Read it.

First, chase down a rabbit. I will wait while you do this. tick tick tick tick tick tick tick….

“If we were to go back to the very beginning of this process that has gone to an extreme today, I think it would really surprise many people,” said Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological sciences at Harvard University. “We used to spend a disproportionate amount of our days chewing.”

“You can go for an entire day without chewing today, and that’s really bizarre from a historical standpoint,” he added.

Jim Goad seeks to right an historic injustice.

There persists a stubborn myth that all serial killers are white. If pressed to name a black serial killer, some may be able to point to The Atlanta Child Murderer, who to this day insists he was framed by police to cover over the true killers—the KKK, natch. Others may recall the black duo who became known as the Beltway Snipers. Beyond that, most people draw blanks—and that’s unfair in a society that prides itself on equality.

Not only have there been a lot of documented black American serial killers, blacks are actually overrepresented in this grisly yet attention-grabbing crime.

Studying the time frame of 1945-2004, criminologist Anthony Walsh found that out of 413 confirmed American serial killers, 90 of them were black—a quotient of 22% and nearly double their percentage of the population. An almost identical quotient is claimed by Eric W. Hickey in his book Serial Murderers and Their Victims. A massive database at Radford University tracking over 4,000 serial killers from 1900 to 2010 found that a whopping 40.6% of the killers were black. In his book Rise of the Black Serial Killer, Justin Cottrell says he’s confirmed 1,837 cases of American serial killers since the year 1860, with 53% of the killers being black. Cottrell also says that only 6% of white serial killers murder “outside their race,” whereas 57% of black serial killers are more racially ecumenical in choosing their victims.

Read it.

As medieval scholars prepare for the journey to Kalamazoo for the International Congress on Medieval Studies, we wanted to tell you the story of a medieval scholar who undertook his own trip for learning – a trip that did not go as planned.

Traveling is always a bad idea.

Read it.

It’s a strong contender for the geekiest video ever made: a close-up of a smartphone with line upon line of numbers and symbols scrolling down the screen. But when visitors stop by Nicola Marzari’s office, which overlooks Lake Geneva, he can hardly wait to show it off. “It’s from 2010,” he says, “and this is my cellphone calculating the electronic structure of silicon in real time!”

Even back then, explains Marzari, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, his now-ancient handset took just 40 seconds to carry out quantum-mechanical calculations that once took many hours on a supercomputer — a feat that not only shows how far such computational methods have come in the past decade or so, but also demonstrates their potential for transforming the way materials science is done in the future.

Read it.

How, then, are cities faring in meeting the aspirations of their black residents, judged especially by the ultimate barometer: whether blacks choose to move to these cities, or stay in them? Among major American cities, three main typologies emerge: the high-flying progressive enclaves of the West, the historically large cities of the Northeast and the Midwest, and the fast-growing boomtowns of the South. Though results vary to some extent, the broad trend is clear: the most progressive-minded cities are either seeing a significant exodus of blacks or, never having had substantial black populations, are failing to attract them. These same cities, home to some of the loudest voices alleging conservative insensitivity to blacks, are failing to provide economic environments where blacks can prosper.

How to have your ‘diversity’ and beat it, too.

The Other McCain, nothin’ but net.

OK, let me interrupt this to make an important announcement. I hadn’t been planning to do this, but I now officially endorse Donald Trump.

If David Brooks hates Donald Trump, then it is my duty as a patriotic American to love Donald Trump. And if David Brooks says the fall election will be a “slaughter” for Republicans, this means Trump will win. And now let’s return to the total wrongness of David Brooks….

…

What is so despicable about David Brooks is his condescending attitude, his insuperable conviction that he is better than the rest of us, more intelligent and sensitive — all that “emotional connection and verbal expression,” you see. And as he departs on his tour of the American hinterlands, ripping himself out of the “bourgeois strata” to leap across “the chasms of segmentation,” I hope David Brooks gets what he deserves, namely to be beaten to a bloody pulp by a tattooed redneck.

I know that feeling.

Read it.

As someone who grew up with most of these ‘obsolete’ technologies, they don’t surprise me. What surprises me is to appreciate how much grown adults today don’t have experience with, say, a dial telephone. (And, as someone who has hand-set lead type, I find ‘uppercase’ and ‘lowercase’ more familiar than most.)

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

Where are racial gaps in school test scores worst? Ironically, where liberals are most dominant.

The new national database of school-district test scores created by education researchers at Stanford and Harvard reveals that the single widest white-black racial gap in American public school districts is in the city most synonymous with leftism since 1964: Berkeley, California.

How badly do blacks lag whites in Berkeley public schools? Berkeley’s white-black gap is 1.60 standard deviations. In other words, the median black student would score at only the 5th percentile if he were white.

Yet, Berkeley is ferociously antiracist. It was the first to have a Black Studies Department at the high school level. In the 2012 election, Berkeley voted for Obama over Romney 90 to 5. Berkeley Unified school-district administrators obsess over any data showing that black students get punished more than other races.

Still, the racial gap is bigger in Berkeley than anywhere else.

I am not making this up.

You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred.

The AntiPlanner has some thoughts.

As noted in today’s Google doodle, today is Jane Jacob’s 100th birthday. No doubt many people will write positive things about her. However, as the Antiplanner has noted before, her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is overrated.

Jacobs made two points, one of them right, and one of them wrong. Her correct point, which is celebrated by many libertarians, is in recognizing that urban planners don’t understand the cities they claim to be designing. The hubris of planners writing 50 year plans when they don’t even know what’s going to happen five years from now would be amusing if the consequences weren’t so expensive.

Jacobs wrong point, which is celebrated by many urban planners today, was in thinking that she did understand cities. She thought she understood her neighborhood, Greenwich Village, New York, but she didn’t understand it very well. She reduced her understanding to four simple “conditions” that she said all cities needed: mixed uses, short blocks, a mixture of old and new buildings, and density of residents and jobs. Her application of these oversimplified conditions to all “great cities” made her just as guilty of hubris as the planners she criticized.

Read it.

In 2007, television underwent a great expansion — beyond the major broadcast networks, beyond televisions and into all kinds of genres — just at the moment the economy shrank, and a fantasy emerged. As real people became poorer and lost their jobs, the ones on TV got richer, and their jobs seemed more beside the point. All that space to tell new stories ended up dedicated to a limited set of jobs and an increasingly homogeneous notion of what work even means.

These days, there are only a handful of workplace taxonomies in scripted television. We’ve got police precincts, crime-and-forensics teams and legal-medical-Beltway dramas. NBC’s “Chicago Med,” “Chicago Fire” and “Chicago P.D.” are a virtual sexy-calendar night. These shows might know what a blue collar is, but they’re class-unconscious: Their characters don’t usually work for the explicit maintenance of their livelihoods. They work for comedy, for suspense, for sport. For the most part, TV cops, lawyers, bureaucrats and doctors inhabit the same kinds of toothsome residences and wear the same exquisitely tailored clothes, all showing off how fabulously art directors and costume designers earn a paycheck. Sometimes we see more of their work than that done by the people who inhabit it. Now on TV, no matter your actual job, almost everybody belongs to the same generic, vaguely upper-class class.

Watch an episode of a NYPD crime drama and tell me where a NYC cop gets the income to live in that sort of an apartment. (Apart of The Pad, of course….)

TV became — and still is — a medium struggling to understand “average,” “ordinary,” “normal.”

Read it.

Ponder the term ‘black market’ — does it say something about the market, or the person who uses the term?

Gates of Vienna is having a fundraiser. Please give generously.

As is often remarked these days, the nations of the West — Europe, Canada, the United States, and Australia — are drifting inexorably into a Soviet-style totalitarianism. Soft totalitarianism, mind you — no gulag necessary just yet — but still Soviet-like in its insistence ideological conformity.

So what artistic style would we associate with the democratic totalitarianism that dominates the post-modern West? What ideology are we obliged to conform to in our visual representations if we, the artists, want to get ahead?

Why, Multiculturalism, of course. What else could it be?

Walk into a post office, or a bank, or a supermarket, or a pharmacy, and all the images you see will display a uniformity of iconography. Images are chosen carefully to include a certain selection of exquisitely represented races and ethnicities. And they’re gender-balanced, too.

Of course.

We have no choice: the future is multicultural.

Such has been decided for us, for our own good, by people who know better than we do. Left to our own devices, we would be racist throwbacks, little Nazis and bigots wearing Ku Klux Klan robes, goose-stepping around the mean streets of our white supremacist dystopia.

But with the help of our cultural betters, we can recover from our atavisms. Through education and diversity training, we can learn to truly celebrate the wonderful inclusive rainbow quilt of cultures!

Then we can buy the world a Coke and live in perfect harmony.

Uh-huh. Yup.

Read it.

Turns out young people actually like driving.

Imagine that.

Lileks.

We went with my wife’s choice, which is fine. She has excellent taste, too, and by deferring to her choice I accumulated husband points, which I can spend on a new 4K TV.

Read it.

The study, published last year by economists at the United Kingdom and Israel doing novel work on archaeological and anthropological evidence, attempts to explain a strange pattern in agricultural practices. The most advanced civilizations all tended to cultivate grain crops, like wheat and barley and corn. Less advanced societies tended to rely on root crops like potatoes, taro and manioc.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in our vegetables, that we are underlings.

Read it.

So I have always thought.

Read it.

Just to remind everybody that this blog is about what I’m interested in, which may not necessarily be what you’re interested in.

Read it.

Over the years I’ve belonged to a variety of different organizations that had the ostensible goal of accomplishing X or Y. At a certain point I would realize that all anyone was doing was exercising their fears and frustrations. Most of all they were trying to stop other people from doing things they didn’t like.

I’m impatient. I want to get on with the business of actually doing something tangible. Waiting for someone else to come along and accomplish your goals for you is a really bad plan. Trying to change government policy is endless. Expecting “the market” to magically solve problems isn’t realistic. So where does that leave any of us?

Writing a blog, maybe? It doesn’t get anything done but you feel better about yourself. Those of us with Native Indolence Syndrome tend to prefer the low-effort option.

Enter the Incremental Development Alliance. Let’s say you have a problem in your neighborhood. It needs a grocery store. It needs bike infrastructure. It needs more public gathering spaces. It’s in decline and needs new investment. It’s in the process of being gentrified and people are being squeezed out. Whatever. Why not be the person who brings the desired change? You. Right now. Go do it.

I doubt seriously that anyplace outside of mainland Europe ‘needs bike infrastructure’; that tends to be the compelling fetish of Hipster Whiteopias like Portland and Seattle and San Francisco. Nor do I see any compelling nned for ‘more public gathering spaces’ in a world where staring down at your cellphone is what most people below the age of 60 spend their day doing. And the innate contradiction between ‘in decline and needs new investment’ and ‘being gentrified and people are being squeezed out’ suggests that the author is either incredibly confused or writing for the incredibly confused. I’m not sure I want a confused person and his confused audience to ‘bring the desired change’; such people cause more problems than they solve.

Easier said than done, right? This isn’t easy stuff. There are zoning regulations, building codes, financing obstacles, bureaucratic landmines… The red tape is endless.

Said as if ‘red tape’ falls from the heavens on the just and unjust alike — which it does, of course, but unlike Global Warming it has an easily detectable cause. RED TAPE IS CAUSED BY GOVERNMENT. I’ll repeat that. RED TAPE IS CAUSED BY GOVERNMENT. Those who want to ‘bring the desired change’ need to GET THE GOVERNMENT OFF PEOPLE’S BACKS.

Read it.

And he did it without any government help. Isn’t that amazing.

Cooking something “from scratch” can mean different things to different people. For some it means heading to the farmers market for some fresh ingredients. For others it means skipping the frozen goods section. But for Andy George, host of the show How to Make Everything, it means spending six months and $1,500 growing a garden, turning ocean water into salt, making cheese, and killing a chicken all so he can take a bite of a sandwich truly made from scratch.

Now, for all the work that went into crafting this chicken sandwich, you’d expect it to be the best thing George has ever eaten. You’d expect it to be a sandwich that would inspire future George to spend every Thanksgiving telling his patient family about the time he had a real sandwich. You’d expect it to be so good that he would consider spending six months and $1,500 to make another one. But it isn’t any of those things.

“It’s not bad,” George said. “That’s about it. It’s not bad. Six months of my life for not bad. Yeah.”

Read it.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to. Raise the cost of labor, and the money is going to come from somewhere.

Vanity Fair, a Voice of the Crust, allows some truth to seep out.

Yesterday’s primary handed victories to Trump and Clinton, and, if Michael Lind is right, Trumpism and Clintonism are America’s future. Lind’s point, which he made last Sunday in The New York Times, is that Trumpism—friendly to entitlements, unfriendly to expanded trade and high immigration—will be the platform of the Republican Party in the years going forward. Clintonism—friendly both to business and to social and racial liberalism—will cobble together numerous interest groups and ditch the white working class. Which might be fair enough, but Lind didn’t mention rich people. Where will they go?

The Democratic Party has not been a total slouch, offering policies friendly to health-care executives, entertainment moguls, and tech titans. In fact, financial support for Democrats among the 1 percent of the 1 percent has risen dramatically, more than trebling since 1980. Traditionally, though, the Republican Party has been seen as the better friend to the wealthy, offering lower taxes, fewer business regulations, generous defense contracts, increased global trade, high immigration, and resistance to organized labor. It’s been the buddy of homebuilders, oil barons, defense contractors, and other influential business leaders.

…

In a world of Trumpism and Clintonism, Democrats would become the party of globalist-minded elites, both economic and cultural, while Republicans would become the party of the working class. Democrats would win backing from those who support expanded trade and immigration, while Republicans would win the support of those who prefer less of both. Erstwhile neocons would go over to Democrats (as they are already promising to do), while doves and isolationists would stick with Republicans. Democrats would remain culturally liberal, while Republicans would remain culturally conservative.

Read it.

And government regulation, and pandering politicians, and eco-Nazis, and fearful special snowflakes, and….

Read it.

Alexis de Tocqueville was a more prophetic observer of American democracy than even his most ardent admirers appreciate. True, readers have seen clearly what makes his account of American exceptionalism so luminously accurate, and they have grasped the profundity of his critique of American democracy’s shortcomings. What they have missed is his startling clairvoyance about how democracy in America could evolve into what he called “democratic despotism.” That transformation has been in process for decades now, and reversing it is the principal political challenge of our own moment in history. It is implicitly, and should be explicitly, at the center of our upcoming presidential election.

Read it.

International team reports CO2 fertilization prompted plants and trees to sprout extra green leaves equivalent in area to two times the continental USA, or nearly 4.4 billion General Shermans (largest giant Sequoia tree).

Well. How about that.

Kyrie

Read it.

A steady push toward mechanization in Maine’s blueberry industry is reducing the number of migrant farmers who travel to the state to rake the crop, which is vitally important to the state’s economy, state officials and industry leaders said. Maine’s blueberry harvest attracted more than 5,000 migrant farmers 10 years ago and it’s down to about 1,500 today, said David Yarborough, a University of Maine professor of horticulture.

I doubt that the machines are making $15 an hour.

Read it.

Who’s Trump gonna call?

Read it.

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” says an ancient legal nostrum.

The reason for it is simple enough: If ignorance could excuse any crime, then ignorance might excuse every crime. Rather than impose on the legal system the obligation to prove a defendant’s knowledge of the law — with the defendant’s incentive running in the opposite direction, toward ignorance of the law — the legal system assigns to itself no obligation in this regard. Upon which defendants find that they have an enormous incentive to know what the law is and to comport themselves accordingly.

Sounds great, but no — this is a rationalization made up after the fact. The real reason the ‘ancient legal nostrum’ came about is that it originated in a time where ‘the law’ was simply what every rational person would or wouldn’t do; the whole concept of ‘the common law’ is of a ‘law’ to which everyone is subject because it just made ‘common’ sense. Don’t kill or maim people, don’t rape, don’t burn down people’s houses, don’t steal their stuff — all of these were things that every sensible person would understand were ‘no-no’s. It was only later, when ‘law’ became a thing of legislatures rather than ordinary life that this self-serving statist ‘nostrum’ became popular. Indeed, that interpretation became so popular (especially with those charged with enforcing such ‘laws’) that people (including lawyers) are scarcely aware that there is any alternative.

Bluebird of Bitterness tells the tale.

On Monday, a florist went to a barbershop for a haircut. But when he tried to pay the barber, the barber said, “I can’t accept money from you. I’m doing community service this week.”

When the barber went to open his shop on Tuesday, he found a thank-you card and a dozen roses waiting for him at the door.

Later that day, a baker came in for a haircut, and when he tried to pay the barber, the barber again said, “I can’t accept money from you. I’m doing community service this week.”

On Wednesday morning when the barber went to open his shop, he found a thank-you card and a dozen cupcakes waiting for him at the door.

Later that day, an English professor came in for a haircut, and when he tried to pay the barber, the barber again said, “I can’t accept money from you. I’m doing community service this week.”

On Thursday morning when the barber went to open his shop, he found a thank-you card and a dozen books waiting for him.

Later that day, a congressman came in for a haircut, and when he tried to pay the barber, the barber again said, “I can’t accept money from you. I’m doing community service this week.”

On Friday morning when the barber went to open his shop, there were a dozen congressmen lined up waiting for a free haircut.

Read it.

Ira Einhorn was on stage hosting the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970. Seven years later, police raided his closet and found the “composted” body of his ex-girlfriend inside a trunk.

Hey, man, it’s like organic.

(Is it just me, or does he look like a Bernie Sanders supporter?)

Andrew Grimson has an interesting take on the subject.

The monarchy is one of the greatest, though least observed, checks on arbitrary power. It occupies the space a dictator would need to occupy.

Because it is unthinkable in Britain to push the monarch aside, tyranny itself becomes unthinkable. In countries where for understandable reasons the monarchy was overthrown – France in 1789, Russia in 1917, Germany in 1918 – tyranny was not unthinkable.

…

The US is a disguised monarchy. The president promises to defend the people against the scoundrels in Washington, and having failed to do so, is replaced by someone else who promises to do the same thing.

…

In modern times, our monarchs have served the public by going above politics, and becoming instead a kind of hereditary umpire.

The Queen plays this role with exceptional and unwearying conscientiousness. She does not have to declare any Prime Minister out: the public elect MPs who do that for her.

But she stops the politicians, few if any of whom remain popular for long, from getting above themselves, and obliges even a convinced republican such as Jeremy Corbyn to play by the rules.

Read it.

I wouldn’t have noticed the difference if it weren’t for my affection for unusual pens, which brought me to my first good fountain pen. A lifetime writing with the ballpoint and minor variations on the concept (gel pens, rollerballs) left me unprepared for how completely different a fountain pen would feel. Its thin ink immediately leaves a mark on paper with even the slightest, pressure-free touch to the surface. My writing suddenly grew extra lines, appearing between what used to be separate pen strokes. My hand, trained by the ballpoint, expected that lessening the pressure from the pen was enough to stop writing, but I found I had to lift it clear off the paper entirely. Once I started to adjust to this change, however, it felt like a godsend; a less-firm press on the page also meant less strain on my hand.

Modern roller-ball and gel pens work the same way as fountain pens (I was raised with fountain pens and still use them on occasion); don’t know what this person is on about.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all. Think of it as evolution in action.

Steve Sailer peeks behind the curtain.

With San Francisco being one of the epicenters of the environmental movement of the past half century, local homeowners are adept at using progressive verbiage for justifying keeping San Francisco in stasis. As a conservative, I rather admire the cleverness with which liberals have contrived to keep San Francisco physically looking much like it did in the past.

That’s why I always say that soi-disant ‘progressives’ ought to be called regressives instead.

Of course, most of the people denouncing other people for being white and wanting to live in San Francisco are white San Franciscans themselves.

Indeed, that’s the case almost everywhere.

Paradoxically, under its current antidevelopment ideology, San Francisco—like Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn, and unlike almost all the rest of the country—is becoming more white. In 1990, young people in San Francisco were only 22 percent white, but by 2014 they were up to 33 percent white. And the future looks even whiter.

The dirty little secret of these hipster utopias.

In fact, this is a broad pattern. We see exactly the same incentives at work with elite colleges. While Arizona State and Florida International have added capacity for tens of thousands of additional undergraduates, Stanford, Harvard, and Yale have barely added any undergrads, even as demand soars. Stanford, for example, kept its class size virtually unchanged for over three decades despite having a 13-square-mile campus, the majority of it undeveloped open land.

To quote W. S. Gilbert, ‘When everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody.’

Read it.

(Who better to track that particular spoor than the New York Times?)

Collectively, these microyuppies are just as strong in their ranks as their progenitors, if not more so. Three decades ago, the yuppie was viewed as a self-interested alien invader in an America that had experienced a solid 20 years of radical activism and meaningful progress in civil rights and women’s liberation. A generation and a half later, we have so deeply internalized the values of the yuppie that we have ceased to notice when one is in our midst — or when we have become one ourselves.

Read it.

I suspect pre-natal influence, but you never know.

Steven Hayward scratches his head.

Historians and political theorists have long puzzled over how to resolve the glaring contradiction of Progressive ideology—namely, that Progressive “reform” emphasizes greater “democracy,” and championed innovations like the direct election of Senators, the initiative and referendum, etc. Give the people what they want! Up with democracy! At the same time, Progressives also advanced the theory of government administration deliberately remote from politics and popular accountability—the Administrative State staffed by elite “experts.” We can’t have those grubby people telling the government what to do! Down with democracy!

It is hard to make out, but there is a deeper dialectic at work in the Progressive mind, not unlike that more famous dialectic conjured up by that hairy German fellow. The purpose of the Administrative State—best understood with Saint-Simon’s famous single sentence description about how “the government of men is replaced by the administration of things”—is to create a new people.

Read it.

Mountain lions and ants are among the many species great and small figuring out clever ways to live among people.

That’s what gun control laws get you….

Lileks.

There are two kinds of people when it comes to disaster preparedness.

1) I have a generator, food for a month, water purification tablets, candles, solar-powered radios, flint, a full medical kit and classic board games; we will sit in our house playing Clue until order is restored.

2) I have a baseball bat and a map to the first guy’s house.

Read it.

Would that we could do the same.

The correct way to handle this is that when ‘none of the above’ wins an election, the existing candidates are barred from running again and the election is repeated. Of course, no real-world political unit would actually do that. Still, it’s a nice dream.

If 10% Is Good Enough For Jesus

Read it.

It has been widely observed that Hillary Clinton is having to repudiate the policy legacy of her husband’s tenure in the White House in the 1990s, which is extremely telling about how far down in the deep end Democrats are today. After all, Bill Clinton’s tenure coincided with robust economic growth, a balanced budget, and expansion of free trade. It also saw two of the greatest social policy achievements of the postwar era—a radical reduction in the welfare rolls, and the beginning of a sharp drop in the crime rate. Ah, yes—liberals don’t like those last two things. And they don’t much like the balanced budget either—and they really hate free trade. Remember that it was near the end of Bill Clinton’s tenure that saw the famous “Battle in Seattle” of leftist protesters against the World Trade Organization, which is ironic, since the Left usually likes any organization that has “World” in the title. Despite this, and Clinton’s shameful personal life, he left office in 2001 with high public approval ratings.

Read it.

No, they’re not talking about politicians, except incidentally.

Beyond the morally reprehensible side of criminals’ work, some business gurus say organised crime syndicates, computer hackers, pirates and others operating outside the law could teach legitimate corporations a thing or two about how to hustle and respond to rapid change.

Well, maybe Obama.

While traditional businesses focus on rules they have to follow, criminals look to circumvent them. “For criminals, the sky is the limit and that creates the opportunity to think much, much bigger.”

That certainly sounds like Obama and the Constitution.

While Devin Liddell, who heads brand strategy for Seattle-based design consultancy, Teague, condemns the violence and other illegal activities he became curious as to how criminal groups endure.

I ask myself the same question about Planned Parenthood.

Some cartels stay in business despite multiple efforts by law enforcement on both sides of the US border and millions of dollars from international agencies to shut them down. Liddell genuinely believes there’s a lesson in longevity here.

Perhaps it’s because they provide something that people want in spite of ruling-class nannying.

One strategy he underlined was how the bad guys respond to change. In order to bypass the border between Mexico and the US, for example, the Sinaloa cartel went to great lengths. It built a vast underground tunnel, hired family members as border agents and even used a catapult to circumvent a high-tech fence.

Like Hamas in Gaza. A perfect example.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.