16 December 2006, a Saturday sunny and 78 at 0630

A taxing day (oof!) yesterday as my forms were all filed.  My corporate tax was (brace yourself) ¢750 since it is actually doing no business in Costa Rica but we hope one day that it will be.  The exchange rate right now is approximately ¢520/$1.

When I left California, the privilege for doing business in California as a corporation, whether you made a profit or not during that year, was $800, simply because you were a corporation.  That was in 1999, I have no idea what it has gone to now.  I like Costa Rica better.

I like this NYTimes item, too...

The only thing I don't understand is why the size of the army might limit the number accepted, but it might be his way of getting out of taking back some of the bad apples without having to point that out.

A number of people have been criticized for the disbanding of the Iraqi army (which fled as much as it was formally disbanded since who formally surrendered it?) but I think it was an absolute necessity.  Letting some of the Sunnis back in even this soon, with Saddam still alive, is taking a calculated risk.

I think the thing the Iraqis need to do very soon is remove from everyone's mind the chance that Saddam is ever coming back into power again.  If you read the history of Iraq, even including his huge defeat in the First Gulf War, you'll find that Iraqis learned that Saddam has made several miraculous recoveries back into power.  For some of these people, Saddam comes from all the way back to their grandfather's time, remember. 

They need to execute Saddam, and soon.  I don't think rebuilding can really begin until after that happens.  As someone recently wrote, we are foolishly trying to rebuild Iraq before the war is over, before the enemy is defeated.  With Saddam crying defiantly on television that he is still the only legitimate president of Iraq, is the war over yet in the minds of his Sunni Baathists?

Even the Iraq Study Group should have been able to figure that one out.

I'm glad we have some military men who can!

You know what?  I think he's right.  American bleeding-hearts like Kerry and the press (as differentiated from Americans actually bleeding) think they are really some kind of misguided youths who, if only treated nicely enough, would return to civilization, maybe even run for the senate...

It isn't all that easy to turn the detainees loose, you know.  In the first place, some of their home countries don't want them back. 

In the second place, and this is REALLY funny, folks, but the people who are screaming about them being tortured at Guantánamo will not allow these, ah, detainees, be released to, um, anywhere that they might be, well, so to speak, tortured.

Better the torturer you know than the torturer you don't?

Hillary is sending them the message, one by one.  Will Barack finally listen?

I shake my head at this article about the New York real estate business, as well as the business in general:

I don't know about evil lawyers because I gather from that line it means closings are not conducted with title companies but with lawyers.  In California, a lawyer is not required in the real estate sales process, thank God, and, as a matter of fact, their very presence if admitted to one is certain to wreck the deal.  Lawyers, even the ethical ones, are required to work only for the benefit of their clients, which turns everything into an adversarial contest rather than what it should be: a mutually-satisfactory agreement.

Ideally, a good broker never lets buyer and seller meet, personally, because the odds are long against them personally liking one another and what stands to be gained other than that?  The broker's role is the exchange of information and to act as grease between all of the intermeshing gears needed to close a deal.  It's why most agents and brokers tend to be short-timers, on the whole...they get burned up too often in the process.  Believe me, I hired quite a few real estate agents and even brokers in my time (and Frieda, reading this, will doubtless agree heartily, and she has hired a hundred times more people than I have, literally).

A good broker (or agent) either has control of his business dealings or he isn't doing the service for which he is getting paid.  He simply makes sure the seller isn't present when the home is being shown (there is typically a different agent or agency on each side) and the home is prepared properly...lights on, shades open, house reasonably clean and picked up, only good odors, music playing softly...and then stands back.

When the house is listed, before it even goes on the market, the seller's broker should have already worked out what items stay with the house and what items will be taken.  And in the event of something unexpected, like a $1000 chandelier in a $1 million deal, if the two brokers who are sharing a $60,000 commission between them cannot figure out how to resolve that problem then they don't deserve to be in business.

Take this horror story that the author recounts:

Of course, we're hearing this from the buyer.  If the guy really was an eccentric artist who created an "enchanting" house, then believe me there were no nearby homes of similar condition, even if they were the same size.  Otherwise the buyer would have simply bought one of them.

Come on, folks...an offer is not "accepted" until a contract has been signed.  No legitimate broker (and we're told in this story that the home was "listed:") would let his buyers fly from Los Angeles to New York without a signed contract in hand.  And even if that ridiculous event could have happened because of a dishonest or incompetent broker, the buyer would either have returned home with a signed contract or simply abandoned the idea.  The fact that the buyer was interested enough to engage in three months of negotiations also indicates that he recognized the place was actually worth more than its $1.2 million neighbors.

Apparently the seller wasn't so detached from reality about his particular piece of East Harlem real estate, after all!?

I fail to detect any real estate brokers in this deal.  "About to sign"...what, closing papers?  The original purchase contract was signed when the "deal was struck".  "Assumed"?  Everything should be in the written contract.  "Dismissive and rude?"  The buyer should never even have been talking directly to the seller or he'd never have had this negative experience.

And what seller would "renovate" his home, especially one artistically designed to suit himself, to suit a buyer without having the buyer's money to pay for them, plus restoration back to the original condition, just in case the buyer decided to back out?  Or died, or something.

If I were a real estate broker trying to get listings in that area I'd carry a copy of this in my presentation book to show my prospective sellers exactly what mistakes we were not going to make.

And I'm make certain I never hired either one of those other incompetent agents, who are certain to be looking for another employer after blowing a $120,000 commission!

Ah, a delightfully racist story told by Colbert I. King.  He sets some of his stories as a fictional exchange in which I presume is also a fictional black neighborhood barber shop.  The barbers are noting the day is unusually slow, when they manage to discover...

Now that's what some might call a win-win situation!  (Sorry, I know I should have resisted, but...)

Did Mr. Carl manage to tell them there were no minimum wage rules in Iraq?  No unions?  No Workman's Compensation, no unemployment insurance?  No social security, no Medicare?

In fact, none of the costs that make US employers unwilling and unable to hire "the brothers" who usually come into the barber shop for haircuts? 

(I used to be a U.S. employer at one time.  I also used to be a landlord.  I decided that I never wanted to enjoy either one of those experiences ever again!)

Mr. Carl also pointed out these were state-owned factories hiring under non-competitive contracts.

I suspect that if George Bush decided to nationalize Halliburton, reopen all of the closed manufacturing businesses in the United States under government management, giving them noncompetitive contracts to hire the unemployed under the same conditions as those hired in Iraq, Mr. King would be among the first and loudest screamers in line.  A long line.

How ironic that Americans won’t work unless they get paid enough to live on, while Mexicans will literally risk their lives crossing the Sonora desert in order to take jobs which pay them sufficiently enough to enable them to send enough money back to Mexico to make it a significant part of the country’s GNP!

One of the reasons we are having so much trouble dealing with the "immigration problem" is that true reform would throw Mexico into more chaos than Iraq!

I suppose I'm risking a 'racist' slam, but Colbert is the guy who began with the story about "the brothers" and invoked Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program, including prejudicial characterizations for Conservatives as well as the Bush administration.

Somehow I doubt that when he refers to "the brothers" he means the brotherhood of the unemployed. 

As for Lyndon's Great Society jobs program, I'm a conservative (if not a Conservative) and believe it or not but I'd like to see some version of a government jobs program happen...for instance, I'd revive the old CCC, Civilian Conservation Corps...but I think you'd find the people fighting hardest against this would be not Conservatives but that other wing of the Liberal Democrat Party, the labor unions.

While I'm on the subject, I just read about a problem the Iraqis were having filling their army ranks in certain areas: they have a requirement that recruits must be able to read and write, and a large percentage of the male population in the area the article was about cannot do that, they are illiterate.

The brothers might consider that when they head to Iraq looking for jobs.

I point it out only to highlight that not all discrimination is racial when it comes to jobs, not even when it comes to a government hiring program.

I swear I don't know what it is in the air these days.  I like Victor Davis Hanson about as well as any writer there is, he's solid and sensible, but this...

So far, so good.  He's exactly right.

Now he is being silly.  Look, suppose with Kofi gone the UN suddenly became serious...let's not argue why that is impossible, let's just accept it for the point of argument.  Suppose the UN does, in fact, endorse global trade sanctions.  Okay, now what?  Who pays attention?  Who enforces the sanctions against the people who do not pay attention?  What happens, do they then get sanctioned as well?

But let's just say that everybody suddenly is willing to go along with the UN sanctions.  Now what?

Does Ahmadinmahead sit up and say holy cow (or whatever animal is allowable, I'd better shape up?  Geez, guys, I was only kidding, can't you take a joke? 

I'm teasing, but I'm serious.  If Bush convinced the UN to endorse tough sanctions, and if the UN did, and if everybody decided to abide by them...what would Iran do?

You are absolutely correct, sir...the sanctions route is meaningless and therefore foolish.

Now he's dreaming.  He may be quite right that the US can achieve energy independence if it immediately embarks upon increased domestic drilling, energy conservation, and embraces alternative energy with open arms.

Again, let's imagine a world where everybody agrees to do all of these things.  We drill in the ANWR, the offshore coastal areas, all of the places we think are somewhere between likely and highly likely.  And we discover umptillions of barrels of oil lurk there.  Also, everybody decides to turn their lights off at night, all of the criminals having been locked up.  And we all get windmills and solar panels and even quartz crystals, known to focus psychic energy from outer space.  And we throw ourselves full-bore into these things.

At best, you are looking at a dozen years before any of those things could seriously affect the price of oil, and that would be presuming that American consumption was the driving force setting prices.

It isn't.  Maybe it was, but not any more.

But even if it was, even if all of this was effective, the UN sanctions, the methane-gas-from-cow-flatulence, everything, we're talking about years.

The man who is going to bring the hidden imam out of the well by destroying Israel with one single bomb is talking about right away.

Radical Islam is now.  It isn't something coming down the pike, for which we could prepare if only we were willing to recognize it, which is far from certain in itself.  It's already here, and even as smart a man as Victor Davis Hanson is talking about fixes which even at best would require a decade or more.

One might well have given George Bush this advice about Osama bin Laden on Bush's first inauguration day.  And Bush, like Clinton before him, smiled, lowered the rhetoric (bin Laden's name was hardly mentioned, Saddam had the Public Law passed with his name on it), and maintained his distance.

Unfortunately for this plan, Mohammad came to the mountain and the East-West twains met in a cwack-up.

Ah, here's one I liked:

Great.  So are they ready to talk turkey, Turki?  You getting good results there?  No?  Same results we are?  Oh...guess we'd better change our way over to yours, huh?

So, okay, now Victor Davis Hanson is going to make me surrender to his excellence the other 99% of the time:

Sure we do.  Their God is mightier than your God.  What else could possibly explain it in any manner that you would be capable of understanding?

One of our generals tried to talk your language, once, explaining to you that our God was mightier than your God, but he got in all sorts of trouble at home for talking like that.  Seems that we are supposed to understand and communicate with you according to your folkways, but not in ways the folks way back home find objectionable.

And what a concluding line:

For those of you who think you can hear the faint reverberations of a tiny echo of the Reverend Jesse Jackson's argument that everything would be jes' fine if only whites paid blacks adequate "reparations" for the time their ancestors spent as slaves, after which all would be well, you may be excused from the rest of this class.  You already get it.

Saturday night

Of all the things we did not expect Costa Rica to be, noisy would have been high on the list.

Oh, sure, jungle animals, howler monkeys, birds, that sort of thing, but not human noise, urban noise, population noise.  Well, we all make mistakes.

High on our list of wishes is a quiet place to have a decent lunch in La Fortuna within comfortable walking distance.  (I almost left out the word 'comfortable' but then I remembered my famous "Walk to BART" home ads in Walnut Creek, an inside joke only Frieda will appreciate.  But my point was that virtually everywhere is within walking distance until an ocean intervenes with no land-bridge.)  With only three major streets through town to handle all of the traffic, local and trucks and buses and off-road vehicles passing through, motor cycles and motor scooters, none of the eating places in two count as being very quiet.

(I know of only one off-road restaurant that is away from the traffic noise, and it's really on the far northwest edge of town, kind of a longish walk.  Unfortunately, the food there is what they call "typical" and I call Costa Rican Indifferent.  Don’t mistake it for Mexican food, a common error for visitors, because of the tortillas, rice and beans...I'd kill for a good Mexican food joint.  We have one place that calls itself a Mexican food restaurant, in fact, but Southern Californians would never recognize it.  There's also a place advertising itself as "Tex-Mex" near San Jose, but I don't think much of their food, either. 

Costa Rican food is plain and bland, and the average working man consumes it for fuel, not taste.  Today I made myself a 'salad' of avocado, tomato and balsamic vinegar.  Tony was interested and wanted a taste...he made a face.  I persuaded Lis, our maid, to try just the tiniest taste...ugh, she said, a reaction spoiled only by the fact that she made it BEFORE the sample touched her tongue.  Tony, though, decided he'd try again, since Dad liked it.  He's a great little guy, that one.  We are best buddies, oddly enough, since I wasn't for this idea in the first place and I'm not really a "kid" person.  I could wish otherwise, but sometimes you just have to learn to face facts and unwelcome conclusions.)

In addition, Costa Ricans seem to be culturally noisy.  They shout loudly to one another, whistle, honk horns at each other even just in passing.  A favorite advertising tactic, especially on weekends but also one that can happen any time, is mounting a loudspeaker on the top of a car and driving slowly through town, including our neighborhood, broadcasting their intrusive and unwanted commercials over and over and over again.  One of these days you may read about the North American who finally broke and started shooting the speakers off of the tops of those vehicles.

I've already written about the neighborhood dogs, and mine, but they are a mixed blessing...I rather enjoy the fact that it is highly unlikely there will be any bad guys trying to skulk through our neighborhood in the middle of the night.  They'd never get away with it.

Now there's another noise problem: the umpteen days of Christmas when my true love said to me...BANG!  BANG-WHISTLE-POW!

These people love fireworks, apparently they can be bought anywhere by anyone, and from now until after the first of the year we are going to have unscheduled bangs and fireworks every night as each neighbor kid figures he can't hold out any longer, he just has to fire off a few.

Trinket and Sabrina don't like it much but take it in stride.  Huge Poco, the elephant, hides under my desk with his head between my knees as soon as he hears the first bang.

Two more weeks to go.