Progress Report

I’m disappointed with Obama’s first year, but not necessarily with Obama. It’s not the same thing. The economy is such a complex and formidable problem, that the most capable leadership in history may not be sufficient to cope with it over an entire decade, never mind a year. As I complained before the election, and will not get over, my biggest fear then and now is that the legacy of the Bush administration will be insurmountable. Obama, however, took on that challenge willingly, and for better or worse, if he fails to deliver recovery, or at least the perception of it, then he gets the credit. Bush got out from under it with a few boos at the inauguration ceremony. Historic, but pretty cheap as far as I’m concerned, considering what he didn’t do for the nation.

A new book confirms another one of my favorite peeves, that the Republicans played into the terrorist trap by distracting us with the enormous expenditure of resources and effort invested in assassinating Bill Clinton’s presidency. How can any sane person think that was somehow a good idea? Where is the evidence? As the economy has demonstrated, the benefit quite clearly accrued to captains of defense, drug, and petroleum industries, and somebody had to pay the price. There is an argument for goating of the banks and automotive industry, but as usual, the costs will trickle down, and the true victims are us. If, like the NRA and Tea Party politics, you are happy to sacrifice for the sake of General Dynamics, Merck, and Exxon, maybe that will work for you, but don’t kid yourself that General Dynamics are us.

Also as usual, Obama’s big failure is probably as much perceptual as performance. The stalling of the health care initiative affects virtually nothing in a practical way. Those with health insurance still have provider networks. Those without health insurance still have the emergency room. That’s a system of sorts, and it helps keep costs high, but once again, the economic benefits accrue to a select management, insurance, and investment group. Maybe we should consider under-insurance to be the real force behind our emergency services system. With health insurance, routine medical treatment would be returned to relatively low-cost routine medical facilities. All those around-the-clock, publicly financed, flu and sprain centers could be scaled back to trauma and life-threatening conditions. Would that solve the crisis of health care costs? Probably not, but we need some token concessions to common sense.

No, the problem with the Obama health care initiative is just what a lot of people other than me are thinking, that the time is not right. Health care is a concern. It’s a huge concern, and we see what he was thinking. Going in with a lot of momentum from the election. Get health care through on the momentum, then build economic activity around the health care initiative. It makes sense, and only those same insane exceptions could consider universal health care a bad thing, except that we neither see health care as being closely related to the economy, or as the foremost issue. The economy is the scary thing. Health care was too complicated and too vague and too esoteric. What would the health care bill have done for me? To tell you the honest to gawd truth, aside from the simple principle of caring for each other, I have no idea.

What I do know, is that housing values are still precarious. Construction is still down. The red-hot jobs market isn’t. The stock market got a little juke and has been creeping up since then, but the emphasis seems to be on creep, and the banks are siphoning off the benefit of any general improvement. The market highs of the housing bubble are charred hulks after a forest fire, an awe-inspiring tribute to a fertile past, now only pathetic, remote, and mythical. The priority, therefore, in the disturbed minds of the voters who put Obama so firmly into office, was not health care. It was economics. Reagan and the Bush boys succeeded in totally derailing us from any social course of fiscal responsibility determined by the Great Depression and returned us to the Jurassic economy of the deregulated free market (redundant?). There seems to be little dispute of that, even from the most conservative, Bill-O’Reilly-variety of financial critics, because the train wreck is sort of hard to ignore. The only question is how to shift the blame to Obama, and if he helps them enough by investing too much time and effort in health care issues that are important but nobody understands, they may be able to pull it off.

Here's Thinking for You,

Iffy

What Educators Do Best

One of the obvious joys of blogging is the opportunity to be an expert on everything, even if only in my own mind, and in my case, that's where my joy has been pretty much confined to. Playing with what I can only consider to be an educational blog (because it has no other apparent useful value), I started thinking that I might eventually want to actually connect with some kind of audience. Originally I took it that making connections would depend on assigning the right key words to insure attention from like-minded intellectuals searching for information. Eventually I determined that perhaps there were no such key words, or no such intellectuals, at least who would admit it, or that what I was producing didn’t qualify as intellectual, or maybe even as information.

Based on this positive attitude, by trial and error I eventually came up with the idea that perhaps I could more productively apply the effort to looking at some blogs and blogging strategy instead of thinking I knew how online searching worked. After skimming through a few educational blogs, however, I quickly realized something else. There are numerous suggestions for great ideas, resources, and connections, but probably 95% of posted material, like blogs for a lot of subjects, either repeats what has been posted other places or rediscovers things that have been produced by somebody else, adding captions to screen captures from Second Life as cartoon graphics, for instance.

Some of the responses make sarcastic comments about redundancy, some attribute social networking to political conspiracy or alien intervention, and some include links to Pamela Anderson's latest sex tape (...which is really about animal rights. How would I know? Research.) but the authors are not discouraged, and in the end, does it matter? Blogging communities are more insular than global information access seems to suggest, and we spend a lot of time chasing our own tails, but is that really any different than talking to somebody you know about something cool you found out about on the internet? Probably not, neither.

And does that mean blogging for education is a bad idea? No, it just means that the problem isn’t information. The problem is access. Educators spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel, but then, maybe that’s what they do best.

Here's Thinking for You

Iffy

Google Does Right

If nothing else, the relationship of Google and China illustrates that neoliberal global capitalism has not conclusively marginalized the effects of national identity and national sovereignty. Despite global economic involvement by China, the Chinese have not been effectively reduced to the ideological status of an obedient citizen in an economically unified global nation. The Chinese have their own agenda, and it does not necessarily conform to capitalist economic expectations.

To an extent, the results are unsurprising. Google sold itself by making concessions to Chinese demands for accommodations in operating policy and restrictions. For some people Google’s concessions suggested an immediate conflict of interest, but that in itself is normal or at least not unusual in a market economy and is not necessarily evil. Consider it a variation of luring customers with a low-price introductory offer. Perhaps Google failed to appreciate the Chinese Government’s perception of the transaction, however.

The world has labeled China as the most promising and lucrative market on the planet. The Chinese have been encouraged to consider their economy as a desirable commodity in many respects. Having purchased Google with access to their markets, Google is, in the Chinese view, bought and paid for, a product they own. By what authority did Google restrict Chinese government access to information? Apparently Google agreed to restrict access for government opposition activists. Why would the Chinese government think using Google for additional surveillance would be a violation of their right to possession? Did they want anybody else to know what they were doing? Of course not. Does the CIA post notification of every attempt they make to infiltrate a terrorist group? I hope not.

I’m not suggesting that the Chinese government rightfully went into the control levels of Google’s systems and took protected information, but I am suggesting that Google dealt with China as if China was merely a typical business customer in a capitalist supply and demand economy, so why should Google be surprised that the Chinese government behaved as a typical capitalist customer and considered the purchased product to be used for whatever purposes suited them? One of the popular platitudes of technology is that people will find ways to use it that nobody anticipated. Google’s relationship with China seems at best naïve, and at worst blindly opportunistic, a technological attempt to colonize a foreign culture that backfired.

What Google should have sold the Chinese government was not a product tailored to meet the demands of their ideology by applying restrictions to content, but a product with functionality limited to the absolute minimum necessary to meet that content level. There are different ways to configure a trial version. Would the Chinese have refused to consider Google without access to personalization that includes confidential information? Maybe they would have refused, and maybe that would have told Google something either way. What would have happened if Chinese users themselves demanded that functionality? Would Google have been in a better position to negotiate the security of the information?

Let’s say Google took a chance thinking there wasn’t anything to lose if it didn’t work out. Maybe they are right, and they can simply start over from a better informed negotiating position. On the other hand, what they may have confirmed is the ability of the Chinese government to control both the technology and the application, to use it as it suits them. In a competitive market, the ideology of the technology then becomes a factor in successful adoption. Not only does Google have to compete on a functional level, but the competition becomes one of the nations and political systems from which the technology has been derived. The search capability of the Chinese state then becomes competitive, and the comparison extends to national origin. In the interests of global reconciliation, I hope Google is right, at least partly.

Here's Thinking for You.

Iffy

A Regulated Madness, Part One

When my mother had a heart attack, I became intimately acquainted with the intensive care unit of the hospital and the perception of people as regulated combinations of information, so I did some thinking about what that means as a reflection of the contemporary information industry and knowledge work and the effects of modernity. If you are easily discouraged by academic commentary, you might be more interested in prior comments about Avatar.

Modernity is the time and the mentality of industry and rational science. Characteristics and consequences of Modernity include manufacturing, scientific study and development, colonial imperialism and exploitation, modern and surrealist art, and Disneyland.

The characteristics and consequences are reflexive. Modernity is itself a consequence of the Renaissance, the printing press, and rationality, an Aristotelian idea of knowable, predictable, and reliable cause and effect. Somewhat paradoxically, Aristotle has been both an obstacle to rational progress as a theologically approved intellectual standard conceptualization of the universe with the earth at the center, (the Galileo problem, and probably not what Aristotle himself originally envisioned), and as the inspiration for an intellectually curious and systematic investigation of nature (probably more along the lines of Aristotle's objectives).

Essentially, the effect of modernity is “valorization” of Western European ideas of knowledge accumulation and application established through adoption of Greek and Roman intellectual culture, partly as an effect of Christianity and partly as an effect of technology as an intellectual enterprise (distinguished from the more personal or mundane as art, craft, and individual functions, a mentality that inspires attitudes of cultural superiority inherited rhetorically from such notable predecessors as Homer, Alexander, Herodotus, and Julius Ceasar, as well as the intellectual heritage of Plato and Socrates). The exact intellectual or social process of technological development and advance is not completely understood. For Auguste Le Comte, John Stuart Mill, and others involved in the initiation of European science, it was an accumulation of knowledge necessary to answer the challenging questions posed by nature. For Thomas Kuhn, it is a series of revisions in paradigms, changes in fundamental ways of thinking about essential concepts brought about by recognition of irreconcilable exceptions, with intervening periods of methodically integrating information into existing concepts. For others, such as Donna Haraway, it is a competition between paradigms as well, or it depends on the contributions of exceptionally capable individuals, on the coincidence or condensation of essential information, or simply on the exclusive ability to ask the right questions. As Kuhn proposes, probably all of these are reflexive and none completely correct, including his.

John Misa describes instances of intellectual technology that are generally acknowledged to represent an acceleration or triumph of progress, production, and the way information has been applied and utilized, such as the advent of the printing press and the steam engine. The printing press contributed, not just to the proliferation of literature, but to religious conflicts, establishment of modern nations, capitalist economics, and the systematic investigation of nature, all depending on efficient and standardized exchange of information. The steam engine brought about both modification in the ways human labor applies to production and in the mobility of individuals through the availability of improved propulsion that ultimately affected a variety of transportation modes on the sea, on the land, and even in the air, when the project of self-contained engines that steam represented progressed to the point of internal combustion.

Electricity affected a wider variety of technical applications than any energy source in history since raw sunlight and fire, including everything from interpersonal communication to giant transportation vehicles. The transistor and the internet concentrated the application of electrical energy in an equally diffusive repurposing for comprehensive communication. In this way, intellectual technology has achieved the potential to involve every human being in direct ways, although the direct effects remain vastly under-developed and elusive.

Day of the Shoshone

In Riverton, Wyoming, about 1962, I think, I must have been in the sixth or seventh grade. My father was a mining engineer at Lucky Mac in the Gas Hills. Riverton was sort of a low-budget ranch town in a sagging wash on the verge of the Wind River Indian reservation. Cold-War uranium mining put some post-agricultural life in the local economy, and eventually the money inspired erratic aspirations to culture and civilization, such as art guilds and French lessons, that eventually seem to overtake established communities in the West, Telluride, Denver, and Laramie, as examples, but Riverton was maybe a hundred years behind.

The kids of the ranchers were those hardy, independent cowboy types with good-hearted but incorrigible contempt for anything exotic and anybody they suspected of intellectual attitudes. I read an article in The Ranger that referred to homosexuals in the state prison. I didn't know what a homosexual was, so I asked my friend if he thought that was a problem. He never spoke to me again. That was Riverton in 1962.

The reservation was a separate economic class for reasons I later learned had to do with the peculiar legal status of the native peoples, oddly echoing the language of segregation, a separate but protected nation. Since they couldn't legally mortgage property, the Shoshone and Arapahoe had no way to borrow for improvements or to finance any kind of enterprise. If you want to understand the social effects of corruption in federal government combined with restricted credit, consider the history of the reservations. At the time, the Shoshone and Arapahoe lived pretty much on a subsistence level with an old car or pickup truck parked outside a tar-paper shack. That was my take on the economic image of the reservation. The Shoshone kids who lived off the reservation were respectful, quiet, and kept to themselves. They didn't mess with the cowboy kids much, or the miners.

I was in Piggly Wiggly one day with my mother, picking up the week's provisions I guess. That was the only way I would have been in the store for any length of time. Occasionally a few of us would walk over there to buy Sugar Babies, but we weren't allowed to hang around on our own. I would have been waiting up front to ring through a pretty good load of groceries. That was probably how I happened to notice an old Shoshone woman walking slowly past the dog food in the space across from the cash registers.

You could always tell the Shoshone because they dressed almost hyper-Western style with pearl button shirts, turquoise bolos, and black Stetsons with silver conchas on the bands. I never understood if that was an expression of a kind of desperate desire to belong, or a kind of irreverent parody of cowboy culture.

Maybe both, maybe neither, but I noticed the old woman because she wasn't wearing cowboy jeans and a corduroy shirt like the younger women with her. She had on a traditional head-dress and Navaho blankets with a big Mexican skirt that spread out four or five feet and hung to the ground, like you saw more in the Southwest, but hardly ever around Riverton. Her face was like the dark shiny old knots on the Pinion Pines, and completely fixed, without an expression, like she really was wood.

She moved slowly, as if she was very tired, a step at a time, but with a kind of dignity that even a junior high school kid could notice, until she got to an empty corner on the other side of the dog food where she could stop and turn around and lean back to brace herself against the wall. Then she pulled her blankets around her and closed her eyes. She moved around a little, a sleeper maybe dreaming under her blankets about life on a lost frontier, but otherwise she squatted there in the corner, completely motionless, while her companions shopped and rung out a few things.

There was some kind of problem with them ringing out, and it took the whole time that me and Mom rung through our own big buggies and got them loaded up again. That was before barcodes and scanners. A price-check or an ID could be terminal.

About the time Mom finished writing her check, the old woman finally opened her eyes, hitched up her colorful Mexican skirt, and waddled in her slow but dignified way out the door after the rest of her family. When we got to the door, my buggy hung up on the edge of the dog food rack, so I walked around the side of the buggy to push it loose, and I was facing the same corner where the old Shoshone woman had waited patiently, maybe dreaming about a proud and mythical past. Spread out there on the gray linoleum floor, in the space that the wide skirt had covered, was a huge shining puddle of bright yellow liquid.

Sometimes I wonder if it was a cultural thing.

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

Revisiting Avatar

The range of reactions to Avatar has been instructive, including racism, feminism, disabilities, religion, economics, technology, and a variety of environmental issues.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/willheaven/100020706/avatar-james-cameron-deserves-the-worst-lefty-award-2009/

I'll comment on a few of the more prevalent that I kind of have answers for.
Regardless of white savior syndrome, the planet and the native culture are part of their own technologically superior bio-computer that ultimately appropriates the white imperialists for its own protection. An attractive take from an environmental perspective, although why bio-technological superiority would tolerate interference in the first place is a little perplexing. Maybe Wounded Knee and ultimate supremacy, through casino construction, were all part of the Indian (Native American) spiritual bio-computer plan.

If you don't like the racial and imperialist tones, don't watch it. Well, maybe you have to watch it once to have some idea of whether the arguments apply, besides which, it's worth watching anyway as a visual experience. The problem there is the nature of art as Trojan virus, a seductive vampire that sucks out your brain, or as stealth delivery vehicle for bad ideas. If you aren't aware of the argument, you may be affected indirectly, so you should at least consider the less obvious messages. Otherwise, a science fiction fantasy that “barely” qualifies for an R rating (based I suppose on the hint of unconcealed alien female breasts and a couple of carefully staged expletives), suggests little concern for offensive content in the way that X-rated material or something from a source that regularly provokes controversy might. To make the don't-watch-it argument valid, you need some kind of reliable cause for both anticipating offensive content and accepting the classification, like complaining that The Simpson's makes fun of religion, duh (or d'oh).

Likewise, the argument that "It's just a movie. Get over it," depends on the same kind of myopia. Just a movie that may pull in an audience of half the country. Accepting destructive messages because they come in artful packages serves the purpose of propaganda, regardless of intent. Spending 300 million dollars could conceivably produce something spectacular whether or not political messages were meant to be included. Essentially we need to at least discuss that. (Consider Caligula.)

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

Pocahantas Simba Binks Meets Avatar

Warning: Plot Spoiler. This review gives away parts of the plot (such as it is). My personal opinion is that a movie worth seeing won't be diminished by previous knowledge of the narrative, but some people can't live with it, so there you are.

The short version: Very long (2.5 hours), watchable, highly Disnified fairytale. No literary classic, but respectable visual and audio effects.

The longer version (but not as long as 2.5 hours):

In a galaxy far, far away, a mining company searches a primitive jungle planet for a mysterious precious mineral with the unlikely designation of something like “Unobtanium.” What this stuff is good for, we never know exactly, since all of the transportation modes involved in the fantasy world appear to operate in old-fashioned combustible ways, but for whatever reasons the stuff is highly desirable. Okay, we'll give them that.

The native inhabitants are a unique and vaguely jurassic group of spiritually interconnected plants, animals, and elongated blue humanoids with little use for the low-consciousness of the invading miners and their environmental carelessness. Coincidentally, deposits of the valuable mineral tend to be associated with the most important places in the native culture. Opposition from the natives and the hazards of the environment require the mining company to employ an army of ex-marines to insure security. If the native population doesn't cooperate, the Marines will also either forcefully relocate them, or eliminate as many as necessary to insure success of the mining operations.

Racing against the military profit schedule set by the corporate business manager, a team of dedicated scientists led by the crusty but culturally-conscious Sigorny Weaver as Grace, the science manager, struggles to find a workable diplomatic compromise by gaining knowledge of the native culture through the interaction of avatars, biological android replicants controlled by transfer of consciousness from a human operator. Just in case that wasn't sufficient provocation to produce avatars, human beings can only live in the atmosphere for about twenty seconds without gas masks. (Sorry folks, those are the rules, I didn't make them up.)

Into this predictable conflict of methodology and objectives, stumbles, so to speak, Jake Sully, a disabled Marine veteran who has lost the use of his legs under circumstances that are not clear, and is now, for reasons that are also not clear, the only suitable replacement to do the job of “sullying” the native culture as an avatar operator that was supposed to be his twin brother who has inconveniently died under circumstances that are even less clear. In a likewise somewhat incomprehensible deal, the militant and determined Marine Drill Sergeant Maniac commander of the security force offers to insure replacement of Sully's legs in return for his cooperation as an avatar operator to find something about the natives the mining company can use to force their cooperation. Apparently, as a fellow Marine, the Marine Drill Sergeant Maniac feels Jake's loyalty can be trusted. Unfortunately for the Marine Drill Sergeant Maniac, the native chief's attractive, independent daughter (think blue Pocahantas) conveniently rescues Jake in the character of his avatar (with a stylized minority face remarkably similar to Simba the lion cub) from the consequences of his own impetuous ignorance in the jungle. The inevitable follows.

Jake learns to appreciate the native culture as well as his shrewd and attractive native guide. His loyalties shift. The infuriated security chief convinces the business manager the time has come for violent action. The company sends in a team to destroy the native home-base (think Disney Tree of Life). The attack aircraft launch explosive incendiary rockets at the base of the colossal tree. The tree falls, and in the chaotic aftermath, the father of Pocahantas, I mean Blue Native Princess, gets speared by a fatal spike of the splintered tree.

Disowned by the natives for his human connections, poor Jake has to find a way to regain their confidence. This he accomplishes with a minimum of fuss by jumping onto a giant flying dinosaur and piloting the awesome beast in for a landing at the powow, becoming only the sixth or so successful major dino pilot in the long history of the natives. This is good enough for them. They take it as a sign.

The natives worship another weird tree (think fiber optic weeping willow) that serves as a kind of connection to the spiritual network of the planet. Unfortunately the tree grows on a promising location for Unobtanium. The company sends out an expedition of giant mining equipment, but Jake and the blue warriors head them off at the pass, so the business manager decides to go ahead with plans to drop a huge bomb on the site, and Jake leads the defense. Some kind of natural forces on the planet interefere with navigational instruments, so it's mano-a-mano, dino-riders against exo-suits.

In spite of their valiant effort and some help from their friends, including the scientists and a rogue copter pilot, the dinos and the natives are getting whacked by the massive firepower of the secuirty machines. Blue Jake jumps onto a flying humvee for a showdown with the Marine Drill Sergeant Maniac, and tosses a missle into the rotor, but Marine Drill Sergeant Maniac escapes in an exo-suit and Blue Jake makes a successful crash-landing through the sympathetic jungle vegetation.

On the ground, Marine Drill Sergeant Maniac in exo-suit takes on Blue Jake, Blue Pocahantas, and some of their dino back-ups. I won't spoil the duel by describing the outcome. I'll only suggest that it won't surprise you much.

As a teacher once put it to me, the simplest way to explain literature is that it messes with your head. Literature sells ideas like billboards sell cruises. How the ideas come across depends on a lot of things, including language, logic, comparisons, organization, all those things literature teachers are always ranting about as elements of literature whether they understand it themselves or not. This is also critical thinking, understanding how ideas are presented and their effect.

As literature, Avatar doesn't especially convey ideas successfully. The fundamental conflict between economics and nature represented by the mining company and the blue natives, a thinly veiled comparison to European colonial expansion, is something Disney has routinely exploited, exploited more effectively, and exploited with more blatant and complete hypocrisy (and I'm not even arguing that would necessarily be a bad thing for a business project).

What impact the narrative has depends, not on discovering any important or novel aspect of the relationship between nature and economics, but on contrived sentimentality of the sort criticized by Horkheimer and Adorno as products of the culture industry, predictable devices: destruction of the loyal companion, destruction of the devoted father, destruction of the loyal pet, destruction of the noble warrior, joining of the romantic characters, not things that have impact because of fundamental, inescapable personal connections, but things that have impact because of conditioned behavior, things that make you want to cry because they are supposed to make you want to cry.

To an extent, all emotional reactions are learned, conditioned, social behavior, but if that's all it is, then there is nothing authentic in the reaction. In that way, Avatar adds little or nothing to the conversation in the way that films like Blade Runner or Brazil added to the conversation, and the construction of the narrative is inconsistent. What supposedly happens to these avatars when the operator disconnects? Apparently they just go to sleep wherever they happen to be, which seems rather careless. Shouldn't they at least be parked somewhere secure?

Like a demanding mother, Grace insists on poking macaroni and cheese into Human Jake while the fate of the planet hangs in the balance. What kind of planning is that? Are clothes generated for avatars the same way as the avatars themselves? Why does one of the scientists' avatars always wear identical clothes? Doesn't that guy ever change clothes, in or out of the tank?

The only real critical success of Avatar is not in narrative or in social issues. The success is almost strictly in the detailed aesthetic world of imagination that conjures up the frightening proximity of unfamiliar creatures, provokes stomach-turning vertigo on the verge of numerous heights, or involves the viewer in the ceremonies and environments of a mystical race. Dinosaur-like predators attack with jarring presence. Fragile, glowing reptiles with wings and luminous jelly-fish insects float through the air. The characters scamper recklessly along mossy branches far above the apparent surface. The meager story advances through myriad views of unfamiliar life forms, but the thing painfully apparent is confinement to the passive visual and audio experience.

This is not an alien world. It is 3-D, the dimensionalizing of fantasy art into movement and sound. The floating mountains, the dinosaur-like dragon creatures, the weapons of the primitive tribe are all standards, not of profound insight, but of an esoteric, mock-medieval style of legend. It is a magnificent set without a script of any significance, and even the technical effect is questionable. It lacks the novelty of a Star Wars and merely utilizes the hyper-real production techniques of a Final Fantasy or even a Toy Story. In some ways more like the arbitrary identity shifts of a video game than narrative, Avatar ends up as an only somewhat successful and very long (2.5 hours) look through a constrained window of special effects, although for that length of time, even the accomplishment of not being totally boring is a degree of success.

I was rather struck that so many people in the audience would accept the corporation and the caricatures of the US military as enemies, that they would literally applaud the destruction of the strike force. But perhaps the joke is on me, because ultimately the representation of military loss is only pretend, and the message that remains attached to the visual spectacle seems to be that the fate of nature and culture depends not on right, or justice, or even on inner strength, but on the disputes and intervention of Anglo, male, U.S. Marines. Whether you are a predatory corporate enterprise, or a valiant blue native, you can't win without an Anglo male Marine on your side. Everything else is incidental, and resistance is futile. As true as somebody might like that to be, 2.5 hours is a long time to take for the message.

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy