Cooperation is often ignored by economists and lawmakers and the established powers-that-be when managing resources. This is another aspect of Richistan, the world of the extremely wealthy, where the normal selfishness of everyday humans plays out with a global power structure. When you have everything, it is hard to see why you should give up something, cooperate, in order to get something. Defending your property seems much more appropriate. This is, I think, the source of the bizarre fears of “class warfare” currently being waved about in public by the very rich and the very entitled.

Too many sheep.

Who owns, say, the natural gas deposits that have lain, untapped, under the ocean near Sable Island, a hundred kilometers from my house? Who owns the Gorgon gas field under Barrow Island off Australia’s west coast? Who owns the methane hydrate deposits off the shore of New Jersey? Who owns the limestone deposits under California’s central coast (deposits that yield up some of the world’s sublime wines)? Who owns the great boreal forests of Alaska, Siberia, and Canada? Who owns the rocks of the earth? Who, indeed, owns the air? The birds of the air? The water? The oceans? Fish stocks? Who owns the whales?

 

Who owns nature?

 

And then another set of questions, about another kind of commonwealth: who owns culture? Who owns languages, science, the accumulated genius of technology? Who owns history? Who owns, in short, the human library? Who owns it, and who has the right to sell it?

 

In an empty world, these questions, or at least the ones about nature, didn’t much matter. Nature seemed inexhaustible. Still, natural philosophers, as scientists were once called, have wrestled with the issue for millennia, as have political authorities. In Roman times, the Senate put together a series of laws that classified several aspects of what came to be called “the commons” as explicitly owned by the people collectively. These res communes, common things, included water and the air, but also “bodies of water,” that is lakes, and shorelines generally. Wild animals, as opposed to domesticated ones, were included. After the Roman empire collapsed, overrun by what the Romans were pleased to call barbarians, some aspects of the res communes came into dispute — feudal lords, and then kings, claimed to control them.

National Geographic: too many sheep

The implications of a commons is that since no one owns it, anyone can use it, exploit it, and pollute it at no charge.

So where, in a well-ordered world, do private property rights stop? How best to treat the commons so it survives for the benefit of all?How best to allocate the profits that flow from what exploitation is allowed? Private property is the engine of prosperity. Common property is the backdrop before which private actors perform. Both are necessary. So an answer is critical. We have three economic sectors: the private sector, the public (or state) sector and the commons sector. Only the last has no body of law to protect it, and no accounting systems for its profits or losses.

So the question becomes: if the various natural systems of the earth, especially the air, the water, the land and its minerals, and the complex life systems they sustain, are indeed “the commons,” how do we guard against the “tragedy of the commons?” If no one owns the resource and anyone can use it, how do we protect it from depletion?

 

The tragedy of the commons as a phrase owes its origins to Garrett Hardin’s essay in Science magazine in 1968, though the notion of a social trap involving a conflict between individual interests and the common good goes back, at least, to Aristotle.

…

Hardin’s argument was widely accepted by economists and free-market enthusiasts. The solution to the dilemma, it seemed obvious, was privatization, the enclosure of the commons.

 

But it is not obvious. Hardin’s theory was the purest poppycock, and widely adopted only because it seemed to convey the essence of free market competition. It was a truly corporatist view.

The main error was to adopt a key proposition of the free market, and of Adam Smith’s, that man is a rational being who always acts in his own best interests, and then to assume that those interests automatically involved multiplication of personal assets. But what Hardin was describing was not rational behavior — it was the purest selfishness.

Enough grass

read the whole article including the original text of the Tragedy of the Commons:

The Fallacy of the Tragedy of the Commons « Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Read whole article there (paywall) or use Google to get at it.

If you haven’t been following this story, when banks and financials like hedge funds and investment banks got into the  business of re-packaging home mortgages as investments, they were faced with a gigantic problem of paperwork. Each state has differing rules on wet signatures and deed transfers, though they generally all require local registration of the deed. So this mortgage-handling MERS thing was setup to streamline the paperwork. The result has been the infamous robo-signers, mortgages with uncertain ownership, illegal foreclosures, and a general widespread flaunting of the rules.

Now if you or I handled a mortgage this way, we’d lose our money or get sued or both. But because so many mortgages are bad, and the miscreants are so large, they are too big to punish. It is still doubtful that the system itself will be cleaned up going forward, there’s little sign of it, and fair punishment for the banks seems out of the question.

By CHAD BRAY

NEW YORK—New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman sued three of the nation’s largest banks over a private national mortgage registry system, contending it has resulted in a wide range of deceptive and fraudulent foreclosure filings.

The lawsuit, filed in New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, names units of Bank of America Corp., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. as defendants, as well as MERSCorp., which owns and operates the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, known as MERS.

In his complaint, Mr. Schneiderman alleges that MERS has effectively eliminated the public’s ability to track property transfers because those transfers are maintained in the private registry, rather than in the local county clerk’s office. He contends the system is riddled with inaccuracies and, as a result, it is difficult to verify the chain of title for a loan or a current noteholder for many properties.

….

The attorney general says the system was designed to allow financial institutions to evade county recording fees, eliminate the need to publicly record mortgage transfers and to facilitate the rapid sale and securitization of mortgages.

“Once the mortgages went sour, these same banks brought foreclosure proceedings en masse based on deceptive and fraudulent court submissions, seeking to take homes away from people with little regard for basic legal requirements or the rule of law,” Mr. Schneiderman said. “Our action demonstrates that there is one set of rules for all—no matter how big or powerful the institution may be—and that those rules will be enforced vigorously.”

…
More than 70 million loans nationally have been registered in MERS, including about 30 million currently active loans, he said.

MERS has granted more than 20,000 “certifying officers” the authority to act on its behalf, including the authority to assign mortgages, to execute paperwork necessary to foreclose, and to submit filings on behalf of MERS in bankruptcy proceedings, Mr. Schneiderman said.

Those certifying officers aren’t MERS employees, but instead are employed by MERS members, including J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, he said.

 

This the resonant frequency magnetic field technique. This article quotes a researcher that it is 97% efficient. Personally I am dubious, but I have no first-hand experience with it. The idea of making recharging roads is just plain silly, because we can’t afford to fix our bridges and pavement, let alone add billions in new infrastructure. I suppose one could argue that charging for the service could repay the bonds…

 

A Stanford University research team has designed a high-efficiency charging system that uses magnetic fields to wirelessly transmit large electric currents between metal coils placed several feet apart. The long-term goal of the research is to develop an all-electric highway that wirelessly charges cars and trucks as they cruise down the road.

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The new technology has the potential to dramatically increase the driving range of electric vehicles and eventually transform highway travel, according to the researchers. Their results are published in the journal Applied Physics Letters (APL).

“Our vision is that you’ll be able to drive onto any highway and charge your car,” said Shanhui Fan, an associate professor of electrical engineering. “Large-scale deployment would involve revamping the entire highway system and could even have applications beyond transportation.”

Driving range

A wireless charging system would address a major drawback of plug-in electric cars – their limited driving range. The all-electric Nissan Leaf, for example, gets less than 100 miles on a single charge, and the battery takes several hours to fully recharge.

A charge-as-you-drive system would overcome these limitations. “What makes this concept exciting is that you could potentially drive for an unlimited amount of time without having to recharge,” said APL study co-author Richard Sassoon, the managing director of the Stanford Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP), which funded the research. “You could actually have more energy stored in your battery at the end of your trip than you started with.”

read entire article

 

(talking about coming resource starvation)….This basic desire for more has meshed beautifully with a growth-based economic model and a planet offering up its stored resources. The last few hundred years is when things really broke lose. And it’s not because we suddenly got smarter. Sure, we have a knack for accumulating knowledge, and there is a corresponding ratchet effect as we lock in new understanding. But we have the same biological brains that we did 10,000 years ago—so we haven’t increased our mental horsepower. What happened is that our accumulation of knowledge allowed us to recognize the value of fossil fuels. Since then, we have been on a tear to develop as quickly as we might. It’s working: the average American is responsible for 10 kW of continuous power production, which is somewhat like having 100 energy slaves (humans being 100 W machines). We’re satisfying our innate need for more and more—and the availability of cheap, abundant, self-storing, energy-dense sources of energy have made it all possible.

As we stand on the precipice of a transition away from this magic elixir, we are still heady with our sense of progress. We feel the wind in our hair and we know with certainty that the present would have been unimaginably rich and complex to someone living 200 years ago. Humans—and especially homo economicus—are ruthless extrapolators, and “know” with the same apparent certainty that the future will be as mind-bogglingly rich and complex and incomprehensible to us simpletons alive today. I get it. I admire the sentiment that we would be foolish to think we know where the far future leads. But as I’ve already pointed out, the same humility can be applied in the opposite direction: “Who, in the year 2011, at the height of the fossil fuel binge, could have possibly imagined that here we would sit in 2211, huddled around a fire, sharing stories—ever less believable—of the days when we could walk on the Moon? Hey, you gonna eat that last grasshopper?”

How many people are offended, scandalized, or just plain irritated by my suggestion that the future may be a step backward from where we are today? If you’re one of these, then you’re a candidate for an attitude adjustment. Don’t you give me that look!…

read the whole post

from National Geographic - Its just a volcano, but what a great picture.

Nobody can predict the future, but outcomes can be predicted – if you stop paying your mortgage eventually you will lose your house and your credit in the US. If European ( or Japanese, or US) sovereign debt prices get too high, or if investors can’t or won’t help roll over sovereign debt, then there will be some sort of collapse. Financial collapses hurt the poor and developing nations first, but this one might well undo the ability of governments all over the Western world to borrow for long-term goals. Plus, austerity measures damp the economy which is having trouble growing as it is. Plus, a lot of people think economic growth can’t continue without growth in cheap energy supplies. And global growth is cheap energy is a fantasy. So wage deflation, job deflation, benefits deflation, public services deflation are likely. Inflation, the bugaboo of the Fed and the investing-rich, and a blessing for mortgage-holders, seems unlikely without growth.

The healthiest export economies in the developed world, Germany, China, are dependent on the health of the importing countries. Importing countries have too much sovereign debt, and their negative balance of payments can’t continue forever. The unhealthy export country, Japan, has way too much debt. It’s a house of cards.

But, nobody can predict the future. Plagues, wars, tweaking the financial or monetary system, asteroid impact, a sudden political maturing where citizens demand sustainable practice, anything could happen.

News & Broadcast – World Bank Projects Global Slowdown, with Developing Countries Impacted.

Press Release No:2012/236/DEC

Beijing, January 18, 2012 – Developing countries should prepare for further downside risks, as Euro Area debt problems and weakening growth in several big emerging economies are dimming global growth prospects, says the World Bank in the newly-released Global Economic Prospects (GEP) 2012.

The Bank has lowered its growth forecast for 2012 to 5.4 percent for developing countries and 1.4 percent for high-income countries (-0.3 percent for the Euro Area), down from its June estimates of 6.2 and 2.7 percent (1.8 percent for the Euro Area), respectively. Global growth is now projected at 2.5 and 3.1[1] percent for 2012 and 2013, respectively.

Slower growth is already visible in weakening global trade and commodity prices. Global exports of goods and services expanded an estimated 6.6 percent in 2011 (down from 12.4 percent in 2010), and are projected to rise by only 4.7 percent in 2012. Meanwhile, global prices of energy, metals and minerals, and agricultural products are down 10, 25 and 19 percent respectively since peaks in early 2011. Declining commodity prices have contributed to an easing of headline inflation in most developing countries. Although international food prices eased in recent months, down 14 percent from their peak in February 2011, food security for the poorest, including in the Horn of Africa, remains a central concern.

“Developing countries need to evaluate their vulnerabilities and prepare for further shocks, while there is still time,” said Justin Yifu Lin, the World Bank’s Chief Economist and Senior Vice President for Development Economics.

Developing countries have less fiscal and monetary space for remedial measures than they did in 2008/09. As a result, their ability to respond may be constrained if international finance dries up and global conditions deteriorate sharply.

To prepare for that possibility, Hans Timmer, Director of Development Prospects at the World Bank, said: “Developing countries should pre-finance budget deficits, prioritize spending on social safety nets and infrastructure, and stress-test domestic banks.”

While prospects in most low-and middle-income countries remain favorable, the ripple effects of the crisis in high-income countries are being felt worldwide. Already, developing country sovereign spreads have increased 45 basis points on average and gross capital flows to developing countries plunged to $170 billion in the second half of 2011, compared with $309 billion received during the same period in 2010.

“An escalation of the crisis would spare no-one. Developed- and developing-country growth rates could fall by as much or more than in 2008/09” said Andrew Burns, Manager of Global Macroeconomics and lead author of the report. “The importance of contingency planning cannot be stressed enough.”

read the whole report

unknown source - Mount Doom

A commentary from ETF daily News

January 19th, 2012

Michael Snyder: The warning signs are all around us.  All we have to do is open up our eyes and look at them.  Almost every single day there are more prominent voices in the financial world telling us that a massive economic crisis is coming and that we need to prepare for the worst.  On Wednesday, it was the World Bank itself that issued a very chilling warning.  In an absolutely startling report, the World Bank revised GDP growth estimates for 2012 downward very sharply, warned that Europe could be on the verge of a devastating financial crisis, and declared that the rest of the world better “prepare for the worst.”  You would expect to hear this kind of thing on The Economic Collapse Blog, but this is not the kind of language that you would normally expect to hear from the stuffed suits at the World Bank.  Obviously things have gotten bad enough that nobody is even really trying to deny it anymore.  Andrew Burns, the lead author of the report, said that if the sovereign debt crisis gets even worse we could be looking at an economic crisis that could be even worse than the last one: “An escalation of the crisis would spare no-one. Developed- and developing-country growth rates could fall by as much or more than in 2008/09.”  Burns also stated that the “importance of contingency planning cannot be stressed enough.”  In other words, Burns is saying that it is time to prepare for the worst.  So are you ready?

 

But of course it isn’t just the World Bank that is warning about these things.  The chorus of voices that is warning about the next great financial crisis just seems to grow by the day.

Some of these voices were profiled in a Bloomberg article the other day entitled “Apocalypse How? Dire ’12 Forecasts“…

Read the whole article at ETF Daily News

from:

Public Outcry Over Antipiracy Bills Began as Grass-Roots Grumbling – NYTimes.com.

 

When Wikipedia went dark and Google blacked out its logo on Wednesday, millions of people could not help but notice. For most, it was the first time that they had heard about two antipiracy bills. One puzzled Twitter user wrote: “Isn’t a SOPA some kind of food?”

But that protest grew out of a much wider grass-roots movement — a collective flexing of Internet muscle that started in some of the less mainstream parts of the Web, like the social news site Reddit and the blogging service Tumblr, and in e-mail chains and countless message boards.

It is no coincidence that these social sites were among those that, according to critics of the legislation in question, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the Protect Intellectual Property Act had the most to lose if it passed. And by design they were able to take the message about the threat and make it go viral.

In the resulting groundswell, lawmaker after lawmaker renounced support for the legislation. Fight for the Future, a nonprofit organization that helped organize the protests, said more than 115,000 Web sites participated, and three million people e-mailed Congress to voice their opposition to the bills. “The tech community is using its own technology to rally around the issue,” said Ron Conway, a Silicon Valley patriarch who has invested in hundreds of start-ups, and runs SV Angel, an investment fund. “We probably wouldn’t prevail here if we weren’t eating our own dog food.”

Supporters of the bills, which include major media and entertainment companies, say their only intention is to go after foreign Web sites that distribute unauthorized copies of software, videos and music. But the tech industry maintains that the language in the bills is too broad, and that they could pose a threat to free speech and stifle innovation. Among other things, they say, the bills could make sites responsible for all content or links posted by their users, a weighty burden for social sites.

Read the whole article at Public Outcry Over Antipiracy Bills Began as Grass-Roots Grumbling – NYTimes.com.

• Going after piracy costs money.
• Going after piracy as outlined in SOPA/PIPA has a very negative effect on Internet freedom, costs innocent web denizens time and money, and sounds totally unconstitutional to me.
• The industry argument for the damage done by piracy is totally bogus and undocumented.

via SOPA, Internet regulation, and the economics of piracy at Ars Technica

Earlier this month, I detailed at some length why claims about the purported economic harms of piracy, offered by supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA), ought to be treated with much more skepticism than they generally get from journalists and policymakers. My own view is that this ought to be rather secondary to the policy discussion: SOPA and PIPA would be ineffective mechanisms for addressing the problem, and a terrible idea for many other reasons, even if the numbers were exactly right. No matter how bad last season’s crops were, witch burnings are a poor policy response. Fortunately, legislators finally seem to be cottoning on to this: SOPA now appears to be on ice for the time being, and PIPA’s own sponsors are having second thoughts about mucking with the Internet’s Domain Name System.

That said, I remain a bit amazed that it’s become an indisputable premise in Washington that there’s an enormous piracy problem, that it’s having a devastating impact on US content industries, and that some kind of aggressive new legislation is needed tout suite to stanch the bleeding. Despite the fact that the Government Accountability Office recently concluded that it is “difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the net effect of counterfeiting and piracy on the economy as a whole,” our legislative class has somehow determined that—among all the dire challenges now facing the United States—this is an urgent priority. Obviously, there’s quite a lot of copyrighted material circulating on the Internet without authorization, and other things equal, one would like to see less of it. But does the best available evidence show that this is inflicting such catastrophic economic harm—that it is depressing so much output, and destroying so many jobs—that Congress has no option but to Do Something immediately? Bearing the GAO’s warning in mind, the data we do have doesn’t remotely seem to justify the DEFCON One rhetoric that now appears to be obligatory on the Hill.

Read whole article at  SOPA, Internet regulation, and the economics of piracy.

The US is a country with a substantial number of people ( Tea Party Republicans)  who strongly defend the rights of extremely rich people who do not work for a living and do not produce anything of value, to pay tax at a much lower rate than they.  The same group harbors many  global-warming deniers, evolution deniers, and hates so-called socialism while they depend on Medicare. Soros grandly predicts class warfare if the economy gets much worse. I think it’s particularly dangerous if we get radical wage deflation with high unemployment. But I don’t think we’ll have class warfare, at least not between the middle class and Richistan, I think those Anglos who suffer will blame the poor and particularly immigrant populations: creeping fascism is much more likely than revolution. And with the total discrediting of left-wing ideologies, there’s nothing to revolt to.

Whether you think his social predictions are meaningful or not, his financial assessment is surely interesting. He may not be right, but his views carry weight.

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

Soros goes on to compare the current state of the western world with what the Soviet Union was facing as communism crumbled. Although he would think that history would have taught the globe a thing or two about noticing trends, Soros says that, despite past events providing a perfect example of what is to come, the end of an empire seems imminent.

“The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening,” adds Soros.

Soros goes on to say that as the crisis in the Eurozone only worsens, the American financial system will continue to be hit hard. On the way to a full-blown collapse, he cautions, Americans should expect society to alter accordingly. Riots will hit the streets, says Soros, and as a result, “It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.”

read the whole article

And from the Wall St Journal, Soros on European Debt Crisis

Billionaire investor George Soros said on Wednesday that the austerity Germany wants to impose on other euro-zone nations “will push Europe into a deflationary debt spiral.”

Speaking to reporters at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Soros also said that measures taken by the European Central Bank in December have relieved the liquidity problems of European banks, but “they did not cure the financing disadvantage from which the highly indebted member states suffer.”

Instead of the International Monetary Fund, “Germany is acting as the taskmaster imposing tough fiscal discipline,” Soros said. “This will generate both economic and political tensions that could destroy the European Union.”

Germans, according to Soros, “have been traumatized by inflation and they don’t understand the threat that deflation can cause.”

In responding to the crisis, European authorities “had little understanding of how financial markets really work and did everything wrong,” Mr. Soros noted.

The billionaire said that fiscal discipline alone will not solve the euro crisis and that the EU will have to provide stimulus to get out of the deflationary spiral. “This will require euro bonds in one guise or another,” he said.

Mr. Soros also talked about Greece, which is currently trying to agree with its private-sector creditors a debt writedown that is voluntary.

“The big issue is how does the euro cope with the danger of a Greek default,” Mr. Soros said. “Because that is something that is looming — it may or may not be avoided.”

The Oil Drum | Obstacles Facing US Wind Energy.

In the United States, we have been working on scaling up wind energy but not getting very far. In 2010, wind energy supplied only 2.3% of electricity purchased.

Such slow progress seems strange for a product that seems to have such great promise. It can reduce CO2 emissions. It doesn’t require fuel. It is at least partly US made. It seems to have promise for protecting against rising fossil fuel prices……

 

One of the big issues with wind is that hopes have been raised for its widespread use, without really working through feasibility issues. If we are already having trouble with the electrical grid not being able to accept more wind energy in popular wind-generating areas when wind energy constitutes only 2.3% of total electricity supply, then wind energy is going to be difficult to scale up quickly. The issues I point out in this article suggest that the cost problem is still large, and the fixes needed to add long-distance transmission are likely to make the cost problem even worse.

read the whole article and check the comments, which are often quite good at The Oil Drum.

Another post I read today used Godzilla as a metaphor and I will too. The banking system, from your FDIC accounts to Goldman Sachs, is a kind of  roving Godzilla, sometimes fertilizing, sometimes destroying,  impervious to argument, out of control. Since Godzilla is a movie metaphor for US defeat and occupation of Japan, and the long-term results of  WWII history are starting to turn sour in Japan, I find it apt. Anyway this post and his previous one are very interesting analyses of what a rationalized “transparent” banking system, a tame Godzilla, might be.

interfluidity » Opaque and stinky logorrhea.

My previous post on opacity in finance attracted a lot of discussion, both in an excellent comment thread and throughout the blogosphere. Thanks. As usual, your comments put my drivel to shame.

I thought I’d follow up (very belatedly, i’m sorry!) with some remarks on opacity in finance. This will be long and very poorly organized, a brain dump of responses I feel I owe people so I can move onto other things. If you actually read it, I am grateful. (I am always grateful that you read my words at all!)

Anyway here goes:

• I, personally, detest opaque finance. I would prefer we eliminate whole sectors of status quo finance, replacing the existing skein of deceptive institutions with very simple arrangements that make it absolutely clear who bears what risks. Banks, money market funds, and pension funds are the first institutions we’d reform out of existence. They wouldn’t be the last. I became interested in financial systems as a large scale information system. It is with great unhappiness and reluctance that, after devoting years of my life to thinking about finance, I’ve concluded that financial systems are better characterized as large-scale disinformation systems and that disinformation is at the core of how they function, not some tumor that can be excised to restore the patient to good health.
• I am still an idealist. I think we should try to develop financial systems that are honest and transparent, that do not combine kleptocracy and effectiveness into a bundle that’s both impossible to refuse and debilitating to accept. But that is a larger and very different project from, say, increasing capital and liquidity ratios at status quo banks.
• We must give the devil her due. It pissed a lot of readers off and pisses me off too, but the argument I offered in the previous post is true. Over the broad scope of history, societies with financial systems that mobilize capital opaquely and at very large scale have completely dominated those that have relied only upon consenting risk assumption by well-informed individuals. Industrialization occurs in societies with corrupt and fragile big banks, or else in societies where the state coerces and obscures risk-bearing and reward-shifting on a large-scale, or (more usually) both. China is a great present day example. That does not mean it would be impossible to develop a set of institutions that would be both effective and transparent. But it does mean developing such a system is an ambitious and ahistorical project, not a mere matter of “fixing what’s broken”. Under present arrangements, transparency and what we perceive as effectiveness stand in opposition to one another. It is incoherent to demand transparency and expect “more” macroeconomically stimulative intermediation from our current financial system.
• A lot of responses to the previous post were of the form, “You are wrong, and like, duh! Look around! Look at where opaque finance has gotten us! No one trusts anyone, we can’t mobilize risk capital at any scale, etc. etc.” That’s all true! But it’s the exception that proves the rule…..

Read the rest at interfluidity » Opaque and stinky logorrhea.