The left brain never knows what the right brain is doing.

The other day, Lisakit noticed that the case of lime juice I'd bought from Cash & Carry had an expiration date of November 11th, 2009.

So I took it back to Cash & Carry. The assistant manager (according to his badge) was very understanding, and when I asked how something like this could happen he said, "We don't sell a lot of lime juice. You can see how hard it is to see the date through the shrinkwrap, and if the box was turned away we could easily miss it during inventory."

"So it just sat there for a year and a half?"

"It's possible."

It was a terrible excuse. After the transaction was over, I asked him about one of Omaha's favorite substances: Mexican Pepsi, made with real sugar. She'd asked a few weeks prior about when they were getting some, and another "assistant manager" had said he'd look into it. C&C was having trouble getting the stuff: the plant in Mexico was having quality control issues with rust on the caps. But he was trying to get more.

This manager told me, "It doesn't sell well, it stayed on the shelves too long. Almost six months. So we're not going to carry it."

I kinda paused at that, staring. I shook it off and said nothing. It wasn't worth pointing out that he'd just excused his staff for leaving something on the shelf for 18 months, and then told me that 6 months was too long for something to stay on the shelves, in the same conversation.

Man, I'm gonna go full Ivanova someday...

I was waiting in line at the local pharmacy, locate in the back of a Safeway supermarket. Omaha needed a refill on two of her heart medications, and they had assured me they'd be ready by 5pm. One gentleman was ahead of me. He was just finishing the "first use" consultation with the pharmacist and I was ready to step up when a woman with wild, dirty-blond hair and a ragged flannel shirt leapt in front of me. "Ma'am," I said, "You have to get behind this line." I pointed to the line that you're supposed to stand behind "for the privacy of those receiving consultation."

"No I don't," she said.

I goggled. What is it with some people? I swear, I'm too repressed. When the man in front of me was done, she immediately occupied the consultation area and demanded that the pharmacist "give me my water pills!" She opened a clenched fist and showed a handful of yellow gelatin capsules. "They're just like these, but they're white!" She was loud, overbearing, but not angry. Just insistent as the damned. She ticced and hopped back and forth from foot to foot, unable to sit still.

The pharmacist said she didn't have a prescription for water pills for this woman. "Well, I got them at Freddy's!" The pharmacist suggested that maybe the pharmacist at Freddy's, another shop across town, would have that prescription, but they didn't have a copy here. "Well, my doctor gave me a prescription for water pills, and I have to have them!"

After several go-rounds, the pharmacist was able to convince her that there was no prescription for water pills at that pharmacy. "Well, give me the rest." The assistant pharmacist rang up three prescriptions in a row. Total price, visible on the register: $3.30.

The woman whipped out a Safeway gift card. It had no money on it. Either that, or she didn't know the PIN. I never did find out which. She got very agitated, but was finally mollified to be sent to the front of the supermarket, where she could hash out the card problem with customer service.

I was stalking furious; why do some people feel they can violate the social norms and customs of human decency in this way? Especially with so many witnesses.

p.s. I am informed that it was Marcus, and not Ivanova, who had the exchange:

Lennier: "They trained you well on Minbar."
Marcus: "They said I had a lot of repressed anger."
Lennier: "And now?"
Marcus: "I'm not repressed anymore!"

David Frum admits that there was class warfare, the rich started it, and won.

In an article entitled Two Cheers for the Welfare State, David Frum makes a startling admission:

The radical free-market economics I embraced in the late 1970s offered a trade: Yes, there would be less social provision. In return, Americans would receive an economy that was simultaneously more dynamic and also more stable. There would be less inflation (because the Federal Reserve would have one job: price stability). There would be fewer and milder recessions (because the Federal Reserve would no longer have to extinguish the inflation it did not create). The financial sector could finance faster growth with less risk (because risks would be cushioned by diversification rather than prohibited by regulation). ...

The terms of the trade were not honored. ... Especially after 2000, incomes did not much improve for middle-class Americans. The promise of macroeconomic stability proved a mirage: America and the world were hit in 2008 by the sharpest and widest financial crisis since the 1930s. Conservatives do not like to hear it, but the crisis originated in the malfunctioning of an under-regulated financial sector, not in government overspending or government over-generosity to less affluent homebuyers.

Frum does not delve into the question of why "the financial sector" should grow rapidly, when it's questionable that more than a tiny fraction of the financial sector growth in the past fifteen years actually has had any utility or improved efficiency.

The real startling issue here is that, thirty years after the start of the Reagan Revolution, even conservatives are starting to admit that they've "accidentally" (I call bullshit on that notion) unleashed a wealthy class that, rather than honor both the useful and painful parts of the deal, capitalized what they liked and socialized the pain upon the middle and lower classes.

Frum offers nice pablum about how conservatives "should" bring correctives into policy to ensure that the middle class gets their part of the deal honored.

Good luck with that. As Hacker and Pierson point out in their book, Winner Take All Politics:

Most policy changes with majority support didn't become law. Policy changes only became law when they were supported by those at the top. When the opinions of the poor diverged from those of the well-off, the opinions of the poor ceased to have any apparent influence: If 90 percent of poor Americans supported a policy change, it was no more likely to happen than if 10 percent did. By contrast, when more of the well-off supported a change, it was substantially more likely to happen.

If you're not pulling in half a million dollars in income every year, your voice doesn't matter. At all.