Stripping Money Quotes

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

Even with all this power, it comes down to the same old things. Connections, money, influence.

Our children should have a wide range of imagination and think about the greatest achievements that they want to accomplish; not making sacrifices by having to give up their clothes, lunch money, or being robbed of their personality and stripped of their self-esteem.

Why do I take a blade and slash my arms? Why do I drink myself into a stupor? Why do I swallow bottles of pills and end up in A&E having my stomach pumped? Am I seeking attention? Showing off? The pain of the cuts releases the mental pain of the memories, but the pain of healing lasts weeks. After every self-harming or overdosing incident I run the risk of being sectioned and returned to a psychiatric institution, a harrowing prospect I would not recommend to anyone. So, why do I do it? I don't. If I had power over the alters, I'd stop them. I don't have that power. When they are out, they're out. I experience blank spells and lose time, consciousness, dignity. If I, Alice Jamieson, wanted attention, I would have completed my PhD and started to climb the academic career ladder. Flaunting the label 'doctor' is more attention-grabbing that lying drained of hope in hospital with steri-strips up your arms and the vile taste of liquid charcoal absorbing the chemicals in your stomach. In most things we do, we anticipate some reward or payment. We study for status and to get better jobs; we work for money; our children are little mirrors of our social standing; the charity donation and trip to Oxfam make us feel good. Every kindness carries the potential gift of a responding kindness: you reap what you sow. There is no advantage in my harming myself; no reason for me to invent delusional memories of incest and ritual abuse. There is nothing to be gained in an A&E department.

What was once a home she had taken apart one piece at a time, one day...She sold her belongings for money to buy food.  First the luxuries: a small statue, a picture.  Then the items with more utility: a lamp, a kettle.  Clothes left the closet at a rate of a garment a day…she burned everything in the basement first; then everything in the attic.  It lasted weeks, not months.  Though tempted, she left the roof alone.  She stripped the second floor, and the stairs.  She extracted every possible calorie from the kitchen.  she wasn’t working alone, because neighbourhood pirates simultaneously stole anything of value outside: door and window frames, fencing, stucco.  They pillaged her yard.  Breaking in was a boundary her neigbours had not yet crossed.  But the animals had.  Rats and mice and other vermin found the cracks without much effort.  Like her, they sought warmth and scraps of food.  With great reluctance, she roasted the ones she could catch.  She spent her nights fighting off the ones that escaped.

To truly strip a man of everything, one must take away his money, community, and the core of his beliefs until he is bathed in the agony of isolation.

Wesley taught me the Way of the Owl. In the human world your value as a person is often intrinsically linked to your wealth or most recent accomplishment. But all the accoutrements of the world were stripped away from me when I got sick. Welsey made me realize that if all I had to give was love, that was enough. I didn't need money, status, accomplishment, glamour or many of the empty things we so value.

...The reason why we’re strippers, is invariably more boring, more grounded in nonexistential needs like money—and pragmatic concerns, like money.

Ten Best Song to Strip 1. Any hip-swiveling R&B fuckjam. This category includes The Greatest Stripping Song of All Time: "Remix to Ignition" by R. Kelly. 2. "Purple Rain" by Prince, but you have to be really theatrical about it. Arch your back like Prince himself is daubing body glitter on your abdomen. Most effective in nearly empty, pathos-ridden juice bars. 3. "Honky Tonk Woman" by the Rolling Stones. Insta-attitude. Makes even the clumsiest troglodyte strut like Anita Pallenberg. (However, the Troggs will make you look like even more of a troglodyte, so avoid if possible.) 4. "Pour Some Sugar on Me" by Def Leppard. The Lep's shouted choruses and relentless programmed drums prove ideal for chicks who can really stomp. (Coincidence: I once saw a stripper who, like Rick Allen, had only one arm.) 5. "Amber" by 311. This fluid stoner anthem is a favorite of midnight tokers at strip joints everywhere. Mellow enough that even the most shitfaced dancer can make it through the song and back to her Graffix bong without breaking a sweat. Pass the Fritos Scoops, dude. 6. "Miserable" by Lit, but mostly because Pamela Anderson is in the video, and she's like Jesus for strippers (blonde, plastic, capable of parlaying a broken nail into a domestic battery charge, damaged liver). Alos, you can't go wrong stripping to a song that opens with the line "You make me come." 7. "Back Door Man" by The Doors. Almost too easy. The mere implication that you like it in the ass will thrill the average strip-club patron. Just get on all fours and crawl your way toward the down payment on that condo in Cozumel. (Unless, like most strippers, you'd rather blow your nest egg on tacky pimped-out SUVs and Coach purses.) 8. Back in Black" by AC/DC. Producer Mutt Lange wants you to strip. He does. He told me. 9. "I Touch Myself" by the Devinyls. Strip to this, and that guy at the tip rail with the bitch tits and the shop teacher glasses will actually believe that he alone has inspired you to masturbate. Take his money, then go masturbate and think about someone else. 10. "Hash Pipe" by Weezer. Sure, it smells of nerd. But River Cuomo is obsessed with Asian chicks and nose candy, and that's just the spirit you want to evoke in a strip club. I recommend busting out your most crunk pole tricks during this one.

Let me outline briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health -- his land's health, his own, his family's, his community's, his country's. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order -- a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, "hard facts"; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.

MOM - noun - One who sacrifices her body, sleep, social life, spending money, eating hot meals, peeing alone, patience, memory, energy and sanity for LOVE!

all the land our forefathers had was a little strip of country, here between the mountains and the ocean. All the way from here west was Indian country, and Spanish and French and English country. It was farmers that took all that country and made it America.” “How?” Almanzo asked. “Well, son, the Spaniards were soldiers, and high-and-mighty gentlemen that only wanted gold. And the French were fur-traders, wanting to make quick money. And England was busy fighting wars. But we were farmers, son; we wanted the land. It was farmers that went over the mountains, and cleared the land, and settled it, and farmed it, and hung on to their farms.

Everything surrounding the ship is gray or dark blue and nothing is particularly hip, and once or maybe twice a day this thin strip of white appears at the horizon line but its so far in the distance you cant be sure whether its land or more sky. Its impossible to believe that any kind of life sustains itself beneath this flat, slate-gray sky or in an ocean so calm and vast, that anything breathing could exist in such limbo, and any movement that occurs below the surface is so faint its like some kind of small accident, a tiny indifferent moment, a minor incident that shouldnt have happened, and in the sky there's never any trace of sun - the air seems vaguely transparent and disposable, with the texture of Kleenex - yet its always bright in a dull way, the wind usually constant as we drift through it, weightless, and below us the trail the ship leaves behind is a Jacuzzi blue that fades within minutes into the same boring gray sheet that blankets everything else surrounding the ship. One day a normal looking rainbow appears and you vaguely notice it, thinking about the enormous sums of money the Kiss reunion tour made over the summer, or maybe a whale swims along the starboard side, waving its fin, showing off. It's easy to feel safe, for people to look at you and think someone's going somewhere. Surrounded by so much boring space, five days is a long time to stay unimpressed.

I want to be the father I never had and the husband my mother was cheated out of. So if I have to take off my fucking clothes to make the money I need, I'll do it. And I pray you want me enough to suffer through it. Because I promise I'll make it up to you for the rest of my life.

I wish you didn't first see me takin' my clothes off for drunks. I wish we didn't meet in a strip club. I wish you could've known me before I started with that kind of thing. Before I got like I am. Before I did all the things I wish I could take back. You know how people pay more money to buy furniture that's been roughed up a little? What do they call it? Things that have been distressed? That's because something that's seen a little wear is just more interesting than something brand-new that hasn't ever had a scuff on it.

You disgust me." "Like you have room to talk," Cathy said. "You're as much a whore as I am." Dan grabbed the hem of her shirt with both hands as she turned, in one easy move she peeled her tee and sports bra off and gestured at her bare chest. "Oh my god, you see these? They're called breasts. Does this make me a whore? This?" Dan jerked a hand between them, and Cathy shifted uncomfortably in her chair. "This is what I do. I strip. I dance. I work a stage five nights a week. I give lap dances to creeps who can't get enough action on their own. But I don't let them touch me and I still make enough money to keep us afloat. Fuck you! I'm seventeen! I'm too young to be your mother!" "No one asked you to be my mother..." "I asked you to be mine. Thanks for failing so spectacularly at it.

Let your mistress’s birthday be one of great terror to you: that’s a black day when anything has to be given. However much you avoid it, she’ll still win: it’s a woman’s skill, to strip wealth from an ardent lover. A loose-robed pedlar comes to your lady: she likes to buy: and explains his prices while you’re sitting there. She’ll ask you to look, because you know what to look for: then kiss you: then ask you to buy her something there. She swears that she’ll be happy with it, for years, but she needs it now, now the price is right. If you say you haven’t the money in the house, she’ll ask for a note of hand – and you’re sorry you learnt to write. Why - she asks doesn’t she for money as if it’s her birthday, just for the cake, and how often it is her birthday, if she’s in need? Why - she weeps doesn’t she, mournfully, for a sham loss, that imaginary gem that fell from her pierced ear? They many times ask for gifts, they never give in return: you lose, and you’ll get no thanks for your loss. And ten mouths with as many tongues wouldn’t be enough for me to describe the wicked tricks of whores.

The divisions we obsess over - money, politics, race - were stripped away first. They did not matter in the end. Then the travelling was taken away, followed by the independence of the individual, the ego. They did not matter either. When you got down to what really mattered. Food. But then you can't eat. Water. But then you can't drink. Air. But then you stop breathing. Finally, all he had left was the final resource that all of us will exhaust - time. But then his time was up. And then he was gone. What's left behind? All that remains in the end is love. The love he had for us. The love we still have for him. And true love never dies.

Lal Wyburd would naturally have interpreted as selfishness every floundering attempt anybody made to break out of the straitjacket and recover a sanity which must have been theirs in the beginning, and might be theirs again in the end. That left the long stretch of the responsible years, when you were lunging in your madness after love, money, position, possessions, while an inkling persisted, sometimes even a certainty descended: of a calm in which the self had been stripped, if painfully, of its human imperfections.

Thank you," he said. "Welcome. Welcome especially to Mr. Coyle Mathis and the other men and women of Forster Hollow who are going to be employed at this rather strikingly energy-inefficient plant. It's a long way from Forster Hollow, isn't it?" "So, yes, welcome," he said. "Welcome to the middle class! That's what I want to say. Although, quickly, before I go any further, I also want to say to Mr. Mathis here in the front row: I know you don't like me. And I don't like you. But, you know, back when you were refusing to have anything to do with us, I respected that. I didn't like it, but I had respect for your position. For your independence. You see, because I actually came from a place a little bit like Forster Hollow myself, before I joined the middle class. And, now you're middle-class, too, and I want to welcome you all, because it's a wonderful thing, our American middle class. It's the mainstay of economies all around the globe!" "And now that you've got these jobs at this body-armor plant," he continued, "You're going to be able to participate in those economies. You, too, can help denude every last scrap of native habitat in Asia, Africa, and South America! You, too, can buy six-foot-wide plasma TV screens that consume unbelievable amounts of energy, even when they're not turned on! But that's OK, because that's why we threw you out of your homes in the first places, so we could strip-mine your ancestral hills and feed the coal-fired generators that are the number-one cause of global warming and other excellent things like acid rain. It's a perfect world, isn't it? It's a perfect system, because as long as you've got your six-foot-wide plasma TV, and the electricity to run it, you don't have to think about any of the ugly consequences. You can watch Survivor: Indonesia till there's no more Indonesia!" "Just quickly, here," he continued, "because I want to keep my remarks brief. Just a few more remarks about this perfect world. I want to mention those big new eight-miles-per-gallon vehicles you're going to be able to buy and drive as much as you want, now that you've joined me as a member of the middle class. The reason this country needs so much body armor is that certain people in certain parts of the world don't want us stealing all their oil to run your vehicles. And so the more you drive your vehicles, the more secure your jobs at this body-armor plant are going to be! Isn't that perfect?" "Just a couple more things!" Walter cried, wresting the mike from its holder and dancing away with it. "I want to welcome you all to working for one of the most corrupt and savage corporations in the world! Do you hear me? LBI doesn't give a shit about your sons and daughters bleeding in Iraq, as long as they get their thousand-percent profit! I know this for a fact! I have the facts to prove it! That's part of the perfect middle-class world you're joining! Now that you're working for LBI, you can finally make enough money to keep your kids from joining the Army and dying in LBI's broken-down trucks and shoddy body armor!" The mike had gone dead, and Walter skittered backwards, away from the mob that was forming. "And MEANWHILE," he shouted, "WE ARE ADDING THIRTEEN MILLION HUMAN BEINGS TO THE POPULATION EVERY MONTH! THIRTEEN MILLION MORE PEOPLE TO KILL EACH OTHER IN COMPETITION OVER FINITE RESOURCES! AND WIPE OUT EVERY OTHER LIVING THING ALONG THE WAY! IT IS A PERFECT FUCKING WORLD AS LONG AS YOU DON'T COUNT EVERY OTHER SPECIES IN IT! WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANT! A CANCER ON THE PLANET!

One of my hobbies is reading finance and economic books—at the strip club, where I “invest” my money.

To truly strip a man of everything, one must take away his community, money, and corrode the core of his beliefs until he is left bathed in the agony of isolation.

I’m not saying I’d take up stripping for money, but what gives you the right to decide what I am allowed to do? I don’t belong to you.” That was where she was wrong. She. Was. His.

A strip club is a con. It’s all about leading you on

But what did it matter what momins of the community said when they picked apart the behavior of her son? What was a believer meant to be like when all their rituals and practices were stripped away? Amar was kind. If one of his sisters came home carrying heavy textbooks, he rose to help them before they even asked. He was generous. He had very little of his own money but still he would bring home the coffee drinks Huda or Hadia liked, or a bag of cherries for Layla come cherry season, or a candle with a floral scent. Layla gossiped sometimes, everyone did, but she had never heard her son speak ill of anyone. Once when she spoke of someone from their community, he said to her, “You don’t know that, Mumma, don’t say that if you don’t fully know it.” Her heart had swelled. How her son was good in a way that she wasn’t, in a way that could instruct her. Layla had begun to think lately that there was no real way to quantify the goodness of a person—that religion gave templates and guidelines but there were ways it missed the mark entirely. And everything a momin should be in his heart, Amar was.

One might say that Trump grasped the essence of the system, which turned money into power and power into money but, until Trump came along, did it politely, tastefully, and by group agreement. Or one might say that Trump acted at once the emperor and the boy who said that the emperor has no clothes, ripping the illusory cover of decency off the system, forcing everyone to stare at its obscene nature. Unlike the emperor in the fairy tale, though, Trump felt no shame and so was not transformed by the exposure—rather, he transformed the system, once again stripping away the moral aspiration of politics.

O, ho, are you there with me? No eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light: yet you see how this world goes. Ear; of Gloster, “I see it feelingly.” Lear, “What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears: see how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places; and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? - Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a begger? Earl of Gloster, ‘Ay, sir. Lear, “And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obey’d in office. - Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! Why dost though lash that whore? Strip thine own back; Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind For which thou whipst her. The usurer hangs the cozener. Through tattere’d clothes small vices to appear; Robes and furr’d gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it. None does offend, none, - I say, none; I’ll able ‘em to seal the accuser’s lips. Get thee glass eyes; To see the things thou dost not. - Now, now, now, now: Pull off my boots: - harder, harder: - so. Edgar (aside), “O, matter and impertinency mixt! Reason in madness!

our goods and money are consumed by taxation; our land is stripped of its harvest to fill their granaries; our hands and limbs are crippled by building roads through forests and swamps under the lash of our oppressors’.

The Strip was still lit by a million neon lights, though the crowds on the sidewalk had greatly decreased by this hour. Still, Bosch was awed by the spectacle of light. In every imaginable color and configuration, it was a megawatt funnel of enticement to greed that burned twenty-four hours a day. Bosch felt the same attraction that all the other grinders felt tug at them. Las Vegas was like one of the hookers on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Even happily married men at least glanced their way, if only for a second, just to get an idea what was out there, maybe give them something to think about. Las Vegas was like that. There was a visceral attraction here. The bold promise of money and sex. But the first was a broken promise, a mirage, and the second was fraught with danger, expense, physical and mental risk. It was where the real gambling took place in this town.

PayPal had been a libertarian company—in Thiel’s most extreme imaginings, it had been a way to unilaterally strip governments of the power to control their own money supplies. But Thiel was, after 9/11 anyway, no longer much of a libertarian, if he’d ever been one in the first place. He was growing skeptical of democracy, of immigration, and of all other forms of globalization—and he was, just then, working on a new company to suit his new politics.

At the end of the day, integrity is all you’ve got. People can strip you of your possessions, money, pride—everything you hold dear—but not your integrity. That’s the one thing they can’t touch. The one thing that’s always yours.

I understood and agreed that from a feminist perspective working in a strip club was extremely problematic, but I was saving money to travel and making more in one night than most of my friends made in a week. Plus, it was interesting.

As there is always more wretchedness below than there is brotherhood above, all was given away, so to speak, before it was received. It was like water on dry soil; no matter how much money he received, he never had any. Then he stripped himself.

But I wouldn't preach to the men: only strip 'em an' say: Look at yourselves! That's workin' for money!--Hark at yourselves! That's working for money. You've been working for money! Look at Tevershall! It's horrible. That's because it was built while you was working for money. Look at your girls! They don't care about you, you don't care about them. It's because you've spent your time working an' caring for money. You can't talk nor move nor live, you can't properly be with a woman. You're not alive. Look at yourselves!

Depressed beyond what I'd previously thought possible, I stripped, showered, and slipped on a fresh pair of jeans and a tee shirt and headed for my mom's, trying to figure out why a bank would charge twenty dollars for insufficient funds when they know you don't have it.

This place where she worked certainly didn't make it look as if she continued to believe her calling was to change the course of American history. The building's rusted fire escape would just come down, just come loose from its moorings and crash onto the street, if anyone stepped on it - a fire escape whose function was not to save lives in the event of a fire but to uselessly hang there testifying to the immense loneliness inherent to living. For him it was stripped of any other meaning - no meaning could make better use of that building. Yes, alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper. There is nothing we can do to dispose of that. No, loneliness shouldn't surprise us, as astonishing to experience it as it may be. You can try turning yourself inside out, but all you are then is inside out and lonely instead of inside in and lonely. My stupid, stupid Merry dear, stupider even than your stupid father, not even blowing up buildings helps. It's lonely if there are buildings and it's lonely if there are no buildings. There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness - not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it. The most lethat of manmade explosives can't touch it. Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness. On May Day go out and march with your friends to its greater glory, the superpower of superpowers, the force that overwhelms all. Put your money on it, bet on it, worship it - bow down in submission not to Karl Marx, my stuttering, angry, idiot child, not to Ho Chi-Minh and Mao Tse-tung - bow down to the great god of Loneliness!

And so, at a December 1981 meeting, Contra leaders, whom Reagan referred to as the “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers,” floated the idea that trafficking cocaine into California would provide enough profits to arm and train the anti-Sandinista guerrillas.108 With most of the network already established, the plan was rather straightforward: There were the Medellín and Cali cartels in Colombia; the airports and money laundering in Panama run by President Manuel Noriega; the well-known lack of radar detection that made landing strips in Costa Rica prime transport depots; and weapons and drug warehouses at Ilopango air base outside San Salvador. The problem had been U.S. law enforcement guarding key entry points into a lucrative market. But with the CIA and the National Security Council now ready to run interference and keep the FBI, the U.S. Customs Service,

There are many people of mature age who are making this kind of major readjustment after having attained a place and profession in their own country and acquired substantial means. Stripped of their possessions and their money, they must start once more at the beginning. They must re-educate themselves, first in the language and second in the new customs. They must re-train themselves in the profession, which, in their own country, they had already mastered. To an older man, this is irksome, but in order to comform to the law and have an opportunity to start life once again, it must be done.

We have been conditioned to fear the shadow side of life and the shadow side of ourselves. When we catch ourselves thinking a dark thought or acting out in a behavior that we feel is unacceptable, we run, just like a groundhog, back into our hole and hide, hoping, praying, it will disappear before we venture out again. Why do we do this? Because we are afraid that no matter how hard we try, we will never be able to escape from this part of ourselves. And although ignoring or repressing our dark side is the norm, the sobering truth is that running from the shadow only intensifies its power. Denying it only leads to more pain, suffering, regret, and resignation. If we fail to take responsibility and extract the wisdom that has been hidden beneath the surface of our conscious minds, the shadow will take charge, and instead of us being able to have control over it, the shadow winds up having control over us, triggering the shadow effect. Our dark side then starts making our decisions for us, stripping us of our right to make conscious choices whether it’s what food we will eat, how much money we will spend, or what addiction we will succumb to. Our shadow incites us to act out in ways we never imagined we could and to waste our vital energy on bad habits and repetitive behaviors.

These practical and cultural challenges are further complicated if the illness is too invisible or too conspicuous. Further still if it makes others uncomfortable or if it requires specialized equipment or rare expertise. The complications increase exponentially for those who do not have the emotional and financial support systems that I enjoy, those, for example, who navigate the labyrinthian regulations of federal disability programs, where funding can be stripped away for such missteps as finding someone you wish to marry or saving too much money. Our legal policies surrounding disability funding carry a clear message. If you need your civilization’s help to stay afloat while disabled, you must be careful to live in the abject poverty society feels you deserve or the help you need will be withheld. Such is our cultural love of billable productivity and our general disdain for everything else. It’s a concept that many of us internalize without a second thought. Our worth is our productivity.

The Pope’s name is taken out of the service book, but parishes have simply glued strips of paper over it, thinking the world will turn and Rome rise again. But once the lands are given out, no subject will want to give them back to the church. Prayers may be rewritten, but not leases. Hearts may revert to Rome, but the money never will.

I think you marry the one who, when everything else is stripped away—money, job, arguments, disagreements—he’s still the one you’d want to sit with on the porch and . . . just . . . do nothing. Or do anything.” I looked down at my fingers spread out on top of the rolling cart next to me, each nail painted a smooth, glossy mother-of-pearl. Not a speck of dirt in sight. “Pick the one who matters more than all the stuff of life.

I don’t know what it is exactly, being a server. It’s a job, certainly, but not exclusively. There’s a transparency to it, an occupation stripped of the usual ambitions. One doesn’t move up or down. One waits. You are a waiter. It is fast money - loose, slippery bills that inflate and disappear over the course of an evening. It can be a means, to those with concrete ends and unwavering vision. I grasped most of that easily enough when I was hired at the restaurant at twenty-two.

In each club we went the dancers had the same moves, none nearly as sensuous as mine on any dance floor, but because they are scantily clad and stripping off the men go nuts and throw money at them. In the largest club and the last we went to I watched one pretty girl with big boobs pull a handful of twenties in one set. I followed her to the ladies-room to learn she only danced a few rounds per night and averaged $250 every night and with my face and body she said I would bank much more.

If you really want to draw distinctions among terms, explain to us the following: that the happy person is not the one ordinary people call happy, not the one who has been showered with money, but rather the one whose every good resides in the mind. That one is upright and exalted; he spurns underfoot the objects of wonder; he would not trade his life for any other that he sees. He assesses a person only by that part which makes him a human being. He takes nature for his teacher, regulates his life by nature’s laws, lives as nature has directed. His goods are those no power can strip away; whatever is bad, he turns to good. He is sure in judgment, unshaken, undismayed. There are forces that move him, but none that alarm him. The sharpest, deadliest blows that fortune can inflict do not wound him: he feels but a sting, and that rarely. As for those other darts that assail the human race, those bounce off him like hail hitting a roof, that rattles and then melts without hurting the one inside.

Malls in the late forties and early fifties were risky. Suburban customers still believed in making major purchases in the central business districts of cities and towns, where they expected to find the greatest selection of merchandise and the most competitive prices. After the tax laws of 1954, this changed. Shopping mall developers were among the biggest beneficiaries of accelerated depreciation, and they most often located projects where the older strips met the new interchanges of major projects. With the new tax write-offs, over 98 percent of malls made money for their investors.

We are lost; waiting tables at Denny's or forgetting ourselves stripping on poles, or working at a coffee shop misplaced in history or slowly dying on the inside as a secretary or landscaping lawns out of desperation working jobs with no futures, like bartending. The next generation of teachers, historians, lawyers, police officers and civil engineers work at this bar because the money can not be passed up, when you’re drowning in debt. The world brings us to our knees and we service it because it nourishes us just enough to get by. We are tired and we don't understand why. We, the over educated searching for happiness at the bottom of the bottle.

In exchange for some wide-ranging modifications demanded by the socialist government to the church’s 1929 concordat, Italy agreed to underwrite the remainder of the $406 million settlement.53 The changes to the concordat would have once been unthinkable. The church dropped its insistence that Roman Catholicism be the state religion. Moving forward, the state had to confirm church-annulled marriages. Parents were given the right to opt their children out of formerly mandatory religious education classes. And Rome was no longer considered a “sacred city,” a classification that had allowed the Vatican to keep out strip clubs and the porn industry. Italy even managed to get the church to relinquish control of the Jewish catacombs. “The new concordat is another example of the diminishing hold of the Roman Catholic church in civil life in Italy,” noted The New York Times.54 In return, Italy instituted an“eight-per-thousand” tax, in which 0.8 percent of the income tax paid by ordinary Italians was distributed to one of twelve religious organizations recognized by the state. During its early years, nearly 90 percent of the tax went to the Catholic Church (by 2010, the church received less than 50 percent as the tax was more equitably distributed). Not only did the tax relieve Italy of its responsibility for the $135 million annual subsidy it paid for the country’s 35,000 priests, it meant the church had a steady and reliable source of much needed income.55

The rise of loneliness as a health hazard tracks with the entrenchment of values and practices that supersede any notion of "individual choices." The dynamics include reduced social programs, less available "common" spaces such as public libraries, cuts in services for the vulnerable and the elderly, stress, poverty, and the inexorable monopolization of economic life that shreds local communities. By way of illustration, let's take a familiar scenario: Walmart or some other megastore decides to open one of its facilities in a municipality. Developers are happy, politicians welcome the new investment, and consumers are pleased at finding a wide variety of goods at lower prices. But what are the social impacts? Locally owned and operated small businesses cannot compete with the marketing behemoth and must close. People lose their jobs or must find new work for lower pay. Neighborhoods are stripped of the familiar hardware store, pharmacy, butcher, baker, candlestick maker. People no longer walk to their local establishment, where they meet and greet one another and familiar merchants they have known, but drive, each isolated in their car, to a windowless, aesthetically bereft warehouse, miles away from home. They might not even leave home at all — why bother, when you can order online? No wonder international surveys show a rise in loneliness. The percentage of Americans identifying themselves as lonely has doubled from 20 to 40 percent since the 1980s, the New York Times reported in 2016. Alarmed by the health ravages, Britain has even found it necessary to appoint a minister of loneliness. Describing the systemic founts of loneliness, the U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy wrote: "Our twenty-first-century world demands that we focus on pursuits that seem to be in constant competition for our time, attention, energy, and commitment. Many of these pursuits are themselves competitions. We compete for jobs and status. We compete over possessions, money, and reputations. We strive to stay afloat and to get ahead. Meanwhile, the relationships we prize often get neglected in the chase." It is easy to miss the point that what Dr. Murthy calls "our twenty-first-century world" is no abstract entity, but the concrete manifestation of a particular socioeconomic system, a distinct worldview, and a way of life.

God, the devil, and Orafoura were walking along a river one day when they came across three naked women splashing in the water. God turned to the other two and said, "Ten talents to the one who can get them fully clothed the fastest." The devil, always money hungry, went first and tried to reverse seduce them. This took him fifteen minutes. Going back in time to their original nakedness, God went next and snapped his fingers and instantly they were clothed. Going back in time again, it was then Orafoura's turn. He crouched and crawled quietly up to the reeds by the river and sat down. Fifteen, thirty, forty-five minutes passed and nothing happened. Finally, God asked him what he was doing. Orafoura replied, "Watching. I'd have squandered my talents at the strip club anyway.

Father, how was it axes and plows that made this country? Didn’t we fight England for it?” “We fought for Independence, son,” Father said. “But all the land our forefathers had was a little strip of country, here between the mountains and the ocean. All the way from here west was Indian country, and Spanish and French and English country. It was farmers that took all that country and made it America.” “How?” Almanzo asked. “Well, son, the Spaniards were soldiers, and high-and-mighty gentlemen that only wanted gold. And the French were fur-traders, wanting to make quick money. And England was busy fighting wars. But we were farmers, son; we wanted the land. It was farmers that went over the mountains, and cleared the land, and settled it, and farmed it, and hung on to their farms.

But first, I want you to over-spend on junk one last time. Take your credit card or store card, walk into any shop you choose and buy something you don’t need with money you don’t have. As you hand the card to the cashier, focus on how you’re feeling. Is it giving you pleasure? Does it make you feel good? As you punch your PIN into the card reader, concentrate on your emotions. Is this expenditure giving you a buzz? Is it making you happy? When you get home with your purchase, unpack it and hold it. Are you happy with it? Be aware of exactly how this purchase has made you feel. Stripped of the brainwashing that previously told you this sort of spending gave you pleasure, you can recognise what an empty, meaningless act it is to spend money you don’t have on something you don’t need.

I found it again at last! Page 156 - 157 of *My Soul to Keep* by Melanie Wells. Dr. Dylan Foster is thinking to herself while searching through literature on snake lore, "Then there was all the mystical stuff. Once again, the dearth of comparative religion in my theology training nearly skunked me. Four years of sod-busing in seminary had taught me exactly nothing more than what I already knew--in grander proportions, of course, and to near-microscopic levels of minutia. In the end, I got out of there with a solid hermeneutical method, an encyclopedic understanding of dispensational theology, and the ability to conjugate verbs and deconstruct participles in Greek and Hebrew--all notable skills--but without even passable knowledge of anything outside one extremely narrow strip of theological territory." "When it was all said and done, I'd spent four years and trainload of money to get indoctrinated, not educated. Lousy planning, if you ask me.

No revolution can be successful without organization and money. "The downtrodden masses" usually provide little of the former and none of the latter. But Insiders at the top can arrange for both.   What did these people possibly have to gain in financing the Russian Revolution? What did they have to gain by keeping it alive and afloat, or, during the 1920's by pouring millions of dollars into what Lenin called his New Economic Program, thus saving the Soviets from collapse?   Why would these "capitalists" do all this? If your goal is global conquest, you have to start somewhere. It may or may not have been coincidental, but Russia was the one major European country without a central bank. In Russia, for the first time, the Communist conspiracy gained a geographical homeland from which to launch assaults against the other nations of the world. The West now had an enemy.   In the Bolshevik Revolution we have some of the world's richest and most powerful men financing a movement which claims its very existence is based on the concept of stripping of their wealth men like the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Schiffs, Warburgs, Morgans, Harrimans, and Milners. But obviously these men have no fear of international Communism. It is only logical to assume that if they financed it and do not fear it, it must be because they control it. Can there be any other explanation that makes sense? Remember that for over 150 years it has been standard operating procedure of the Rothschilds and their allies to control both sides of every conflict. You must have an "enemy" if you are going to collect from the King. The East-West balance-of-power politics is used as one of the main excuses for the socialization of America. Although it was not their main purpose, by nationalization of Russia the Insiders bought themselves an enormous piece of real estate, complete with mineral rights, for somewhere between $30 and $40 million.   ----  

I never meant to bring all of it upon you. Surely you understand that. I have loved you and admired you all my life. You are the only true hero I have. I owe you everything.' Lizzie reached out and stripped leaves off a twig. 'You always wanted to do something big. Something important.' 'Is that such a terrible thing? You're the one who told me once that the world can't forgive ambition in a woman.' 'I never got to find out. My ambitions never seemed to figure into things. You were away at the university when Mother got sick, so it fell to Jessie and me. And you were already married by the time Jessie passed. Your life was set. Suddenly there was a niece to raise, and then...' Lizzie paused. ' Then you had your personality to go discover.' She tossed away a fistful of leaves. 'You had everything. You had a wonderful man who adored you, beautiful healthy children. Freedom. No money worries. A nanny and a housekeeper. You didn't have to work, and Edwin never asked a thing of you. Do you realize what you gave up for Frank Wright? The kind of life most women-- most feminists-- dream of.

Liberals are imperfect. Yes, of course. Liberals need to grow one fucking vertebrae, stop massaging capitalism’s nards, and actually serve their constituents. But, on the other hand, if you look at the actual fucking laws they are trying to pass and the actual fucking leader they are supporting, the Republicans of 2019 literally do not want human beings to have health care. They do not want millennials to be able to earn a living wage, own property, or comfortably retire, ever. They want to expand access to guns and shrink police accountability. They want refugees tossed into concentration camps. They want pregnant people to be forced to incubate and birth unwanted children and for barely pubescent rape victims to die in childbirth. They certainly want to roll back marriage equality, if they can, and they’ve already begun stripping rights and protections from trans people. They want to squeeze every last resource out of our ecosystem until everything you love—manatees, dragonflies, fruit, your grandchildren—either burns or starves or drowns. They want to steal your money and waste it on gold-leafed steaks that they can shit into their gold toilets while they watch the sun swallow the earth. They are very, very bad! Similarly, sometimes Democrats ask you to respect people’s pronouns!

I conceive a strip miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health—his land’s health, his own, his family’s, his community’s, his country’s. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order—a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, “hard facts”; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.

Muriah approached him with a new pair of khakis and a couple of T-shirts. “I guessed at the size so you might want to go try these on first.” He took the clothes and slid his arm around her waist, maneuvering her toward the fitting room. “Hey, I didn’t sign on to be your dresser.” She grumbled, but didn’t struggle. He pulled the door closed and turned to meet her eyes. “It’s light in here and full of people. Apep will not be able to surprise us, and his serpents cannot spy. We need to talk.” *** He stripped off the wet shirt, exposing his chiseled torso. She did her best not to choke on her tongue. His tanned skin and taut muscles tempted her, luring her to touch him. Turning around to give him privacy seemed like the right thing to do, but there wasn’t a hint of modesty in this Mayan god, and if he could handle getting this personal, then she could, too. When he unzipped the wet pants, she held her breath. Would an ancient guy wear underwear? She was about to find out. He bent over to lower the wet slacks. When he straightened up, she realized he’d been talking, but she didn’t have a clue what he had said. Instead, all her attention was focused on a fine trail of dark hair leading from just below his navel and disappearing under the low-slung elastic band of his boxer briefs. “Muriah?” Her gaze snapped up to meet his. Thank the universe he couldn’t read her thoughts. “Yeah?” “Did you hear my question?” He stood two feet from her in only his underwear, and he thought she was listening? He was either completely unaware of his sex appeal, or he was way too accustomed to being obeyed. Probably both. She cleared her throat. “I must’ve missed it.” A spark lit his eyes that told her he might have more than a clue to his sex appeal. He picked up the T-shirt and pulled it on. “I asked if you knew of another hotel closer to the airport so we can get out of New York as soon as the sun sets tomorrow.” “I’m sure I can find one.” She pulled out her phone, grateful to have something to pretend to focus on besides him tucking his package into the new khakis she pulled off the rack for him. “I probably should’ve grabbed some dry underwear, too.” “They are nearly dry now. I will be fine.” He popped the tags off, and she glanced up from her hotel search. “They’re not going to like you taking the tags off before you pay.” The corner of his mouth curved up. “They will be honored to take my money.” She groaned and rolled her eyes. “Do you ever not get your way?” He stepped closer to her, his chest an inch from hers until her back pressed against the modular wall of the fitting room. “Rarely.” His dark gaze held hers, and the deep rumble of his voice sent heat through her body. “But some things are worth the extra effort.

Statisticians say that stocks with healthy dividends slightly outperform the market averages, especially on a risk-adjusted basis. On average, high-yielding stocks have lower price/earnings ratios and skew toward relatively stable industries. Stripping out these factors, generous dividends alone don’t seem to help performance. So, if you need or like income, I’d say go for it. Invest in a company that pays high dividends. Just be sure that you are favoring stocks with low P/Es in stable industries. For good measure, look for earnings in excess of dividends, ample free cash flow, and stable proportions of debt and equity. Also look for companies in which the number of shares outstanding isn’t rising rapidly. To put a finer point on income stocks to skip, reverse those criteria. I wouldn’t buy a stock for its dividend if the payout wasn’t well covered by earnings and free cash flow. Real estate investment trusts, master limited partnerships, and royalty trusts often trade on their yield rather than their asset value. In some of those cases, analysts disagree about the economic meaning of depreciation and depletion—in particular, whether those items are akin to earnings or not. Without looking at the specific situation, I couldn’t judge whether the per share asset base was shrinking over time or whether generally accepted accounting principles accounting was too conservative. If I see a high-yielder with swiftly rising share counts and debt levels, I assume the worst.

We had little money but didn’t think of ourselves as poor. Our vision, if I can call it that, was not materialistic. If we had a concept about ourselves, it was egalitarian, although we would not have known what that word meant. We spoke French entirely. There was a bond between Cajuns and people of color. Cajuns didn’t travel, because they believed they lived in the best place on earth. But somehow the worst in us, or outside of us, asserted itself and prevailed and replaced everything that was good in our lives. We traded away our language, our customs, our stands of cypress, our sugarcane acreage, our identity, and our pride. Outsiders ridiculed us and thought us stupid; teachers forbade our children to speak French on the school grounds. Our barrier islands were dredged to extinction. Our coastline was cut with eight thousand miles of industrial channels, destroying the root systems of the sawgrass and the swamps. The bottom of the state continues to wash away in the flume of the Mississippi at a rate of sixteen square miles a year. Much of this we did to ourselves in the same way that a drunk like me will destroy a gift, one that is irreplaceable and extended by a divine hand. Our roadsides are littered with trash, our rain ditches layered with it, our waterways dumping grounds for automobile tires and couches and building material. While we trivialize the implications of our drive-through daiquiri windows and the seediness of our politicians and recite our self-congratulatory mantra, laissez les bons temps rouler, the southern rim of the state hovers on the edge of oblivion, a diminishing, heartbreaking strip of green lace that eventually will be available only in photographs.

Nothing you've been through has been wasted. I know at times you feel you've wasted time, moments, and years over what you can't regain again — a job, a marriage, a relationship, your health, the sacrifices, your time and service, and giving up something you love for God, that broke your heart. You sit back and wonder, "Will I ever be happy again? Was everything I've been through worth the pain, the tears, the sleepless nights, the embarrassment." The Lord is saying, "It's just preparation." Where you are now is no accident. What has happened to you didn't take God by surprise. He already initiated a plan of escape before you were formed; mistakes, setbacks, disappointments, things outside your control.. The plan was already made! I don't know your story but only you and God know your story. He took you from bad company, He took you from suicide, He took you when you were at your lowest, He took you when nobody wanted you, He took you when your money was low, Why? Because He saw potential in you! As God as my witness it gets lonely at times. Life can be fearful when you don't know what to expect. When you feel everything has been stripped away...When you feel there's no hope... When you wonder how much longer do I have to wait. Who wants to feel rejection or disappointments.. But it's in those moments when we experience the faithfulness of God! I want to encourage whoever I'm speaking to, to hold on! Before Joseph became Prime Minister of Egypt he was in prison for years because of his brothers. He wasn't expecting that... In other words what God has for you is something bigger than you've imagined. It's so much greater and better than what you had at first. It's something you never thought about or even prayed for because nothing you've been through has been wasted. Your situation is going change suddenly because all it did was reposition you for a blessing. God is getting ready to move! You're frustrated because you're on the verge. You're restless because you're on the verge. Your moment is coming sooner than you think!

He felt it. Misery, we must insist, had been good to him. Poverty in youth, when it succeeds, is so far magnificent that it turns the whole will towards effort, and the whole soul towards aspiration. Poverty strips the material life entirely bare, and makes it hideous; thence arise inexpressible yearnings towards the ideal life. The rich young man has a hundred brilliant and coarse amusements, racing, hunting, dogs, cigars, gaming, feasting, and the rest; busying the lower portions of the soul at the expense of its higher and delicate portions. The poor young man must work for his bread; he eats; when he has eaten, he has nothing more but reverie. He goes free to the play which God gives; he beholds the sky, space, the stars, the flowers, the children, the humanity in which he suffers, the creation in which he shines. He looks at humanity so much that he sees the soul, he looks at creation so much that he sees God. He dreams, he feels that he is great; he dreams again, and he feels that he is tender. From the egotism of the suffering man, he passes to the compassion of the contemplating man. A wonderful feeling springs up within him, forgetfulness of self, and pity for all. In thinking of the numberless enjoyments which nature offers, gives, and gives lavishly to open souls, and refuses to closed souls, he, a millionaire of intelligence, comes to grieve for the millionaires of money. All hatred goes out of his heart in proportion as all light enters his mind. And then is he unhappy? No. The misery of a young man is never miserable. The first lad you meet, poor as he may be, with his health, his strength, his quick step, his shining eyes, his blood which circulates warmly, his black locks, his fresh cheeks, his rosy lips, his white teeth, his pure breath, will always be envied by an old emperor. And then every morning he sets about earning his bread; and while his hands are earning his living, his backbone is gaining firmness, his brain is gaining ideas. When his work is done, he returns to ineffable ecstasies, to contemplation, to joy; he sees his feet in difficulties, in obstacle, on the pavement, in thorns, sometimes in the mire; his head is in the light. He is firm, serene, gentle, peaceful, attentive, serious, content with little, benevolent; and he blesses God for having given him these two estates which many of the rich are without; labour which makes him free, and thought which makes him noble. This is what had taken place in Marius.

MY OWN BUSINESS . . . M. O. B. MOB assumes the right of every individual to possess his inner space, to do what interests him with people he wants to see. In some areas this right was more respected a hundred years ago than it is in the permissive society. 'Which is it this time, Holmes? Cocaine or morphine?' asks a disapproving Watson. But Holmes won’t have fink hounds sniffing through his Baker Street digs. If he accepts an American assignment 8 narks won’t beat his door in with sledge hammers, rush in waving their guns “WHATZAT YOU’RE SMOKING?” jerk the pipe out of his mouth and strip him naked. We will make the MOB stand on criminals and crim­inal communes clear. A criminal is someone who commits crimes against property and crimes against persons. We feel that criminals are not minding their own business. Someone who steals your typewriter, starts barroom fights, kicks an old bum to death, is not minding his own business at all. The Thuggees of India, the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan are examples of criminal communes. Strangling someone and stealing his money, throwing acid in his face, lynching beating and burn­ ing people to death is not minding one’s own business. On one side we have MOBS dedicated to minding their own business without interference. On the other side we have the enemies of MOB dedicated to interference. Equipped with new techniques of computerized thought control the enemies of MOB could inflict a permanent defeat. MOB want to know just where everybody stands. Wouldn’t advise you to try sitting on that fence. It’s electric. Your enemies then are the enemies of MOB. You can do more to destroy these enemies with tape recorders and video cameras than you can with machine guns. Video tape puts any number of machine guns into your hands. However, it is difficult to convince a revolutionary that this weapon is actually more potent than gelignite or guns. What do revolu­tionaries want? Vengeance, or a real change? Both perhaps. It is difficult for those who have suffered outrageous brutal­ity and oppression to forget about vengeance, which is why I postulated the wholesome catharsis of MA, the Mass Assassination of enemy word and image. And this brings us to a basic question that every revolutionary must ask himself. Can I live without enemies? Can any human being live without enemies? No human being has ever done so yet. If the present revolutionary movement is to amount to more than a change of management, presenting the same old good-guy, bad-guy movie, a basic change of conscious­ ness must take place.

His choice had to be swift as the wind. Should he take cover behind the row in front of him and toss the bit of metal in the snow (it'd be noticed but they wouldn't know who the culprit was) or keep it on him? For that strip of hacksaw he could get ten days in the cells, if they classed it as a knife. But a cobbler's knife was money, it was bread. A pity to throw it away. He slipped it into his left mitten. At that moment the next row was ordered to step forward and be searched. Now the last three men stood in full view-- Senka, Shukhov, and the man from the 32nd squad who had gone to look for the Moldavian. Because they were three and the guards facing them were five, Shukhov could try a ruse. He could choose which of the two guards on the right to present himself to. He decided against a young pink-faced one and plumped for an older man with a gray mustache. The older one, of course, was experienced and could find the blade easily if he wanted to, but because of his age he would be fed up with the job. It must stink in his nose now like burning sulfur. Meanwhile Shukhov had removed both mittens, the empty one and the one with the hacksaw, and held them in one hand (the empty one in front) together with the untied rope belt. He fully unbuttoned his jacket, lifted high the edges of his coat and jacket (never had he been so servile at the search but now he wanted to show he was innocent--Come on, frisk me!), and at the word of command stepped forward. The guard slapped Shukhov's sides and back, and the outside of his pants pocket. Nothing there. He kneaded the edges of coat and jacket. Nothing there either. He was about to pass him through when, for safety's sake, he crushed the mitten that Shukhov held out to him--the empty one. The guard crushed it in his band, and Shukhov felt as though pincers of iron were crushing everything inside him. One such squeeze on the other mitten and he'd be sunk--the cells on nine ounces of bread a day and hot stew one day in three. He imagined how weak he'd grow, how difficult he'd find it to get back to his present condition, neither fed nor starving. And an urgent prayer rose in his heart: "Oh Lord, save me! Don't let them send me to the cells." And while all this raced through his mind, the guard, after finishing with the right-hand mitten, stretched a hand out to deal with the other (he would have squeezed them at the same moment if Shukhov had held them in separate hands). Just then the guard heard his chief, who was in a hurry to get on, shout to the escort: "Come on, bring up the machine-works column." And instead of examining the other mitten the old guard waved Shukhov on. He was through. He ran off to catch up with the others. They had already formed fives in a sort of corridor between long beams, like horse stalls in a market, a sort of paddock for prisoners. He ran lightly; hardly feeling the ground. He didn't say a prayer of thanksgiving because he hadn't time, and anyway it would have been out of place. The escort now drew aside.

So Japan is allied with Germany and they’re like “Sweet the rest of the world already hates us let’s take their land!” So they start invading China and Malaysia and the Philippines and just whatever else but then they’re like “Hmm what if America tries to stop us? Ooh! Let’s surprise attack Hawaii!” So that’s exactly what they do. The attack is very successful but only in a strictly technical sense. To put it in perspective, let’s try a metaphor. Let’s say you’re having a barbecue but you don’t want to get stung by any bees so you find your local beehive and just go crazy on it with a baseball bat. Make sense? THEN YOU MUST BE JAPAN IN THE ’40s. WHO ELSE WOULD EVER DO THIS? So the U.S. swarms on Japan, obviously but that’s where our bee metaphor breaks down because while bees can sting you they cannot put you in concentration camps (or at least, I haven’t met any bees that can do that). Yeah, after that surprise attack on Pearl Harbor everybody on the West Coast is like “OMG WE’RE AT WAR WITH JAPAN AND THERE ARE JAPANESE DUDES LIVING ALLLL AROUND US.” I mean, they already banned Japanese immigration like a decade before but there are still Japanese dudes all over the coast and what’s more those Japanese dudes are living right next door to all the important aircraft factories and landing strips and shipyards and farmland and forests and bridges almost as if those types of things are EVERYWHERE and thus impossible not to live next door to. Whatever, it’s pretty suspicious. Now, at this point, nothing has been sabotaged and some people think that means they’re safe. But not military geniuses like Earl Warren who points out that the only reason there’s been no sabotage is that the Japanese are waiting for their moment and the fact that there has been no sabotage yet is ALL THE PROOF WE NEED to determine that sabotage is being planned. Frank Roosevelt hears this and he’s like “That’s some pretty shaky logic but I really don’t like Japanese people. Okay, go ahead.” So he passes an executive order that just says “Any enemy ex-patriots can be kicked out of any war zone I designate. P.S.: California, Oregon, and Washington are war zones have fun with that.” So they kick all the Japanese off the coast forcing them to sell everything they own but people are still not satisfied. They’re like “Those guys look funny! We can’t have funny-looking dudes roaming around this is wartime! We gotta lock ’em up.” And FDR is like “Okay, sure.” So they herd all the Japanese into big camps where they are concentrated in large numbers like a hundred and ten thousand people total and then the military is like “Okay, guys we will let you go if you fill out this loyalty questionnaire that says you love the United States and are totally down to be in our army” and some dudes are like “Sweet, free release!” but some dudes are like “Seriously? You just put me in jail for being Asian. This country is just one giant asshole and it’s squatting directly over my head.” And the military is like “Ooh, sorry to hear that buddy looks like you’re gonna stay here for the whole war. Meanwhile your friends get to go fight and die FOR FREEDOM.

Wife's Letter (excerpt) It was not the mask that died among the boots, but you. The girl with the yoyo was not the only one to know about your masked play. From the very first instant, when, elated with pride, you talked about the distortion of the magnetic field, I too saw through you completely. Please don’t insult me any more by asking how I did it. Of course, I was flustered, confused, and frightened to death. Under any circumstances, it was an unimaginably drastic way of acting, so different from your ordinary self. It was hallucinatory, seeing you so full of self-confidence. Even you knew very well that I had seen through you. You knew and yet demanded that we go on with the play in silence. ... But you went from one misunderstanding to the next, didn’t you? You write that I rejected you, but that’s not true. Didn’t you reject yourself all by yourself?.. In a happy frame of mind, I reflected that love strips the mask from each of us, and we must endeavor for those we love to put the mask on so that it can be taken off again. For if there is no mask to start with, there is no pleasure in removing it, is there? ... Is what you think to be the mask in reality your real face, or is what you think to be your real face really a mask? Yes, you do understand. Anyone who is seduced is seduced realizing this. ... At first you were apparently trying to get your own self back by means of the mask, but before you knew it you had come to think of it only as your magician’s cloak for escaping from yourself. So it was not a mask, but somewhat the same as another real face, wasn’t it? You finally revealed your true colors. It was not the mask, but you yourself. It is meaningful to put a mask on, precisely because one makes others realize it is a mask. Even with cosmetics, which you abominate so, we never try to conceal the fact that it is make-up. After all, it was not that the mask was bad, but that you were too unaware of how to treat it. Even though you put the mask on, you could not do a thing while you were wearing it. Good or bad, you could not do a thing. All you could manage was to wander through the streets and write long, never-ending confessions, like a snake with its tail in its mouth. It was all the same to you whether you burned your face or didn’t, whether you put on a mask or didn’t. You were incapable of calling the mask back. Since the mask will not come back, there is no reason for me to return either. ... While you spoke of the face as being some kind of roadway between fellow human beings, you were like a snail that thinks only of its own doorway. You were showing off. Even though you had forced me into a compound where I had already been, you set up a fuss as if I had scaled a prison wall, as if I had absconded with money. And so, when you began to focus on my face you were flustered and confused, and without a word you at once nailed up the door of the mask. Indeed, as you said, perhaps death filled the world. I wonder if scattering the seeds of death is not the deed of men who think only of themselves, as you do. You don’t need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself.

But let’s be clear: the madness of everyday life was its own issue. It didn’t have any relationship to whether or not Christianity was bullshit. Obviously, Christianity was total bullshit. It was the most insane bullshit! But it was impossible to make an argument against superstition and magical nonsense, and have it stick, when that argument was delivered from a society where every citizen was a magician. And yes, reader, that includes you. You too are a magician. Your life is dominated by one of the oldest and most perverse forms of magic, one with less interior cohesion than the Christian faith, and you invest its empty symbolism with a level of belief that far outpaces that of any Christian. Here are some strips of paper and bits of metal! Watch as I transform these strips of paper and bits of metal into: (a) sex (b) food (c) clothing (d) shelter (e) transportation that allows me to acquire strips of paper and bits of money (f) intoxicants that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (g) leisure items that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (h) pointless vacations to exotic locales where I will replicate the brutish behavior that I display in my point of origin as a brief respite from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (i) unfair social advantages that allow my rotten children to undertake their own moronic pursuits of strips of paper and bits of metal. Humiliate yourself for strips of paper. Murder for the strips of paper. Humiliate others for the strips of paper. Worship the people who’ve accumulated such vast quantities of strips of paper that their strips of paper no longer have any physical existence and are now represented by binary notation. Treat the vast accumulators like gods. Free blowies for the moldering corpse of Steve Jobs! Fawning profile pieces for Jay-Z! The Presidency for billionaire socialite and real-estate developer Donald J. Trump! Kill! Kill! Kill! Work! Work! Work! Die! Die! Die! Go on. Pretend this is not the most magical thing that has ever happened. Historical arguments against Christianity tended to be delivered in tones of pearl-clutching horror, usually by subpar British intellectuals pimping their accent in America, a country where sounding like an Oxbridge twat conferred an unearned credibility. Yes, the Crusades were horrible. Yes, the Inquisition was awful. Yes, they shouldn’t have burned witches in Salem. Yes, there is an unfathomable amount of sexually abused walking wounded. Yes, every Christian country has oriented itself around the rich and done nothing but abuse the fuck out of its poor. But it’s not like the secular conversion of the industrialized world has alleviated any of the horror. Read the news. Murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape...Despair. All secularism has done, really, is remove a yoke from the rich. They’d always been horrible, but at least when they still paid lip service to Christian virtues, they could be shamed into philanthropy. Now they use market forces to slide the whole thing into feudalism. New York University built a campus [in Abu Dhabi] with slave labor! In the Twenty-First Century AD! And has suffered no rebuke! Applications are at an all-time high! The historical arguments against Christianity are as facile as reviews on Goodreads.com, and come down to this: Why do you organize around bad people who tell you that a Skyman wants you to be good? To which the rejoinder is: yes, the clergy sucks, but who cares how normal people are delivered into goodness?

When I got to Broderbund (around noon), it felt unreal. For three hours I’d been a stranger with no money, no friends, no escape hatch. My personality, my sense of myself, was stripped away. I was Man, waiting for Bus. It was primal.

The basic premise of 1031 exchanges is the asset swap: you’re essentially trading one asset for another. To qualify here, the assets have to be real estate and be “like-kind.” Here are some examples of real estate assets that you could swap and benefit from the 1031 rules: • Single-family rental property • Multi-family rental property • Apartment building • Office building • Strip mall • Self-storage facility • Hotel • Raw land

I won $2 playing the lotto today. And I might win $2 again tomorrow. But if I buy thousands of $1 lottery tickets, each with an expected payout of $.56, then it becomes a near mathematical certainty that I will lose money.

The law of large numbers explains why casinos always make money in the long run.

The law of large numbers suggests that an investment firm, or a rich individual like Warren Buffet, should seek out hundreds of opportunities like this with uncertain outcomes but attractive expected returns. Some will work; many won’t. On average, these investors will make a lot of money, just like an insurance company or a casino.

When we notice the prices on the menu we ask Ken if we can have the money instead and just go to Burger King. He laughs and tells us no because life is about experiencing new things. When the waiter takes our orders, Preston asks for the filet mignon but pronounces it totally wrong. Alvin asks for the New York strip steak, and then asks to substitute the sides for another New York strip steak. The waiter starts laughing, but we don’t because we know he is serious. Malcolm and I both play it safe with pasta. It was always a dream of mine to eat at a fancy restaurant. Now that the dream is fulfilled, there is room for more dreams.

made quick work of his belt and his fly, then gasped as his hot flesh filled my palm. And I really mean filled it. He was huge. No wonder he'd decided to get into stripping and prostitution in order to make the money he so desperately seemed to need. The boy was blessed. "You mean you don't pick up random women in bars and fuck them in supply closets?" I teased, wrapping my hand around his shaft.

You’ll see,” he said, pacing the room. “You think they’re powerful—those giants of industry who’re so clever with motors and furnaces? They’ll be stopped! They’ll be stripped! They’ll be brought down! They’ll be—” He noticed the way she was staring at him. “It’s not for ourselves,” he snapped hastily, “it’s for the people. That’s the difference between business and politics—we have no selfish ends in view, no private motives, we’re not after profit, we don’t spend our lives scrambling for money, we don’t have to! That’s why we’re slandered and misunderstood by all the greedy profit-chasers who can’t conceive of a spiritual motive or a moral ideal or . . . We couldn’t help it!” he cried suddenly, whirling to her. “We had to have that plan! With everything falling to pieces and stopping, something had to be done! We had to stop them from stopping! We couldn’t help it!

In classical times, there was a plant called silphium that grew in a narrow coastal strip of Cyrenaica, modern-day Libya. Its resin was used as a contraceptive and abortifacient. The resin appears to have been very effective, preventing pregnancy with a once-a-month pea-sized dose. Silphium eventually became too popular for its own good. Never domesticated, it was overharvested as demand grew. As it became scarcer, the price rose until it was worth its weight in silver, which drove further overharvesting and eventually led to one of the first human-caused extinctions in recorded history. However, during the centuries in which it was routinely used by the Greco-Roman upper classes, it must have noticeably depressed fertility, unless they were throwing money out the window.

Stripping the duvet from the bed and throwing it over the victim’s body in this situation is an indicator of depersonalization—the UNSUB did not want to see the results of his assault as he remained in the room searching for money and valuables. The UNSUB would be able to justify the killing in his own mind as necessary to protect himself;

(This is one reason shipping container architecture, far from being some kind of Earth-friendly “recycling,” is in many cases an absurd vanity: stripping away all that nasty stuff takes more time, money, and energy than building a comparable structure anew.)

THE EGO’S SEARCH FOR WHOLENESS Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intrinsic part of the egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole. In some people, this is conscious, in others unconscious. If it is conscious, it manifests as the unsettling and constant feeling of not being worthy or good enough. If it is unconscious, it will only be felt indirectly as an intense craving, wanting and needing. In either case, people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill this hole they feel within. So they strive after possessions, money, success, power, recognition, or a special relationship, basically so that they can feel better about themselves, feel more complete. But even when they attain all these things, they soon find that the hole is still there, that it is bottomless. Then they are really in trouble, because they cannot delude themselves anymore. Well, they can and do, but it gets more difficult. As long as the egoic mind is running your life, you cannot truly be at ease; you cannot be at peace or fulfilled except for brief intervals when you obtained what you wanted, when a craving has just been fulfilled. Since the ego is a derived sense of self, it needs to identify with external things. It needs to be both defended and fed constantly. The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you. Do you find this frightening? Or is it a relief to know this? All of these things you will have to relinquish sooner or later. Perhaps you find it as yet hard to believe, and I am certainly not asking you to believe that your identity cannot be found in any of those things. You will know the truth of it for yourself. You will know it at the latest when you feel death approaching. Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die” — and find that there is no death.

Shireen Baraka Barghouti lives in a cauldron of hate that often boils over. She’s never been outside the Gaza Strip even though it’s only twenty-five miles long and three miles wide at the narrowest borders, seven miles at the widest. Qasem Soleimani, until his death in 2020, was the major general over Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who invested monstrous sums of Iranian money in the youth of Gaza. In fact, Hamas simply could not exist without the Iranian money he supplied. And to make sure he covered all the bases, Soleimani also funded the rival Islamic Jihad. Shireen doesn’t hold back when speaking about the climate of death and destruction that has helped create. “In Gaza, terrorism is our number-one export,” she said. “How sad that whenever the Gaza Strip is mentioned, people automatically think of radical Islamic terrorists. But how could they not? Our Gaza government is run by them. Iran gives Hamas thirty million dollars a month. “At different times we’ve had al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in charge, to name just a few. New groups form every year, and our young Gaza boys see these ‘freedom fighters’ as heroes to emulate. “In Europe, people idolize soccer players. But not in Gaza. Here, men dressed in green uniforms, toting AK-47s, and shouting ‘death to Israel’ are featured on billboards. “The explosions are enough to cause you a nervous breakdown. A few years ago Hamas fired over ten thousand rockets into Israel in one extended attack over several months. We knew it was just a matter of time before the Israelis responded, and once we heard the drones humming over Gaza, we took cover. “Hamas has done nothing for the people of Gaza. While they line their pockets with millions of dollars, the people go without eating. They are cruel and intentionally keep us in this senseless war with Israel. “You might think because I live in Gaza and grew up Muslim that I hate Israel. But I don’t. I do detest Hamas, however—and all the other terrorist groups that make life unbearable in the Strip.

All of the labors of love, stripped of the capitalist impulse to make money, fame, and power, or really at bottom attempts to connect to other people…stripped of the need to fight to survive, how much more connection could we create?

Curtis made money, more money than he’d ever seen. He bought cars. He started a strip club. He knew these things were in direct conflict with Islam and the values the Stones had claimed to endorse, but he did it anyway. He still went to Friday prayers, didn’t he? It’s easy to ignore hypocrisy when you have an enemy.

I began to delight in surprising adults with my refined palate and disgusting my inexperienced peers with what I would discover to be some of nature's greatest gifts. By the age of ten I had learned to break down a full lobster with my bare hands and a nutcracker. I devoured steak tartare, pâtés, sardines, snails baked in butter and smothered with roasted garlic. I tried raw sea cucumber, abalone, and oysters on the half shell. At night my mother would roast dried cuttlefish on a camp stove in the garage and serve it with a bowl of peanuts and a sauce of red pepper paste mixed with Japanese mayonnaise. My father would tear it into strips and we'd eat it watching television together until our jaws were sore, and I'd wash it all down with small sips from one of my mother's Coronas. Neither one of my parents graduated from college. I was not raised in a household with many books or records. I was not exposed to fine art at a young age or taken to any museums or plays at established cultural institutions. My parents wouldn't have known the names of authors I should read or foreign directors I should watch. I was not given an old edition of Catcher in the Rye as a preteen, copies of Rolling Stones records on vinyl, or any kind of instructional material from the past that might help give me a leg up to cultural maturity. But my parents were worldly in their own ways. They had seen much of the world and had tasted what it had to offer. What they lacked in high culture, they made up for by spending their hard-earned money on the finest of delicacies. My childhood was rich with flavor---blood sausage, fish intestines, caviar. They loved good food, to make it, to seek it, to share it, and I was an honorary guest at their table.

Song" Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree. All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing The song of a night bird. They sat up in their beds, and then They lay back down again. In the night wind, the goat’s head Swayed back and forth, and from far off it shone faintly The way the moonlight shone on the train track miles away Beside which the goat’s headless body lay. Some boys Had hacked its head off. It was harder work than they had imagined. The goat cried like a man and struggled hard. But they Finished the job. They hung the bleeding head by the school And then ran off into the darkness that seems to hide everything. The head hung in the tree. The body lay by the tracks. The head called to the body. The body to the head. They missed each other. The missing grew large between them, Until it pulled the heart right out of the body, until The drawn heart flew toward the head, flew as a bird flies Back to its cage and the familiar perch from which it trills. Then the heart sang in the head, softly at first and then louder, Sang long and low until the morning light came up over The school and over the tree, and then the singing stopped…. The goat had belonged to a small girl. She named The goat Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry, named it after The night’s bush of stars, because the goat’s silky hair Was dark as well water, because it had eyes like wild fruit. The girl lived near a high railroad track. At night She heard the trains passing, the sweet sound of the train’s horn Pouring softly over her bed, and each morning she woke To give the bleating goat his pail of warm milk. She sang Him songs about girls with ropes and cooks in boats. She brushed him with a stiff brush. She dreamed daily That he grew bigger, and he did. She thought her dreaming Made it so. But one night the girl didn’t hear the train’s horn, And the next morning she woke to an empty yard. The goat Was gone. Everything looked strange. It was as if a storm Had passed through while she slept, wind and stones, rain Stripping the branches of fruit. She knew that someone Had stolen the goat and that he had come to harm. She called To him. All morning and into the afternoon, she called And called. She walked and walked. In her chest a bad feeling Like the feeling of the stones gouging the soft undersides Of her bare feet. Then somebody found the goat’s body By the high tracks, the flies already filling their soft bottles At the goat’s torn neck. Then somebody found the head Hanging in a tree by the school. They hurried to take These things away so that the girl would not see them. They hurried to raise money to buy the girl another goat. They hurried to find the boys who had done this, to hear Them say it was a joke, a joke, it was nothing but a joke…. But listen: here is the point. The boys thought to have Their fun and be done with it. It was harder work than they Had imagined, this silly sacrifice, but they finished the job, Whistling as they washed their large hands in the dark. What they didn’t know was that the goat’s head was already Singing behind them in the tree. What they didn’t know Was that the goat’s head would go on singing, just for them, Long after the ropes were down, and that they would learn to listen, Pail after pail, stroke after patient stroke. They would Wake in the night thinking they heard the wind in the trees Or a night bird, but their hearts beating harder. There Would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song, The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother’s call. Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness. Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Song. (• BOA Editions; 1st edition 1995)

This is the last time you’re ever getting my money, Johal.” “Until I fail at hockey and follow my true calling in life,” JJ counters. “Stripping.” “Until then.

We were watching videos at night on her Samsung tablet or my company iPad. She showed me the Silvano Agosti 1983 Italian interview with a little Italian boy called “D'Amore si vive, We Live of Love.” The boy was so cute, and his thoughts seemed similar to mine and Martina's. I was so deeply in love with her. The boy on the interview was just like what our own child would be, and we agreed and laughed. “We Live of Love.” What a coincidence! Living. By: Love. I knew the interview from before and she was surprised at how I knew about it. I showed her on my Instagram a picture of the boy I had recently taken a screenshot of and posted. With the subtitle at the right moment under his face: “Descubrir a la vida.” To discover life. Together. With his one and only girlfriend, as the boy explains. I told her multiple times that I was still unsure if she was real, or if it was all a dream; if I had only dreamed of her one night in the dark; if Pinto and I had invented her in my mind. She was a big fan of space, but I thought she liked the mystery behind the endless space with all its questions and secrets for us humans. I thought she liked the sky and space because she recently flew from Argentina to land in my arms. Martina and I were obsessed with Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy; we both knew all their stand-up comedies by heart. We kept replaying the best moments or faces that Chris or Eddie made. We had so much fun watching the same videos over and over that I couldn't believe it. Nobody else ever found the same moments or the same stand-ups as funny as Martina and I did. Nobody before or after found it so amusing. If I showed it to someone, they didn't understand why I was so excited about it or why racist jokes were so funny for an hour from one black comedian to the next. We were obsessed the way Eddie spoke about the „Zebra-Bitch of her dreams, her dream-wife who doesn’t know the concept of money”, saying “she should have an afro, like Angela Davis goes 'God damn it.'“ We were laughing so much. Sometimes I tickled her flat belly or her ribs and she was laughing so sweetly and so much that she couldn't stop. She was begging me to stop tickling her when I barely touched her. She said “No, no, no, no” so many times so quickly and cutely that I had to stop and kiss her; I couldn't resist her lips or her person, I had to kiss and hug her. We laughed so much at particular parts of Chris Rock's stand-up comedies that we could barely stop, almost as if we were tickling each other. We were laughing when Chris Rock was mocking Bone-Thugs-n-Harmony for singing ‘Welfare chariots’ such as „The First of the Month” or when he explained that the government hates rappers, but „only the good rappers get gunned down. They could find Saddam Hussein in a cave in Iraq but couldn't arrest anyone related to Tupac Shakur’s assassination, which didn't happen in a cave in Iraq but in Las Vegas, on the Strip, not one of those side streets, but in front of Circus Circus, after a Mike Tyson fight. Now how many witnesses do you need, to arrest somebody?” We were fascinated with Eddie Murphy, Charlie Murphy, and Chris Rock, but when I showed her Richard Prior, Doug Stanhope, Aries Spears, or George Carlin, she was no longer so impressed for some reason. Her favorite part perhaps was when Chris Rock talked about love and relationships. He said that „you never really been in love unless you have contemplated murder; unless you have practiced your alibi in front of the mirror, staring at a can of rat poison for 45 minutes straight, you haven't been in love. And the only thing preventing you from killing your significant other was an episode of CSI.” He said that relationships are hard and that in order for them to work, both people need to have the same focus, which is all about: her.

We were watching videos at night on her Samsung tablet or my company iPad. She showed me the Silvano Agosti 1983 Italian interview with a little Italian boy called “D'Amore si vive, We Live of Love.” The boy was so cute, and his thoughts seemed similar to mine and Martina's. I was so deeply in love with her. The boy on the interview was just like what our own child would be, and we agreed and laughed. “We Live of Love.” What a coincidence! Living. By: Love. I knew the interview from before and she was surprised at how I knew about it. I showed her on my Instagram a picture of the boy I had recently taken a screenshot of and posted. With the subtitle at the right moment under his face: “Descubrir a la vida.” To discover life. Together. With his one and only girlfriend, as the boy explains. I told her multiple times that I was still unsure if she was real, or if it was all a dream; if I had only dreamed of her one night in the dark; if Pinto and I had invented her in my mind. She was a big fan of space, but I thought she liked the mystery behind the endless space with all its questions and secrets for us humans. I thought she liked the sky and space because she recently flew from Argentina to land in my arms. Martina and I were obsessed with Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy; we both knew all their stand-up comedies by heart. We kept replaying the best moments or faces that Chris or Eddie made. We had so much fun watching the same videos over and over that I couldn't believe it. Nobody else ever found the same moments or the same stand-ups as funny as Martina and I did. Nobody before or after found it so amusing. If I showed it to someone, they didn't understand why I was so excited about it or why racist jokes were so funny for an hour from one black comedian to the next. We were obsessed the way Eddie spoke about the „Zebra-Bitch of his dreams, his dream-wife who doesn’t know the concept of money”, saying “she should have an afro, like Angela Davis goes 'God damn it.'“ We were laughing so much. Sometimes I tickled her flat belly or her ribs and she was laughing so sweetly and so much that she couldn't stop. She was begging me to stop tickling her when I barely touched her. She said “No, no, no, no” so many times so quickly and cutely that I had to stop and kiss her; I couldn't resist her lips or her person, I had to kiss and hug her. We laughed so much at particular parts of Chris Rock's stand-up comedies that we could barely stop, almost as if we were tickling each other. We were laughing when Chris Rock was mocking Bone-Thugs-n-Harmony for singing ‘Welfare chariots’ such as „The First of the Month” or when he explained that the government hates rappers, but „only the good rappers get gunned down. They could find Saddam Hussein in a cave in Iraq but couldn't arrest anyone related to Tupac Shakur’s assassination, which didn't happen in a cave in Iraq but in Las Vegas, on the Strip, not one of those side streets, but in front of Circus Circus, after a Mike Tyson fight. Now how many witnesses do you need, to arrest somebody?” We were fascinated with Eddie Murphy, Charlie Murphy, and Chris Rock, but when I showed her Richard Prior, Doug Stanhope, Aries Spears, or George Carlin, she was no longer so impressed for some reason. Her favorite part perhaps was when Chris Rock talked about love and relationships. He said that „you never really been in love unless you have contemplated murder; unless you have practiced your alibi in front of the mirror, staring at a can of rat poison for 45 minutes straight, you haven't been in love. And the only thing preventing you from killing your significant other was an episode of CSI.” He said that relationships are hard and that in order for them to work, both people need to have the same focus, which is all about: her.

In 1995, as governor of Texas, Bush revamped education in the state with Senate Bill 1. Running for governor, he promised more charter schools, more accountability, and more money for school vouchers. The goal of Bush’s model was for school districts to abandon state regulations and create competition among schools that demonstrated high standardized test scores. Charter schools would be the incubator of this competition. Senate Bill 1 also replaced the traditional school governance model with a corporate structure that stripped most managerial and regulatory power away from the state board of education.46

Aight so bet, here we go! You will experience joy, angst, and mild frustration. I’m 10x/10 going to unalive someone and/or bring them back from the dead…with a smile on my face. So know that if you slide in my DMs hollering, I’m going to laugh. I love you, but I’m going to laugh. These characters are going to fight, cuss, and hunch a lot. Lots of lewd scenes. Procreation and such. Baby, if that’s not your thing, close this book and never open it again. This is a BLACK ROMANCE WITH URBAN UNDERTONES – it will not give you “fluffy”, it will not give you “YT Romance vibes”, it will not give you “unproblematic”. It will give you Ganton Hills, BIG BLACK ENERGY, with guns, and gas station drug money, and strip clubs. Because yeah I love them strippers! Who doesn’t? BFFR!

Dr. Ferris smiled. “No private businessman or greedy industrialist would have financed Project X,” he said softly, in the tone of an idle, informal discussion. “He couldn’t have afforded it. It’s an enormous investment, with no prospect of material gain. What profit could he expect from it? There are no profits henceforth to be derived from that farm.” He pointed at the dark strip in the distance. “But, as you have so well observed, Project X had to be a non-profit venture. Contrary to a business firm, the State Science Institute had no trouble in obtaining funds for the Project. You have not heard of the Institute having any financial difficulties in the past two years, have you? And it used to be such a problem—getting them to vote the funds necessary for the advancement of science. They always demanded gadgets for their cash, as you used to say. Well, here was a gadget which some people in power could fully appreciate. They got the others to vote for it. It wasn’t difficult. In fact, a great many of those others felt safe in voting money for a project that was secret— they felt certain it was important, since they were not considered important enough to be let in on it. There were, of course, a few skeptics and doubters. But they gave in when they were reminded that the head of the State Science Institute was Dr. Robert Stadler—whose judgment and integrity they could not doubt.

It's like a bunch of hookers advertising their cellulite/ stretch- mark infested bodies to the highest bidder, and then claiming they deserve respect. Crawling on their hands and knees, pupils dilated on the high of greed, licking their lips almost tasting their next job of self- whoredom, and nothing is more tempting than the idea of Mr. Ellison. He could pay for tricks perform by the Pope, chandler-swinging strip-tease nuns.. No one has ever said "NO" to the idea of money and therefore no one has ever said "No" to Mr. Ellison and actually meant it... and then you have to wonder why he has no respect for people?

You’ll have to have a sponge bath before we go on, Mr. Fairfax. There’s a question of infection here.” To her surprise, the recalcitrant visitor was looking at her in a different way—his hazel eyes were twinkling with weary mischief, and his voice was lower. Smoother. “How much does that cost? A sponge bath, I mean?” Emma frowned, puzzled. “Cost?” Fairfax smiled at her, showing that fine set of teeth Emma remembered from their earlier encounter. He looked rather like a gentleman when he did that, instead of a trail bum down on his luck. “You know.” Emma had no time to debate. “I’m sorry,” she said, on her way out the door. “I’m afraid I don’t.” She left the room again and came back soon after with a basin of hot water, soap, a washcloth and a towel. “You really are a great deal of trouble, Mr. Fairfax.” “Steven,” he corrected. Emma looked at him in confusion. “Steven.” “May I call you Emma?” “No,” Emma replied, uncomfortable with his familiarity. “You certainly may not. It wouldn’t be proper.” He grinned as though she’d said something funny. “Proper?” he repeated, and he chuckled. Emma lathered up the washcloth and set about cleaning him up as best she could. Of course, she wasn’t about to deal with any part of his anatomy besides his arms and chest. “There’s money over there, in the pocket of my coat,” he said, when Emma was rinsing away the soap. “Good,” Emma said disinterestedly. “You’ll want to buy yourself another set of clothes. I’d be glad to do that for you on my way home from the library tomorrow.” He watched her, his eyes dancing in his wan face. “How long have you been working here?” She wrung out the washcloth. “Working here? I don’t work here—I’m the town librarian. This is my home.” At that Steven gave a hoarse cough of laughter. “You’re a librarian? That’s a new one.” Emma was cutting a sheet into strips. “A new what?” “Listen, when you’re through with these bandages, I could use a little comforting.” She

I try not to scan the floor when I enter. There’s already a buzz in the air, the hunger and desperation of a strip club on Saturday night. I’m ready to earn money, ready to move my body.

inside them, no one’s having fun. Instead, people are expressing needs (to earn money, to see a woman’s skin) in pretty much the most depressing way possible.

My office is over here—” He stopped. Frowned. Looked about. Had to backtrack to the kitchen in order to find the various parties. Sola’s grandmother had her head in the Sub-Zero refrigerator, rather as if she were a gnome looking for a cool place in the summer. “Madam?” Assail inquired. She shut the door and moved on to the floor-to-ceiling cabinets. “There is nothing here. Nothing. What do you eat?” “Ah . . .” Assail found himself looking at the cousins for aid. “Usually we take our meals in town.” The scoffing sound certainly appeared like the old-lady equivalent of Fuck that. “I need the staples.” She pivoted on her little shiny shoes and put her hands on her hips. “Who is taking me to supermarket.” Not an inquiry. And as she stared up at the three of them, it appeared as though Ehric and his violent killer of a twin were as nonplussed as Assail was. The evening had been planned out to the minute—and a trip to the local Hannaford was not on the list. “You two are too thin,” she announced, flicking her hand in the direction of the twins. “You need to eat.” Assail cleared his throat. “Madam, you have been brought here for your safety.” He was not going to permit Benloise to up the stakes—and so he’d had to lock down potential collateral damage. “Not to be a cook.” “You have already refused the money. I no stay here for free. I earn my keep. That is the way it will be.” Assail exhaled long and slow. Now he knew where Sola got her independent streak. “Well?” she demanded. “I no drive. Who takes me.” “Madam, would you not prefer to rest—” “Your body rest when dead. Who.” “We do have an hour,” Ehric hedged. As Assail glared at the other vampire, the little old lady hitched her purse up on her forearm and nodded. “So he will take me.” Assail met Sola’s grandmother’s gaze directly and dropped his tone a register just so that the line drawn would be respected. “I pay. Are we clear—you are not to spend a cent.” She opened her mouth as if to argue, but she was headstrong—not foolish. “Then I do the darning.” “Our clothes are in sufficient shape—” Ehric cleared his throat. “Actually, I have a couple of loose buttons. And the Velcro strip on his flak jacket is—” Assail looked over his shoulder and bared his fangs at the idiot—out of eyesight of Sola’s grandmother, of course. Remarshaling his expression, he turned back around and— Knew he’d lost. The grandmother had one of those brows cocked, her dark eyes as steady as any foe’s he’d ever faced. Assail shook his head. “I cannot believe I’m negotiating with you.” “And you agree to terms.” “Madam—” “Then it is settled.” Assail threw up his hands. “Fine. You have forty-five minutes. That is all.” “We be back in thirty.” At that, she turned and headed for the door. In her diminutive wake, the three vampires played ocular Ping-Pong. “Go,” Assail gritted out. “Both of you.” The cousins stalked for the garage door—but they didn’t make it. Sola’s grandmother wheeled around and put her hands on her hips. “Where is your crucifix?” Assail shook himself. “I beg your pardon?” “Are you no Catholic?” My dear sweet woman, we are not human, he thought. “No, I fear not.” Laser-beam eyes locked on him. Ehric. Ehric’s brother. “We change this. It is God’s will.” And out she went, marching through the mudroom, ripping open the door, and disappearing into the garage. As that heavy steel barrier closed automatically, all Assail could do was blink.

When you finally strip away all the material things in your house and closets, you realize how much time and money was spent wasted on things that you never really needed in the first place.

The idea is simple: Provide full public financing of elections for qualified candidates. That is, give candidates who have established a broad base of community support a grant to run their campaigns. If candidates accept public funds, they must agree to forgo any private contributions. Clean elections grants equal opportunity to run for public office. It ensures that elections are fair by stripping away the corrosive influence of money. Elections are a public good and should be supported by the common wealth. Clean

Katie Wells stood looking out her window down to the street below. She could still feel the effects of the hard-rock miner getting his money's worth in every way he could. Angry that he could not afford the younger, prettier girls of the Golden Nugget like Jolene and Candy, he had taken his frustrations out on her. The man had treated her in a way which he never would have if she hadn't been nearing forty, and slightly overweight. The moon was full tonight, and the street below was full of men looking to spend a few dollars for someone soft to hold. She stripped off what little was left of her clothes and saw herself in the mirror. Katie was still soft, perhaps almost pretty in the right light, with her blonde hair and blue eyes, but life had been unkind and it showed. She was bruised and sore, and she could feel the grime and dust from the mine all over her. The dirt would wash off, she knew. But the dirty way she felt inside would not.

As I saw it, these three titanic egos—Barack, Hillary, and Debbie—had stripped the party to a shell for their own purposes. Barack never had seen himself as connected to the party. He had not come up through it the way Joe Biden and Hillary had, but had sprung up almost on his own and never had any trouble raising money for his campaigns. He used the party to provide for political expenses like gifts to donors, and political travel, but he also cared deeply about his image. Late into his second term, the party was still paying for his pollster and focus groups. This was not working to strengthen the party. He had left it in debt. Hillary bailed it out so that she could control it, and Debbie went along with all of this because she liked the power and perks of being a chair but not the responsibilities.

Political bargaining and political entrepreneurship can be seen naked, stripped of the flattering wardrobe of democracy, rule of law and state building.