When Smirk entered the White House in 2001, the price of gasoline was bumping around the $1.80 mark. Crude was bumping around the $30 a barrel mark. You can’t blame that jackass and his idiot henchmen for all of the increase, but his splendid little war is one factor exacerbating it. The other is actually more Reagan’s fault then Bush’s. Reagan began the financial deregulation process that led straight to the sub prime mortgage meltdown we have now, and the resulting credit crunch. Investors, worried that all of a sudden real estate isn’t the safe haven for money it used to be, are putting their dough into buying commodities like…er…crude oil…which drives up the price.
Why it is that people assume republicans are better at managing an economy then democrats is beyond me, other then I guess people think that if you’re rich you must know how to make money. Some rich people do. Some rich people absolutely love to make money. And those people rise the standard of living for everyone. Their energy makes the world a better place. But others are rich because they merely hunger for wealth and they don’t care how they get it. The ones of low ambition turn to petty crime. The really ambitious ones build empires, corrupt governments, and legally rape everyone and everything around them blind. Guess which sort gravitate to the republican party.
After more than five years of petroleum price increases, American consumers appear to be expecting the worst. A CNN poll taken last week showed that 59 percent of Americans believe it is very likely that they will pay $5 a gallon for gasoline before the end of the year and that an additional 27 percent say it is somewhat likely.
Economists say these expectations make it more probable that people will change behavior rather than simply wait for a turn in the traditional up-and-down cycle of commodity prices. "People now realize that prices may come back down, but they’re not going down to where they were," said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com. "We’re going to have to live with higher energy prices for a while. And that’s affecting their behavior and what they buy and don’t buy."
For Rusty Davis, a handyman from Arlington, the high cost of gasoline is changing the way he runs his business. He has started to refuse jobs outside the county. When he does travel to jobs, he now takes his fuel-efficient car and leaves behind his work van, which gets only 12 miles to the gallon. He also used to do free estimates in person. Now he does them over the phone.
My brother does that kind of work for a living, and when I read that I thought of him. He doesn’t do estimates over the phone for the obvious reason that you need to see the situation you’re getting into before you bid on it if you don’t want any unpleasant surprises gulping down your profit margin. I would expect he just adds in the higher cost of gas to his bids now, if he has to go far afield. But much of his work is local so I doubt he drives very far, very often to a job. But I don’t think he’d turn down a job outright simply because it involved driving a distance. The thing to do is bid it for what it will cost you and if you don’t get it…well…you can’t work a job that’s going to cost you more then you make back from it.
My brother has a big Ford truck, but he also has a smaller one he can use when he doesn’t need the capacity of the big one. I expect that one’s getting a lot more use now. I remember when all those air foils started appearing on tractor-trailer rigs back in the late 70s and 80s. Before the first oil embargo it didn’t matter how much fuel one of those things burned because it was so cheap, and the profile of most of those big rigs was like a fist going down the highway. Then suddenly the truckers were having to find ways to squeeze out every little bit of milage they could and there was a new appreciation for air drag. Now you see them all the time on the big trucks. Something else I’m starting to see more of on American highways are the mid-sized and smaller European trucks and vans.
More fuel efficient automobiles will come and that’s a good thing, but if you really want to keep the cost of living down, investing in more fuel efficient trucks will do a lot more for the economy.
So I’m hitting up Google Images for Maybach photos like This One to dream over…
…because a photo is about as close as I’ll ever get to sitting behind the wheel of a Maybach in this life. This is why my TV gets so little use anymore, other then to play the occasional DVD. At the end of my day instead of lounging on the sofa flipping channels, I sit at the computer and wander around the web for a bit. Maybe it was because of all the news stories I saw yesterday about how the skyrocketing cost of gasoline is changing our lives, and I am afraid I’m living to see the end of the open road, but for some reason I started googling images of my fantasy car.
I wonder if I’m going to live to see then end of that breed too…the supercars…the high powered sportscars and the sumptuous luxury sedans that only the fabulously rich can afford. For me they’re not so much symbols of wealth, as icons of human engineering and craftsmanship. This is the best of the best of automotive engineering and craft. This is what you do when you set out to build the absolute best and no compromise anywhere. Every car maker should make one of these, as a statement of how serious they are about automobiles. It’s been the disillusionment of my lifetime, that none of the American car makers can be bothered to build one of these. A guy who ran the Cadillac division of GM once tried to…but the boardroom shot him down. Here in America, a luxury car is a status symbol first, and an automobile second…if that. Mechanical quality? Engineering? Hon…if the rubes staring at you as you drive past can’t see it, it doesn’t matter.
The Rolls used to be my fantasy car. In my teen years I had a brochure photo of the dashboard of a Silver Shadow tacked up to my bedroom wall. But the new Rolls is ugly. The Bentley is far and away the more beautiful car now in my opinion. But I just love the new Maybach. It’s not only sumptuous but state of the art technically. I just love it. Not the tank of a limousine 62, but the 57, which is for a driver not a chauffeur. Why anyone would buy a fantasy car and hand it over to a chauffeur is beyond me. Unless the rich can’t even be bothered to get their driver’s licenses.
So my eyes are roving all over the photo above…lingering on the leather upholstery and the burl walnut wood on the center console and the wheel, while my fingers are wondering what it would feel like to wrap themselves around it…and the geek in me eyeballs the video display…and I notice that the radio is set on a…huh…a shortwave band? Well in Europe the shortwave bands were used by broadcasters much more so then here in America. But I’ve got some old high school pals who would have had the same laugh I did seeing that…
Well listen you haven’t heard nothing yet! I’ve got right here in this car for your transatlantic driving pleasure, this fully alacrafted sea mattress shortwave radio, in this non-returnable non-disposable sinkline carrying case!
Ayutthaya – A body of a 40-year-old man with a cobra carcass in his head was found on a roadside here Sunday morning.
An preliminary autopsy also found that Wiroj Banlen, 40, was wearing a condom although he was putting on his trousers. No semen was found inside the condom.
His body was found on the side of a dirt road in Tambon Lamsai of Ayutthaya’s Wangnoi district at 7 am.
He was bitten several times by the snake on his right leg and on his cheeks.
His hands were clenching the dead cobra, whose body was bitten several times especially on its stomach.
The preliminary autopsy found scales of the snake in his mouth.
His body was sent for a full autopsy at a hospital.
This story is from Thailand, and the translation may be a tad…off. So I’m trying to unpack this. His body was found by the roadside. He was bitten several times by a cobra. Some of the bites were on his right leg, the others on his cheeks. I assume the cheek bites happened while he was trying to eat the cobra. His pants seem to have been at least partly undone and he was wearing a condom as though he was about to have sex, but hadn’t yet. I’m sitting here thinking that if there is a God it must have created human beings because a universe that obeys quantum physics just wasn’t strange enough.
Military engineers defused a giant bomb from World War II that was discovered in East London during construction for the 2012 Summer Olympics, a military spokesman said. The 2,200-pound bomb… started to tick at one point while being defused by a team of Royal Engineers from the British Army. Thousands of bombs fell on East London during World War II.
It strikes me as odd that this necessarily short “World Briefing” item avoids mentioning just who it was that dropped all those bombs on East London during WWII. Those bombs decide on their own to fall all over East London.
Er…what’s your point Dan? You think the American readers of the New York Times might not know where that bomb came from without being told? Hmmm… World War II bomb… East London… Now where the hell could that thing have come from… think… think… think…
Well it probably wasn’t the Japanese. Maybe the Times should have told its readers what that ticking sound signified too because goodness they might think the British had dug up a 2,200 pound Soviet era kitchen timer some poor East German refugee family brought back with them during the cold war, and promptly threw in a ditch when they saw how much better the kitchen timers in the west are. You never know. Maybe there’s a Trabant buried somewhere nearby…
I had work to do for a deadline this coming Wednesday and I figured I would be staying home Friday, and most of the weekend. Friday is my usual telecommute day, and at the end of it I usually drive down to Washington to gather with some friends at the 30 Degrees bar for drinks and a nice restaurant later. But this Friday I couldn’t make it because I had to spend that time at the computer in my home office instead.
When I came home last Thursday my little neighborhood street was packed almost solid with cars. This should not be a hard city street to find parking on because it’s a little dogleg of a side street that only has rowhouses on one side of it. On the other side are four widely spaced detached homes, some of which have their own parking pads anyway. So that side of the street is usually open. But we have two households here now on my end of the street, on the rowhouse side, that like to hog the available parking like they’re the only people who live here. One of them is a little gay diva who rents his house out to two other people and between them and their friends parking on the street there isn’t much space left. The other is a straight couple who just had a baby…so they’ve had family and friends over all week long. Another guy is moving and he’s had friends over helping out. The net result is that my little out of the way city street is suddenly hard to find parking on. Last Thursday I had to park halfway up the street, and then wait for a space near my house to open up. It wasn’t until Friday morning that I was finally able to park in front of my house.
So I started the weekend feeling reluctant to move the car anyway. Having to fight for a parking space here is something I’m not used to. In point of fact, I bought the house here on this street specifically because parking seemed to be no problem here, as opposed to some of the other densely rowhouse packed streets in the neighborhood. Now I’m seriously considering putting a parking pad in the back yard, which would eliminate the only yard I’ve ever had in my life. I kinda like having that little 8 by 15 foot patch of green grass back there…tiny as it is. But I need a place to park my car, and there is always the even smaller front lawn I can always make a fuss over.
I’ve been busy at the computer most of my waking time this weekend, getting stuff done for work. But I live within walking distance of two nice grocery stores, and Saturday evening after it had cooled down a bit, and then again early this morning, I was able to take a short walk to buy some food. I also took a brief cigar walk around the neighborhood late last night, when I started getting cabin fever. It’s a nice neighborhood to stroll around in, when it’s not sweltering.
But my cigar humidor is getting a tad empty. I toyed briefly this afternoon with the thought of taking a quick drive to my favorite cigar store in Cockeysville and loading up. So a few moments ago I checked outside to see what the parking situation looks like. It’s still bad, but not horrible. I thought it over for a moment. There were just a few spaces on the street, but later, as guests go back home for the work week, more will probably open up. But did I want to drive all the way out to Cockeysville just to buy cigars with gas prices being what they are now? I still have a few good cigars left in the box to tide me over until I need to buy something else out in Cockeysville.
Now…see what happened? I would probably be on the way home from my favorite cigar store right now, were it not for the price of gasoline. It is making less and less sense these days to drive somewhere for just one item. I can walk to two good grocery stores and a handful of drug stores to get most of my day to day necessities. The things I need to drive outside the beltway to get I now find myself carefully planning out. Instead of making several trips out there I try to make only one.
The net result being that car sits in front of my house a lot more then it did when I bought it. I’m still in new Mercedes love. I still go outside periodically and just…stare…at that car like I just brought it home. But you know…I’m finding I appreciate it all the more when I drive it less often. Driving it has become something of a special occasion now. The last time I bought gas was almost two weeks ago.
I doubt I’m the only person making these sorts of calculations because gas has become so expensive. I’ve noticed now for several weeks that traffic has been much, much lighter on the highways then usual. Thing is, I haven’t actually started spending less on things like food and other necessities. I’m holding off until I can combine trips, instead of getting stuff on an as-needed basis. If that’s what other people are doing, then this isn’t necessarily hurting retail too badly. On the other hand, I’m not shopping and impulse buying either. I’m just buying things I need. That’s probably hurting business. But the housing bubble burst would have done that without the gas price spike.
DEAR AMY: I am a gay man living in California. My partner and I have raised a family and have been together for 26 years.
The California Supreme Court recently stated it is illegal not to allow gays to marry. We are thrilled.
Now that we are aging Baby Boomers, we need the protection and rights that married couples have. A proposition to change the California constitution to state that marriage "is between only a man and a woman" will appear on the November ballot, and it only needs a simple majority to pass.
The problem is that four of my best friends are women. It is important to me to know that I have their support of gay marriage. If they vote "no," it will be impossible for me to continue these friendships. I need help on how to handle this situation. — California Gay Guy
DEAR CALIFORNIA: Perhaps you should ask people how they intend to vote on the question of gay marriage before you befriend them. It would save you the trouble of having to sever the relationship later.
I understand your need to have people in your corner, but your friends are already in your corner. That’s what makes them your friends. Demanding that your friendship hinges on what people choose to do in the privacy of the voting booth is offensive.
Furthermore, you seem to assume that your women friends might not support gay marriage. Is this because they’re straight or because women are somehow more likely to want to limit the bounds of marriage? This is a sexist assumption.
I’d suggest that you tread very lightly.
Dear Amy…maybe people should be more honest about what they really think before turning us into the ‘some’ in "some of my best friends are…"
That this guy isn’t sure how his friends will vote told you all you needed to know. I’ve no idea why he’s making a point of their gender…it could be he’s as sexist as you think, or it could be that all his male friends are gay like himself, and he simply said "women" when he meant "straight". I’ve met gay guys who have absolutely no straight male friends at all, but pal around constantly with their straight female friends like they’re all sisters. But the point is he’s not sure how they will vote, and that says it all when it comes to their friendship.
This isn’t about how they’ll vote. This is where push comes to shove and what he wants to know is if they’re with him…in other words, are they really his friends. I’d Suggest that it was treading lightly that got him into that situation to start with. I’ve been there myself and I know the feeling. All through the 70s and 80s and 90s I treaded lightly among my straight friends when I should have been fucking loud and proud and on November 2000 it bit me in the ass, and then again on November 2002 and then again on November 2004 by which time I’d finally wised up and dumped the bastards.
Oscar Wilde was right about true friends stabbing you in the front. I have a lot fewer straight friends now then I did before, but I don’t need to ask them how they’d vote on a same-sex marriage amendment. The people in my life who could only go so far as extending me tolerance because they just couldn’t bring themselves to regard a homosexual as their equal are gone and suddenly I don’t have to wonder who has my back in a political knife fight. Offensive? Reducing this to an issue of voting booth privacy is offensive you drooling lifestyle page hack. This isn’t about how people vote. It’s about friendship. When a gay man has to wonder if his friends might vote to cut off his ring finger come November he needs to know he’s been treading too lightly around them for his own good. If they really were his friends, he would already know.
California Gay Guy needs to live a little louder and prouder around his straight friends. Tell them he’s thrilled. Tell them how much it means to him and his partner and his family of 26 years. He needs to let his excitement be loud and proud. He needs to openly and clearly make his fears about the upcoming referendum known. Then he won’t need to ask his friends how they’ll vote. They’ll tell him, by their expressions of joy and happiness for him and his family, and with their absolute solidarity. Or they’ll tell him with their polite silence on the matter.
Treading lightly is exactly what he needs to stop doing. And if you think gay people shouldn’t get pissed off at "friends" who vote away their basic human rights then you need to grow a soul. Friendship is love, not tolerance.
You know it’s going to be hot and sweltering here in Baltimore when the temperature is reading 92 in the shade and it’s only 9:30 in the morning. I was going to take a short walk to the store to get some hot dogs but decided to just walk around the neighborhood a bit and then retreat to my air conditioning. It wasn’t this bad in Mexico. Puerto Vallarta is by the Pacific ocean, and hot as it got out in the streets, wherever you had shade a nice cool ocean breeze made things actually very lovely. Here in the city all you get is the breeze off acres and acres of asphalt.
I have some Institute work to do to meet a deadline next week so I was planning on staying inside this weekend anyway. I had to boot the Windows XP drive I hadn’t touched in over a year and I’ve been spending time between coding updating this and that on it. It feels…strange…to have to refer to the mounted drives as letters again. But I have Cygwin installed so I can still do most things in a terminal the way I’m now used to. I actually used to love running Windows. But that was back when it’s quirks were tolerable, and there was still a Microsoft Basic to code in. Those were good times…
I’ve heard it said from time to time on various blogs, that the republicans are re-fighting the battles of the 1960s. The sense is that they’ve never gotten over their resentment toward all the dirty hippies who fought against the war and got Nixon impeached. But the upheaval in American politics back in the 1960s and early 70s wasn’t about the Vietnam war and it wasn’t about the hippies. And we’re about to see if America has grown enough in the time since, to start putting that past behind us and heal the wounds.
Over at Pam’s House Blend, Pam writes about Michaelangelo Signorile’s bad day on the radio yesterday, fielding callers who were adamant that they would rather vote for McCain the Obama…
This whole call needs to be transcribed and circulated because we seriously need to have a discussion about the underlying issues here that are hitting on the third rail. Mike challenges the caller to explain these positions, given the huge political gulf between McCain and Obama on nearly every issue. The caller ends up admitting that his decision to vote for McCain is not based on logic.
Caller: My arguments aren’t logical…this is what my gut is telling me; I don’t consider myself a racist or bigoted…there’s just something about the man I don’t like and I’m not going to vote for him."
Mike: It’s funny that you say your gut is telling you this and then you go on to say that you’re not a racist, funny how that works, right? Because maybe your gut is telling you something that you’re not wanting to admit…but listen, but you should be voting based on logic, based on rationality. What Republicans want is for you to vote on emotion. And you are a perfect example of how they get votes from people who are voting against their own self interest.
Just so. And it started with Nixon and the so-called "southern strategy". There are liberals and democrats who blame the Reagan years for the undoing of the vibrant middle and working class economy we had in America since the New Deal. I can remember a time when your basic retail and service workers made a living wage. They had affordable health care and they had pensions to retire on. No more. And it was Nixon and his gang who put the machinery in motion to undo all that. Goldwater ran on his principals, and as conservative as his view of government was, he was a principled man and he campaigned straightforwardly. Nixon always played from the gutter while posing as a respectable cloth coat republican. He was a man of the people, standing up for the silent majority, surrounding himself with gutter crawling thugs like himself. And the weak point where they found they could drive a wedge right through Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition wasn’t the war, it wasn’t religion and it wasn’t anger toward all the dirty hippies…
Rick Perlstein is a national treasure. Buy his Nixonland. Buy it now:
The Meaning of Box 722 | OurFuture.org: art of the narrative. They’d never really been examined in-depth before, but by my reckoning they were the crucial hinge that formed the ideological alignment we live in now. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson—and, apparently, liberalism—achieved such a gigantic landslide victory that it appeared to pundits the Republican Party would be forever consigned to the outer darkness if they ever entertained a Goldwater-style conservative law-and-order platform again. Two years later, most of the new liberal congressmen swept in on LBJ’s coattails—the congressional class that gave us Medicare and Medicaid, the first serious environmental legislation, National Endowments for the Humanities and Arts, Head Start, the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the end of racist immigration quotas, Legal Aid, and more—was swept out on a tide of popular reaction. That reaction, I hope I demonstrate effectively in NIXONLAND, rested on two pillars: terror at the wave of urban rioting that began in the Watts district of Los Angeles; and terror at the prospect of the 1966 civil rights bill passing, which, by imposing an ironclad federal ban on racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing—known as "open housing"—would be the first legislation to impact the entire nation equally, not just the South. (What that reaction most decidedly did not rest on: fear and loathing of "hippies," which were unknown, except in California, to most of the nation until 1967; or anti-war activists, which were not associated with either party, because Republicans and Democrats had about an equal number of hawks and doves in 1966.)
When I learned that the papers of Senator Paul Douglas were at the Chicago Historical Society (as it was known then; now it’s cursed with the decidedly more prosaic name the Chicago History Museum), I decided to make Douglas’s 1966 loss to Republican Charles Percy a key case study for my hypothesis. Douglas was a popular liberal lion first elected in 1948 and a civil rights champion, whose wife Emily Taft Douglas (a one-term congresswoman herself) had strode proudly across Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 arm in arm with Martin Luther King. He was also, as an economist, one of the architects of many of the New Deal ideas and programs that created the world’s first mass middle class.
In the summer of 1966, as debate over open housing raged in Congress, King marched not in Alabama but in Chicago, to implore the city to enforce its own open housing ordinance, passed in 1963—which, if Chicago did, would be a first. It was the most segregated city in the north. As I put it in NIXONLAND (drawing on this classic study):
You could draw a map of the boundary within which the city’s seven hundred thousand Negroes were allowed to live by marking an X wherever a white mob attacked a Negro. Move beyond it, and a family had to face down a mob of one thousand, five thousand, or even (in the Englewood riot of 1949, when the presence of blacks at a union meeting sparked a rumor the house was to be "sold to niggers") ten thousand bloody-minded whites. In the late 1940s, when the postwar housing shortage was at its peak, you could find ten black families living in a basement, sharing a single stove but not a single flush toilet, in "apartments" subdivided by cardboard. One racial bombing or arson happened every three weeks…. It neighborhoods where they were allowed to "buy" houses, they couldn’t actually buy them at all: banks would not write them mortgages, so unscrupulous businessmen sold them contracts that gave them no equity or title to the property, from whcih they could be evicted the first time they were late with a payment.
And in 1966, a teenager answering a job ad walked over the border from Chicago into the all-white city of Cicero, and for that sin and no other was beaten to death. That was what Martin Luther King came to fight in Chicago.
At the Chicago History Museum, the Douglas collection covers seven hundred "linear feet"…. I stumbled upon Box 722, which contained all the letters Senator Paul Douglas received about open housing and Martin Luther King’s presence in Chicago….
Republican Charles Percy had gone into the race a civil rights liberal: "Chuck, do you have to talk so much about open housing?" one suburban Republican official complained to him. But by October, following Jerry Ford’s talking points to the letter, he went on ABC’s "Face the Nation" and said that while he still supported the "principle" of open housing, he disagreed with Senator Douglas on one thing: including "single-family dwelling" would be "an unpassable and unenforceable" attack on property rights. "Right now, we aren’t ready to force people to accept those they don’t want as neighbors," he said in tones of rue.
Long story short: Douglas soldiered on, imploring his constituents to remember the favors they had received from the Democratic Party—entree, for one thing, into the world’s first mass middle class of factory workers. To no avail. Percy won in an upset. Pundits said it was because Percy’s daughter had just been brutally murdered; it was a sympathy vote. But if people voted for Percy because he was a grieving father, the ratio of the sympathetic to the callous was suspiciously high in the Bungalow Belt neighborhoods where Martin Luther King had marched. A ward analysis demonstrated that in Chicago neighborhoods threatened by racial turnover, new Percy voters were enough to account for Douglas’s 80 percent decline in the city since 1960. Pundits also pointed to people’s unwillingness to vote for such an old man. But in the backlash wards younger Democrats declined almost as significantly.
No, it was voters like this, from 4315 W. Crystal:
A few years ago I had written you a letter stating how I and my family would welcome the opportunityy to vote fyou in to the highest office in the land–The Presidency. Since that time however your support of the open occupancy bill has caused me to change my support of your candidacy for senator of Illinois, and believe me sir there are many more in my category who are changing in their support of you.
Here is the fundamental tragedy of the backlash: voters like this empowered a party that decided they didn’t need protection against predatory subprime mortgage fraud. Didn’t need affordable, universal health insurance; made it easier for companies to rape their pensions; kept on going back to the well to destroy their social security; worked avidly to shred their union protections. Fought, in fact, every decent and wise social provision that made it possible in the first place for mere factory workers to live in glorious Chicago bungalows, or suburban homes, in the first place.
Now a black man from the city King visited in 1966 and called more hateful than Mississippi is running for president, fighting for all those things that made the midcentury American middle class the glory of world civilization, but which that middle class squandered out of the small-mindedness of backlash.
This post is for Chicago. This post is for America. This post is for our future. This post is for our history—that we may, this November, redeem it. This post is for a man who, had he walked down the wrong street in his own city 42 years ago, might well have been beaten to death.
Emphasis mine. At a time when the nation needed healing from racial strife, Nixon and the republicans embarked on a deliberate campaign to inflame those wounds because they figured that would finally break up the New Deal coalition and restore the prerogatives of the rich and powerful. Nixon paved the way for Reagan, who began his successful campaign for the presidency in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been kidnapped and murdered for helping black citizens register to vote, by making a speech on state’s rights. Reagan knew exactly what he was doing then, was following the playbook laid down by Nixon and his henchmen a decade before, of inciting race hatred in poor and working class whites, so they would vote for men who would later line their pockets with the money from their pension plans. Everything since then has been a variation on that theme set by Nixon. Find out what scares middle class and working class whites and wave it in their faces so enough of them won’t vote democrat. And never mind the damage it does to America. The more the people hate each other, the better that is for us.
And now the factories are closed, the unions either dissolved or paper shells of their former selves. The pensions are gone and your 401K is monopoly money for Wall Street to play the stock market with. Lincoln said you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but not all the people all the time. But race is the gift that keeps on giving in this country. Look at the gay callers to the Signorile show saying they’d rather vote for an anti-gay republican then Obama. It isn’t all about bitterness in the Hillary camp. I don’t think it’s even mostly that. When we saw the statistics saying more Obama voters would vote for Hillary then Hillary voters would vote for Obama, that wasn’t about her base being cheap and vengeful. Nobody likes it when their candidate looses, especially if they’ve invested a lot of their dreams for the future in that candidate. Obama’s supporters would have been just as disillusioned if he lost. But if Obama was white you wouldn’t have seen that difference.
I have had anti-gay prejudice shoved in my face often enough to know that most people who act that way don’t regard themselves as being prejudiced. I don’t have anything against gay people…I just don’t want them teaching my kids… I don’t have anything against gay people…I just feel marriage should be between a man and a woman. I don’t have anything against gay people…so long as they don’t flaunt it… Prejudice doesn’t always burn crosses. Sometimes it burns bridges. Divide the country, said Pat Buchanan to Nixon, and we’ll have the bigger piece. For decades now, the republicans have been pushing our buttons, making us afraid of each other, waving scarecrows in our faces to keep the middle and working class divided and weak. So they could raid our pensions. So they could raid our standard of living. So they could get us to accept living in a nation where government can conduct its business in secret, and tap your phones and your mail without a warrant. Iraq. Katrina. The Patriot Act. Torture. Guantanamo Bay. Look closely at the face of the scarecrow they are waving at you. It is yours.
As we experience it today, the romantic fallacy is a transparent curtain of ingenious weave with a warp of rationality and a woof of sensation that hangs between ourselves and reality. So transparent is its quality that we cannot perceive its presence. So bright in outline do men and affairs appear beyond the curtain that we cannot doubt but that reality is what we observe. Yet in truth every color has been distorted. And rare is the conclusion based on such observations that would not bear re-inspection if the curtain were lifted.
Ardrey’s talking there of what he called elsewhere, the illusion of original goodness. That being his shorthand for the enlightenment notions of human nature which influenced thinkers as diverse as Marx and Rousseau and Jefferson. In it, the default human nature is assumed to be peaceful and good, and the simpler agrarian past from which we emerged is our natural condition. In this view, civilization has separated us from the circle of life and all the plagues which befall us, violence, poverty, sickness and war, are the result of our being divorced from our natural state by this artificial construct we live our daily lives in. If we could only return to our agrarian roots again, live more as nature intended us to live, then the default human nature which is peaceful and good would once more reassert itself and all would be well. It is the secular flavor of the much older banishment from Eden story, and it is just as poisonous.
Steven Pinker would some decades later debunk The Blank Slate model of the human identity…that human kind is so distinct and apart from the rest of the animal kingdom that its ancient tides pull and tug on us not at all. We are, for all intent and purpose, what we are taught to be. A human being is all rational mind, and our emotional state is simply the logical end result of how our rational mind processes the world around us. For humankind there is no nature, only nurture. Ayn Rand thought of human nature in exactly this way, and it is just as false as the romantic fallacy. In Fact, the false premise of both the Romantic Fallacy and the Blank Slate model is one and the same. Back when I was a teenager, this passage from the beginning of Ardrey’s book, African Genesis, opened my eyes…
We are not so unique as we would like to believe. And if man in a time of need seeks deeper knowledge concerning himself, then he must explore those animal horizons from which we have made our quick little march.
Ardrey was much criticized later for, among other things, the overwrought image of the "killer ape" that arose from his writings. But he was a dramatist by trade when he took up the search for our ancient origins. If the bloodthristy image he served up of our not-yet-human forbears was a tad emphatic, you can argue that it had to be to jolt the popular culture into rethinking it’s model of human behavior. We are not fallen angels. Neither are we blank slates. We are humans.
We are still in a process of learning what that really is. Perhaps, like any individual journey of self discovery, that learning will be an endless process. I would like to propose the existence of another self destructive popular fallacy. Call it, The Heterosexual Premise. In it’s simplest form, it states that since heterosexual sex is necessary to continue the human species, heterosexuality is the natural condition of our kind. Let me paraphrase Ardrey here…
The Heterosexual Premise stands in relation to the entire human species as the conviction of central position stands in relation to the individual human being. Both in their most naked aspects rest on assumptions of special creation, of special blessedness, of unique destiny and innate sovereignty; and both are false…
As we experience it today, the heterosexual premise is a transparent curtain of ingenious weave with a warp of rationality and a woof of sensation that hangs between ourselves and reality. So transparent is its quality that we cannot perceive its presence. So bright in outline do men and affairs appear beyond the curtain that we cannot doubt but that reality is what we observe. Yet in truth every color has been distorted. And rare is the conclusion based on such observations that would not bear re-inspection if the curtain were lifted.
Obviously in any species that reproduces sexually, via opposite sex pairs, opposite sex pair bonding is necessary for reproduction. But it does not follow then that sex serves only that one single purpose, vital though it is. Nor does it follow that everyone born of a heterosexual relationship must therefore be heterosexual themselves, any more then that right-handed people must be the result of right-handed parents.
An entire cosmos of conclusions follow from the heterosexual premise, which all seem perfectly reasonable, yet are utterly false. That homosexuality amounts to some sort of damage to our nature…a biological mistake as the talk radio host Laural Schlessinger once averred. That homosexuals experience neither desire nor love as fully as heterosexuals do. That homosexuals must be, can only be miserable deep down inside, frustrated, angry at the world, resentful toward normal heterosexuals, because of their condition. If homosexuality is a kind of mental damage, then homosexuals may well be mentally damaged in other ways too…possibly dangerous ones. Since humans don’t reproduce homosexually, homosexuals must reproduce in some other way, more like a disease then by natural reproduction. Homosexuality must be a kind of perdition. Homosexuals then don’t so much seek out partners, as prey. And every person turned away from heterosexuality is one less to carry on the species. So homosexuality damages the species ability to reproduce. It must be contained or else the human race will die out. Homosexuals prey on heterosexuals, and in doing so make war on humanity itself.
Add religion into the mix, and you have gay people waging war on God almighty too. If God created the human race, then homosexuals are attacking God’s own creation and God himself. By…being homosexual…obviously. But even among people who reject out of hand the notion that gay people represent any sort of threat to the survival of the species, the heterosexual premise nonetheless prevents them from seeing us as being quite as human as they. We are still damaged goods. Because the natural condition of a human being is heterosexual. Yes, we should treat the gays with decency and respect. But there is something wrong with them. There must be. They are not heterosexual, and heterosexual is the natural state of a human being.
Larry Niven, author of the Ringworld and Known Space stories, with that effortless self assuredness granted by the heterosexual premise, once wrote that giving the homosexuals what they want would be a good way of breeding it out of the species. Yet it exists in all sexually reproducing species that have been studied. Why has it not already been bred out of those then? The heterosexual premise has no answer, only a requirement that whatever the answer is it must fit the premise. Perhaps it is because humans are crowding the rest of animal kind out of their natural habitats. Perhaps homosexuality spreads from species to species. Perhaps homosexuality is such a gross distortion of nature that it’s impact cannot be confined to just the humans. Perhaps the other animals who engage in homosexuality are a warning sign that our own dalliance with it as gone too far and now we have polluted the rest of nature with it like we have with our greenhouse gases. Nature is not telling us we’re wrong about sexuality and sexual orientation. Nature is telling us how bad our own behavior is. See how easy that is?
Heterosexual sex is what makes babies. Therefore heterosexuality is the natural condition of our kind. Therefore something must be wrong with homosexuals. But it is not so simple. The two-legged thinking creature that stands before you asking for directions with a smile, or ringing up your purchase behind the checkout counter, or delivering your newspaper in the morning, carries with them every moment of their day, in their blood and bones, the entire history of life on earth. As do you. Ironically, the ex-gay gurus are right about one thing; we are more then our genitals. On the other hand, there they are. And if sex is simply for reproduction and nothing more, then why does every human male alive today have an erogenous zone up their ass? For maybe nine-tenths of the male population that makes no sense at all. But there it is.
It wasn’t civilization that did that. It wasn’t godlessness. Somewhere back in our distant, probably pre-human past, possibly even well before that, same sex pair bonding among some individuals began making enough sense that our bodies adapted to it. If it was destructive it would have been bred out. If it had no benefit whatsoever that erogenous zone probably would not be. There had to have been some selection For it. But what? I give my own hypothesis Here. Others may have better ones. The point is you make your model of human behavior fit the evidence, not make the evidence fit the model, which is what the heterosexual premise demands. Our bodies are adapted to both opposite-sex and same-sex pair bonding. So heterosexuality cannot be the natural state. It is just the most likely one.
Yet in truth every color has been distorted. And rare is the conclusion based on such observations that would not bear re-inspection if the curtain were lifted. Lift the curtain. Look at us as we are, not as what your conceits tell you we must be. We are your neighbors. We are your sons and daughters, your parents, aunts and uncles. Look at us. We are as human as you. We bear within us the same story of life on earth you do. The ancient tides pull and tug at as just as they do you. The exaltation of love and desire burns within us as it does you. We love. We cherish. We long. We need. There is nothing wrong with us. Look at us.
Kagro X over at KOS catches David Brooks in usual form …babbling away about how democrats are elitists who know nothing about how the common folk live…unlike, well Brooks of course…
How big of a douchebag is David Brooks?
He’s such a big douchebag that he tries to criticize Barack Obama as not being an oh-so-regular guy (just like the tortoise shell spectacled and pink necktied drip Brooks is, of course) by saying:
[H]e doesn‘t seem like a guy who can go into an Applebee‘s salad bar and people think he fits in naturally there.
Only problem? David Brooks has apparently never stepped out of the limo and actually gone into an Applebees. Because they don’t have salad bars.
Dumbass.
Brooks is an expert in how the middle America that exists only in the middle of that empty space between his two ears Really lives…
Brooks, an agile and engaging writer, was doing what he does best, bringing sweeping social movements to life by zeroing in on what Tom Wolfe called "status detail," those telling symbols — the Weber Grill, the open-toed sandals with advanced polymer soles — that immediately fix a person in place, time and class. Through his articles, a best-selling book, and now a twice-a-week column in what is arguably journalism’s most prized locale, the New York Times op-ed page, Brooks has become a must-read, charming us into seeing events in the news through his worldview.
There’s just one problem: Many of his generalizations are false…
…
As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home.“On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu—steak au jus, ‘slippery beef pot pie,’ or whatever—I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee’s,” he wrote. “I’d scan the menu and realize that I’d been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and ‘seafood delight’ trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it.”
Taking Brooks’s cue, I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The “Steak and Lobster” combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75. “Most of our checks are over $20,” said Becka, my waitress. “There are a lot of ways to spend over $20.”
The easiest way to spend more than $20 on a meal in Franklin County is to visit the Mercersburg Inn, which boasts “turn-of-the-century elegance.” I had a $50 prix-fixe dinner, with an entrée of veal medallions, served with a lump-crab and artichoke tower, wild-rice pilaf and a sage-caper-cream sauce. Afterward, I asked the inn’s proprietors, Walt and Sandy Filkowski, if they had seen Brooks’s article. They laughed.
I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County, and the ease with which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. “I didn’t see it when I was there, but it’s true, you can get a nice meal at the Mercersburg Inn,” he said. I said it was just as easy at Red Lobster. “That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end?” he replied, his voice trailing away. “That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but I did have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20.”
In the years that follow the Bush Administration, you’ll be seeing a lot of people pointing the finger at Bush and his cronies for all the lies that got us into, and have kept us in Iraq. And a lot of that finger pointing will be done, never doubt it, by the people most responsible…
FAIR studied all on-camera sources on the nightly ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS newscasts: Less than 1 percent – 3 out of 393 sources – were antiwar. Only 6 percent were skeptical sources.
This at a time when 60 percent of Americans in polls wanted more time for diplomacy and inspections.
I worked 10-hour days inside MSNBC’s newsroom during this period as senior producer of Phil Donahue’s primetime show (cancelled three weeks before the war while the network’s most-watched program).
Trust me: too much skepticism over war claims was a punishable offense. I and all other Donahue producers were repeatedly ordered by top management to book panels that favored the pro-invasion side.
I watched a fellow producer get chewed out for booking a 50-50 show.
At MSNBC, I heard Scott Ritter smeared – on-air and off – as a paid mouthpiece of Saddam Hussein. After we had war skeptic and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark on the show, we learned he was on some sort of network blacklist.
When MSNBC terminated Donahue, it was expected that we’d be replaced by a nightly show hosted by Jesse Ventura. But that show never really launched.
Ventura says it was because he, like Donahue, opposed the Iraq invasion; he was paid millions for not appearing.
Another MSNBC star, Ashleigh Banfield, was demoted and then lost her job after criticizing the first weeks of “very sanitized” war coverage. With every muzzling, self-censorship tended to proliferate.
I’m no defender of Scott McClellan. Some may say he has blood on his hands – and that he hasn’t earned any kind of redemption.
But as someone who still burns with anger over what I witnessed inside TV news during that crucial historical moment, I’m trying my best to enjoy this falling out among thieves and liars.
Thieves and liars. Yes. That about sums up the miserable lot of them. I was walking through the concourse of Washington National Airport the other day and noticed a CNBC News Store in passing. A Store, mind you…like a Disney store or a Nicktoons store, or one of those As Seen On TV stores. You could buy a CNBC coffee mug, or a T-shirt, and books by various CNBC personalities. I am living in a day and age when network news organizations have their own shopping boutiques. You could get everything but the latest news there.
What’s Spanish For “No I Am Not Interested In A Timeshare”…?
They’re busy building high rises here in Puerto Vallarte and swear to God every conversation down in the main shopping zone somehow seems to turn into a pitch for a condo or timeshare. It starts out "Hey amigo…" and they ask you where you’re from and how long you’ve been here and how long you’re staying and whether or not you’re traveling alone (which I would always answer ‘no’ to even if I was…), and then it segues into a goddamned condo pitch. Some of the stores along the ocean front shopping zone have put "no timeshare" signs in the windows.
I’ve bought a few nice things to bring back home (I must show you my rabbit…), but I’d probably have bought twice as much it if weren’t for the aggressiveness of the street vendors. Instead of just letting me shop in peace they absolutely have to try and drag you in off the street and into their shop. By the time I get home I’ll have "No gracias" down pat. (My brother says it’s "Gracias no", but here everyone is saying it "No gracias", so I’m just going with the flow…)
But I am having a wonderful time here so don’t take the above as a complaint so much as just a random observation. The people here are very friendly and it’s easy for me now to just walk into any little shop here and if I see something I want buy it. You need very little Spanish in the small convenience stores and the staff in the expensive crafts and jewelry stores all know enough English that you can get by easily. I greet them with Hola, as they meet me at the door. A couple times staff has taken that to mean I speak Spanish and start talking to me in it, but when they see that flash of panic on my face they’ve quickly switched to English. I make sure to say "please" and "thank you" in Spanish even then.
I walked into an OXXO…its like the local equivalent to a 7-11 or a Royal Farms back in Maryland…to get something to drink as I strolled around with my camera. (I’ve been sticking to soda and beer during my stay here, with the occasional bottled water) They sell these really convenient little half size cans of soda down here for 40 pesos. I was standing in line at the counter with about a half dozen locals, all busy chit-chatting with each other and I understood not a word of it and it didn’t matter.
My fear of the language barrier has kept me from seeing so much of the world and I think I finally realize now that it isn’t anything to be afraid of. Here in the tourist zones everybody seems to get by with a little basic Spanish and a little basic English and it works out somehow. The locals, again at least here in the tourist zone, really do appreciate it when you make an effort, and without a doubt if I stayed here longer then a weekend I’d find myself picking up all kinds of useful phrases here and there.
But there in the convenience store it simply didn’t matter that I can’t really speak Spanish much at all. What the clerk needed to know was what I wanted to buy, which was obvious enough from the half can of Coke I brought up to the counter. And all I needed to know was to pay him 40 pesos for it, which was marked plainly on the can. I gave him a 50 peso note and he gave me back a 10 peso coin. Its been like that for me ever since Thursday afternoon. I really never needed to know the language of a country I want to visit as well as a native. At least if all I plan on doing is sticking to the tourist zones. Just well enough to be polite and respectful. In the tourist zones all over the world probably, they’re use to Gringos.
I grew up in the Washington D.C. area, which arguably qualifies as a tourist zone. I am so glad right now that I have always taken a forbearing attitude to the non English speaking foreigners I’ve encountered, and tried at times to be helpful when I could. A couple years ago on one of my road trips through the southwest I came across a tour bus full of Germans in Monument Valley. I saw a middle aged German man taking a photo of the license plate of my car…it’s a special plate with the state bird, the blue Heron, in the middle. You pay a little extra for it and the money goes to the Chesapeake Bay clean-up fund. The German saw me watching him and became a bit embarrassed and started gesturing with his camera that he was just taking a picture and it was obvious he didn’t speak a word of English. I wanted to tell him about the plate because I thought he’d be interested in that little bit of information to go with the photo he was taking, but I do not speak any German. All I could do was gesture back at him that it was okay, I didn’t mind his taking pictures of my car or the license plate on it. Basically we just smiled at each other, nodded, and went on our separate ways. Now I’m the stranger in a strange land and I’m real glad I don’t have any memories of being rude to foreigners to feel ashamed about now.
[Edited a tad to fix the value of the soda I bought… That’s 40 pesos not 4. I was thinking in dollars as I wrote that…]
As we walked toward customs at the Puerto Vallarta airport my friend Joe turned to me and said "Welcome to someplace other then the U.S." It was the first time in my life I’d ever set foot outside the country of my birth, and what was going through my mind at that moment was "I don’t speak a word of Spanish." That’s not entirely true, but as all I can do pretty much is say ‘Hello’ and ‘Please" and ‘Thank you’, it might as well be.
I’m finding now that I’m immersed in someone else’s language that it’s not all that bad. Hearing a language spoken all around me that I simply don’t fathom isn’t as frightening as I thought it would be. I’m actually likely to pick up on some more of it before I leave Monday. At least here in a tourist zone, people expect that not everyone wandering the streets speaks the language, particularly if you look like a Yankee tourist. And what I’m discovering is that it doesn’t matter if I come off like a damn fool while trying to fumble my way to "let me know when you want to clean my room and I’ll leave", with the guest house help. I’m a gringo…I’m not only allowed to be a fool, I’m expected to be one.
The people here are so friendly I feel completely welcome here. The only irritant is the tons of condo sales droids wandering the streets, all trying to grab your attention. No fooling, about every block you walk around here, particularly in the gay neighborhood, you get a sales pitch that starts how "Hola Amego!" They may offer to direct you to a nearby restaurant or get you a taxi or tickets to some show or event, but it always comes bundled with a pitch to get you to go look at some nice condo somewhere. We were warned coming down here to be careful to get a regular cab and not one of the independents, some of whom claim to be working for hotels, because you’ll get a condo sales pitch all the way to your destination.
Here’s the view I wake up to in the morning from my room…
My room is to die for. If you go to the Villa David web site, it’s #1…The Minx Room. I do not qualify as ‘Minx’, but the room is absolutely the best I have ever stayed in.
You really know you’re someplace other then the U.S. when you can look out your window and see naked high voltage power lines less then an arm’s reach away.
Look closely, and you can see how they tap the power for the guest house we’re staying at. This ad hoc approach to everything seems to be the guiding principal here. And while I can see where it would become annoying, I’m finding it intensely enjoyable too. Something about the way things are just slapped together around here, and the near complete lack of traffic control, appeals to the inner anarchist in me. On the one hand I am in a place where I don’t have the rights I do in America. There is no first Amendment here, no innocent until proven guilty. On the other hand, you have to like the way people here just get things done with what they have to work with. Germany and Switzerland this isn’t. Judging by Puerto Vallarta, this country would drive a control freak absolutely nuts, very very quickly. In a way, you have to love that. Take your favorite control freak to Mexico for a holiday and tell them to loosen up a bit.
My infrequent trips to Manhattan prepared me, somewhat, for navigating the roads here on foot. Whereas in Manhattan the relationship between pedestrians and autos was just hectic, here it’s positively anarchic. You Have to pay attention. There are maybe one or two stop signs in the entire town of Puerto Villarta and maybe as many traffic lights. I think right of way is determined by an informal game of chicken: whoever blinks first has to wait. I have never seen an intersection before in my life, where there is only one traffic light controlling one approach, and the other three are free to do as they damn well please.
Much of the old town is built on the hillsides over looking the Pacific and it is beautiful and charming in just the way you always imagined a real Mexican town would be. But they don’t do switchbacks here. Even San Francisco does switchbacks. Not here. Here they just go straight up the damn hillside. No kidding, one of the roads to our Guest house had lateral grooves cut into the pavement so cars could get enough traction to climb it. I’d say it was somewhere between a 60 and 70 degree incline.
And these are narrow little neighborhood streets. The cars negotiate right of way on an ad hoc basis constantly, just as they do at intersections. The drivers here seem to have a second sense of how close they are to getting their sides scraped. Several times on the way to the villa, our driver came so close to the cars parked on the side of the streets you couldn’t have put a credit card between us. When people park around here, I see them always folding their side view mirrors in.
The original Volkswagon Beetle lives on here in Mexico. I’ve never seen so many on the streets since I was a kid. Late yesterday afternoon I heard one wandering up the side roads next to our Villa, blaring something in Spanish out of two loudspeakers mounted on the roof. I walked out onto my balcony to look and figured the two guys inside were either advertising something or hawking some political candidate. They stopped at a nearby corner, and one by one people came out to them with their dogs. As I watched, one guy stepped out with a syringe and vaccine bottle while the other took notes on a clipboard and they gave the dogs shots of some sort. Maybe it was for rabies or some such.
Here’s how they deliver gas here…
This was taken off my rear balcony a little while ago. The green trunk prowls around the neighborhoods like a damn ice cream truck. It plays a little musical jingle which is periodically interrupted by a male voice saying something that I reckon means "Propane", then it goes back to playing the jingle.
It’s not as hot here as I thought it would be, but it is sweltering humid. Being a Washingtonian I am use to this kind of humidity, but it’s early in the year for that for me. They say it’s a dryer heat in the winter months. So yesterday and today I am avoiding the streets while the sun is high. The Villa has a nice pool I can soak in, and my room is on the top floor and it is to die for, with a lovely view of the town and the ocean on one side, and a balcony with a view of the town on the other. I get nice air flow all day long, and I turn on the AC at night mostly to dry the air out a tad.
Villa David is absolutely lovely! The pictures on the web don’t do it justice. I could hang out here the whole weekend, but I want to explore some of the town with my camera too. My fear of being a stranger in a strange land is melting away. What I’m finding is that at least here in the tourist zones I don’t need to worry about the language barrier much. That you are seen making an effort really does go a long way. At least in the tourist zones. And it’s just a real trip seeing another people’s take on living life. I’m having a lot of fun here…finding myself more adventurous then I thought I’d be so soon after arriving.
I’m coming to appreciate Puerto Vallarta as being a good place for a first visit outside the country. It’s more authentically Mexican then (so I’ve been told) Cancun. But it’s welcoming to foreigners, and there is enough English spoken here that I quickly became comfortable roaming the streets with my camera alone, and walking into shops along the way to browse and buy. All the shop owners know "How much?"
As I was walking along I noticed a blister starting to form on one foot under the pair of sandals I bought in Key West last Christmas. I didn’t want it going any further so I looked around for a place to buy a bandage and disinfectant. I’m finding I can make out what most store signs in Spanish say because so many of them resemble English words, and I saw some word close enough to ‘Pharmacy’ on a sign above a little shop, that I figured it was the same thing as ‘Drugstore’. Which it was. What I saw inside looked little different from a small drugstore at home, other then some brand names were new to me. The guy behind the counter said "Hola" and I greeted him likewise and said simply "Band-Aid"? and he nodded and took me over to a counter full of them. I picked out a small tourist size package and glanced at the price…twenty-three pesos. The exchange rate is close enough to 1 to 10 that I just move the decimal when I want to judge the value of anything here. Basically, that pack of bandages was $2.30. Fine. I took it back to the counter and was rung up. I handed him a fifty peso note and he handed me back a twenty peso note, a five peso coin and a two peso coin. My first all-by-myself purchase in a foreign land. Piece of cake. Mathematics and commerce are universal languages.
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