, it offends them. We hate it when we are trying so hard to earn something, and then someone else gets the same thing without trying as hard. Think about this for a moment, in real, “today” terms. Someone gives you a backbreaking job, and you’re happy for it, but at the end of the day, when you’re getting paid, the guys who came in with five minutes left get the same amount you just got. Seriously? It’s imbalanced, unfair, maddening . . . and it’s also exactly what Jesus just said the kingdom of God is like. Not only is it maddening; it’s maddening to the “good” people! Common sense says you don’t do this. You don’t pay latecomers who came in a few minutes ago the same amount that you paid the hardworking folks you hired first. Jesus tells this story, knowing full well that the conscientious ones listening would find this hardest to take. And, as a matter of fact, as a conscientious one, I find this hard to take. I’m just being honest. This story does not fit my style. I’m all about people getting what they deserve. Oh, it’s offensive, too, when Jesus turns to a guy who’s being executed next to Him, and tells him, “Today, you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). What did the guy do to deserve that? He did nothing. If you call yourself a Christian, and you want things to be fair, and you want God’s rewards given out only to the deserving and the upstanding and the religious, well, honestly, Jesus has got to be a complete embarrassment to you. In fact, to so many upstanding Christians, He is. He has always been offensive, and remains offensive, to those who seek to achieve “righteousness” through what they do. Always. People who’ve grown up in church (like me) are well acquainted with the idea that Jesus is our “cornerstone.” He’s the solid rock of our faith. Got it. Not controversial. It’s well-known. But what’s not so talked about: That stone, Jesus, causes religious people to stumble. And that rock is offensive to “good” people: So what does all this mean? Those who are not Jews were not trying to make themselves right with God, but they were made right with God because of their faith. The people of Israel tried to follow a law to make themselves right with God. But they did not succeed, because they tried to make themselves right by the things they did instead of trusting in God to make them right. They stumbled over the stone that causes people to stumble. (Rom. 9:30–32 NCV) And then Paul says something a couple verses later that angers “good Christians” to this day: Because they did not know the way that God makes people right with him, they tried to make themselves right in their own way. So they did not accept God’s way of making people right. Christ ended the law so that everyone who believes in him may be right with God. (Rom. 10:3–4 NCV) It’s not subtle, what Paul’s writing here. For anyone who believes in Him, Jesus ended the law as a means to righteousness. Yet so many think they can achieve—even have achieved—some kind of “good Christian” status on the basis of the rule-keeping work they’ve done. They suspect they’ll do good things and God will owe them for it, like payment for a job well done. Paul says, in effect, if you think you should get what you earn, you will . . . and you don’t want that.

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

The Rothschilds taught the rich men of the earth to smile and be glad to permit such debts to be incurred. But such debts must not be personal debts. They must be debts owed by governments so that entire peoples may thus be mortgaged. And, when entire peoples are mortgaged, what more might a gentle multimillionaire ask? Why should he require that the debt be paid? Better for him and his class that the debt be not paid. So long as the debt stands the people are mortgaged to him. They plant. He reaps. He holds the bond. He can draw interest upon it until the bond is due and then exchange it for another bond and draw interest some more; or he can sell his bond to some other millionaire and thus get his money back. It is really so great a device that these gentlemen themselves assure us that the existence of a national debt is " the first stage of a nation toward civilization." Of course, such assurances are often given, not by the rich personally, but by the eminent political economists who are employed by them to provide wholesome reading matter for the common people.

The Mysterious Letter You get an anonymous letter on January 2nd informing you that the market will go up during the month. It proves to be true, but you disregard it owing to the well known January effect (stocks have gone up historically during January). Then you receive another one on Feb 1st telling you that the market will go down. Again, it proves to be true. Then you get another letter on March 1st –same story. By July you are intrigued by the prescience of the anonymous person until you are asked to invest in a special offshore fund. You pour all your savings into it. Two months later, your money is gone. You go spill your tears on your neighbor's shoulder and he tells you that he remembers that he received two such mysterious letters. But the mailings stopped at the second letter. He recalls that the first one was correct in its prediction, the other incorrect. What happened? The trick is as follows. The con operator pulls 10,000 names out of a phone book. He mails a bullish letter to one half of the sample, and a bearish one to the other half. The following month he selects the names of the persons to whom he mailed the letter whose prediction turned out to be right, that is, 5000 names. The next month he does the same with the remaining 2500 names, until the list narrows down to 500 people. Of these there will be 200 victims. An investment in a few thousand dollars worth of postage stamps will turn into several million.

Some immigrants to the United States borrow a great deal of money from investors to get to America. Upon arrival they are required to work off the debt to the investor over a period of time. Many Christians view their salvation the same way—that they owe Christ a lifetime of indentured servanthood. This is completely understandable—especially with such Christian phrases like “He paid a debt He didn’t owe,” that set us up with the wrong perspective. The debtor concept sets us up to see God as an all-powerful slave master, always expecting us to “pay up” with all the religious currency we can gather!       First of all, we are not foreigners trying to immigrate to heaven. Heaven is our true home. God is our true Father. We are His people. He does not bring us to Himself and then have us pay off our debt to Him for doing so. The pleasure of redemption and the joy of salvation is God’s. It is for His supreme pleasure and for the glory of His name that He has saved and redeemed us. To require us to work off some sort of debt for His redemption would be to dilute his pleasure, adulterate His supreme act of love, and weaken His powerful sacrifice.

It hit me like divine inspiration. Religion is the greatest graft ever invented because no one ever loses money claiming to speak for the invisible man in the sky. People already believe in him. They already accept that they owe him money, and they think they'll burn in hell if they don't pay him. If you can't make money in the religion business, you need to give up.

Never gamble with other people’s money,” he said to me the next day, as if I should have known it. “If you lose, you’ll be in debt to them. If you win, you’ll feel you’re owed something, but it’s their choice whether to share the winnings with you—and how much. It’s a position no woman should put herself in.

Lucy, I’m begging you,” he says, whispering with bite. “Just go out with the guy for one night.” “Why the hell would I do that?” He hesitates. “I owe some money to some bad people—

But no matter how tough a filming day can be, I’m grateful, and I look at it as getting paid to have dinner with my family. I am blessed. I’ve also realized, now that I’ve been blessed with a good paycheck, that I think I’m like my dad, and I really don’t care about money so much. It doesn’t make you happy. I had a great childhood, and I never even had my own bedroom. What does make you happy is doing for other people. Whether it’s taking fresh deer meat or ducks to some neighbors in need down the road or flying down to the Dominican Republic to help build an orphanage, it’s people that matter, not money. When I went to the Caribbean with Korie a while back to help build the orphanage, I came with bags full of new Hanes underwear and T-shirts. When I handed out those little packages, worth just a few bucks each, the kids literally fell to the ground, crying with happiness. They were the happiest, funniest little kids, grabbing my beard and smiling big. They have nothing, and some free underwear made them happy. It was a big wake-up call for me as I realized how much I have and how a little inconvenience like the Internet going out can ruin my day. I don’t want to live like that, like the world owes me a comfortable life and I’m not happy unless I have all the conveniences. I want to live a fulfilled life, and I want my kids to live a fulfilled life too. I want more for my kids. I want to show my kids how to have faith in Jesus, how to use the Bible as their guide to life, and when they grow up, I want my kids to change the world. I also want Jess and me to continue to learn how to love each other, and I want us to grow old together and be just like my mom and dad. My idea of happiness is being with my family in a cabin in the woods or at a campout, sitting around a campfire telling stories, roasting marshmallows, and watching the fireflies.

The most remarkable thing is that even in Adam Smith’s examples of fish and nails and tobacco being used as money, the same sort of thing was happening. In the years following the appearance of the Wealth of Nations, scholars checked into most of these examples and discovered that in just about every case, the people involved were quite familiar with the use of money, and in fact, were using money- as a unit of account. Take the example of dried cod, supposedly used as money in Newfoundland. As the British diplomat A. Mitchell pointed out almost a century ago, what Smith describes was really an illusion, created by a simple credit arrangement: In the early days of the Newfoundland fishing industry, there was no permanent European population, the fishers went there for the fishing season only, and those who were not fishers were traders who bought the dried fish and sold to the fishers their daily supplies. The latter sold their catch to the traders at the market price in pounds, shilling and pence, and obtained in return a credit on their books, which they paid for the supplies. Balances due by the traders were paid for by drafts on England or France. It was quite the same in the Scottish village. It’s not as if anyone actually walked into the local pub, plunked down a roofing nail, and asked for a pint of beer. Employers in Smith’s day often lacked coin to pay their workers; wages could be delayed by a year or more; in the meantime, it was considered acceptable for employees to carry off either some of their own products or leftover work materials, lumber, fabric, cord, and so on. The nails were de facto interest on what their employers owed to them. So they went to the pub, ran up a tab, and when occasion permitted, brought in a bag of nails to charge off against the debt. The law making tobacco legal tender in Virginia seems to have been an attempt by planters to oblige local merchants to accept their products as a credit around harvest time. In effect, the law forced all merchants in Virginia to become middlemen in tobacco business, whether they liked it or not; just as all West Indian merchants were obliged to become sugar dealers, since that’s what all their wealthier customers brought in to write off against their debt. The primary examples, then, were ones in which people were improvising credit systems, because actual money- gold and silver coinage- was in short supply.

Amelia went to a built-in bookshelf and inspected the volumes as she asked idly, “Why is it, do you think, that Mr. Rohan was reluctant to take money from Lord Selway?” Merripen cast a sardonic glance over his shoulder. “You know how the Rom feel about material possessions.” “Yes, I know your people don’t like to be encumbered. But from what I’ve seen, Romas are hardly reluctant to accept a few coins in return for a service.” “It’s more than not wanting to be encumbered. For a chal to be in this position—” “What’s a chal?” “A son of the Rom. For a chal to wear such fine clothes, to stay under one roof so long, to reap such financial bounty … it’s shameful. Embarrassing. Contrary to his nature.” He was so stern and certain of himself, Amelia couldn’t resist teasing him a little. “And what’s your excuse, Merripen? You’ve stayed under the Hathaway roof for an awfully long time.” “That’s different. For one thing, there’s no profit in living with you.” Amelia laughed. “For another…” Merripen’s voice softened. “I owe my life to your family.” Amelia felt a surge of affection as she stared at his unyielding profile. “What a spoilsport,” she said gently. “I try to mock you, and you ruin the moment with sincerity. You know you’re not obligated to stay, dear friend. You’ve repaid your debt to us a thousand times over.” Merripen shook his head immediately. “It would be like leaving a nest of plover chicks with a fox nearby.” “We’re not as helpless as all that,” she protested. “I’m perfectly capable of taking care of the family … and so is Leo. When he’s sober.” “When would that be?” His bland tone made the question all the more sarcastic

Most people can’t see, even if you tell them, that money doesn’t exist. Money is literally speaking an IOU – I owe you. Therefore, we’re all exchanging beliefs between one another.

The United States government effectively put a three-trillion-dollar Band-Aid over the problem and changed nothing. The bankers were rescued; small-scale debtors—with a paltry few exceptions—were not.14 To the contrary, in the middle of the greatest economic recession since the ’30s, we are already beginning to see a backlash against them—driven by financial corporations who have now turned to the same government that bailed them out to apply the full force of the law against ordinary citizens in financial trouble. “It’s not a crime to owe money,” reports the Minneapolis-St. Paul StarTribune, “But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts.” In Minnesota, “the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009 … In Illinois and southwest Indiana, some judges jail debtors for missing court-ordered debt payments. In extreme cases, people stay in jail until they raise a minimum payment. In January [2010], a judge sentenced a Kenney, Ill., man ‘to indefinite incarceration’ until he came up with $300 toward a lumber yard debt.”15

Table of Contents Things About House For Rent Barrie Excitement About House For Rent Barrie The 15 Second Trick For House For Rent Barrie If you're looking to move into a home that's not going to be taken over by an estate agent, then you should seriously consider taking a house for rent to stay. There are many reasons why you might want to rent a home rather than staying in your own. Perhaps you've just bought a house and you're trying to find somewhere to stay before you move in. Maybe you're simply on holiday and need somewhere to stay until you're back at home. Things About House For Rent Barrie There are many things to think about when you are considering renting a house instead of buying one. Before you decide whether or not you want to rent a house, you will need to consider what you'll be doing in the house for the majority of your stay. Will you be living alone, with a friend or partner or as a couple? How long do you want to stay in the house to avoid being tempted to move away once your new home is complete? The main reason why you might want to rent a house instead of buying it is because you can save money in the process. You won't have to spend months paying rent, or put down a deposit, or arrange for an insurance policy or rental repayments to take care of everything in the event that you move out. With the economy currently, people don't like to have to spend money, but they also like to save money. If you live in Barrie, then this will be an ideal place to rent a house to live for most of the year. Although you may have to pay some sort of rent during the summer months, and during the colder months you may have to find some other way to pay the costs involved in staying there. Most people who rent a house often decide to move back into their own homes once the lease on the property is up. However, they often find that moving back in isn't as easy or comfortable as when they first moved into the home. So, they choose to take a house to rent to stay for a few months, until they're back in their own home. Renting a house is also a great way to get a place to work in London. Because London is so popular, there are many people working in various different places all across the city, and they are not all living in one place. A house to rent to stay in is a convenient option for many people, and it allows them to work from home. This way they will be able to continue to work, pay their bills and other expenses at home, but still have access to other activities throughout London. Excitement About House For Rent Barrie When you are thinking about taking a house to rent to live in, there are also a number of benefits for you. First, you won't have to put up with the expense of all the costs that go along with having a property to rent and buying a property. Even if you do want to buy a property you may be able to buy it cheaper. The other benefit to owning a home is that you'll be able to easily get a tax return back on the money you have saved by taking on a house to let in Barrie. Although not all landlords give out tax returns on the money you owe them, it is worth asking. The truth is that more people are choosing to rent out their homes to tenants, and this gives them an opportunity to help themselves to some of that money.

The political triumph of Donald Trump is a symbol and symptom—not cause or origin—of our imperial meltdown. Trump is neither alien nor extraneous to American culture and history. In fact, he is as American as apple pie. Yet he is a sign of our spiritual bankruptcy—all spectacle and no substance, all narcissism and no empathy, all appetite and greed and no wisdom and maturity. Yet his triumph flows from the implosion of a Republican Party establishment beholden to big money, big military, and big scapegoating of vulnerable peoples of color, LGBTQ peoples, immigrants, Muslims, and women; from a Democratic Party establishment beholden to big money, big military, and the clever deployment of peoples of color, LGBTQ peoples, immigrants, Muslims, and women to hide and conceal the lies and crimes of neoliberal policies here and abroad; and from a corporate media establishment that aided and abetted Trump owing to high profits and revenues.

Today, if you go to an ATM machine and you put in your card, the bank may decide to give you your money. One day—as the people of Cyprus, Greece, Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and a list of hundreds of countries over the last several decades and even centuries have discovered—one day, you go to the bank and the bank does not want to give you the money, because they don’t have to. That’s the essence of a master-slave relationship. Bitcoin is fundamentally different because in bitcoin, you don’t owe anyone anything and no one owes you anything. It’s not a system based on debt. It’s a system based on ownership of this abstract token. Absolute ownership.

Banks remain twice as likely to offer loans to White entrepreneurs than to Black entrepreneurs. Customers avoid Black businesses like they are the “ghetto,” like the “White man’s ice is colder,” as antiracists have joked for years. I knew this then. But my dueling consciousness still led me to think like one young Black writer wrote in Blavity in 2017: “On an intellectual level, I know that Black people have been denied equal access to capital, training, and physical space. But does that inequitable treatment excuse bad service?” Does not good service, like every other commodity, typically cost more money? How can we acknowledge the clouds of racism over Black spaces and be shocked when it rains on our heads? I felt Black was beautiful, but Black spaces were not? Nearly everything I am I owe to Black space. Black neighborhood. Black church. Black college. Black studies. I was like a plant devaluing the soil that made me.

Sins and Love A Pharisee named Simon invited Jesus to supper. There, a woman came with a beautiful little jar of perfume. She was weeping at Jesus’ feet. This was a well-known, sinful woman who lived in town. Jesus’ feet were bathed in her tears. Then the woman dried them with her hair. As this sinful woman kissed Jesus’ feet, she anointed them with perfume. “I don’t think this man’s a prophet,” Simon said to himself. “If he were, he’d know who’s touching him. She’s a sinner.” Jesus spoke up. “Simon, I want to tell you a story.” “Two people owed another man money. The first owed 500 dollars. The other owed 50 dollars. Neither of them could pay. So he told them both they didn’t need to pay him back. Which one loved him more?” Simon the Pharisee answered, “I suppose the one who owed the most money.” Jesus said to him, “You’re right. I came to your house. Did you give me water to wash my feet? No. Do you see this woman, Simon? She bathed my feet in tears and wiped them with her hair. You didn’t greet me with a kiss. But since I came she hasn’t stopped kissing my feet. You didn’t anoint my head with oil. But she has anointed my feet. I tell you, her many sins are forgiven. But the one who’s done little to forgive, loves little.” Jesus said to the woman, “Your sins are forgiven.” The people around the table murmured. “Who’s this who forgives sins?” And he said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.

In the Orwellian dystopia the original sin was thoughtcrime, but in our new corporate dystopia the secret inner crime is need, particularly financial need. People in America hide financial need like they hide sexual perversions. Why? Because there's a direct correlation between need and rights. The more you need, the more you owe, the fewer rights you have. Conversely, the less you need, the more you have, the more of a free citizen you get to be. On the extreme ends of this spectrum it is literally a crime to be poor, while a person with enough money literally cannot be prosecuted for certain kinds of crimes.

When you leave tomorrow, you’ll be accompanied by a few of my people.” “Why?” “Because they will be needed to drive the wagon to Xandria. I know that you are indentured to your master—that you still owe him a good deal of money before you are free to live your own life. He’s making you pay back a fortune that he forced you to borrow.” He squeezed her hand before approaching one of three trunks pushed against the wall. “For saving my life—and sparing hers.” He flipped open the lid of a trunk, then another, and another. Sunlight gleamed on the gold inside, reflecting through the room like light on water. All that gold … and the piece of Spidersilk the merchant had given her … she couldn’t think of the possibilities that wealth would open to her, not right now. “When you give your master his letter, also give him this. And tell him that in the Red Desert, we do not abuse our disciples.” Celaena smiled slowly. “I think I can manage that.” She looked to the open window, to the world beyond. For the first time in a long while, she heard the song of a northern wind, calling her home. And she was not afraid.

The proctor still held the note, and he turned it so I could read it. Imtiaz had written it on his official stationery, with his name and title embossed at the top. “Please allow this student to sit for the exam,” it said. “It is my personal guarantee that his fees will be paid.” He’d signed it with his full name and printed his title below, as if to make certain no one would imagine I’d forged the note. I felt a hitch in my throat and a flush in my cheeks, a spasm of gratitude for such an act of faith and kindness. Imtiaz barely knew me, if he recognized me at all. He owed me nothing. Yet he had staked his reputation, and a sum of money, on me, merely because I had a need for which he was able to provide. I’d always been taught that people are fundamentally decent, and that each individual should be treated with as much dignity as I can muster. But to see it play out, to be the direct recipient of such kindness? To read Imtiaz’s words? Perhaps it seemed a minor gesture to him, a moment of jotting a few lines on a paper, nothing more. But the consequences for me were, literally, life-changing.

People think that only the banks can create money. That’s a hallucination. Aleister Crowley tells in his autobiography of a part of Mexico during the Revolution where there was no money available, so the people in the town just wrote on pieces of paper, “I owe you five pesos,” or whatever. And they were using these pieces of paper while the town went right along and got more prosperous because they weren’t paying interest every time they created money.

This struck me as a pretty basic misunderstanding of the way capitalism works—as does, in fact, the whole notion of a nurturing “ecosystem” dedicated to “mentoring” and “incubating” other people’s precious startups. (It’s a basic misunderstanding of ecology, too, but we will let that pass.) Other than the chance to make some money, why would a capitalist participate in such a thing? If startups really were to encourage other startups, they would be contributing pretty directly to their own competition—and robust competition is precisely what today’s thinking business person wants to avoid. The winning quality today is monopoly, not competition. But this is not a literature given to subtlety or introspection. As the tech writer Evgeny Morozov points out in To Save Everything, Click Here, the cult of innovation holds every info-age novelty to be “inherently good in itself, regardless of its social or political consequences.” Sure enough, as far as I have been able to determine, few of the people who write or talk about innovation even acknowledge the possibility that innovations might be harmful instead of noble and productive. And yet recent history is littered with exactly such stuff: Innovations that allow companies to spy on us. Innovations that allow terrorist groups to recruit online. Innovations that allowed Enron to do all the fine things it used to do. Come to think of it, the whole economic debacle of the last ten years owes its existence to the financial innovations of the Nineties and the Aughts—the credit default swaps, or the algorithms companies used to hand out mortgage loans—innovations that were celebrated in their day in the same mindlessly positive way we celebrate tech today.

conducted by the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team. The goal of the experiment was to see whether taxpayers who owed money could be nudged to pay off their debts more quickly. The results were analyzed by team member Michael Hallsworth in collaboration with three academic economists. The subjects (who did not know they were part of an experiment) were taxpayers, such as business owners, who had income that was not subject to the withholding tax and had not paid in full. Several different letters were tried and compared to a control letter just reminding people of how much money they owed.

are constantly taking transient experiences, cramming them into prearranged slots, turning discontinuity into continuity, and making solid what is actually fluid. The technical term for what’s happening is reification—giving immaterial experiences “thingness.” So convincing is this transformation that rocks seem solid and heavy when, in fact, your mind reified them—you have created solidity and heaviness in your own awareness. This constitutes another outrageous conclusion to anyone who is out to reinforce and reaffirm the spell/dream/illusion. But you cannot thaw out the “thingness” of the physical world unless you break down the process that created it. I’m hesitant to use any kind of jargon, but we need to delve into how reification works. The dictionary definition of reify is “to make something more concrete or real.” The mental image of money gets reified into a dollar bill, which you can fold up and stick in your wallet. “Parenting” gets reified when you decide to have a baby you can hold in your arms. What’s earthshaking is that virtual reality owes its existence entirely to reification. The web of connections that entangles everything in the spell/dream/ illusion with everything else comes down to the mind, because connections are mind-made. No object is actually a physical thing, pure and simple. “Object” and “thing” and “physical” are strands of a mental web. People find it relatively easy to accept that a piece of paper currency is the reified form of a concept (money), but they balk when they are told that the same is true of body, brain, and universe. The key is to

throughout my life, using skills or talents or a person’s raw physical power to help them rise to the top of their society came and went. In the beginning, it was the strength in their arms to swing their swords. Then the tongue to sway large groups to accomplish something together. It became those who developed the sciences, and then—to a degree—it was those again who had physical prowess and could run or shoot a ball into a hoop. Yet, it was those who produced the food, built the homes, protected society, or taught the children or young adults who often weren’t supported. They would do their jobs, punch their time cards, and do what needed to get done to keep society going. My suggestion is to consider all work—if done well—equal. Government needs to be in place, but we’ll require some form of service as your debt to society. Perhaps you are a musician but can test into working with an R&D lab in the future. Can that be your service?” “That,” Bethany Anne replied, “could be a nightmare. Just think about the ongoing effort for some of Jean Dukes’ stuff. There’s no way we could place a person into a project for two weeks and then they leave.” Michael tapped a finger on the table. “I understand. However, let me give you a quote from a worker to Jack Welch.” “Who?” Peter interrupted. Stephen answered, “Jack Welch. He was the CEO of General Electric—GE—back on Earth in the twentieth century.” Michael continued, “He was talking to the assembly line workers at one of their businesses and one of the men spoke up, telling Welch that ‘for twenty-five years you paid for my hands when you could have had my brain as well for nothing.’” The table was quiet a moment, thinking about that. Peter was the first to break it. “Makes sense. We use that concept in the Guardians all the time. Everyone has a role to play, but if you have ideas you need to speak up.” “It would,” Addix added, “allow those interacting to bring new ways of thinking to perhaps old and worn-out strategies.” “What about those who truly hated the notion?” Stephen asked. “I can think of a few.” “I’m tempted to say ‘fuck ‘em.’” Bethany Anne snorted. “However, I know people, and they might fuck up the works. What about a ten-percent charge of their annual wealth if they wish to forego service?” “Two weeks,” Michael interjected, “is at best four percent of their time.” “Right,” Bethany Anne agreed, “so I’d suggest they do the two weeks. But if they want to they can lose ten percent of their annual wealth—which is not their annual income, because that shit can be hidden.” The Admiral asked, “So a billionaire who technically made nothing during the year would owe a hundred million to get out of two weeks’ service?” “Right,” Bethany Anne agreed. “And someone with fifty thousand owes five thousand.” “Where does the money go?” Peter asked. Admiral Thomas grinned. “I suggest the military.” “Education?” Peter asked. “It’s just a suggestion, because that is what we are talking about.” Stephen scratched his chin. “I can imagine large corporations putting income packages together for their upper-level executives to pay for this.” “I suggest,” Bethany Anne added, “putting the names of those who opt out on a public list so everyone knows who isn’t working.” “What about sickness, or a family illness they need to deal with?” Stephen countered. “With Pod-docs we shouldn’t have that issue, but there would have to be some sort of schedule. Further, we will always have public projects. There are always roads to be built, gardens to be tended, or military

Now the Democrat Party has tilted so far left that it threatens to collapse any day. Just look at what remains of the party’s presidential hopefuls. Elizabeth Warren wants to arm the IRS (not literally but with more pencils) to punish the wealthiest people in the country. It doesn’t matter to her if they made their money by working hard, then creating jobs. She believes that the money belongs to the government. Of course, that didn’t stop her from making almost $500,000 a year from teaching one class at Harvard. It’s no wonder why college tuition is through the roof! Kamala Harris wants to get rid of all private health care and replace it with a single-payer government-issued model. The fact that the US government owes $122 trillion in unfunded liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare doesn’t even faze her. Just dump more debt on the pile, and let our children figure out how to pay for it.

The book, by anthropologist David Graeber, argued that historians and economists have wrongly assumed that money grew out of barter. In fact, Graeber argued, and Wences came to believe, barter was never common and money was actually an evolution of credit—a way of tracking what people owed to each other. People used to just keep a mental tally of what they owed each other, but money provided a way to expand the system more broadly among people who didn’t know each other.

11 Downing Street was the official residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the minister in charge of the British government’s finances. As the old saying had it, if you owe the bank ten thousand pounds, you have a problem; if you owe the bank ten million pounds, the bank has a problem; and if you owe the bank ten billion pounds, the Chancellor has a problem. The New Management took a drastic approach to dealing with problems—they simply went away, as did the skeletons of the people who created them—so Rupert was always at pains to keep Number Eleven briefed, ideally well in advance, about his more adventurous money-making initiatives.

And with a forty-five-year-old genuine grown-up and experienced entrepreneur as president and CFO, we now had access to all kinds of working-capital credit we couldn’t get before. Unlike the twenty-one-year-old CEO, Lee Walker could go to people like Frank Phillips at Texas Commerce Bank and say, “Look, Texaco, Exxon, Monsanto—all these companies, not to mention the US government—they all owe this company money. Give us a loan based on all these receivables.” And the bankers would say, “Okay, Lee, we don’t know about the kid, but we trust you.

Those elected officials need money to finance their campaigns, so when they get elected, they owe a lot to the people who donated millions to their campaigns.  Those people expect them to return the favor via guiding the government in ways that help them out.

He’s been so kind to me that I’ve forgotten he’s an enforcer for the mafia. He gets paid to hurt people who owe the mafia money.

I nod slowly again, and then say, “And how much of that wealth have you personally used to house and feed and clothe and protect and teach members of your community? How much of that money have you given to the Gifted community? People that are completely separate and different to your own, but who may have requirements that are not being met?” She frowns deeper at me and blusters, “We live in a society in which people are responsible for taking care of themselves. I owe them nothing.” I nod slowly to her. “Yes, and my community is at war with itself, as well as members of your own community who have chosen to pick a side. So, instead of running away with my money to somewhere safer, I have chosen to stay and protect as many people as I can. I've put my money where my mouth is. I will not be told by some half-bred hick that I am incapable of doing my job. Someday, when you choose a cause that actually means something to you, and you do put your money behind it, then maybe I'll listen. But I don't foresee that day coming anytime soon, do you?” Her mouth opens and shuts a few times as she gapes at me like a fish, and I give her one last decisive nod as I skirt around her and out of the building,

More Quotes II 151/ … what we inherit is so vast it must come to us in installments received over time. 153/ Of course we may rage against our parents and siblings for a time. Either we have been given too little of what we wanted, too much of what we did not want, or not a fair portion compared to what someone else received. The most obvious symbol of this giving is money, but love, attention, encouragement, and so much more are also part of our inheritance. 180/ … no simple rule can govern whether we should enter into debt. 192/ CG Jung wrote of the play of fantasy that precedes any creative work. “Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.” 250/ Receiving this symbol [in the Wizard of Oz] is like a ritual that allows the to take the final step in their process of transformation, the step of knowing what they have become. 252/ The power of money to symbolize our life energy confuses us; we imagine that our self-worth and value depend on possessing money instead of using money as a tool to look more deeply within ourselves. … To circulate money, especially in service to our community, allows us to contact the natural wealth that we have within, energy that is augmented by giving to others. 253/ Dispelling illusions about money guides us towards the values that are most true for us. Each of us must find the nature of our own abundance. Each of us must decide how willing we are to share our money, our productivity, and our energy. So our relationship to money can deepen our understanding of our connection to other people and to our community.

A Harlot Crashes the Party A very “nice” man named Simon, a Pharisee, brought Jesus to dinner at his home in Capernaum (Luke 5). As they were reclining around the table, a woman known to be a harlot somehow came in, bringing with her an expensive flask of perfumed lotion. She certainly had overheard Jesus teaching and had seen his care for others. She was moved to believe that she too was loved by him and by the heavenly Father of whom he spoke. She was seized by a transforming conviction, an overwhelming faith. Suddenly there she was, down on the floor by Jesus, tears of gratitude for him pouring down upon his feet. Drying them away with her hair, she then rained kisses upon his feet and massaged them with the lotion. What a scene! That nice man, Simon, was taking it in, and—no doubt battling a surge of disapproval—he tried to put the best possible construction on it. It just could not be that Jesus wasn’t nice. Clearly he was a righteous man. So the only reason he would be letting this woman touch him, or even come near him, was that he didn’t know she was a prostitute. And that, unfortunately, proved that Jesus didn’t have “it” after all. “If this fellow really were a prophet,” Simon mused, “he would know what this woman does, for she is filthy.” Perhaps Simon consoled himself with the thought that it is at least no sin not to be a prophet. It never occurred to him that Jesus would know exactly who the woman was and yet let her touch him. But Jesus did know, and he also knew what Simon was thinking. So he told him a story of a man who lent money to two people: $50,000 to one and $5 to the other, let us say. When they could not repay, the man simply forgave the debts. “Now Simon,” Jesus asked, “which one will love the man most?” Simon replied that it would be the one who had owed most. That granted, Jesus positioned Simon and the streetwalker side by side to compare their hearts: “Look at this woman,” he said. “When I entered your home, you didn’t bother to offer me water to wash the dust from my feet, but she has washed them with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You refused me the customary kiss of greeting, but she has kissed my feet again and again from the time I first came in. You neglected the usual courtesy of olive oil to anoint my head, but she has covered my feet with rare perfume. Therefore her sins—and they are many—are forgiven, for she loved me much; but one who is forgiven little, shows little love.” (Luke 7:44–47 LB) “Loved me much!” Simply that, and not the customary proprieties, was now the key of entry into the rule of God.

- Can you keep secrets? - Yesss. - We are going to make one of the biggest coffeeshops in Barcelona with my boss, Adam. - Realllllly? - This Adam guy is kind of my friend and kind of my boss, but I don't trust him; he is a bad guy. “Bad to the bone.” His father is an even darker figure. I am pretty sure that both have killed before, hired to kill people. - I am from Buenos Airessss. - I understand honey but you don’t know this kind of people, these f…g desert roses. - There are Jewish people in Argentina too. - I am sure, baby, but these are not regular Jewish people, not regular Israeli people. These people are dark. Hocus-pocus. Criminal minds. Do you understand? - I guessss. - There are a lot of criminals in this town. They will try to take our club away, just like the Camorra is taking away other people's clubs. Just like that. Do you understand? - Yessss. - I know them; they are one of my clients. If there is anyone in the world who could make a deal with them, it would be me and Adam. He cannot cross me and I cannot cross him either. I would never do that. I am not sure about him though what is on his mind, I can tell there is something he is orchestrating I just don’t know what exactly, but he is as fishy as Sabrina. The problem is that only my ex-girlfriend knows about my signature on the non-profit organization, which is the base of the coffeeshop, the marijuana grow and the smoker club. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - We are talking about millions of Euros monthly cashflow. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - By telling you everything now, you are becoming my trusted; your life is in danger too if they manage to find a gap between us. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - I'm not sure what they're up to. They owe me already more money than anyone in this town would murder for. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - Now you know about it, too. Sabrina didn't care; she didn't think I would make it happen. She doesn’t know about the place. Only you know about it and us. But she will figure it out somehow; she will try to take your position, slipping between the criminals. Do you know how to play chess? - Not really. - OK then. Imagine this as a throne, these chairs you are sitting on top of. OK. No one can remove you from this throne being my girlfriend, no one can stand between us. No one can take the club away from us. They have no chance. Understand? - Yesss. - As long as you stick with me, she cannot do anything; no one can mess with us. Do you understand? - Yes. Everyone in the world would try to take your place, being my girlfriend, and they will try to push you out from this position, which only me I can give you, with Love. They will tell you lies about me and about themselves who’s club is it. Do you understand? - Yes. But why? - Because Rachel and Tom, the other two founding members of the club, Golan, I signed up with, are Adam's puppets. I don't trust any one of them. If they kill me, they never have to pay me what they owe me already, plus they can keep the 33% of the club which belongs to me. 100% Adam would keep. Do you understand now? - Yessss. - We will pull all the trash out and remodel the place without any permit, under the rug, in secret. - I sssseeee. (Eye. See.)

If you’re gonna owe money, owe more than you can pay, then the people can’t afford to foreclose.

Lord Vetinari sighed, sat back, and stared up the ceiling for a moment. “Then all I can do is thank you for your services, Captain, and wish you good luck in your future endeavor. Do you have enough money?” “I’ve saved quite a lot, sir.” “Nevertheless, it is a long way to Uberwald.” There was silence. “Sir?” “Yes?” “How did you know?” “Oh, people measured it years ago. Surveyors and so forth.” “Sir!” Vetinari sighed. “I think the term is . . . deduction. Be that as it may . . . Captain, I am choosing to believe that you are merely taking an extended leave of absence. I understand that you’ve never taken a holiday while you have been here. I am sure you are owed a few weeks.” Carrot said nothing.

- Can you keep secrets? - Yesss. - We are going to make one of the biggest coffeeshops in Barcelona with my boss, Adam. - Realllllly? - This Adam guy is kind of my friend and kind of my boss, but I don't trust him; he is a bad guy. “Bad to the bone.” His father is an even darker figure. I am pretty sure that both have killed before, hired to kill people. - I am from Buenos Airessss. - I understand honey but you don’t know this kind of people, these f…g desert roses. - There are Jewish people in Argentina too. - I am sure, baby, but these are not regular Jewish people, not regular Israeli people. These people are dark. Hocus-pocus. Criminal minds. Do you understand? - I guessss. - There are a lot of criminals in this town. They will try to take our club away, just like the Camorra is taking away other people's clubs. Just like that. Do you understand? - Yessss. - I know them; they are one of my clients. If there is anyone in the world who could make a deal with them, it would be me and Adam. He cannot cross me and I cannot cross him either. I would never do that. I am not sure about him though what is on his mind, I can tell there is something he is orchestrating I just don’t know what exactly, but he is as fishy as Sabrina. The problem is that only my ex-girlfriend knows about my signature on the non-profit organization, which is the base of the coffeeshop, the marijuana grow and the smoker club. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - We are talking about millions of Euros monthly cashflow. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - By telling you everything now, you are becoming my trusted; your life is in danger too if they manage to find a gap between us. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - I'm not sure what they're up to. They owe me already more money than anyone in this town would murder for. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - Now you know about it, too. Sabrina didn't care; she didn't think I would make it happen. She doesn’t know about the place. Only you know about it and us. But she will figure it out somehow; she will try to take your position, slipping between the criminals. Do you know how to play chess? - Not really. - OK then. Imagine this as a throne, these chairs you are sitting on top of. OK. No one can remove you from this throne being my girlfriend, no one can stand between us. No one can take the club away from us. They have no chance. Understand? - Yesss. - As long as you stick with me, she cannot do anything; no one can mess with us. Do you understand? - Yesss. - Everyone in the world would try to take your place, being my girlfriend, and they will try to push you out from this position, which only me I can give you, with Love. They will tell you lies about me and about themselves who’s club is it. Do you understand? - Yes. But why? - Because Rachel and Tom, the other two founding members of the club, Golan, I signed up with, are Adam's puppets. I don't trust any one of them. If they kill me, they never have to pay me what they owe me already, plus they can keep the 33% of the club which belongs to me. 100% Adam would keep. Do you understand now? - Yessss. - We will pull all the trash out and remodel the place without any permit, under the rug, in secret. - I sssseeee. (Eye. See.)

We convinced EarthLink to pay us $125,000 to become “the official Internet Service Provider of the Parks Department.” We used that money to pay to build a new website to help New Yorkers take advantage of everything offered at their parks. We owed EarthLink attention and media coverage in return. So we built a forty-foot-by-forty-foot giant spiderweb of rope in Times Square. We dressed Henry in a sequined silver suit and top hat, put him on a riser obscured by dry ice, and blasted the theme song to 2001: A Space Odyssey out of the giant speaker they use for New Year’s Eve as he ascended the web to launch the new Parks Department website, paid for by EarthLink. The same approach worked for policy initiatives. We staged elaborate funerals for trees murdered by people (cut down illegally by construction crews or poisoned by people who thought their views were obstructed by trees). One time, Henry chained himself to a tree in Union Square Park to try to prevent its demise. This all helped fuel legislation through the city council making arborcide a crime.

Most of the time. When they decide to speak up or cry out loud. It is not about them seeking justice, but it is about the money. It is about them getting what they think they are owed. Them getting what they want and their way. It is not about the truth, right or wrong. Because of that they make it hard for real victims to be assisted and get help and justice.

Unfortunately, the Bull that gilded Renaissance New York did little for most Americans. Eighties Wall Street was about institutional money released by deregulation, mergers and acquisitions, and, most of all, the debt that made it all possible. As John Kenneth Galbraith points out, financial euphoria always starts with new ways to borrow money; this time it was triggered by the Savings & Loan crisis. Volcker’s rocketing interest rates had forced S&Ls to offer double digits to new depositors while only getting back single digits on the old thirty-year mortgages on their books. S&Ls were going under, and getting a mortgage was nearly impossible, so in March 1980, with the banking system and the housing market on the brink, Carter had signed a law to allow them to issue credit cards, invest in commercial real estate, and offer checking accounts in order to stay in business. Reagan then took it a step further with a change that encouraged S&Ls to sell their mortgages in search of higher returns, freeing up a $1 trillion that needed to be invested in something. Which takes us back to Salomon Brothers, where in 1978 one Lew Ranieri had repackaged an old investment product the government had clamped down on during the Depression: A group of home mortgages all backed by government insurance would be bundled together, then sliced into bonds, thus converting the debt some people owed on their homes into an asset for others. Ranieri had been a bit ahead of the curve then—the same high interest rates that killed the S&Ls also made his bonds unattractive—but now deregulation let Salomon buy up the S&Ls’ mortgages at a deep discount, bundle them into bonds, and sell them back to the S&Ls who believed they’d diversified into the bond market when in fact they’d just bought ground meat made out of their own steaks. In June 1983, Salomon Brothers and Freddie Mac together issued the first collateralized mortgage obligation bonds (CMOs), which bundled up debt and cut it into tranches based on the amount of risk: you could choose between ground chuck and ground sirloin. It would be years before technology would allow doing this on a huge scale, but the immediate impact was that all kinds of debt, not just mortgages, were bundled, cut into bonds, and sold: credit card debt, car loans, you name it. Between 1983 and 1988, some $60 billion of CMOs were sold; GM’s financing arm became more profitable than its cars. America began to make debt instead of things. The

Fear and debt. The two most powerful tools of empire... Most everybody thinks military might is the driver of empire, but war's important because it--and the threat of it--instills fear. People are terrified into parting with their money. They take on more debt... Whether we owe money or favors, debt shackles us. That's why the economic hit man approach is so effective. More so than war.

After the United States shifted from a gold-and-silver standard to a gold standard in 1873, prices fell for twenty years. This was very good for rich people, whose money bought more and more stuff. It was very bad for poor people who owed money and had to keep working more and more just to make the same monthly payments. As a result, a fight broke out over what should count as money in America.

At first, I did them because I owed it to Sergei. He had been killed because he worked for me, and I couldn’t let his killers get away with it. As with the theft of my childhood flute, but on an infinitely grander and more meaningful scale, I have been compelled to get justice. As the theft of my flute showed, this inclination toward justice is part of who I am. It’s in my nature. To reject it would have poisoned me from the inside. Then, as things escalated, it also became a fight for survival. Not only for myself and my family, but for my friends and colleagues, and all the people who were helping Sergei’s cause inside of Russia. But in the end, I’ve done these things because doing them is the right thing to do. For better or worse, I’ve been obsessed with this cause since the moment of Sergei’s death. This obsession has affected every facet of my life, and all of my relationships, even those with my own children. These effects haven’t always been for the better.

This Gospel is easy to misunderstand. Jesus is not praising dishonesty. The unjust manager misused his master’s money in the past and continued to misuse it in the present when on his own authority he lowered the amount his master’s debtors owed to the master. But Jesus praises him for two things: first, for being clever on a worldly level (he notes that the worldly are more enterprising and clever about money than the otherworldly are), and second, for using money for a higher purpose than making more money—that is, for making friends. He lost his friendship with his master over money, so he used money to make new friends—namely, his master’s debtors. Jesus then says that this little worldly thing, the enterprising use of money, is an indication of a greater thing, the use of greater things, and that people who can be trusted to take care of this lesser thing, money, can also be trusted to take care of greater things than money. But then, at the end, he adds that not only are there greater things than money even in this life, such as friendship; there are much greater things in the next world and in our relationship to God. In fact, he says that it is impossible for anyone to have two gods, two masters, two greatest goods, two final ends and goals in life. You cannot give your single self to a double end, God and money. You either love God for his own sake and refuse to serve money and all the things money can buy, demoting it to a mere relative and instrumental means to that one ultimate end; or, you love money and the things money can buy in this world as your final end, your greatest good, your god, and you despise and demote God and the things of God to mere means to this other thing. Jesus is reminding us of what he calls the very first and greatest of all the commandments: to love the Lord your God with your whole heart and soul and strength—and also with your mind, that clever mind that the fired manager used as a means to the higher end of worldly friendships and that you also ought to use for the higher end of your friendship with God. After all, God created it all and owns it all, and you are only the manager of a tiny portion of his goods. It all belongs to God, not to you. No matter what you give to God—your money, your stuff, your time, your life—you are only returning to him what is his.

if the beneficiary of the trust (the person who eventually gets the income or the assets) is different than the grantor (the person putting the money or assets into the trust), then creditors (people to whom you owe money, including plaintiffs) cannot get at the assets of the trust.

By 1932 his debt had grown to more than four million dollars, far more than his net worth. “Aren’t you concerned about owing all this money you can’t pay?” Ernest Closuit asked him. “No,” Murchison said with a smile. “If you’re gonna owe money, owe more than you can pay, then the people can’t afford to foreclose.

It is the heavy reality of the writing life which makes the “why” so easy to forget: Gutless rejection letters, denigrating revision letters, incompetent copy edits, insulting reviews, late checks, disappointing sales, down-trending print-runs, shrinking advances, royalties paid in a geological timeframe, imprints folding, publishers downsizing their lists and conglomerating their overhead.  One day your editor expresses all the enthusiasm of an overtired undertaker. The next day your agent demonstrates all the faith and commitment of a diseased streetwalker. Your book is packaged with a cover that would embarrass anyone who wasn’t raised in a Red Light district. You give a thoughtful interview only to discover the resultant article describes you as churning out potboilers. Three people show up at your book signing, two of them because they thought you were someone else; the third person came because you owe him money. When you make the New York Times list, a neighbor asks you “which” NYT list you’re on, because there must be a separate one for the trash you write. Though you’ve been publishing regularly for years, you know people who ask, every single time they see you, if you still write. (No, I fell back on my independent wealth when the going got tough.)

Most alcoholics owe money. We do not dodge our creditors. Telling them what we are trying to do, we make no bones about our drinking; they usually know it anyway, whether we think so or not. Nor are we afraid of disclosing our alcoholism on the theory it may cause financial harm. Approached in this way, the most ruthless creditor will sometimes surprise us. Arranging the best deal we can we let these people know we are sorry. Our drinking has made us slow to pay. We must lose our fear of creditors no matter how far we have to go, for we are liable to drink if we are afraid to face them.

Nick implied the job pays crap, so they can’t expect me to be some sort of art professor, right?” She paused when the bartender appeared with a bottle of beer and a slender fluted glass of champagne. The bubbles streaming upward through the pale liquid reminded him of Emma’s personality: round and fizzy, rising as high as they could go. He felt like shit. “Of course, I still need to find a place to live,” Emma said after taking a sip of her drink. “But as long as I have a place to work, I’m good. I can always buy a tent.” “You don’t have to buy a tent,” he said curtly. “Just joking.” She reached across the table and gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “But at least now I don’t have to worry about finding a place to live where I can also work.” He drank some beer straight from the bottle, relishing its sour flavor. Closing his eyes, he pictured that small, windowless room in the community center, its linoleum floor, its cinderblock walls, its sheer ugliness. She was thrilled because she thought it was her only option. But it wasn’t. “Look, Emma—if you want, I’ll take my house off the market. I don’t have to get rid of it. If you want to continue to live there…” She’d raised her champagne flute to her lips, but his words clearly startled her enough to make her lower the glass and gape at him. “But you came to Brogan’s Point to sell the house.” “It can wait.” “And I can’t keep teaching there. You said so yourself. There are those nasty zoning laws. And insurance issues, and liability. All that legal stuff.” She pressed her lips together, effectively smothering her radiant smile. “Taking the room at the community center means I’ll be able to teach there this summer in Nick’s program. So I’ll earn a little more money and maybe make contact with more people who might want to commission Dream Portraits.” She shook her head. “I can make it work.” “You could make it work in my house, too. Stay. Stay as long as you want. We’re not a landlord and tenant anymore. We’ve gone beyond that, haven’t we?” She stared at him, suddenly wary. “What do you mean?” He wasn’t sure what was troubling her. “Emma. We’ve made love. Several times.” Several spectacular times, he wanted to add. “You can stay on in the house. Forget about the rent. That’s the least I owe you.” Her expression went from wary to deflated, from deflated to suspicious. Her voice was cool, barely an inch from icy. “You don’t owe me anything, Max—unless you want to pay me for your portrait. I can’t calculate the cost until I figure out what the painting will…entail.” She seemed to trip over that last word, for some reason. “But as far as the house… I don’t need you to do that.” “Do what? Take it off sale? It isn’t even on sale yet.” “You don’t have to let me stay on in the house because we had sex. I didn’t make love with you because I wanted something in return. You don’t owe me anything.” She sighed again. The fireworks vanished from her eyes, extinguished

Your Personal Economic Model One tool we use when discussing the best course of action to secure your financial future is the Personal Economic Model®. Just as a medical doctor would use an anatomical model to convey medical concepts, we use the following model to convey financial concepts. This model offers a visual representation of the way money flows through your hands. On the left, you will notice the Lifetime Capital Potential tank, which illustrates that the amount of money you will control during your lifetime is both large, as well as finite. Most people are shocked to see how much money can flow through their hands in their lifetime. Once earned, your money flows directly to the Tax Filter where the state and federal governments take tax dollars owed from your paycheck. The after tax dollars are then directed to either your Current Lifestyle or your Future Lifestyle. Your management of the Lifestyle Regulator determines where these dollars go. Regulating the cash flow between your current lifestyle desires and your future lifestyle requirements may be the most important financial decision you will ever make. Here’s why. Each and every dollar that is allowed to flow through to your Current Lifestyle is consumed and gone forever. The goal is to accumulate enough money in the Savings and Investment tanks so that when you retire, the dollars in those tanks can be used to pay for your future lifestyle requirements. Retirement planning seems hard for most people to do but it is not rocket science. The best position, position A, would be to have enough in the tanks so that you can live in the future like you live today adjusted for inflation and have your money last at least to your life expectancy. That’s a win, but the icing on the cake would be to accomplish that with little to no impact on your present standard of living, and that is exactly what we strive to help our clients to do. Working with us can help you with the following: Optimize the balance between your Current and Future Lifestyles Identify inefficiencies in your current personal economic model (where are you losing money) Design, implement, and execute a plan to secure your financial future Limit the impact on your Current Lifestyle dollars (maintain your current standard of living)

prettiness and their cut showed off her neat figure. It was a pity that Paul wasn’t there to see the chrysalis changing into a butterfly. She had to make do with Queenie. She had to admit that by teatime, even though she had filled the rest of the day by taking the dogs for a long walk, she was missing him, which was, of course, exactly what he had intended. Mrs Parfitt, when Emma asked her the next day, had no idea when he would be back. ‘Sir Paul goes off for days at a time,’ she explained to Emma. ‘He goes to other hospitals, and abroad too. Does a lot of work in London, so I’ve been told. Got friends there too. I dare say he’ll be back in a day or two. Why not put on one of your new skirts and that jacket and go down to the shop for me and fetch up a few groceries?’ So Emma went shopping, exchanging good mornings rather shyly with the various people she met. They were friendly, wanting to know if she liked the village and did she get on with the dogs? She guessed that there were other questions hovering on their tongues but they were too considerate to ask them. Going back with her shopping, she reflected that, since she had promised to marry Paul, it might be a good thing to do so as soon as possible. He had told her to decide on a date. As soon after the banns had been read as could be arranged—which thought reminded her that she would certainly need something special to wear on her wedding-day. Very soon, she promised herself, she would get the morning bus to Exeter and go to the boutique Paul had taken her to. She had plenty of money still—her own money too…Well, almost her own, she admitted, once the house was sold and she had paid him back what she owed him. The time passed pleasantly, her head filled with the delightful problem of what she would wear next, and even the steady rain which began to fall as she walked on the moor with the dogs did nothing to dampen her

I have never understood Chapter 11. You’re broke, you owe people a shitload of money, you throw up your hands and say, “I can’t pay,” and six months later you’re back in business, debt-free. And fuck everyone you owe. Does that seem right? I didn’t think so

An Iraq vet can surmise that two of three people he encounters don’t consider his sacrifice worth the trouble. “You come back to this oblivion,” says Reddish, “and people don’t even care that you’re in a bad way, that your friends had to be identified from a dog tag in their boots. They say, ‘You did a great job. Now, how much money do you owe me this month?

Another Unit 8200 whistle-blower said that every phone conversation in the West Bank and Gaza could be listened to by Israeli surveillance. He told Middle East Eye in 2021 that nothing was off limits; Israeli soldiers invaded the public and private lives of Palestinians and laughed when they heard people talking about sex. “It might be finding gays who can be pressured to report on their relatives, or finding some man who is cheating on his wife,” he said. “Finding someone who owes money to someone, let’s say, means that he can be contacted and offered money to pay his debt in exchange for his collaboration