A Lot Of What We

From An Entertainment Point Of View, The Solar System Has Been A Bust. None Of The Planets Turns Out To Have Any Real-estate Potential, And Most Of Them Are Probably Even Useless For Filming Dune Sequels.

Lenders, Including Major Credit Companies As Well As Payday Lenders, Have Taken Over The Traditional Role Of The Street-corner Loan Shark, Charging The Poor Insanely High Rates Of Interest.

Individually The Poor Are Not Too Tempting To Thieves, For Obvious Reasons. Mug A Banker And You Might Score A Wallet Containing A Month's Rent. Mug A Janitor And You Will Be Lucky To Get Away With Bus Fare To Flee The Crime Scene.

I Was Raised The Old-fashioned Way, With A Stern Set Of Moral Principles: Never Lie, Cheat, Steal Or Knowingly Spread A Venereal Disease. Never Speed Up To Hit A Pedestrian Or, Or Course, Stop To Kick A Pedestrian Who Has Already Been Hit. From Which It Followed, Of Course, That One Would Never Ever -- On Pain Of Deletion From Dozens Of Christmas Card Lists Across The Country -- Vote Republican.

The "discovery" Of Poverty At The Beginning Of The 1960s Was Something Like The "discovery" Of America Almost Five Hundred Years Earlier. In The Case Of Each Of These Exotic Terrains, Plenty Of People Were On The Site Before The Discoverers Ever Arrived.