You have heard that the ten richest of the 750+ US billionaires enjoyed a gigantic pandemic windfall that raised their fortunes by at least 70%. How about that for a return on your investment! In this country it is no crime to exploit your advantages to get as super-rich as you can, even if it brings an American authoritarian to power based on calculated misinformation you help to proliferate, or casts people out into the streets to live dangerous, shortened lives in makeshift homes. Why should real estate billionaires not have the same chance to profit from misery that tech billionaires enjoyed?
That’s what America is all about, the right of winners to win, in a totally Free Market, no matter how many millions of losers might quibble and commit mumbling class warfare against them, as each of those losers rightfully and legally lose a safe place to live. Don’t let anybody tell you anything else, loser.
As this recent Washington Post article points out (and the graph above, from the article, shows) average rents across the nation have gone up 14% over the second half of 2021.
Average rents rose 14 percent last year, to $1,877 a month, with cities like Austin, New York and Miami notching increases of as much as 40 percent, according to real estate firm Redfin. And Americans expect rents will continue to rise — by about 10 percent this year — according to a report released this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. At the same time, many local rent freezes and eviction moratoriums have already expired. . .
Let’s hit the old calculator, see how many hours a $15/hr minimum wage worker has to work to pay an average rent of $1,877. 125.13 hours. Shoot, that’s barely three full forty hour work weeks… and a half day shift.
The pandemic has exacerbated inequalities in many parts of life, and housing is no different. Homeowners benefited from rock-bottom interest rates and surging home prices, while renters have faced surging costs with little reprieve. And unlike markups in other categories — such as food or gas, where prices can waver in both directions — economists say annual leases and long-term mortgages make it unlikely that housing costs will come back down quickly once they rise.
And, an added benefit of wildly increasing residential rents, for opponents of social change and the right to live in a home instead of on the street, is that skyrocketing rents fuel inflation. Inflation makes Biden look weak, even as the overall economy has exceeded all recovery expectations, even as most of his larger, ongoing economic stimulus plans have been filibustered. So, by all means, raise the rents, fuel inflation, make Biden a one term LOSER. It’s win-win, for the winners, just another loss for the vast population of powerless American losers.USA! USA!!!
It sounds like a sick joke, I know, but my favorite book (aside from Isaac Babel’s Collected Stories, Walter Morrison translation — out of print) is Hannah Arendt’s readily available masterpiece Eichmann in Jerusalem. I’ve read it several times recently and listened to it a few more, in the beautiful reading by Wanda McCaddon, a reading that makes you feel like you’re listening to the author herself (though with an English accent). It is a book many American fascists, on school boards and state legislatures everywhere, would happily ban, based on how bad it makes their German predecessors, many other Europeans and perhaps also present dayAmerican anti-Semites, look, how bad it might make their innocent children feel about themselves. Why should the kids feel the sting of being unfairly judged for an honest belief that 91 year-old George Soros is the source of all evil, head of a global cabal of powerful freedom-hating, Christ-denying, child-blood drinking Jewish monsters.Who are they to judge us?
Listening to, or reading, the thoughts of a brilliant thinker who spoke knowledgeably, calmly, frankly and with wit about an extensive historical and legal record she had mastered, and was attacked for decades for her assessment of a trial she attended and followed closely in the original language, I feel each time I open the book that I’ve entered into an ongoing conversation with a remarkable woman. Nobody in the world was better positioned than Arendt, a refugee from Nazism, to analyze that important trial, which is why she petitioned the New Yorker to send her. In verifying just now that it was that magazine that sent her, the first few search results were present day critiques of Arendt. Still. Some Jews are still furious at Hannah Arendt. I wonder how many of her angry critics have actually readher book.
One uncomfortable fact Arendt establishes throughout the book is the utter ordinariness of Adolf Eichmann. He was as ordinary as someone like Jeffrey Clark, the corrupt DOJ official appointed by Trump who was ready to aid Trump in insurrection by making false claims about a stolen election under the DOJ letterhead, or a poisonous troll like Stephen Miller. Every totalitarian needs an army of dedicated bureaucrats like Eichmann, blindly obedient, ambitious followers willing to do whatever they are told, to the extent of their abilities.
Eichmann, as Arendt shows over and over, was, outside of his undeniable organizational ability, something of a dolt. Arendt translates some of Eichmann’s doomed wrestling matches with the German language and concludes that his inability to speak was an outgrowth of his inability to think. Neither educated nor curious, Eichmann, who bemoaned his bad luck throughout the trial, was, to the end, an unquestioning follower of the Fuhrer. Eichmann was certainly not alone in this, every deranged utterance of Mr. Hitler’s immediately had the full force of German law, some of the best legal minds in the world stayed busy transcribing it all into the law books of The Thousand Year Reich.
Still, during the trial in Jerusalem Eichmann was treated as the mastermind of the Final Solution, and tried before the world in a trial intended to show the massive inhumanity of the Third Reich, in revolting detail, as personified in this powerful Nazi monster. The trial was necessary, and, as Arendt described it, effective in directing world attention to Nazi horrors, but Eichmann was no mastermind of anything but filling the trains with victims and carrying out increasingly insane orders from his bosses. Eichmann, to this day is often portayed as the monstrously evil architect of the plan he energetically carried out (he’s described that way in a current Netflix description of a film about him) although he was simply a monstruously ordinary functionary in a morallyinverted order, one of thousands, who did their parts to keep the death machine humming. Eichmann had been the industrious head of shipping.
He deserved to die for his role in the mechanized genocide, as Arendt states with no hesitation, as any reader of the book grasps over and over. If anyone deserves hanging, Eichmann certainly did. A big part of Arendt’s literary “crime” was pointing out that there was an element of theatre to the trial which was compromised if the audience learned that Eichmann could have been, rather than a bloodthirsty mass murderer, any banal, blindly ambitious idiot loyal to any powerful, murderous madman anywhere in the twentieth century (and beyond).
Arendt puts her finger on the true monstrousness of Eichmann — how ubiquitous his ambitious, morally debased type is, and how crucial that type is to the reign of every actual monstrous psychopath who bloodies the chapters of human history with their implacable need to dominate and punishothers.
Now that we’ve come to that unthinkable place here, in the United States of America, where derangred lies animate millions, books are banned, burned, whole subjects forbidden from history class, insights from books like Arendt’sEichmann in Jerusalem take on an urgent relevance to our lives. Critique Arendt’s thoughts on the trial all you want, attack a few salty asides about Zionism all day long, but try disputing this bit, a factual, chillingly calm account of the nauseating brutality of the Rumanians under Antonescu:
This horrified even the Nazis, as Arendt informs us. A large group of disparate Nazi rivals, including Eichmann, intervened to make sure the elimination of Rumanian Jews was done in an orderly, efficient and slightly less vomit-inducing fashion.
Deportation Rumanian style consisted in herding five thousand people into freight cars and letting them die there of suffocation while the train traveled through the countryside without plan or aim for days on end; a favorite follow-up to these killing operations was to expose the corpses in Jewish butcher shops.
Hannah Arendt
A truly sickening, somewhat complex sentence. Imagine some kid in that Tennessee county where they just banned the graphic novel, Maus, in which a holocaust (conducted by Nazi cats) is carried out against the powerless Jews (mice), trying to get through that sentence of Arendt’s. How nauseating is the image of suffocated corpses displayed hanging in the windows of butcher shops? And the notion that it was a “favorite follow-up” to the mass killings? Makes you want to vomit, unless you believe the victims only got what they deserved, I suppose.
That sickening image is in the same category, I think, as detailed descriptions of countless ships owned by wealthy entrepreneurs carrying naked human cargo, chained and packed like sardines, from Africa to slave markets in the new world, a lucrative live product with a high death rate crossing the ocean. Equally, horrific, the atrocities of the “Peculiar Institution” for the survivors of the infamous Middle Passage and millions more born into slavery. The grim reality of that is as viscerally upsetting as the hideous practices of the Rumanians, who shocked even the Nazis.
Those who would not be troubled by those atrocious things done by our American ancestors must believe that the Civil War was not fought over slavery, that it was a glorious stand for a cherished way of life, fought over States’ Rights (to keep and torture slaves). And, that it was, and is, strictly States’ Rights to decide who can easily vote and, for a century, who could be lynched for trying to vote.
You hear the same arguments today in justifying the filibuster to protect the core group of angry, frightened Americans who feel truly threatened by the predicted demographic future, as well as by the past, when they may well have behaved in ways, or sat by agreeing with things, might still, in their hearts, embrace things that would justify the just punishment Thomas Jefferson trembled about as he equivocated about the ungodly injustice of slavery.
So, as in anything that can cause shame and a wrenching questioning of core values, the best thing, for many, is denial. It runs deep and it can’t be denied. Just one more reason I love Hannah Arendt, she truly didn’t give a fuck about your denial.
What else is the Grand Old Party for? States’ rights to reject federal efforts to standardize federal election rules and ensure ease of casting ballots for all Americans. Why should there be national rules for national elections? Totally unfair if you control a state government!
These “conservatives” want to make sure their partisan advantage is preserved wherever they currently have it, and are proposing hundreds of creepy new laws in as many states as possible to guarantee partisan advantage. Georgia’s was one of the splashiest, and while litigation continues, it stays in full force and effect for upcoming elections, absent a filibuster-blocked federal law to the contrary.
The Federalist Society 6-3 Supreme Court majority announced, in the recent 6-3 Brnovich v. DNC decision, that, in principle, partisanship is a perfectly fine motive in making laws. There is nothing the Court, or the Constitution, can do about “political questions” like partisan gerrymandering or seemingly restrictive partisan voting laws (mandating masks or vaccines is not considered “political” and can be quickly struck down).
Partisan voting laws that may also disproportionately disadvantage ethnic minorities, under Brnovich, can only be set aside if they are provably virtually 100% racist in expressed intent.Partisan voting laws are perfectly cool with the partisan six, emanators of the stench. Elena Kagan’s dissent had the better of the argument:
“This Court has no right to remake Section 2 [of the VRA]. Maybe some think that vote suppression is a relic of history—and so the need for a potent Section 2 has come and gone. … But Congress gets to make that call.”[25] Kagan further wrote “What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses. What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting.'”[29]
Although, one could argue that in 2013 John Roberts and four other corporatist justices set the precedent that the Court has the right to void the virtually unanimous bipartisan will of both Houses of Congress and the President, when their then 5-4 majority overruled a 400-20 House majority, a 98-0 Senate vote and the public approval of the sitting Republican president to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, which the five eviscerated without anesthesia or so much as the figleaf of a coherent legal argument. John Roberts based his ruling on a shrewd mix of misconception and lies, dispensed cooly and couched in the most reasonable nd judicious language.
For purposes of the sacred Electoral College, Biden won Georgia by only 11,779 votes, getting all of their electors. Trump was enraged and did everything he could think of after the election to get Georgia officiald to find 11,780 votes for him. He had Lindsey Graham call Raffensberger, who he correctly felt was ducking his calls.
Republicans in Georgia followed the law, and Trump’s loss stood, so Trump demanded the law be changed, post haste, in every state he lost. The GOP quickly fell into line behind Trump’s baseless, racist rants about supposedly massive, though unprovable, Black Voter Fraud (it’s always Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta… where the imagined fraud all took place, coincidentally all areas with large Black and Brown populations vote, (that’s how you blow a foghorn dog whistle, you angry, paranoid, irrational, superior, urban sodomites).
Here is a piece about how well Georgia’s new voter integrity/voter suppression law has been working so far (pardon the format, fucking YouTube wouldn’t let me copy or share it any other way…)
Make no mistake, these American States’ Rights (except for “anarchist jurisdictions”) authoritarians mean business. Business, literally, the unforgiving, freedom loving religion of the American ruling class.They never lost the goddamned Civil War and they don’t plan to lose this war neither.
No increased budget for the Internal Revenue Service to collect the vast sums of unpaid tax every year, the money that pays for everything the government does. The IRS is underfunded to collect the vast amount of fraudulently ducked taxes, estimated at around a trillion (a thousand billion) dollars a year. Never going to happen, not the ten percent increase Biden asked for, not a zero percent increase, nada, not with the steady Joe Manchin III on the side of the fifty Republicans on this issue. Increased IRS funding for enforcement of the tax code was one of the sticking points the West Virginia senator found with Build Back Better. Another was enhanced ethics rules for federal officials, with enforcement mechanisms. Fuck that tyranny! What’s a trillion dollars a year among friends? {1]
Years ago it was fringe right-wing extremists who wanted to shrink government small enough to drown it in a bathtub, except when it comes to policing things like defending the lives of the unborn, suppressing the non-white vote and things of that nature. Today hobbling the government, the hated administrative state, is a major goal of MAGA nation and the mainstream Republican party. Get the government off our backs.
To me, the nine scariest words in the English language are “Hi, I’m Ronald Reagan and I’m your new president.” That politely racist prick (he announced his presidential run in the Mississippi town where the Ku Klux Klan killed three poll workers less than twenty years before) is now revered as a “moderate” Republican, like the bellicose defender of torture and preemptive war turned folksy painter, Born-Again George Dubya Bush. Reagan was the man who made it cool to openly express your desire to be an American fascist. My man undoubtedly had style, but the substance, sadly, was very bad.
Serious question: why fund the agency that collects the tax that makes the country run when you can defund it, quietly, simply by keeping its slashed budget as it is, and let everybody keep whatever they can steal, except for poor people, the lowest level of tax filers, who will always be made grim examples of in the name of Law and Order?
[1] from that Wall Street Journal Article:
As much as $1 trillion a year in federal taxes may be going unpaid because of errors, fraud and lack of resources to enforce collections adequately, Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Charles Rettig told lawmakers Tuesday.
During a nearly three-hour appearance before the Senate Finance Committee, Mr. Rettig said much has changed since the IRS last formally published data on the so-called tax gap—the difference between taxes owed and tax collected—using returns from tax years 2011 to 2013. That reporting, to be updated next year, showed annual losses of $441 billion.
The growth of cryptocurrencies and foreign-source income, as well as outside estimates that suggest a tax gap of $7.5 trillion over the next decade, mean past IRS research has almost certainly undercounted the losses.
[2] from the great Jane Mayer in the New Yorker article linked above
The claim that the Justices’ opinions are politically neutral is becoming increasingly hard to accept, especially from Thomas, whose wife, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, is a vocal right-wing activist. She has declared that America is in existential danger because of the “deep state” and the “fascist left,” which includes “transsexual fascists.” Thomas, a lawyer who runs a small political-lobbying firm, Liberty Consulting, has become a prominent member of various hard-line groups. Her political activism has caused controversy for years. For the most part, it has been dismissed as the harmless action of an independent spouse. But now the Court appears likely to secure victories for her allies in a number of highly polarizing cases—on abortion, affirmative action, and gun rights.
With the unvaccinated 20X more likely to die of Covid-19 than fully vaccinated people, what are we to make of this: overall infections are down while deaths are up substantially.
I have to ask Joe Rogan about this, he’s wildly popular.
The news broke recently, right before the annual Davos convention of the world’s richest people (done by Zoom this year), that the world’s top ten billionaires had doubled their combined wealth during the pandemic, to the tune of about $800,000,000,000 (800 billion), accruing at $15,000 a second ($1.3 billion a day).
It appears, as the BBC points out, that the figures might be slightly exaggerated. If you choose a starting day in February 2020, instead of once the pandemic, officially underway, dropped stock prices in March 2020, then the wealth of the ten richest men may only have increased by 70%, a full thirty percent less than the 100% increase in their wealth claimed by anti-poverty organization Oxfam in its recent report.
So rather than a combined almost two year windfall closing in on a hard to imagine trillion dollars, say, the world’s ten richest men may only have reaped a more modest five or six hundred billion, combined. Beyond that, all of the world’s richest men did not profit equally, throwing things off a bit more still.
Bill Gates, for example, only saw a 30% rise in his net worth, while Times Man of the Year Elon Musk raked in a more than 1,000% increase, skewing the average and making all the other world’s richest look worse than they actually are in evading all social responsibility while fighting to shield their wealth from taxes.
The BBC account does seem not contest these findings by Oxfam:
The pandemic has made the world’s wealthiest far richer but has led to more people living in poverty, according to the charity Oxfam.
Lower incomes for the world’s poorest contributed to the death of 21,000 people each day, its report claims.
But the world’s 10 richest men have more than doubled their collective fortunes since March 2020, Oxfam said.
Oxfam typically releases a report on global inequality at the start of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.
That event usually sees thousands of corporate and political leaders, celebrities, campaigners, economists and journalists gather in the Swiss ski resort for panel discussions, drinks parties and schmoozing.
Oxfam’s report, which was also based on data from the World Bank, said a lack of access to healthcare, hunger, gender-based violence and climate breakdown contributed to one death every four seconds.
It said 160 million more people were living on less than $5.50 (£4.02) a day than would have been without the impact of the Covid pandemic.
The World Bank uses $5.50 a day as a measure of poverty in upper-middle-income countries.
As John F. Kennedy, raised in tremendous wealth (the Kennedy fortunes were greatly enhanced during Prohibition, as a result of taking bold business risks similar to those of organized crime) said: Life is unfair. Then they shot him in the head. His nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently said at an anti-vaccine rally in Washington DC, of the tyranny of vaccine mandates during a :
“Even in Hitler Germany (sic), you could, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did,” said Kennedy, a prominent anti-vaccine advocate, in a speech at the Lincoln Memorial. “I visited, in 1962, East Germany with my father and met people who had climbed the wall and escaped, so it was possible. Many died, true, but it was possible.”
Another insightful opinion piece by Jennifer Rubin (giftedto you by the earth’s second or third greatest man, Jeff Bezos.) Another argument that is impossible to refute, except with a hearty, though only 39% persuasive,“fuck you, wasshole!”
Number one and two in the sense of the polite way people sometimes refer to the output of the urethra and colon. Also in the sense of causing a large percentage of their population to embrace irrational beliefs that sometimes disproportionately kill them.
Putin was trained in this dark art in the KGB, Trump simply has the natural gift of a sociopathic compulsive liar with an overwhelming need to be loved.The US, which leads the world in Covid deaths, is a close second only to Russia in the percentage of citizens who would literally rather die than ever take the vaccine, and other reasonable precautions, against the pandemic. Freedom from what they believe is tyranny is worth more than life to these folks.
Twenty percent of Americans polled report that they will never take the vaccine, are unwilling to ever take it [1]. Most of the 2,000 a day dying of covid in the US are unvaccinated. The US is once again Exceptional in this, most other nations are in the single digit percentage for those diehard Live Free or Kill Myself 20% of our exceptional fellow citizens, folks who believe they have never lost any fight, war, argument or game of tic tac toe. Their steadfastness in resisting science, and their ability to move freely from state to state and cough on anybody they choose to cough on, enables us to easily lead the world in daily covid deaths. Here in New York City I am often in stores that post a strict mask policy people feel free to ignore, with no consequences. American Exceptionalism — fuck your fucking so-called social fucking contract, asshole! Here’s the worldwide death chart:
Here is Chris Hayes, on the lying liberal media [2], laying out the deadly case of this exceptional American delusion that freedom equals the right to catch a deadly, but now controllable, disease and spread it to as many people as you like, before you yourself angrily die from it.The exceptional American belief that willing a thing makes it so and that freedom means, under certain circumstances, the right to infect and kill whoever you come into contact with. If I never admit I was wrong, I WAS FUCKING RIGHT!
[1]
Yes, I know about the general reliability of polls, but this one, as described in the video above, is based on the self-reporting of respondents. They are asked the questions and 20% of Americans, versus 5% of Spaniards and 7% of Australians, said “shit no, I’m no moron, I would never let the Deep State put that poison in my body.”
[2]
die Lügenpresse, give credit where credit’s due, this was stolen from the old Nazi playbook. Fake News!Nazis, many feel, have been as falsely maligned by the fake news as our American as apple pie Ku Klux Klan. So unfair! SAD!
The New York Times editorial board decided the most important story for Saturday, in a country on the doorstep of authoritarianism, was the following critique of our beleaguered president(because of worldwide inflation, don’t you know?):
When you click on the link you learn that not only is Biden not passing the so-called Big Mac test, he’s failing!!!
I had the stomach to read this poisonous editorial board editorial to the very end where one reads this:
The role of presidents in shaping the nation’s economic fortunes is generally overstated. But if the government can complete the work it has begun, this administration may yet deserve the victory laps it is taking for successful stewardship of the nation’s economy.
The discomforting truth is that the United States last year faced a choice between a protracted period of economic pain and an economic recovery whose benefits are temporarily attenuated by high inflation. Mr. Biden made the right choice. But it came at a real price — economically, for the nation, and politically, for him.
It’s hard not to offer a hearty “fuck you and what the fuck is your fucking problem?” to the New York Timeseditorial board . Breitbart, OANN, Newsmax, The Wall Street Journal, The NY Post and FOX news could not have done it better! It is certainly a model of editorial restraint. Mazel tov, momzers...
Bear in mind:
To recap the NY Times’s perfectly reasonable sounding analysis: Biden took office during a pandemic/economic/political nightmare on a global scale, and his policies worked, much better than in most other places.
The White House finds itself in the position of a physician who has administered a successful course of treatment but who has neglected to prepare the patient for the side effects or to give the timeline for a full recovery. A lot of pain was averted, but it’s hard to feel gratitude for things that didn’t happen. The economic outlook is strong, but it’s hard to feel gratitude for things that haven’t happened yet. Right now, the pain of inflation is front and center for most.
A one-year expansion of the child tax credit helped to reduce the share of American children living in poverty to the lowest level since the government began to keep records in the 1960s. But Democrats, unable to agree on the terms of a permanent expansion, have allowed the expanded benefits to expire, depriving millions of working families of needed help.
Something like “Biden and Democrats, needing every vote to pass laws and budgets, even by reconciliation, were blocked by all fifty Republicans and two conservative Democratic senators who are staunch opponents of minimum wage and the child tax credit, and incoherent defenders of the filibuster, who stand athwart all progressive aspirations, no matter how modest,” would have been a little more accurate, and fairer, description of Biden’s inability to get anything passed.
The Times continues (my recap): Admittedly, the president alone is not responsible for fixing all of that, particularly not in his first year in office. He did a good job, much better than anyone could have predicted. BUT, the price of a Big Mac is up, so that’s Biden’s fault, he failed, which is why, even though highly successful on most of these supremely challenging fronts, during the second half of a period when the world’s ten richest men doubled their net worth to the tune of five trillion untouchable bucks, Biden is still a fucking failure, as the polls show, largely because of inflation and nobody approves of a failure, particularly one who picks their pockets.
It’s not as if fraud is murder, fraud is just stealing from people, with a cunning lie that foolsthe credulous for long enough to get their money. Fraud may not be shooting somebody to death on Fifth Avenue, but it’s bad nonetheless.
It’s not as though these fraud allegations against the Trump Organization are anything new. Fraud is a big part of his lifelong business model and an integral part of Trump’s classy, gold-plated, exclusivebrand.
Right before the Electoral College selected him as the president of the United States in 2016, Donald Trump agreed to pay the State of New York $25,000,000 (twenty-five million dollars) to settle, with no admission of wrongdoing, a case brought on behalf of defrauded former students of hugely profitable Trump University which also agreed to shut down[1]
It’s not likehis fraudulent charitable Trump Foundation was closed because of fraud, it just happened that a few million dollars of the money Trump raised for the charity were spent by the Trump family in a legally improper way, and his charitable Foundation was forced to empty its bank account and donate all the funds to actual charities. The Trump Foundation, now bankrupt, was closed down as well. New York Attorney General Letitia James summarizes:
“Not only has the Trump Foundation shut down for its misconduct, but the president has been forced to pay $2 million for misusing charitable funds for his own political gain. Charities are not a means to an end, which is why these damages speak to the president’s abuse of power and represent a victory for not-for-profits that follow the law.”[2]
These pain in the ass witch-hunting DA’s and AG’s are a big part of the reason Trump retired to DeathSantis’s hospitably fascistic Florida.
Deflating the value of assets that you used, in their inflated form, for purposes of obtaining maximum loans and social status, and lowered for purposes of evading taxes … is that fraud? It would sure seem to be. Why this fraud is the subject of a very likely civil action by the NYS Attorney General (rather than a criminal one) is hard to grasp, at least without two minutes of diligent research on DuckDuckGo or Ecosia.Whichwearieth me too much at the moment, tapping away, eyes agoggle, on this tiny but very, very smart phone, but feel free to drop a comment below if you do.
gratuitousblahg 