Aphorisms as antidotes from Jurmala, Latvia: 1. You own stuff, stuff owns you.

2. The real purpose of money: to buy yourself an exemption from contact with idiots.

3. The best American health insurance is a plane ticket.

4. My only car has two wheels. It earns my calories.

5. Feudalism is a versatile institutional transvestite. It dresses up in new clothes every other generation to enserf the vast majority. As the Sicilian aristocrat said in Visconti's The Leopard during the 1848 revolution, "in order for things to remain the same, things will have to change."