Thursday, May 31, 2018

As Always, Living The Dream


My college is having it's Spring Festival yesterday and today.  I'll probably go by tonight to see some music and cop some free beers from my boss.  I'll avoid getting shit-faced with / in front of my students, but this being Korea that would be perfectly acceptable.

Also, the graphic design work here is pretty nifty.

It's Racism, Stupid

Ed from Gin and Tacos gives the last word on Roseanne-gate:
"The more complicated answer involves the media’s drive to 'humanize' and explain those who see Trump as their long-awaited salvation. Like the endless journalistic forays into the Rust Belt to profile Trumpers with shuttered steel mills as a photo backdrop, the Roseanne reboot intended to show what the media kept calling the 'white working class' sympathetically. The latest iteration of Roseanne Conner would demonstrate that the real-life people her character represents are not racist caricatures. This is, after all, what we would like to think about our fellow Americans—that we have differences, but we can still come together as one nation. Halfway through the first episode of the new season, Roseanne Conner and her Jill Stein–voting sister Jackie Harris, played by Laurie Metcalf, have already reconciled after an argument about Trump, hugging out their political differences.
But so often the actual Trump supporters ruin that narrative. Journalists and researchers are now finding that the veneer of 'economic anxiety' among Trump supporters is built on a foundation of hate. Fans of Trump say little about the president’s Gilded Age economic policies, but boy do they fume over kneeling NFL players. And because this racism, xenophobia, and paranoia is not what we want to find, we go looking again and again until we find an answer that is more comforting."
Which is to say, there's something peculiar about an American press corps that is unwilling to judge a president, a political party, and the supporters of both by what they actually say, think, and do.

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

"all weightless grace with no effort required"

Last night I finished Kim Gordon's memoir Girl In A Band.  It was smart as hell,which comes as no surprise, but also pretty funny in parts which I didn't expect.  It's also brave.  It begins and ends with stark reflections on her divorce from Thurston Moore, with no punches pulled.

On playing live with Sonic Youth in the early days:
"When I first began playing onstage, I was pretty self-conscious.  I was just trying to hold my own with the bass guitar, hoping the strings wouldn't snap, that the audience would have a good experience.  I wasn't conscious of being a woman, and over the years I can honestly say I almost never think of 'girliness' unless I'm wearing high heels, and them I'm more likely to feel like a transvestite.  When I'm at my most focused onstage, I feel a sense of space with edges around it, a glow of self-confident, joyful sexiness.  If feels bodiless, too, all weightless grace with no effort required.  The need to be a woman out in front never entered my mind at all until we signed with Geffen."
Highly recommended, especially if you aren't convinced that Courtney Love was always awful.

Grift Supreme

To say the least, we live in a metaphor-laden universe these days for those interested in the decline, fall, and collapse of human civilization.  But hey, let's stick to basic stuff like Late Capitalism for now.

For the past few years I've been fascinated by the story of Theranos, a plucky start-up that promised to revolutionize blood testing thanks to a female Steve Jobs clone named Elizabeth Holmes.  She became "the world's youngest female billionaire" by creating a machine that could do a comprehensive blood test with merely a drop of flood (a finger pin-prick) rather than tapping a vein.

Unimaginable wealth was earned based on the promise of vaporware tech that lots of folks outside of Silicon Valley saw as a fraud, basically.  But within the tech bubble, nobody could stop themselves from forking over millions of dollars for fear of missing out on something amazing, actual benefits-to-society-and-medicine be damned.

Anyhow, there's a new book out about the whole thing by the reporter who basically cracked the (non-existent code) in the first place, and I'll be downloading it soon for my summer reading binge in August.

A small but telling story from the book:
"After they hung up, Hunter took aside Renaat Van den Hoof, who was in charge of the pilot on the Walgreens side, and told him something just wasn’t right. The red flags were piling up. First, Elizabeth had denied him access to their lab. Then she’d rejected his proposal to embed them in Palo Alto. And now she was refusing to do a simple comparison study. To top it all off, Theranos had drawn the blood of the president of Walgreens’s pharmacy business, one of the company’s most senior executives, and failed to give him a test result!
Van den Hooff listened with a pained look on his face.
'We can’t not pursue this,' he said. 'We can’t risk a scenario where CVS has a deal with them in six months and it ends up being real.'”
To paraphrase G. B. Shaw (sort of), pure meritocracy is a fabulous fucking idea.  It's a shame nobody, especially hyper-Capitalist / Libertarian societies, have ever tried it.

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

State Of Affairs

Monday, May 28, 2018

"if you're tired / or you're hungry / or you've had too much sugar"


Jonathan Fire*Eater, "Give Me Daughters"

R.I.P. Stewart Lupton of DC greats Jonathan Fire*Eater.

In a previous life I played guitar in a forgettable high school band that opened for the band that preceded JF*E.  And I met him once at a mediocre sushi restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue.

Go figure.

Friday, May 25, 2018

"the mercurial, erratic, and unreliable obstacle to peace"

Good analysis on Trump pulling out of a summit with North Korea:
"As a result he has every incentive to simply continue to bilaterally negotiate with Kim to achieve Moon’s and Moon’s government’s understanding of the ROK’s national interest. By impulsively deciding to grant Kim a summit based and now impulsively pulling out of that summit because of some tough talk, the President seems to think that his maximum pressure campaign got him the opportunity for the summit and can now simply be reimposed and once again achieve positive goals. The problem, of course, is there is no evidence that the President’s maximum pressure approach actually contributed to or set the conditions for Kim to pursue a bilateral US-DPRK summit, which is something Kim, his father, and his grandfather have been trying to achieve for decades. . . .
Kim has largely already gotten what he wanted. He got the President to agree to meet with him. He got two photo ops with Secretary of State Pompeo. He got the President to call him an honorable man. And he got the President to call this off, making the US look like the mercurial, erratic, and unreliable obstacle to peace. It is important to remember that there are a whole bunch of foreign reporters in the DPRK right now because they were there to observe and report on the destruction of the DPRK nuclear test facility. If we’re very lucky, Kim won’t decide that he too can play the “or else” game as well and scarf these folks up as hostages to use as bargaining chips."
tl,dr: Kim Jong-un drank Trumps milkshake.  Because of course he did.

Who Could Have Predicted?

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Jung Ones

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

World Cup 2018 Kit Rankings

It's hard to believe the next World Cup starts in less than a month, and that the U.S. won't be there.  (Thanks Bruce!)  Anyhow, 30 of the 32 national kits have been announced and in my incredibly humble opinion, this is definitely an off-year for interesting uniform design.  There's a hell of a lot of monochrome red on offer.  And red is fine, but it's kind of ridiculous -- 15 out of 60 total home and away kits.

Anyhow, here are the best and the worst (both home and away):

The good:

1)  Saudi Arabia home (green is my favorite color, but the minimal design is also great)
2)  Mexico home and away (green again, but with a nice pattern at home, and the away has a nice retro vibe)
3)  Peru home and away (rocking the diagonal is always nice and more teams should do it)
4)  Belgium away (nice and bright, and ten times better than their home kit)
5)  France home and away (minimal, but somehow standing out as well)
6)  Croatia home (can't beat the checkers)

The bad:

1)  Anything mono-red -- England away, Iran away, Tunisia away, Belgium home, Russia home, Egypt home, Spain home (not entirely red but the pattern sucks), Serbia home, Denmark home (but the arrows on the shoulders are cool), South Korea home, Costa Rica home, Panama home, Portugal home (but the green is nice), Switzerland home, Poland home

2)  Germany home  (black and white, literally, and the shoulder piping doesn't match up with the pattern)

3)  Australia home (those sleeves are a mess)

Honorable mentions:

1)  Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil home are iconic and eye-catching.  Never change.

Still not sure:

1)  Nigeria home (points for trying something different)

As for the less important matter of who actually wins?  That'll be Germany again.  And who will I root for in a U.S.-less tournament?  South Korea, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Iceland.  (Mexico might do something, the other three not so much.)

Monday, May 21, 2018

Toxic Masculinity Is Real

Jessica Valenti notes the not so secret thread behind the most recent U.S. shootings, misogyny:
"How many more tragedies have to happen before we recognize that misogyny kills? The longer we ignore the toxic masculinity that underlies so many of these crimes, the more violence we’re enabling.
Sadie Rodriguez told the LA Times that her daughter Shana Fisher 'had four months of problems' from the Santa Fe shooter.
'He kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no.' A week before the shooting, she says, her daughter stood up to the shooter and 'embarrassed him in class.'
This comes not even a month after the van attack in Toronto that killed 10 people and injured 13 more – violence enacted by a man who was reportedly furious that women wouldn’t sleep with him. Before that there was the 2015 shooting at an Oregon college  by a young man who complained of being a virgin with 'no girlfriend'. In 2014, there was Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and left behind a 140-page sexist manifesto and videos where he warned: 'I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me but I will punish you all for it.' In 2009, George Sodini killed three women at a gym in Pennsylvania after lamenting online that younger women wouldn't date him." 

One Of My Very Rare "Life In South Korea" Posts

It's been a while since I've done a straight-up informational post about life in South Korea.  The fact is, 90 percent of what I know living here has come through pretty basic Google searches of other ex-pats.  The "K-blog" era of roughly 2008-2013 or so, where four or five prominent bloggers ruled the roost, has pretty much died off.  Now a lot of Korean ex-pats have migrated over to places like Facebook (yuck!) and tumblr (cool!).  (Have I mentioned this post shall remain positively neutral and unbiased?  Good, because it won't.)

The fact is, over the past ten years with developments in internet culture and apps, it's easier than ever to get along in South Korea even if your language skills are lacking.  I'm going to simply throw out some sites that I read and utilize quite regularly.

1)  Tripadvisor is -- pretty good.  It's getting better though, as more folks use it to rate hotels and restaurants around the country.  You'll find it more helpful for higher traffic cities like Seoul and Busan than you will my own lurvely Daegu, but it's not a bad place to start if you're looking for good restaurants or hotels.  There are some Korean foodie sites on Facebook that are even more hit-or-miss.

2)  Whatthebook? is an English-language bookstore in Seoul that delivers quickly and cheaply throughout the country.  Yes, the name is terrible but the service is absolutely indispensable.  You can use your Korean bank card to pay at any ATM, which is my preferred payment method for almost any large-ish purchase.  (Paypal has never worked with my American bank, and getting a Korean credit card is not worth the hassle IMO.)  Also, they've managed to ship me some pretty obscure stuff in terms of sci-fi and even graphic novels.  The selection is surprisingly top-notch.

And why not Amazon you might ask?  Because Korean customs will charge you extra as an import fee.  There is Amazon Japan, and maybe someday Amazon South Korea will be a thing.  But for now it's not.

3)  iHerb for vitamins, healthy snack options, and perhaps most importantly for foreigners -- stick deodorant.  I think these guys are based in America, but they seem to have a very Asia-friendly business.  And they sell deodorant, which is a Western toiletry that hasn't really caught on here.

4)  English PC Sales -- my laptop died a few months ago and I really didn't want to deal with a typical South Korea "mega PC mart."  Sure, you can do your homework and find decent deals within them, but even with a respectable level of Korean language ability I really wanted the freedom to get the exact specs I wanted on a new machine.  Lo and behold, English PC Sales is your friend from now on.  They have a decent selection, the owner is an ex-pat himself, and they'll put together exactly what you want with minimal hassle.  Do be aware that for an expensive bank transfer like this you'll probably end up going to a local branch of your bank to OK the amount required.

5)  And finally, kind of the Elephant In The Room of online shopping in Korea, is G-market.  They are huge.  They specialize in clothing and shoes as far as I can tell but they even sell everything from electronics to sex toys.  The drawback is that their prices are pretty awful, compared to someone used to American Amazon.  But I'm willing to pay the price as opposed to lugging clothing back from America every time I visit during the summer.

The good?  They have Western brands I'm familiar with and more importantly, Western sizes.  (US size 12 shoes can only be found near military bases, and the selection is always terrible.)  The bad?  I'd say my success rate ordering from them is about 50 percent.  About a week after an order I will randomly get an e-mail saying the item has shipped or the order has been cancelled (not by me, by them for some unknown reason).  The other companies listed all provided very fast shipping.  G-market, not so much.  It's a roll of the dice, and if they do cancel your order they will effectively "keep" you money in a virtual account (I think it's called Smile Cash or some such).  Feel free to try ordering something again and hope the Gods of Commerce and Fashion smile on you.

Anyhow, G-market is what it is.  I've gotten some nice stuff in a timely fashion from them, and I've had to wait two weeks after an order to be told they're out of stock and I'm out of luck.  This is surprisingly un-Korean, compared to the other services above.

That's about it.  As of 2018 there's no reason you should have to lug stuff back from home -- new iPads, books, shoes, vitamins, clothing -- when you can simply order it all from here.  Then again, on larger purchases you will save a few hundred bucks on something like a new laptop, and that's nothing to sniff at.  Still though, it's nice you know you have more than one option.

(And if you do try to bring an expensive electronic purchase into Korea, never, ever leave it in the box or customs will have some questions for you.)

Any other ideas or suggestions?  When it comes to hotels and plane tickets, I'm still using American-based sites like Expedia and Travelocity.

Saturday, May 19, 2018

Get Off Of My Lawn

Friday, May 18, 2018

Love It

A racist asshole threatened to get some women fired and / or deported simply for speaking Spanish (in New York fucking City of all places).  Hilarity ensued:
"There is a street party happening in New York this evening. There will be taco trucks, Jarritos margaritas and a mariachi band – but this is not a Cinco de Mayo parade that got the date wrong. This party’s only theme will be retribution.
Festivities are taking place outside the Manhattan apartment of Aaron Schlossberg, the lawyer who was filmed being irate and abusive towards Hispanic restaurant workers this week. Schlossberg threatened to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) on the workers, saying he believed they were illegal immigrants because they were speaking Spanish to some customers."
Beautiful.  Also, America is the only country I know of where speaking more than one language is considered a defect.

Also, good Mexican is really hard to find in South Korea.  There's one place in Seoul and that's about it.

Use lard or GTFO.

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

대프리카

Any spring semester in South Korea where the great and holy Dude In Charge Of Turning On The Campus-Wide Air-Conditioning gets in done in mid-May rather than mid-June is a good one.

And yes, I'm complaining about Korea again.  But you should know I live in the hottest city in the country.  "Dae-pu-ri-ka" or "대프리카" is a portmanteau of "Daegu" and "Africa," as in, Daegu is as hot as Africa in the summer.

And while it hasn't hit 90 yet (give it a week), the terrible humidity is already creeping in.  Everything from clothing to bed-sheets is just slightly damp all the time, and older Korean buildings aren't that great when it comes to proper air ventilation.

Living the dream, as always.

This, A Million Times Over

Paul Waldman gets it:
"We see this again and again: Democrats bend over backward to show conservative white voters respect, only to see some remark taken out of context and their entire agenda characterized as stealing from hard-working white people to give undeserved benefits to shiftless minorities. And then pundits demand, 'Why aren’t you showing those whites more respect?'
So when we say that, what exactly are we asking Democrats to do? It can only be one of two things. Either Democrats are supposed to abandon their values and change their policies, despite the fact that many of those policies provide enormous help to the very people who say Democrats look down on them, or they’re supposed to take symbolic steps to demonstrate their respect, which always fail anyway. How many times have we seen Democrats try to show respect by going to a NASCAR event or on a hunting trip, only to be mocked for their insincerity?
In the world Republicans have constructed, a Democrat who wants to give you health care and a higher wage is disrespectful, while a Republican who opposes those things but engages in a vigorous round of campaign race-baiting is respectful. The person who’s holding you back isn’t the politician who just voted to give a trillion-dollar tax break to the wealthy and corporations, it’s an East Coast college professor who said something condescending on Twitter.
So what are Democrats to do? The answer is simple: This is a game they cannot win, so they have to stop playing. Know at the outset that no matter what you say or do, Republicans will cry that you’re disrespecting good heartland voters. There is no bit of PR razzle-dazzle that will stop them. Remember that white Republicans are not going to vote for you anyway, and their votes are no more valuable or virtuous than the votes of any other American. Don’t try to come up with photo ops showing you genuflecting before the totems of the white working class, because that won’t work. Advocate for what you believe in, and explain why it actually helps people.
Finally — and this is critical — never stop telling voters how Republicans are screwing them over. The two successful Democratic presidents of recent years were both called liberal elitists, and they countered by relentlessly hammering the GOP over its advocacy for the wealthy. And it worked."
Sorry for the over-long quotation, but this is the clearest statement yet of why some Democrats are flailing in the Trump era.  They're trying to play a game they literally cannot win, ever.

There's no reason not to try and win over Trump voters, but in the limited-resource world of politics it's a Mug's Game.  We win by sticking with a solid message (increase the minimum wage, some form of universal health care, fight global warming, restore seriousness to our foreign policy) and never by compromising.

There's just so much awfulness in world right now that it's nice to see such a clear and powerful statement of principle of how to move forward from Cheeto Hitler.

And it's definitely not going to be easy.

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Consistency


The Sea and Cake, "Any Day"

Almost a quarter of a century and 11 albums in, these guys have never made a bad move.

Friday, May 11, 2018

Kim Jong-un Is Going To Drink Trump's Milkshake

There's a lot to say about what's going on between Cheeto Hitler and Kim Jong-un right now, with a face-to-face meeting set for next month, but I'll simply throw out this thought: trading three hostages for a summit that basically legitimizes Kim's rule and North Korea as a global force to be reckoned with was not a Nobel Prize-level act of statesmanship.

It was the definition of a sucker bet.

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

"on being a super-mom"

While #MeToo has made its ways to the shores of a culturally conservative South Korea, change for most women, and especially working mothers, is very slow to come:
"A major problem is that home often becomes as demanding as work. 
'I feel like I have two jobs,' said Nam Yun-ju, aged 38. 'There are so many small and detailed things that a mom needs to take care of, even while she’s working, and it takes up so much energy and time. From changing the filters at home, or paying the insurance, I’m the one that has to communicate with the outside world. Even when the daycare tutor uploads a picture of my child online, I’m always the one writing comments.'
According to Lee Ye-jin, 38, the social standards of an ideal mother are too high for women to bear, leading them to feel guilty if they don’t meet expectations. 'There’s too much pressure on being a super-mom, probably because of portrayals of mothers in the media where mothers do work and childcare without any trouble. At the same time, everyone’s telling me that a child needs a mother’s care. Even when I get to do something away from the child, I’m stuck with a sense of guilt,' said Lee.
'I have no idea why elementary schools call in the students’ mothers to volunteer at the school cafeteria or at the crosswalk in front of the school,' said Ms. Jeong, aged 37. 'The [mothers] have regular gatherings at the kids’ cafe, and it’s awkward for me not to go. But the funny thing is, there are no fathers at those meetings.'"
When a major holiday comes up in South Korea I rarely ask my adult female students what their plans are, because nine times out of ten they'll mention the drudgery of having to prepare for, cook meals, and clean constantly for at least three days in a row.

Thursday, May 3, 2018

New books!


Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest and Death’s End

Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach

Hari Kunzru, White Tears

 Lynne Murphy, The Prodigal Tongue – The Love-Hate Relationship Between British & American English

As always, life in Korea is made much easier and enjoyable thanks to Seoul's What The Book? store and their free delivery service.

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

2018

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

"I skipped a rock and it fell to the bottom"


Beach House, "Black Car"

When I came to South Korea one thing I hated was that if a national holiday fell on a Saturday or Sunday, it wasn't moved to the adjacent Friday or Monday.  (Hence the yearly ritual of looking at the calendar for a new year and deciding whether it was "good" or "bad" for vacation days.)

This is changing though.  Saturday is Children's Day, and it got moved to Monday of next week.  And Tuesday next week is my college's Founder's Day, a two-day holiday.

So heeyah for unexpected five-day weekends but, because Korea, I would have actually planned a trip somewhere nice if I'd known before a few days ago that the schedule was getting scrambled up.

As it stands, I'll probably go to another Samsung Lions ball game, eat a lot of Indian food downtown, and get started on book two of Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy.

Meanwhile, here's some new Beach House.  It's predictably sublime.

"small mutton"

A very brief and cool overview of vegetarian "fake meats," why they originate in China, and why they aren't nearly as popular in Japan and India:
"While mock meat has a place in some temple kitchens, much of the cooking consists of vegetables, rice, and plant-based proteins that have not been purposely twisted to resemble meats. This is especially true in Japan, where Buddhist law prohibited the consumption of four-legged animals throughout the empire for centuries, eventually doing away with the edict in the 19th century. Due to a lack of appetite for meat, Japanese people never tried to imitate it with other substances, says Akiko Katayama, a food consultant and host of the Japan Eats podcast. Similarly, in the heavily vegetarian country of India, you won’t find traditional mock meats for the same reason. 'For many Indian vegetarians, I don’t think a meat substitute would even register since meat was never a reference point to begin with,' says Chitra Agrawal, the author of the vegetarian Indian cookbook Vibrant India.
However, in China, the origins of both tofu and wheat gluten are somewhat linked to their use as meat replacements. In Mandarin, mianjin, or wheat gluten, means literally 'wheat meat' (George Ohsawa, the founder of the macrobiotic diet, coined the term 'seitan' for the same food in 1961). And tofu, a food that dates back to prehistoric times in China, was popularly known as 'small mutton' in the 10th century, according to records. Although they need not only to be enjoyed as meat analogs, they have been used as such for centuries. There is mention of seitan textured to emulate goose in the classic Chinese cookery book Recipes From the Sui Garden by the Qing Dynasty Chinese poet Yuan Mei. And the Ming Dynasty novel Journey to the West references wheat gluten several times, including a scene in which demons attempt to serve a monk a meal of human flesh and brains fried to resemble wheat gluten—that is, meat masquerading as mock meats."
The author concludes that if we always approach these foods as "substitutes" we'll never learn to appreciate their own culinary virtues.

"What Kim Jong Un Wants From Trump"

To say the least, things are moving quickly on the Korean peninsula.  Professor Van Jackson has the best English-language take I've come across so far:
"With a firmer grip on the regime and a strengthened nuclear strike capability, all this diplomacy moves Kim closer to his remaining goals of prioritizing the economy and elevating North Korea’s international standing as a nuclear state. The fact of hosting friendly meetings with foreign delegations and presenting them with memorabilia commemorating the recent success in 'perfecting the national nuclear forces' is a nuclear status fait accompli. And even if North Korea can’t rejoin the international community in full because of continuing human rights abuses and opaque economic practices, going on the diplomatic offensive is a smart way of discouraging the international community—and especially China—from stringently implementing an increasingly suffocating international sanctions regime. Diplomacy is a low-cost means of getting sanctions relief, which will help improve the North Korean standard of living. At the same time, an extended process of reconciliation with South Korea holds out the promise of much needed economic investment and assistance. Already there’s talk of an energy corridor running from Russia, through North Korea, down to the South. That all this encourages greater friction in the U.S.-South Korea alliance and mutes the preventive war narrative that was building last year in Washington is simply a bonus.
Kim’s playing a multi-level game. Thinking in terms of Kim having a singular or primary motivation oversimplifies the reality that diplomacy done right can do many things at once—for example, nudge the United States out of the picture while presenting North Korea to the world as a 'peaceful' nuclear state that doesn’t deserve to be under such stringent sanctions. Kim’s diplomacy encourages a public narrative of rapprochement with both the South and the United States, which in turn helps bring all of his goals closer to reality. North Korea does not necessarily need to abandon any of its nuclear weapons for all of this to happen."
The fact that Trump is probably going to meet with Kim in three to four weeks is already a major win for the North Korean regime.  Xi and Macron and Saudi Arabia simply put on meaningless banquets and parades and promptly got exactly what they wanted from Trump.

Guess what?  Nobody does meaningless banquets and parades like North Korea!  It's pretty much their thing.

Anybody's guess is as good as anybody's at this point, but my feeling is that Trump's desire for a "big win" regarding North Korea means he'll take an empty promise of the North de-nuking itself and run for the cameras claiming the Nobel Prize.  (No, this is not an exaggeration.)  Kim Jong-un will (rightfully) claim that North Korea is now an international player and should be treated as such, human rights be damned.  South Korea will, under a liberal, pro-diplomacy president in Moon Jae-in, be happy to move towards further reconciliation with the North as businesses and markets in Seoul can stabilize and go back to "business as usual."

And frankly, given how close to war we came in 2017, that's an imperfect but pretty much O.K. outcome for now.

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