A Day On Hawk Mountain

On Wednesday “She Who Must Not Be Named” had a girl’s day out. It started early in the morning when she and a few friends went walking and talking on a course a few miles from our place. Then immediately she got home, she and some other women took off for lunch. Lunch! At 8:30 am? Well…, yes. A group of them drove about a hundred miles to eat in a restaurant located in a major upscale shopping area not far from Philly. The lunch was just an excuse for a shopping trip. They drove and talked, and ate and talked, and mostly they shopped and talked. What, I wondered, did they find to talk about?

She didn’t get home until about 7:30 pm., and was still on a shopping buzz and, incidentally, eager to discuss some home improvement ideas she had picked up [so that’s what they were talking about]. The upshot of it is, she wants a new counter top in the kitchen and a new hardwood floor in the living/dining rooms. To pay for them she’s willing to give up the trip to Australia and New Zealand to visit her sister. Done! Sold! Some people enjoy travel. I don’t. To me traveling is an endless sequence of expensive annoyances. Don’t get me wrong. I like being elsewhere, and I like her sister. It’s just the getting there and getting back that bothers me.

So what did I do while she talked and shopped and planned?

Wednesday was a beautiful day. Bright sun, temps in the seventies, pretty good visibility, strong breeze, fall foliage coming out – a perfect day for a boy [OK, an old man] and his camera.

In the morning I drove down to the Schuylkill and walked along its banks for a while photographing trees and streams. At the time I thought the pictures would be spectacular – they weren’t. Cameras just can’t catch the subtleties of light and depth that your eyes see. Everything looked dull and flat compared to actually being there.

Then, since it was nearby, I traipsed along the Appalachian Trail for a while and took a few shots. Nothing particularly good, though.

Finally I headed for Hawk Mountain for some hot raptor action and found it!

Wednesday was a great day for birding. We are now well into the migration season for eastern raptors. Different birds migrate at different times, and right now is the peak for sharpies [sharp-shinned hawks] and Coopers hawks. The sanctuary lies right smack-dab along the migration route where two mountain ranges converge, and on a good day you can see thousands of raptors and other assorted species. Wednesday was fair to middling.

I drove up to the summit, found a place to park [not easy during migration season, but possible on a weekday], renewed my membership, and hit the trails. Stopped for a while at the South lookout to chat with a few people I knew from past seasons. One thing about birding is that it attracts really nice people. Everybody was enjoying themselves. Then I headed for the fabled North Lookout. Funny, the express route seemed a lot steeper than I remembered from past seasons. I was huffing and puffing when I got to the top. Maybe I’m just getting old. Nah!

The place was packed. Lots of people having a wonderful time staring off into the sky. Here’s a picture [above]. No sooner had I got there than a bald eagle plowed by on the left. Good omen! I settled in and started to scan the sky. There were lots of birds, but they were flying individually – not in clusters like broad-wings. That meant that for long stretches of time you had to stay alert. Around two in the afternoon even the pros who were keeping an official count were getting frustrated. As one woman put it – “too many damn birds going too many directions.” Fortunately, there were plenty of eyes looking for them, and there was a constant stream of calls – “bird over Hunters, moving fast”; bird over Donut”; “sharpie below the horizon, slope of one”; “bird two glasses up over Pinnacle”. And with each call the pros or talented amateurs would identify the species and record it.

There were slack periods too, when people could sit and chat. Hawk Mountain at migration time attracts hard core birders from all over the world and it is interesting to listen in as people recount spectacular sightings they had in Botswana, in Mexico, in Wyoming, in British Columbia and elsewhere. A couple of well-traveled gentlemen got into a long debate as to which continent had the ugliest vultures. They finally agreed on Africa.

There were a couple of memorable sightings. One bald eagle flew by no more than a hundred feet in front of the lookout, taking his time and giving us a good look. There were lots of bugs in the air too, so we had several chances to watch sharpies darting around snapping them up. Not everyone was enthralled. Once, after a sharpie suddenly came up out of nowhere and passed about twenty feet directly over me, I heard a voice from behind say, “Wow, honey, did you see that?” to which a woman replied wearily, “you look at the birds dear, I’ll look later.” I looked back to see a man staring raptly into the sky while beside him a woman stretched out [uncomfortably, I would think] over the rocks, hat pulled down over her face, trying to catch some Z’s. A couple hours later, as I was leaving, I saw her doing an exercise routine while her companion still sat immobile, raptly scanning the skies.

Different folks…, different strokes.

Maryland Politics -- Steele Finally Jumps

The Sun is reporting that

After months of courting by national Republican figures, Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele appears poised to announce his candidacy for U.S. Senate on Tuesday.

Steele said in an e-mail to supporters that he will have "a very special announcement" Tuesday [Oct. 25th] at Prince George's Community College, complete with live music and refreshments.

Read it here.

It's about time. Too bad I'll be out of state on Tuesday. I could go for some free "refreshments."

More Mid-level Bureaucratic Complaints -- Wilkerson's Conspiracy Theories

The Financial Times has an explosive story about Bush's diplomacy. It charges:

Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.

//

In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.”

Mr Wilkerson said such secret decision-making was responsible for mistakes such as the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran.

Do say!

It also resulted in bitter battles in the administration among those excluded from the decisions.

Well that certainly is true. In fact,

Mr Wilkerson said his decision to go public had led to a personal falling out with Mr Powell, whom he served for 16 years at the Pentagon and the State Department.

Wilkerson attributes that to Powell's determination to be a loyal soldier, but there seems to be more to it than that.

Read the article here.

It seems more likely that Secy. Powell has a much broader view of the whole diplomatic process than does his deputy, and sincerely holds a much different view on the matter.

Note, for instance, this article from AP:

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Wednesday the United States is "not doing bad at all" diplomatically, despite anti-American sentiment over the war in Iraq.

"If you stand back a bit," Powell told an audience at the University at Buffalo, "you might see we have done very well in most parts of the world."
...
Powell, a guest in the university's Distinguished Speakers Series, outlined strides made in Europe, China and Asia, and predicted nuclear disputes with North Korea and Iran would be solved diplomatically.

Read it here.

Powell has a point -- an excellent one. The contest with western European powers over the Iraq war has turned out to be an overall plus for Bush. It is the French and Germans, not the US, that were isolated by the controversy, and revelation of the Oil-for-Food scandal has tarnished their standing, not Bush's.As Powell has noted, the US has made major diplomatic strides with regard to Europe, China, and Asia in general, and has led the way in addressing the problems of Africa. The US is also promoting needed reform at major NGO's like the UN and the World Bank, and has three stupendous successes on its record. Five years ago the world was on the brink of nuclear warfare as Pakistan and India went eyeball to eyeball over Kashmir. Bush defused the situation so successfully that we are now close allies with both powers and they are cooperating on a wide range of problems. The denuclearization of Qaddafi's Lybia is another major triumph that is too little noted, and the management of the Korean crisis has turned out very well. Bush rightly refused to engage in bilateral talks and insisted on Chinese involvement in the solution. He achieved that and now China, not just the US, has its credibility on the line if Korea misbehaves again.

There is something known as the "Colonel's Fallacy" that refers to the inability of mid-level managers to see the big picture. They focus intensely on the small part of the puzzle that is their responsibility, but fail to see how that relates to the larger whole. Col Wilkerson's critique of the Bush administration, which by any fair assessment has had a stupendously successful record in foreign affairs, is an excellent example of this principle, as was Richard Clarke's earlier critique of intelligence gathering.

Mid-level carping is probably inevitable, and occasionally valuable, but usually should not be taken too seriously. Col. Wilkerson's complaints are one such case.

Pennsylvania Politics -- Santorum is Kryptonite to Liberals

Gary Andres, writing in the Washington Times, thinks that things will soon be looking up for Santorum. His argument is that so far Rickey has been running against the memory of beloved former Gov. Bob Casey, but as the public begins to learn more about little Bobby Casey Jr., his actual opponent, they will become disenchanted.

For starters, [Santorum's] opponent has the luxury of being all things to all people — more of a myth than a true candidate. As the campaign unfolds and Mr. Casey faces the inevitable increasing demands of liberal, secular interest groups within the Democratic Party, the fabled Casey name, built by his father, might become less attractive. At a joint appearance last week in Pennsylvania, several observers noted a stark stature gap, with the challenger not looking ready for prime time. Pressure on Mr. Casey to move left is already mounting, too. MoveOn.org will play a major role trying to elect him, already telling supporters in June that he was "part of our larger plan to win key seats and elect progressives in 2006." According to the American Spectator, a Democratic leadership staffer said "everyone was assured Casey was going to hang tough with us on reproductive rights and judges." He also has opposed other compassionate conservative ideas like school choice and welfare reform. All of this will create mounting cross pressure on his presumed supporters and lead to non-traditional defections. Arthur C. Brooks, writing in the fall 2004 issue of the Public Interest, underscores these risks, demonstrating that religiously oriented Democrats are much more likely to switch parties than faith-oriented Republicans. "As a practical matter, the rapidly secularized Democratic Party should probably view religious blacks as an "at-risk population," he writes.

Read the whole thing here.

Andres has a point. As Casey starts to lay out his positions, he will inevitably alienate some of his current supporters. But will it be enough to close an eighteen-point gap in the polls? That remains to be seen.

Stay tuned....

South Africa Heats Up -- Bring Back My Old Machine Gun

The upcoming graft trial of Deputy President Jacob Zuma has brought simmering tensions to the fore and is threatening the rule of President Thabo Mbeki.

Reuters reports:

JOHANNESBURG, Oct 17 (Reuters) - South Africa's ruling ANC is fighting to win back grassroots members in revolt over issues from a lack of jobs and crumbling municipal services to the graft trial of popular sacked Deputy President Jacob Zuma. [pictured above]

New hotlines at the party's Johannesburg headquarters have been taking calls from members across the country. And on Sunday President Thabo Mbeki took the lead, delighting rural audiences in the Vaal district with a speech denouncing corrupt local officials. But some analysts say it may be too late for Mbeki and his allies to unify the party, not least because the initiative is controlled by the central leadership seen to be detached.
....

The wave of popular support for Zuma, who was sacked in June and then charged with corruption, has stung the African National Congress (ANC), polarising the 90-year-old movement and exacerbating discontent in the ranks.

It is almost impossible to believe it is the same party that launched Nelson Mandela to power in 1994 as South Africa's first black president and cruised to a two-thirds majority in parliament in the last general elections just over a year ago.

Popular anger in ANC strongholds over a jobless rate of over 26 percent has spilled into the streets. Township residents protesting poor municipal services have ripped water pipes while commuters angry at delayed trains have set carriages ablaze.

Last week in Durban when Zuma made a court appearance, his supporters sang insults and burned ANC T-shirts emblazoned with Mbeki's face. Protesters targeted Mbeki allies, pelting the regional premier with urine-filled bottles, according to witnesses. At one point Zuma led them in chanting the liberation song "Bring back my old machinegun".

Western officials have time and again urged President Mbeki to take a stronger role in international affars, particularly in opposing the mad reign of Bobby Mugabe in neighboring Zimbabwe, but such calls are futile. Mbeki has his hands full with domestic discontent and many among the opposition are strong supporters of Mugabe's racist/maoist reforms.

Imagine the problems of governance in a country where the refrain of a popular song is "bring back my old machine gun."

Read the whole thing here.

Possibly Good News Out of Ireland -- The IRA is Growing Up

ABC News reports:

DUBLIN, Ireland Oct 18, 2005 — The Irish Republican Army has halted many of its underground activities including bank robberies and vigilante attacks and is broadly observing its July 28 peace declaration, two government officials who have read a confidential report told The Associated Press.

The assessment offers no firm conclusions, however, on whether the group has ended involvement in criminal rackets, which has emerged as a major new stumbling block in Northern Ireland's peace process.

The report from the Independent Monitoring Commission, a panel formed by the British and Irish governments to assess the activities of the IRA and other outlawed groups, is to be published Wednesday.

….

However, both officials said the experts could not say for certain whether the IRA is withdrawing from many of its traditional criminal rackets, chiefly the cross-border smuggling of fuel and cigarettes. Such activity, they said, was pervasive, but difficult to pin on the IRA as an organization rather than on individual IRA members.

Certainly there are a lot of caveats -- there always are when talking about Ireland, and the process of legitimization will take a long, long time -- but it seems clear that progress is being made toward an eventual settlement that will preserve the peace. Now if only the Prots would get on board....

Read the whole thing here.

The Crimes of Saddam

There has been a lot of commentary in the blogosphere regarding the coverage of Saddam's trial -- how respectful and restrained the MSM has been, and how this restraint sanitizes the record of one of the world's most monstrous figures. Fortunately the European press feels no such scruples. Der Spiegel has a slideshow of highlights from Saddam's reign. Here are a couple of samples. Check out the whole thing here.

Sorry, I cannot take a "balanced" view toward this monster or toward those who would support him.

Lileks on America's Universal Culture

Lileks has a nice piece on the interpenetration of cultural forms and America's unique role in the process, and why we shouldn't take UN efforts to preserve cultures too seriously.

American culture is far more diverse than the products of the nations it purportedly corrupts. “The Matrix” was a synthesis of innumerable Hong Kong wire-fu movies. Recent Hollywood horror movies borrow heavily from Japanese ghost movies. HBO’s brilliant “Rome” is about, well, Rome, shot in Italy. Musically, there’s not a culture we haven’t pillaged, dissected, broken into digestible bits and recycled, except perhaps for 15th century Aboriginal didgeridoo tunes. But give us time.

American culture is eventually world culture, and vice versa. Brittle cultures don’t handle it well. Adaptive cultures absorb and adapt–the point of multiculturalism, no?

Read the whole thing here.

Bilious Young Fogey is Back

Toby, the BYF, has returned from the outback and is blogging again. (He has pictures.) Check him out here.

Christopher Albritton is liveblogging Saddam's Trial

Check him out here.

He also has a primer on the trial at Time.com [here].

Picture [Pravda].

RELATED:

Excellent description of reactions to the trial in Iraq from Mohammed at Iraq the Model. [here]

Iraqpundit unloads on Juan Cole here. And Iraqi Bloggers Central explores 'the frontiers of The Land of Visceral Revulsion over Cole here. The professor's pronouncements from afar really do have a way of pushing the buttons of people who are actually on the scene and are experiencing historical events directly.

For pro-Saddam reactions you can always count on the New York Times. [here]
And the Scotsman has reactions from both pro- and anti- Saddam sources. [here]

Shall We Dance?

No comment. I just liked the picture.

Intelligent Design Trial Update -- The Defense Strikes Back

On Tuesday the defense [representing the Dover School Board] continued to present its case. The day was taken up by testimony from Michael Behe, Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University. He testified that the plaintiffs had mischaracterized intelligent design saying that it does not necessarily constitute an affirmation of God’s providence (although he stated that such was his personal belief) and it was not, as critics have charged, simply “creationism” in new garb. He also charged that authorities such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science which had endorsed excluding ID from the classroom were making political, rather than a scientific, statements. He further argued that ID was perfectly compatible with the teaching of evolutionary theory and in no way precluded investigation into natural causes. [here]

See also here.

Behe's testimony is important because it goes to the heart of the plaintiff's case -- that introducing ID into public school classrooms is a violation of the separation of church and state. By asserting that ID does not necessarily invoke the deity as agent, he makes it possible to argue that the separation clause does not apply. To me this seems something of a stretch, but we'll see how it plays.

Hanna Rosin elaborates over at Slate:

In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that states can not require schools to teach creationism alongside evolution. So, the plaintiffs are intent on proving ID is just another form of creationism....

as time goes on, the ID people are getting better and better at avoiding overt theism, narrowing their theory to its most unobjectionable form. Of Pandas and People merely replaced the word "creationism" with "intelligent design." There's already an updated textbook in the works called Design of Life, which excises the Genesis-speak and more thoroughly incorporates the principles of ID. The Discovery Institute does not like this case because it involves a requirement that teachers mention ID and because there are too many creationist fingerprints on it. They prefer a model tested in Ohio schools called Critical Analysis of Evolution. In this model, teachers are encouraged to poke holes in evolution and make sure students understand it's just a theory. They can check out ID in their own free time. "They need at least a couple of different perspectives to appreciate the difference between fact and theory," Behe says in his testimony. This is the safest position for ID people to take: What could be more scientific than subjecting a theory to hard scrutiny? But it's also the most disingenuous. This would be teaching 14-year-olds that the truth is relative, that life can be explained by any one of many competing theories....

Read her here.

And here's the rub. The major attacks on evolutionary science have come not from the right [where all the attention is focused] but from the academic left. Postmodernist critics have launched major frontal assaults on any attempt to intrude evolutionary principles into matters of human psychology or social interaction ["sociobiology" and "evolutionary psychology."] In the post-modern milieu truths are relative and competing theories are distinguished only by their power relations.

Once again we see the ideological convergence of the cultural left and the religious right. Why? Because both are repelled by the amoral reductionism of scientism.

Lennon Tops Best Magazine Covers

The American Society of Magazine Editors has chosen what they consider to be the best 41 magazine covers of the past 40 years. Here are their top four -- not the ones I would have chosen but....

Here's a slideshow of all 41 covers [from AP].

Another Cultural Indicator -- I-pod Halloween Costumes

Remember how we used to laugh at "pet rocks"? Now it just seems prescient.

I forget..., is this one of the signs of the Apocalypse?

Check out the whole line here.

Iraqi Babes for Bush

Gateway Pundit wonders why this picture didn't make it into the MSM. It was readily available from Getty Images.

He also notes [and documents] that much of the Arab media was far more upbeat regarding the election than were western media.

Check out his post here.

Michael Rubin, writing in the WSJ, also notes that Iraqi news sources are far more optimistic about what is happening in their homeland than are American "opinion makers." Read his piece here.

The Domestication of War -- This is Huge!!!

The Christian Science Monitor reports:

[A] three-year study by a group of international researchers... find[s] that the world is witnessing fewer wars - and those wars that do occur are killing fewer people.

"We knew the number of wars was coming down, because that has been around in academic circles for a while, but particularly surprising is how the decline in wars is reflected right across the board in all forms of political conflict and violence," says Andrew Mack, head of the Human Security Center at the University of British Columbia. He directed the team that delivered the report.

That means that not only are interstate wars down, but so are civil conflicts, as well as other forms of political violence like human-rights abuses.

The report finds that the total number of conflicts declined by 40 percent since the cold war ended. The average number of deaths per conflict has also declined dramatically, from 37,000 in 1950 to 600 in 2002. The study found 25 civil conflicts last year - the lowest number since 1976.

Read it here.

This completely turns on its head the conventional wisdom that the Cold War was a time of relative stability enforced by the superpowers and that the world today is much more dangerous. Now the big question:

Why is global violence decreasing?
The study was conducted by the Center for Human Security at UBC, headed by Andrew Mack, former "Director of Strategic Planning" at the UN, so quite naturally it credits the improvement to actions of that body. [For a video presentation on the subject of the UN's role in reducing violence by Mack himself, go here]

The report credits an "explosion of efforts" in conflict prevention and peacebuilding. The number of UN "preventive diplomacy" missions and government-based "contact groups" aimed at resolving conflicts has risen sharply in the last decade.

Somehow I find that explanation both self-serving and inherently implausible, but there are others:

Then there's the Fukayama position, that the spread of democracy has promoted peace.

"Yes there are caveats, but generally the growing number of democracies in the world reduces the number of countries to fight," says Richard Stoll, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston.

This idea at least has the advantage of addressing both the decline in international conflicts and the lessening of internal conflicts within nations. Democratic empowerment is a powerful check on oppression.

Then there is the nebulous invoking of the weight of world opinion.

The increasing weight of world opinion and action is also having an impact on leaders and warlords who in another era would have felt no constraints on warmaking, says John Norris, a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group in Washington.

He continues:

"There is an international rallying to the notion of a need to protect populations that are threatened in their own borders; it's gained some traction," say Mr. Norris. He notes that international actions against high-profile violators like Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic or Liberia's Charles Taylor have had an impact.

"The world has sent a message to the warlords and despots," he says, "and we've seen modified behavior from people who were engaged in the worst sorts of abuses."

Norris says failures in Rwanda, the Balkans, and Sierra Leone in the 1990s taught the international community what doesn't work. Peacekeeping operations are now "more robust, and we're generally better at postconflict activities."

Here the problem is the continuing demonstrated ineffectiveness of "world opinion" to deal with crises, not just in the "nineties," but in places today like Darfur and Zimbabwe.

So far all we have is general assertions underlaid by faith-based assertions. What is needed is a systematic identification of specific mechanisms brought to bear on specific crises and their results. So far little has been done in that regard.

Finally the report addresses the profound gap between public perception and documented reality. Why should people widely disbelieve clear evidence that the situation is improving?

The article offers three answers.

1) that old standby, the media which systematically misrepresents the true situation in order to boost ratings and profits [in other words it's the capitalists, stupid].

2) the public is slow to react to new information. It will take time for the good news to sink in [in other words the people are stupid].

3) perpetrators of violence are getting better at attracting attention to themselves, as for instance by targeting aid workers, and this increases the public perception of rising violence. This, at least, offers the possibility of a counter-strategy of hardening obvious targets.

Read the whole thing. It's well worth your time.

The AP report has some more information here.

The full report can be read here.

RELATED????

AP reports:

WASHINGTON - The nation's murder rate declined last year for the first time in four years, dropping to the lowest level in 40 years. Experts said local rather than national trends were mostly responsible. [of course, wouldn't want to give the administration any credit]

The rates for all seven major crimes were down and the overall violent crime rate reached a 30-year low, according to the FBI's annual compilation of crimes reported to the police

Read it here.

One might think that this was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Fischer and the Failure of the Green Red Movement

The recent German elections were frustrating to many, but as I see it there were three wonderful results. 1) The "grand alliance" of Christian and Social Democrats ensures continuity and places limits on radical change, 2) Germany at last has a female head of state, and 3) most delightful of all, the Greens were marginalized.

Nothing symbolizes the collapse of "green power" more than the retirement of enfant terrible, Joschka Fischer. Sight and Sign publishes a farewell interview with the ageing icon. My favorite quote:

The Greens are no Fischer party, even if I've influenced them significantly. We had already managed to break out of the generational jail in 2002. But now a new chapter begins. The red-green chapter, which was written by my generation, is irrevocably over. The new chapter must be written by the younger ones, those under 40. The notion that I have something to offer them is absurd. I'm bound to my own history and my own being.

The alliance of the Greens with the socialist left has always been their fatal flaw. If significant envionmental reform is to take place it will originate within, rather than in opposition to, capitalist institutions. The left's strategy of infiltrating and taking control of legitimate movements has had the ultimate effect of marginalizing them.

Read the interview here.

The History Carnival is Up!

The eighteenth history carnival is being hosted by Acephalous.

Lots of interesting stuff...

Check it out here.

Flores Hobbit Update -- The Debate Heats Up

Last week John Nobel Wilford presented a good brief overview of the disputes and evidence swirling around the discovery of "hobbit" fossils on the island of Flores in Indonesia. Basically anthropologists and pathologists have advanced three interpretations of the evidence: 1) diseased/deformed modern humans – 2) dwarf homo erectus – 3) australopithecines. There is also a debate as to whether artifacts found in association with the fossils were produced by the “hobbits” or by modern humans who shared the island with them. As with everything money, reputations, and national pride complicate the debate. Read Wilford's article here.

Over at Corante, Carl Zimmer's Loom has a couple of excellent posts on the subject. Here's his first reaction to the finding of new bones. And here's his followup post on the subject. It surveys evidence that shows that the "hobbit" brain looks an awfully lot like a human one.

John Hawks has a more technical take on the same subject. Check him out here.

Hu Yan's "Shanghai Living"

Here's a fascinating glimpse into the lives of the people of Shanghai -- Hu Yan's photo essay on the New China. The accompanying commentary gives great context to the pictures. Check it out here.

Chen Qiang (Shanghainese, Technical Secondary Instructor)

My wife and I have comparatively decent salaries but our monthly expense is high. We have to pay for the apartment, the car and the studio, and therefore, we have pressure from time, energy and money. I like painting in the studio, it’s free and relaxing. I don’t know what to do when I come back home and usually I just stare blankly. I feel spiritually lonely.