To make it short, he offered me $20 to sip two glasses of beer and choose which was tastier. In a room of 12 other people, I tasted beer 452 and 946. Now, 452 was one of those rice, wheat and enzyme concoctions. But 946 was barley, hops and yeast. No contest. Here’s my check for $20, and for the joke about his sister, he handed me another check for $10. That $30 pays my phone bill. Gee, if I’d known the test was going to be so easy, I wouldn’t have studied so hard.Politics is not my field, but for a little, I digress. Vita is one of the few people I’ll discuss politics with. Like myself, she shares an informed dislike of bureaucratic systems. I am also a Libertarian; I believe participation in any political or economic system should be voluntary. I believe in majority rule, even if the majority is wrong, on all issues political, but definitely not on moral issues. Morality is individual, and that is why you’ll never catch me supporting any brand of prohibition.
If the majority says stop the war, it should stop. Now. If the majority says no more immigration, cut it off. Today. You get the idea. Vita is substantially more informed than I about political details. I have no idea what a senator does, or who the Vice-President is. I choose not to participate even to that extent and all I ask is they do the same. Vita thinks the entire banking system is about to collapse, which the Feds want so as to have a scape-goat. This country has, in reality, been bankrupt since 1979 but remember the old maxim: Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day.
I finished Buffet’s “Margaritaville” and carefully analyzed the places he is describing. There is a time difference of less than three years, but my guess is we were indeed less than 75 miles apart on several occasions in the Yucatan. Oh, there were other differences than just the time. He was staying in a luxury condo; I was in a $6 hotel room with no A/C. He sailed there on his yacht; I flew in on a $275 air fare special out of Seattle.
It is amusing to read his perspective. He talks about blowing his entire first music royalty check on a sailboat. Indirectly he is stating he was already so well off that he did not have to conserve a single penny for the future, for food, or for docking fees. Can you imagine that? Again, amusing, for except mentioning his grandfather was a sailor, Buffet never once manages to say a word about just where or how he learned to sail or to buy sailboats, or how he already knew all the millionaires everywhere he went. Dang, I always thought he was self-made.
Such silence is a very common affliction among the offspring of the wealthy—by selective reticence they clearly hope the world will believe they did it all by themselves. There is nothing wrong with this behavior. It just amazes me the length they sometimes go through to disguise their unearned advantages, and their callousness in not giving credit to those who must have supported them beyond what most of us can imagine.
Oh, and for good measure, Reinhardt’s Pipes. See blog from y’day.
veryatlantic veryatlantic this is a test of the google search mechanism
