Is more often than not are very wealthy individuals from abroad who are acquiring 3rd, 4th, xth 'homes' at relatively bargain prices because the value of the dollar has declined some 35% in the last 6 years.

It's just another sort of currency arbitrage - another version, too, of 'flight capital'. Persons who may well need that Palm Springs mansion when thing go pear shaped in their country of origin.

Like the son of a well known African kleptocrat who recently purchased an estate in Malibu. Just as one for instance...

Yep, as one letter writer puts it - America was once the world's Saudi Arabia.

The vast personal fortunes which came out of Standard Oil (where the Bush/Walker dynasty got their start) were based on one thing: kerosene. The tens of thousands of other useful hydrocarbon products were burned off or simply discarded into rivers, streams and the sea.

Billions of barrels. Tens of billions. Wasted. To export kerosene to replace whale oil which was becoming expensive.

I had a good friend in college, a physicist, who wailed that oil was simply too valuable to burn it all up. He was right in more ways than one.

The Venezuelan economist (trained at the University of Texas at Austin) who devised OPEC modeled the cartel on the Texas Railroad Commission. How's that for a globalization link?

I'm one one those who have tried for nearly 40 years to talk about what our profligacy and dependence on the dream world of endless oceans of cheap oil and, for my insight, been ignored or ridiculed. It's difficult under the circumstances to feel any sense of satisfaction at having been prescient.

Just won a Peabody. A downpayment for all the awards this truly excellent series will win - just as 'Freaks and Geeks' did before it.

It didn't save F&G but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that there are just a few suits in Cloudcuckooland who want that tiny bit of class to, you know, make up for all the other drek they program.

Concentrated benefits, distributed costs shell game. Benefits flow up, costs flow down.

"Their presence in the labor market increases competition for low-skilled jobs, reducing the earnings of low-skilled native-born workers. . . . Because of their low earnings, low-skilled immigrants also tend to pay less in taxes than they receive in public benefits, such as income transfers (e.g., the earned income tax credit, food stamps), public schooling for their children, and publicly provided medical services. Thus while the presence of low-skilled immigrant workers may raise the profits of their employers, they tend to have a negative effect on the well-being of the low-skilled native-born population, and on the native economy as a whole." University of Illinois economist Barry Chiswick in testimony before Congress

"What this is, is a huge redistribution of wealth away from workers who compete with immigrants to those who employ them." George J. Borjas, a professor of economics and social policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University

"For many unskilled American workers, immigration amounts to imported outsourcing." Harold Meyerson Washinton Post 17May06

>>[Robert E.] Rector asserted that the Senate’s immigration bill, which converts a low-skilled, uneducated population into legal citizens will cost taxpayers at least $50 billion per year in the coming decade

Rector said, “An unskilled illegal work force is a drain, but an unskilled legal workforce is a disaster.”

He explained that current welfare benefits are focused on providing assistance for a low-income, uneducated population with children, which largely resembles that of the illegal workforce. Rectors said giving illegal workers legal status will also give them constitutionally guaranteed access to those benefits.

Congressional Budget Office estimates that are being used to project immigration-related costs are faulty because the CBO is only authorized make economic forecasts 10 years into the future. Welfare benefit spending for newly legalized low-income workers won’t peak until at least a decade in the future.

Darn.

There went my claim to fame.

Somehow playing dominoes with Jerry Jeff Walker, which, by the way, is not something I'd recommend to any but my most implacable enemies, just doesn't stack up.

And as for my anecdote of how, through an excess of feminist sensibilities, I blew a chance to meet Saul Bellow...

Truly, I'm running out of heroes.