The Apathetic Lie

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” - John Milton, Aeropagitica.

The above quote seems like common sense in our Information Age but have we truly realized the desires of Milton? Arguments over meaningless trivia, such as who starred in what movie, that used to be answered by a phone call to our favorite aunt can now be resolved almost instantaneously with the flashing of thumbs over the latest, greatest digital device. News no longer spreads from mouth to ear to mouth but instead expands like a forest fire, uncontrolled, unchecked, and many times unsubstantiated. Our minds and senses are barraged by stimulation on a daily basis, inundated under a sea of cascading advertisements and pulled to and fro by the ever-fluctuating tide of public opinion.
Just because we have access to countless bytes of data doesn’t mean we are knowledgeable. Knowledge doesn’t imply access to information but rather awareness of information. In our Copy & Paste Society, blind acceptance of truth is far more dangerous than ignorance of a lie, for the lie comes from intent rather than apathy. Retweeting a sports score doesn’t make you Howard Cosell anymore than sharing the news of a tragedy on Facebook make you a first responder. Knowledge comes through time and experience, not from a Wi-Fi transmission.
In days such as ours, “to utter” takes on a meaning of great importance. As a verb it means to speak out or express. As an adverb it means absolute, total; carried to the highest degree. The word itself in both denotations comes from the 15th century. Is it a coincidence that the invention of the printing press occurred in that same century? Did Milton use utter two centuries later by accident? I have serious doubts in both of these incidents.
So firmly are we entrenched in the battlefield of uncompromising opinions that we ignore the larger task of ensuring our arguments are backed up by facts. How are individuals to have scintillating debates when the news providers are more concerned with getting it first rather than getting it right? If our social conscience is driven by the insatiable desire for more and more commas in our bank accounts as opposed to following the natural and nurturing qualities of our mammalian instincts, do we even bother worrying about the other liberties Milton placed below his most prized?
The times of least dissent are the signs of the greatest of tyranny. The Nazis didn’t burn books because those books were wrong or right. They were burned because they challenged the paradigm that was being created by the regime of Hitler and his fellow mad men. And even though the principles of Aryan supremacy were crushed with the spectacular performance of a non-Aryan, Jesse Owens, during the 1936 Olympics, the intentions of Hitler’s lie far surpassed the dissent of the German people.
Following the publication of Milton’s Aeropigitica, there was a sharp spike in the usage of the word dissident in English published books, according to Google, rising from %.00036 occurrence rate in 1644 to %.00084 by 1666 (dissident). Grand ideas like John Milton’s are game changers. They are exhibitions of immense willpower, overwhelming aesthetic resonance, and most importantly, expansive creative flow.

The concept of creativity is a relatively new one compared to other philosophical constructs. The formal “Creator” appears a great deal in English texts during the 17th and 18th centuries. Following its revival in the 1850s, the word “Creator” begins to appear less in texts entering the 20th century. On the other hand, you can look at a Google Ngram of “create” or “creativity” and see the trends of the word in the 20th century change in the complete opposite.
The word creativity itself is an example of creative flow. The process of idea formation shifted from a deified Creator to a creative source originating from human beings during both the end of the Renaissance and into the Age of Enlightenment. While it might appear this example of creative flow is the deification of humans, it might better be represented as the humanization of God. The difficulty in studying creativity is that there isn’t a single discipline under which the topic falls. Cognitions want to view it from a biological and psychological aspect. Anthropologists look at its affect on culture. Corporations try to utilize the ability for the purpose of generating money, while philosophers and theologians seek its source. And artists swim in the fields of energy generated by the creative process itself.
It is true that the end result of the creative process is through utilizing the physical realm. But for the philosopher and artist, the material aspects of creativity are generally lower on the totem pole of importance. The creative flow of ideas, or a society’s ability to shape and interpret social policy, can be correlated with the number of available media outlets in that society. The monopolization of the press is a symptom of a diseased society, resulting in lowered creative flow. With control over content coming from global oligarchs rather than organically generating itself at the local level, the creative forces normally associated with a free and democratic society are diminished.
In the grand scheme of things, democracies are a rarity. It takes a special alignment of factors to produce a democracy and an even more special people to perpetuate it. Throughout history nations, states, and empires have overwhelmingly been ruled by monarchs, theocrats, plutocrats, or some other totalitarian regime. Democracy arose in Greece when a strong middle class of merchants and artisans could openly speak with one another at the Agora. In the United States, the American Revolution took place to expand the rights of citizens who were already the freest of all the Earth’s peoples. But as we have already stated, the inclination to be ruled by the few instead of the many is strong, and it has reared its head in American democracy in the form of deception, distraction, and delusion.
For creative flow to transfer from one person to another, those people must have an understanding of the social mechanism they are operating within. In the United States we are made to believe that we have a democratic-republic as our form of government. A government of this form requires education and training on how it operates. However, a Boston Globe editorial from 2014 wrote, “In a recent survey released by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, 35 percent of respondents were unable to name even one branch of the federal government; only 36 percent could identify all three” (Americans’).
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Who is to blame for this show of ignorance? Are teachers not doing their jobs? Are the students unwilling to learn? Is the education system inherently flawed? If you look at the studies, it is obvious that knowledge amongst average citizens about the basic workings of their government is far too low. Imagine being told you need to take your car to work but you are not given instructions on how to operate the car. While the overall operations are complex, most people can be given appropriate directions to operate a vehicle without having to know exactly how the engine works. But in this analogy, not only do the American citizens not know how the engine works, they aren’t even informed enough to open the door.
So what about the citizens who do comprehend the system? Why aren’t their voices being heard? Because as it turns out, there never was a car to begin with, and we do not live in a democratic-republic. Instead, our form of government is known as a corporate oligarchy, or corporatocracy. The ruling oligarchy is centered upon the Council on Foreign Relations as its executive body, the Federal Reserve as the fiscal branch, and conglomerated media as its marketing, public relations, and propaganda machine. When you realize the deception being laid upon the world by this small group of individuals, it becomes clear why so few Americans understand their system of government, let alone have the creative flow of information to make appropriate social decisions and changes.
The first of the three groups who maintain this deception of governance is the Council on Foreign Relations, or CFR. Technically it was born during the peace process of World War I, but its philosophical origins can be traced to the Round Table Groups of Cecil Rhodes and the secretive group Professor Carroll Quigley called the “Society of the Elect” (Round Table). During the Paris Peace Conference, English and American elites planned to form a group called “The Institute of International Affairs”. President Wilson’s friend and advisor, Edward M. House was one of the gentlemen behind the initial formation of the group (Council).
Because of the isolationistic views of America following the war, the American branch of the IIA was named the Council on Foreign Relations and was officially incorporated in 1921. From its inception it has had an elitist nature about it. It was initially headed by former Secretary of State, Elihu Root. Its members were comprised of bankers, lawyers, industrialists, and government officials who funded their first magazine with donations from “the thousand richest Americans” (Council).
As time went by, more and more government officials were members of the CFR. During President Eisenhower’s administration the percentage of CFR members was 40%. By the Johnson administration that number had risen to 57%. Here is a partial list of current CFR board members: Carla Hills, Robert Rubin, David Rubenstein, Richard Haass, Madeleine Albright, Alan Blinder, Tom Brokaw, Ann Fudge, Jami Miscik, Colin Powell, Fareed Zakaria, and the list goes on. These are just members of the board. While the names of members have changed over the years, the industries and organizations they represent have remained constant. The Council’s membership is still filled with industrialists, academics, bankers, and former government representatives. The CFR acts as a hub of influence for the corporate oligarchy, as its members use the CFR to jump back and forth between the public and private sector, all without the scrutiny of public debate or the necessity of elections.
Not only are there individual members of the Council on Foreign Relations, but there are corporate members as well. Knowing the influence and power wielded by individual members, combined with the money and influence directed by corporations during election cycles, it is easy to connect the dots and recognize why the politicians in Washington, D.C. are so beholden to such a small group of individuals and the companies they run. This is a list of just the founding corporate members of the group, taken from the CFR website: The Abraaj Group, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Chevron Corporation, Citi, Exxon Mobil Corp., Goldman Sachs Group, Hess Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., McKinsey & Company, Morgan Stanley, Nasdaq OMX Group, PepsiCo, Shell Oil Company (Corporate).
If there appears to be an overlap between the banking interests and policy advisors this is because it is true. This brings us to the second cog in the corporatocracy’s machine, The Federal Reserve, or simple, The Fed. In his tome, Tragedy and Hope, Professor Quigley notes how closely the CFR and bankers were tied together, noting, “The New York branch was dominated by the associates of the Morgan Bank. For example, in 1928 the Council on Foreign Relations had John W. Davis as president, Paul Cravath as vice-president, and a council of thirteen others…” (Quigley 952). Even today there is overlap, as CFR board member, Alan Blinder, served as vice chairman of the Fed from 1994-1996 (Council).
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered” (Private). These were Thomas Jefferson’s words of warning to future generations ceding monetary power to private banks. While the Constitution clearly gives Congress the sole authority to print and coin money, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 took that power from the people and placed it back into the hands of the bankers. A central bank in the U.S. hadn’t existed since Andrew Jackson allowed its second incarnation to die in the 1830s.
But beginning in 1910 through a system of secret meetings with banking giants, Senator Nelson Aldrich and his allies Paul Warburg, J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. set about to rebuild the Bank that Jackson killed. Aldrich met with five of the major banking leaders at the time and drafted what would become the charter for a new central bank on Jekyll Island. After a series of compromises in Congress, and a lobbying effort by President Wilson advisor Edward House, the Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress while some members were away for the Christmas holiday (Federal).
Besides the obvious issue of a central bank created by bankers and banking interests in Washington designed to not only regulate itself but also regulate the overall economy is the idea of fractional reserve banking. This is a term that is generally kept out of the public debate, and there is good reason for that. Henry Ford is quoted as saying, “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning” (Henry Ford). But the followers of the system are thankful for “the magic of fractional reserve banking”, quoting the Fed itself when it explains, “…For the economy and the banking system as a whole, the practice of keeping only a fraction of deposits on hand has an important cumulative effect. Referred to as the fractional reserve system, it permits the banking system to ‘create’ money” (Understanding).
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It is hard to grasp that our monetary system is created out of nothing, yet this is the case. While traditionally paper money has been backed by some sort of resource such as gold, silver, or a mixture of both, today’s money is based on faith that it is worth something, and the power of debt it holds over most of those who use the fiat currency. As more money is created from deposits, more debt is created, yet there is nothing real world tied to any of the money being created. This might work well in a system designed for permanent growth, but on a planet with resources regenerating at a limited rate, if at all, perpetual growth can only work for so long and only for the few.
As long as the people in charge of the monetary system of the United States government continue to come from the very banking industry they are suppose to regulate, the current economic system will remain in place. CEOs and other executives will continue to gain a larger and larger share of the pie while keeping wages of workers at subsistence levels. Former Treasury Secretary under President Obama, Tim Geithner, put in time in the government before joining the Council on Foreign Relations. He then moved onto the presidency of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2003 before making his way back into government as Obama’s first Treasury Secretary. There couldn’t be a more obvious example of the revolving door policy for the corporate oligarchy. Treasury Secretary under the second President Bush, Hank Paulson, had worked in banking himself before having to deal with the 2008 financial crisis. Is it any wonder the banks found themselves bailed out after failing to do their jobs while millions of working Americans suffered for doing theirs’.
“After meeting with Bernanke, Paulson flew to New York on a private plane he paid for himself. He could afford it. He had earned $40 million as Goldman’s CEO in 2005 and had sold nearly $500 million worth of Goldman shares accumulated over his thirty-two years at the firm when he took the Treasury job in 2006” (Wessel 11). You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see the massive disparity between the corporate executive and the average worker. “In 1970, for instance CEOs made about 38 times what workers made. Now they make an average of about 280 times what workers make” (Sirota 80).
How is it that stories such as those mentioned above are not a part of the nightly news conversation? Why do these and other important issues get pushed to the side and are interrupted by sensationalized stories like Justin Beiber being arrested for throwing eggs at a house? Because without the corporate media’s collusion with government and big business, the deception containing the people’s creative flow wouldn’t be possible.
An early example of media consolidation was the shrinking of the number of Hollywood studios. The goal was to eliminate competition from the independent studios and control all aspects of the industry. “Had it taken strong antitrust measure against the movie industry during the 1920s and 1930s (as it later did in the 1940s), there would not have been the unified control of production, distribution, and exhibition that made a neocorporatist system of movie regulation effective” (Starr 325). This form of censorship, known as the Hays Code, shows how easily the government can manipulate smaller number of media entities more efficiently. The 1996 Telecommunications Act gave legality for even more media consolidation. “Or, as one cable executive put it in 1998, ‘Most entrepreneurs have already gotten the word that the cable field is closed’” (McChesney 148).
Since the T-Com Act, media ownership has continued to shrink. In 1980 50 companies controlled 90% of the mass media. As of 2011, that number of companies was down to six. When will the people demand control of the creative flow of information? How few companies are enough? “Goebbels’ dramatic successes made it clear that if one man exercised strict control over every possible outlet for public information it would be possible to convince millions that his view of what has happening in the world was correct” (Finn 197).
According to the Newspaper Association of America there were 1382 daily newspapers in print in 2011. One hundred years before there were over one thousand more (Minor 141). Combined with the fact that our population has boomed in the last one hundred year this is quite a drastic drop in daily papers per individual. “The ability to stay informed makes people feel secure, whether or not they remember what they read or hear or see. Even though the news may be bad, at least they feel that there will be no startling surprises. News reassures them that the political system continues to operate despite constant crises and frequent mistakes” (Graber 9).
“The oft-repeated conspiracy theories about news are not the nature of the problem, indeed, they miss the point. The loud complaint about television news ought to be this: TV news doesn’t serve the public interest. Corporate ownership of the networks and local stations is destroying the integrity of news” (Cohen 33). Former staff member under President Carter, James Fallows said, “‘The more basic concern is the conversion of the news business to just another corporate operation where whoever is in charge must be driven by the demands of the financial markets.’ Fallows now edits U.S. News & World Report, where he has to navigate those very corporate waters” (Schechter 75).
Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” If this is the case, then what other factors keep a society’s creative flow low other than deception? One of those answers would be distraction.
“We falsely think of our country as a democracy when it is has evolved into a mediaocracy. Where a media that is supposed to check political abuse is part of the political abuse” (Orwell), Danny Schecter stated in a speech of his. While it might appear to most that our number of choices of entertainment has increased, the ownership of those choices grows smaller all the time. Over a period of a year, the average viewer watches almost 150 hours of television per month. If you break those numbers down to a weekly rate, the average viewer watches as much television almost the equivalent of a full-time job. Between their regular jobs, sleep, and travel, this doesn’t allow much time to think about current issues, let alone dedicate the time necessary to have a conversation or activity that can increase the levels of creative flow between individuals.
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Another great distraction from the idea of media consolidation and corporate oligarchic rule is war. Over the years the media has worked in collusion with the government to either steer policy towards the idea of war, or to justify warlike activities. This goes as far back as 1898 and led up to the Spanish American War. “‘Remington, Havana. Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war. WR. Hearst.’ There is no other evidence that Hearst sent this cable, so often quoted as conclusive evidence against him, but in a sense it reflected the situation. Of all the American newspapers, Hearst’s Journal worked the hardest to create public sentiment for war” (Emery 365).
During WWII the Roosevelt administration, through the use of the Office of War Information (OWI), maintained their own version of propaganda utilizing the corporate media. “And while some journalists complained about the sterility of the debate and the government’s self-serving restrictions on information, many more were willing to look the other way, and some were eager accomplices in disseminating the government’s propaganda” (Carpenter 37).
A former reporter for the Washington Post, Murrey Marder, said about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, “‘It was an operation-- a deliberate manipulation of public opinion… None of us knew, of course, that there had been drafted, months before, a resolution to justify American direct entry into the war, which became the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution’” (Solomon 59). This isn’t the only time an incident such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident has been used as a pretext for war or wartime powers. Homeland Security, under a different guise, had been introduced to Congress and failed to pass only six months before the attacks of 9/11.
We have established how the corporatocracy uses deception to hide their true nature and distraction to keep potential detractors from building their creative flow, but how do they deal with the people who actively try to make changes to the social mechanism? In an interview on RT’s The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann, consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader explained, “It’s a divide and rule strategy by the corporate powers. Obviously if they can split the left right opinion, and put the focus on where they do disagree like reproductive rights or gun control they control the scene and they keep the left and right from moving where they do agree” (Ralph).
The technique that Nader is talking about is called delusion, and it is the third component of the deceive/distract/delude strategy of the corporate oligarchy. Every couple of years an illusion of choice is given in our supposed democracy. This two-party system, or Duopoly, is nothing more than an extension of the corporations and their pawns of whom are running the show.
The retention rate vs. approval rate of Congress is a key factor in showing how delusional our democracy is. According to politifact.com, in the 2014 election, Congress had a 14% approval rating yet 96% incumbent retention (Congress). This is an absolutely maddening statistic, even to the political novice. But when the masses are deceived about their form of government, and a small group of corporations control 90% of the 150 hours of television people watch, is it any wonder that the levels of creative flow travelling between individuals would be so low? And as Nader said, even when there is agreement on the right and left, they are divided by wedge issues presented by the very media who is suppose to be informing them of actual news.
The delusion continues when we talk about money in politics. We have already shown the tools the corporatocracy uses to maintain their power, and despite most people wanting money out of politics, the people in power refuse to change their own system. Even when finance reform in government is passed, the Supreme Court continues to advance the notion of corporate personhood and equating money with free speech (Citizens United). And just to make sure everything goes as planned, giant corporations like Goldman Sachs donate almost equally to Democrats and Republicans, so even if their guy looses, their other guy wins (Goldman Sachs).
Of all the manipulations and machinations of the corporate oligarchy, the Trans Pacific Partnership could very well be the nail in the coffin of any sort of attempt to restore the democratic-republican values of our ancestors. In April of 2015, the TPP was “fast tracked” by the Senate, limiting debate and pushing the global agenda of the corporate oligarchy further ahead. While it has the outward appearance of a trade treaty, there are provisions that would allow multinational corporations to sue nation-states over laws that cut into that company’s profit (Picchi). Just imagine the United States being sued by a company like Monsanto for passing laws that limit the amount of pollution Monsanto can put into the environment. The TPP would finalize the 100 year-long transition from democracy to corporate oligarchy that the Council on Foreign Relations, the Federal Reserve, and all their banking and corporate cohorts have been so patiently planning and waiting for.
Jeff Cohen is a media critic and former corporate media commentator on multiple networks. Having come from within the industry, he should know best how to explain, “When you look at who’s on the boards of media corporations they’re also on the boards of U.S. oil companies, and they’re on the boards of U.S. military contractors, so trying to study who owns America you’re really also [pause] these are the people that own the media. We don’t have a state media, but in some ways it’s very much like a state media, it’s the corporate state” (Documentary).
There is an emerging global cultural amongst the corporatocracy. Chrystia Freeland, in her book on plutocrats, talks of a Scandinavian investment banker who said his move from London to Hong Kong “was easier than moving from one borough of New York to another” (Freeland 61). These multinational companies have no national allegiance at heart. While General Eisenhower was building Coke factories on the recently captured areas of North Africa, Coca-Cola employee, Max Keith, had developed a version of Coke called Fanta for the Nazis (Pilger 73). ”This consciousness is shared by multinational executives, long-haired environmental campaigners, financiers, revolutionaries, intellectuals, poets, and painters, not to mention members of the Trilateral Commission. I have even had a famous U.S. four-star general assure me that ‘the nation-state is dead’” (Toffler 325).
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So if the nation-state is dead, or at least in the throes of dying, then what type of social mechanism will take its place? If the trends and indications listed above provide any clue it would appear that a world-wide, corporate oligarchy is to become the new powers that be. But the world they are trying to create is a world of constant consumption, production, and profit growth. Without any sort of correlation between the money spent and the resources that money is tied to, there is no way to ensure a stable environment. “Technical advances allowed increased populations to exist; population leveled off at the new, higher level, and the starving margin remained more or less constant. But it is characteristic of our time that we are living far beyond our energy ‘income.’ When our ‘capital’ runs out, we will have to retrench at a lower level of population. This adjustment will be cataclysmic” (Van Doren 365).
Altering the course of current events seems daunting if not impossible. The United States Congress has had trouble passing legislation as simple as keeping the government running. An illusion of choice is being presented to the American people between two opposing points of view. But these two opposing views receive large donations from the same companies, making the reigning Duopoly nothing more than opposites sides of the same corporate coin. In fact, many former representatives, Senators, and bureaucrats go on to lobby for the very companies who paid to get them elected in the first place.
There is however, a loophole in the system that must be used to the average person’s advantage. That loophole is the vote of the political independent. With a voting block of over 40% (Ralph) simple math would dictate that those numbers could potentially win elections if unified in goals and effort. Should the Duopoly merge their opposing 30% control of the political spectrum into a single unit, the ruse of political choice would be shattered and their hand would be shown. In either scenario, the Duopoly would be exposed and control could be wrested from the hands of the few.
Once the corporate oligarchy is dismantled, and the propaganda machine known as consolidated media broken up, the flow of creative energy would be free to disseminate amongst the masses. Ideas shaped by the experts of various fields could be debated amongst peers. The power to find solutions to the complex problems facing our emerging global civilization could be held by the very people who understand the problems the most, instead of politicians who seek control, and corporations who seek profit. An informed public, with the tools to utilize information and control of their own resources will finally be able to shape their own destiny, free from the incessant cycle of war, and liberated from the control of those with limited mindsets.







Works Cited
"Americans’ Grasp on Civic Knowledge Is Shaky at Best, Study Finds - The Boston Globe."
BostonGlobe.com. 7 Oct. 2014. Web. 23 Apr. 2015. Editorial.
Carpenter, Ted. The Captive Press: foreign policy crises and the first amendment. Washington,
D. C.: Cato Institute. 1995. Print
Citizens United v. FEC. No. 08-205. Supreme Ct. of the US. 21 January 2010. Wikipedia.
22 April 2015. Web 23 April 2015
Cohen, Richard. Conglomerates and the Media. New York: The New Press. 1997. Print.
“Congress has 11% approval ratings but 96% incumbent reelection rate, meme says”.
politifact.org. Tampa Bay Times. 11 November 2014. Web 23 April 2015.
"Corporate Members" Council on Foreign Relations. Council on Foreign Relations, 23 Apr.
2015. Web. 23 Apr. 2015.
“Council on Foreign Relations” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
9 April 2015. Web 23 April 2015.
“dissident.” Google Ngram Viewer. 23 April 2015.
“Documentary: Who Rules America 4”. Youtube.com. Youtube, LLC. 30 October 2012.
Web 23 April 2015.
Emery, Edwin. The Press and America. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1972. Print.
“Federal Reserve System”. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
16 April 2015. Web 23 April 2015.
Finn, David. The Corporate Oligarch. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1969. Print.
Freeland, Chrystia. Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-rich and the Fall of
Everyone Else. New York: Penguin Random House. 2012. Print.

I know it was long but I hope you enjoyed reading it.

a reply to: revswirl

Good god man, just publish a book.

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

Someday perhaps☺

a reply to: revswirl

Sorry if I came off as a bit sarcastic, thats just a LOT of info to take in. Nevertheless, it is important info. Thanks.

a reply to: revswirl

A lot of information, but you tied it together nicely. Thanks for sharing your research.

a reply to: Isurrender73

Glad you enjoyed it. It's a bit of a preview of my future website firecongressnow.org

a reply to: revswirl

seems to summarize as, vote independent or else doooooom!

a reply to: pryingopen3rdeye

Man, I could have saved a lot of typing and research