Endless Thread - Bad Assumptions

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

A blurry video surfaces on the r/trashy subreddit of what appears to be a work dispute in an unspecified African country. A Chinese man slaps a clipboard out of a Black worker's hands, then leaves the frame for a moment, before coming back with a large metal pole. There's no context provided with the video, but most of the commenters seem to know what's happening — seem being the operative word. They're just making assumptions, grounded in a complicated geopolitical relationship that's changing everyday life all across the African continent. In pursuit of context for this video, Endless Thread explores the sweeping geopolitical relationship between China and Africa, and hears from Henry Mhango, a Malawian journalist who hunted down the context for another viral video, exposing racism and exploitation in the process. Show notes: "Racism for Sale" (BBC Africa Eye) "Sierra Leonean Miner vs Chinese Miner: Company PRO Breaks Down What Transpired" (News Central TV) "Why China Is in Africa - If You Don’t Know, Now You Know" (The Daily Show) "How China Sees itself in Africa" (The Global Jigsaw) "Chinese companies in Africa can be flexible and adaptive in their employment strategies." (The Washington Post) Credits: This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus. It was hosted by Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson.

Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Amory, normally I spare you from the darkest corners that I encounter while I scroll Reddit. I appreciate that, Ben. I do. I'm pretty good at avoiding them myself, too, I will say. Well, today I do want to go there for a second. I want to talk about the video. The video. The one from R-slashy, the subreddit for all things. things trashy.

Yes. Our trashy is not a place. I spend a lot of time. I try to live my trashy truth in real life. It is a subreddit with a mix of things, but it's generally about kind of like looking down on the behavior of others, I guess. And sometimes that's delicious, I suppose. But this video didn't quite feel like the usual fair. Let's watch it together.

It is not pleasant, but I think it's important. Okay. Okay. So it starts with a seemingly Chinese man whacking a clipboard out of a construction worker's, a black man, a construction worker's hands. Yep. The construction worker starts to like slap back. He throws his arms out. The guy in blue, the Chinese man sort of like runs away. And then he sort of runs back and he's carrying a pole. Yeah, and then there's an altercation with this pole. And he like starts going after the guy with the pole and like starts stabbing him with the pole. The comments on this video sort of veer between outright racism, mostly towards Chinese people,

and people actually describing what they think is happening, but often in a way that might further fuel the outright racism. Yeah, like this is a comment from a few weeks ago, quote, there's loads of these videos where a Chinese boss is slapping or hitting the African workers, but this is the first one I've seen the worker slap back. It's about time. Good for him. Notable, I guess, in that this comment, seems to say what is happening in this video.

And it seems to say it's just one of many videos of Chinese bosses attacking African workers at African work sites. Which we now know is not true. That is not what is happening in this video. Which you won't know just by looking at this Reddit thread and would also be difficult to understand from Googling. African Chinese workers fight, for instance, which I did and found tons of evidence of this video spreading a...

across the internet with absolutely no regard for the facts of the matter at all. Like this broadcast from an Indian media company where they mix up the country, Sierra Leone, where this video maybe took place with a woman named Sierra Leone. This is of a Chinese man who is mistreating and attacking a woman. Her name is Sierra Leone. It's like they didn't even watch the video before sharing it. And what is interesting is that there is another extremely, viral video that in some key ways is also similar.

Mm-hmm. Should we talk about the other video? Yeah. The Chinese Blessings video, which also went very viral and also connects African people and Chinese people in what feels like another culture clash. Okay, so we should say that was from a BBC documentary that was made about the original viral video. What you heard in that clip is children from someplace in Africa. In the original video, the actual location was unclear, and they are repeating a man chanting Chinese phrases.

It's another example of a very viral video that, well, if you don't speak Chinese, is not what it seems at first blush. It seems like a little moment of cultural exchange, of kids being really excited to learn a new language. But as we will learn, it also involves racism. assumptions, and a sort of colliding of two cultures. These two videos have sent us on a journey, metaphorical, unfortunately, across the African continent, where for millions of people, life is being transformed.

And if you're trying to understand this transformation from the comment threads on these viral videos like we were, you're probably not going to get the whole story. Buckle up, this is a big one. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Sebertson. And from WBUR in Boston, this is endless threat. Today's episode, Bad Assumptions. Before we started this, I vaguely knew that the Chinese government had invested in Africa in a big way,

but I really didn't know much more than that. Clearly, people have big feelings online about China's presence in African countries. Understanding that felt like an important piece of understanding what was going on in these videos. Before we get started, we should say we're going to be talking a lot about generalizations. And we're also going to be talking about a huge, complicated relationship between China and dozens of African countries. Every country has its own specific relationship, but they're also part of the same big story about how China is trying to position itself, which is why people tend to study China-Africa relations as a whole. People like our first call, Lena Ben-Abdallah.

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Lina's research focus is China-Africa Relations. She's a politics and international affairs professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. I am currently visiting, actually, my parents in Algeria, so I'm joining you from home. Back in 2010, Lina was working as a teacher in China, and she was a little surprised that so many of her students were also from Africa. A lot of the students, I remember having a class, came from countries such as Nigeria,

Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. So the number of students from her own continent surprised Lena a bit. But something else jumped out to Lena. She and her students, who are, of course, from very different countries across Africa, were all noticing the same thing about China, this one key difference between China and their home countries. We're just used to seeing things take so, so long to be completed. You'd hear of a project, and then you'd wait 20, 30 years before seeing any.

change. In China, the speed and volume of construction is on another level. We were joking that we could take a picture from the living room every day, and it would look different every day. In the span of a few months, you could actually see things move. But back in 2010, while Lena and her students are in China saying, wow, this is so different, China's construction explosion is actually starting to take hold back home. China has started to pour millions of dollars into huge projects all across Africa. Algeria was one of the top destinations of Chinese laborers, construction workers. It had, I think, in the upwards of 30,000 Chinese workers at the time.

And what Lena is seeing is really the result of this relationship between China and countries on the African continent, which goes way back. Probably farther back than we can really go in this episode. So in 1955, there was this conference on Afro-Asian Solidarity, which was held in Bandun, which is a city in Indonesia. But it's important to say that China's relationship with countries in Africa goes back to before the U.S. and China had any sort of diplomatic or trade relationship. A lot of Africa was still under colonial rule, under colonial regimes by France, English, English, Portugal, Germany as well. At this time, China's trying to show its solidarity with the revolutionary cause

and position itself as a leader for the global south, which comprises countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, Asia, and Oceania. But then, Nixon goes to China. We seek an open world, a world in which no people, great or small, will live in angry isolation. Because it maybe sees more upside

to partnering with the U.S., China basically puts African countries on the back burner, until Tiananmen Square, 1989. On the streets leading down to the main road to Tiananmen Square, furious people stared in disbelief at the glow in the sky,

listening to the sound of shots. Massive student demonstrations advocating for things like freedom of the press and other democratic reforms, and a government response with tanks. No one knows how many people have died in the crackdown,

we may never know. The U.S. and a lot of other Western countries are putting sanctions on China. The United States cannot condone the violent attacks and cannot ignore the consequences for our relationship with China, which has been built. There are other inflection points

in this China-Africa relationship, but Tiananmen Square has a big impact. China turns back again to find and rekindle those relations and ties to African states, looking for markets, looking for support, looking for solidarity. In other words, China really needs to find other partners in growing its economy at home and abroad.

And a lot of African countries fit that bill. By the time Lena's living there in 2010, China has spent the better part of the last 20 years re-solidifying its relationship with countries across Africa. The Beijing summit of the Forum on China-Africa Corporation came to a positive conclusion last week. Kenya and China have jointly launched the Kenya-China Tourism Association in the Kenyan Capital. And I believe that shows the cordiality between the government of Ghana and the government of the People's Republic of China.

People are moving between China and these African countries more than they ever have before. Lena and her students studying in China in 2010 are really an example of this. So are a lot of these Chinese. workers arriving in Africa, who are working on building infrastructure. In Algeria, for instance, there's a huge expansion of public housing. And because there's this influx of Chinese laborers in Algeria, there's also a kind of influx of Chinese culture. There were these growing kind of pseudo-China towns in some of the big cities in Algiers and Constantine. You could see this interest in opening Chinese restaurants and Chinese grocery.

Then, in 2013, China launches what is called the Belt and Road Initiative. The Belt and Road Initiative is Xi Jinping's big bet to expand China's economic influence and to raise China's profile as a world power by investing even more money into other country's infrastructure. Nearly every African country signs on. What all of this adds up to is literally billions of dollars flowing into Africa from China, either through direct aid, loans, or other types of investment. China is now, collectively, Africa's biggest trading partner, dethroning Western economic powers,

the European Union, the U.S. This also means sort of Chinese goods are extremely popular. There are high levels of imports of Chinese goods. Chinese companies are also getting into mining, into oil, into all of these industries extracting natural resources. Think lithium. and copper and coal bolt, minerals that are critical in making batteries, smartphones, and cars. And then there are all the Chinese-backed railways and the roads.

For every project, you have work sites, like the one that we were seeing in the first video, where Chinese nationals are working alongside local African people. Henry Mahongo is a journalist in La Longue, the capital of Malawi. He's involved in our second viral video, the one showing African children chanting in Chinese. We'll tell you about that in a bit. Henry had a front row seat to China's explosion of investment. Because in 2008, Malawi was one of the last countries to cut ties with Taiwan. The Chinese money started pouring in.

Henry says that Malawi needed a big investment in infrastructure, and the jobs that came with huge construction projects. 70% of people in Malawi live in poverty. 51% struggle to eat enough food each day. If we were in La Longue and you were giving us a tour to show us kind of Chinese investment, what would you show us? What would that look like? We have parliament building.

Then we have five-star hotels. We have about two five-star hotels in the long way. Henry says the Chinese government helped fund the construction of a parliament building, hotels, universities, a huge stadium, a highway spanning the northern part of the country. But many ordinary people in Malawi and other African countries are skeptical of the price of all this investment. What do you think is important for American listeners to understand about Malawi that they don't understand? and also about Chinese diplomacy and investment specifically. We have so many young people who have completed school, but they can't manage to find a job.

Henry's tape is a little hard to make out. He was speaking to us from his car during a citywide blackout. And now if there is a foreign investor somewhere out there who is offering a job, they will even go for that job, even if that person will be exploiting them, even if that person will be minimizing them. But he's saying, we have so many young people who have completed school, but they can't manage to find a job.

And now if there is a foreign investor somewhere out there who's offering a job, they'll definitely go for that job, even if that person will be exploiting them. Even if that person will be victimizing them. Chinese employers have a ton of leverage over local Malawians who don't have the money for basic needs. It's an off-kilter power dynamic that can contribute to really bad work environments. And a lot of people worry that's happening on the macro level, too, that China has too much power over the countries it's loaning money to. In 2011, Hillary Clinton gave an interview in Zambia. She was Secretary of State at the time. And she talked about her concerns that African nations are facing colonialism 2.0.

We don't want to see a new colonialism in Africa. We want when people come to Africa and make investments, we want them to do well. but we also want them to do good. We don't want them to undermine good governance. We don't want them to basically deal with just the top elites. This was a long interview. There was a lot of nuance, but the takeaway and headlines at home in the U.S.

was that China in Africa equals bad. This became an even bigger talking point during the Trump administration. China uses so-called dead diplomacy to expand its influence. That's VP Mike Pence talking about the idea that countries are falling into a so-called debt trap. This is when a richer country, in this case, China, loans money to a poorer country, in this case, one of more than 50 African countries. The poorer country can't pay the money back, so the richer country forces the poorer country to do something else for them.

A sort of geopolitical blackmail. Even Trevor Noah gets into the debt trap discourse in a segment on The Daily Show in 2021. They know Africa can't afford not to take the deals that they offer. And then when Africa can't pay it back, the Chinese are like, Right, we're taking all your shit. And if you don't like it, read the fine print. But it's tricky, right? The Chinese government has actually been pretty willing to restructure loans

when countries can't pay on time. And the U.S. practices this kind of investment-driven diplomacy all the time. This MOU will unlock new opportunities for tricks. and investment between our countries and bring Africa and the United States even closer than ever. What we have here could be considered a classic case of throwing stones

while living in glass houses. And a lot of African leaders are quick to point this out. They're leading sovereign nations. They don't need the U.S. to tell them who to take money from and who not to. For its part, remember, China first started reaching out to African countries with the idea of dissonverning.

dismantling colonialism. The Chinese government is also very committed to this narrative that they're not as meddlesome as Western powers. They're not loaning money with strings attached. They're not going to interfere in issues like, say, human rights. The message China is trying to get across is that while they're a global power, they don't think they're better than countries with less economic development.

In addition to all of the infrastructure spending, China is also funding media organizations to get that message. message out, like the state-run Chinese global television network, which has several stations across Africa. ... thereby increasing the popularity of Kenya among the Chinese. This in turn has boosted Chinese tourism in Kenya. All this stuff, the diplomatic and economic relationships, the rivalry between China and the U.S., all flavors of propaganda.

This is the incredibly complicated backdrop of those viral videos we were watching earlier, of the construction incite skirmish and those little kids speaking Chinese. These viral videos are evidence of how this huge, naughty, geopolitical relationship is playing out. If you ask the right questions. Previously, I had an assumption that if it's coming to Malawi, it's coming for the goodwill. But after this video was out, it really changed my mindset. What was actually happening in those viral videos? in a minute.

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Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org. Creative Studio. Okay, so at the start of this, we watched two videos. One with some sort of skirmish that commenters said was a workplace dispute. And another of a group of kids in an unspecified African country speaking in Chinese. Let's talk about that second video. One of the byproducts of this flourishing relationship between China and African countries has been a little micro-industry. selling videos of kids across Africa saying short greetings in Chinese.

They're known as Blessings videos, and they usually cost anywhere from $10 to $70 a pop. In 2020, this Blessings video went viral. If you don't speak Chinese, you might think it went viral because the kids are very cute. Maybe it could be evidence of the narrative the Chinese government has invested so much in that this economic relationship has also resulted in cultural exchange. and community. But no. The ground zero for its virality was terrible.

It was posted on a Chinese social media account that translates to jokes about black people club. If you do speak Chinese, you already know this by now. But what the group of little kids are being coached to say translates to, I'm a black monster. My IQ is low. The kids have no idea what they've just said. They smile and cheer. This obviously punctures any narrative that all Chinese people coming to the African continent are doing so in good faith and that anti-black racism is a purely Western disease.

We know the true story of this video because of Henry Mahongo. Remember Henry? We heard from him earlier. But also because of a journalist named Runaku Selena. Runaku used to live in China. She was disturbed by this video and so she started investigating the blessings industry. She especially wanted to know how this specific video came to be made. With the help of colleagues at the BBC, she identified the location of the video, Malawi.

And this is where Henry comes in. Runaku needed some on-the-ground investigative journalism help. So she reached out to Henry and asked him to visit the village where the video was filmed, to find out more. It wasn't far from Henry's home in the capital city of La Longue. I have to be honest, I even shed tears. I didn't believe this was happening in my community. Together, Henry and Runaku discovered that these videos were being filmed by a Chinese man named Lu He.

Lu He would tell parents that he was teaching their children Chinese. He'd take them out of actual school, and he'd film these videos. Initially, most people Henry talked to thought Lu He was doing a good thing for their community. The children were getting paid, at least a little, maybe 50 cents for appearing in a video. Henry said that's as much as many people in Malawi live on in a day. Despite that, it was a small amount of money. They felt they were actually getting something from him. So they would still treat him as a king.

They would still treat him as a hero in the village. Given the huge infusion of Chinese investment in Malawi, you can see how teaching kids Chinese, as Luh He claimed to be doing, seemed like a good idea. The assumption of the parents was that since it's, It is hard to get an employment in Malawi. I think this guy will at least bring an opportunity for children to access jobs in Chinese shops.

Because by the end of the day, they'll be able to understand Chinese and they'll be able to translate Chinese to the Malian customers who are buying products from these Chinese. This is what the parents could see in this Chinese guy. Henry's saying that the parents assumed that this was an opportunity for their children to access jobs in Chinese shops, because at the end of the day, they'll be able to understand Chinese and translate it from Malawian customers. Henry had to tell some of the parents what had actually been happening. That their kids weren't learning Chinese. That while their kids were making 50 cents here and there, Luka was making thousands of dollars a day.

And maybe worst of all, that millions of people had seen videos of their children. saying horrible things. I remember when we taught them that this is the meaning of what their children were saying in the videos. Their parents cried. Henry says this is one of just countless stories of Malawians being exploited by Chinese businesses. After the BBC documentary came out, China banned advertisements for those so-called blessings videos on social media and shopping websites, although the industry still exists. Lujah was arrested in Zambia.

A Malawian court eventually convicted him of racial discrimination against children, and he was ordered to leave the country. Still, seeing this story up close made Henry much more skeptical of foreign investment in Malawi and about whether an arrangement between his country and another can ever truly be a win-win. It is still expecting me until you do with day. I have to be honest. What happens when no one bothers to clear up the context of a video guy, on viral, people in the comments start to fill in the blanks, and what they fill them with

is disturbing. Which brings us to that first video we watched, the one from R-slashy, showing a physical altercation between Chinese and African workers at a construction site. The commenters on this particular thread mostly seemed to assume that this was a local African worker, retaliating against a bad Chinese boss. And that it was just one example of many, of Chinese bosses imposing prison-like atmospheres on local work sites, examples which have been documented around Africa. The Directorate of Criminal Investigations has arrested a Chinese national after a disturbing video clip

in which it was caught whipping a Kenyan employee went viral on social media. We don't abuse our bloodas and sit at here. You are here making our money for free. It's not China here. That assumption that the video from our trashy is a Chinese boss abusing a worker isn't baseless. But sometimes these workplace disputes aren't fueled by racism. They're the product of a genuine misunderstanding or cultural differences. Like in Algeria, where all of the housing was being built,

there were rumors that Chinese workers on construction sites were actually prisoners. A lot of scholars have been trying to research this and look at what started these rumors. And just to be straightforward, there's no evidence that suggests that these are prisoners. But what happens is oftentimes these laborers, the workers, they live in compounds, sometimes a bit kind of isolated from the communities in which they work. Oftentimes they might be seen wearing uniforms. I spent a little bit of time in China in 2002. And it was always interesting to me to see the construction workers who were working on new construction because they seemed to be effectively like migrant workers who were living at the base of the construction site that they were creating.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's what started some of these rumors about them, this kind of these workers being prisoners. And so it's really interesting. But that also tells us that there wasn't a lot of, interests on either side to really get to know the other side. We talked to another expert, a professor at Cornell, who has studied the working conditions of Chinese companies in Africa, specifically Ethiopia. Professor Ding Fei says people speaking in generalizations are almost never getting it right.

A lot of the nuances and the day-to-day interactions are missed in those, like, very sweeping accounts. Professor Fay reiterated that there's a lot of variety among experiences. across an entire continent. Some Chinese companies are tight with the government. Some aren't. Some hire lots of local workers in managerial positions and have high employee satisfaction.

Some don't. This is not a single Chinese. There are Chinese states, Chinese financiers, and different types of Chinese companies, and even different groups of Chinese workers. So are you talking about managers, or are you talking about, like, service workers who are on short-term contract?

So there are so much heterogeneity within the Chinese community. But you wouldn't know that from reading the comments on R-slash-trashy, which, remember, were mostly critical of China, and all too often went beyond being critical of the Chinese government to being racist about Chinese people. And these very same types of videos are also weaponized to fuel racist vitriolic theories about black Africans.

4chan and 8chan are littered with videos of African workers arguing with Chinese workers, where they're distorted into hateful memes. It's not just white supremacists who spread this type of meme. Sometimes some of these comments will really show kind of racialized assumptions, comments about how African workers are not, they don't have a hard work ethic, or they're not punctual. They're kind of common racist tropes, right?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. There is no way around sort of discussing this in terms of these racial biases and racialized kind of work spaces where you have a Chinese boss coming in with a specific set of assumptions and stereotypes. And so these videos go viral because they reinforce this perception. But they are really disturbing videos when you see them. And when you look at the comments, it's sometimes even more disturbing to see just how normalized racism is among some of these commentators. You used the word earlier,

reinforce, right? These videos reinforce negative stereotypes effectively. And I think what's interesting to me, and I wonder if you agree with this, is that some of these videos seem to reinforce really problematic views on both sides,

right? If you come to the video from the perspective of, oh, African workers are less capable, they're lazier, they don't show up on time. If you come to this video with that, you might have that view reinforced by this video. And if you come to this video with the assumption that, like, you know, China is trying to take over African spaces and And Chinese workers are cruel, and China's culture of, I don't know, taking over is cruel and

inhumane. You might also have that view reinforced. And this is really tricky to talk about, right? But it's, I think, what you're getting at in some of these cases is it's possible that there's a kernel of truth in kind of how people are viewing this stuff, but they're viewing it through a sort of like generalized lens as opposed to understanding the kind of cultural differences that bring these things into sharp relief. Yes, I absolutely agree. They don't show us the context. We don't see where this is happening or why. There's no conversation. It's almost like

if you believed or if you were buying into the stereotype that Chinese, workers or Chinese companies in Africa are the new slavery, the new age of slavery, or this is the new age of bounded labor, right? And you'll find in these videos enough to reinforce that. And then if you come into these videos thinking, well, but then these African workers are not necessarily up for the task, then you will find in those videos what reinforces that. So here's what actually happened in the video from R-slash-trashy. It was filmed in Sierra Leone at a mine.

All right, we'll move on to Sierra Leone, where a Chinese mine worker added Akoli Lee, beg a party, the Takuli mines has attracted wild condemnation after a show, a video showed him attacking a Sierraonian safety officer on site. It was a workplace dispute. The media officer for the mine where this happened gave an interview shortly after the incident with a Nigerian-based media company called News Central TV. And what happened is that previously, before now, we had several issues with regards to safety, environment. And the guy in the blue is Chinese.

The other man is a Sierra Leonean safety officer. These two men are fighting about whether or not the mine is safe. So it was actually trying to sensitize some of the local staff on site about some of the safety measures that has to be taken in place. Whenever you are on site, then the Chinese team. We still don't have the full context here. But you can't assume that the Chinese worker has more power in the situation than the safety officer just because he's from China and the safety officer is from Sierra Leone. It's more complicated than that.

And people who are using this video to build racist arguments don't even have the most basic facts right. The narrative the Chinese government wants to promote is that, China, and by extension Chinese people at large, are free of the kind of prejudices that you see in the comments of the worker dispute video, that any Chinese-backed project in Africa is done in a spirit of equality, that they want the relationships they've built with African nations to be win-win. The extent to which that's true is actually not for us to say over here in the United States on the other side of our screens. The internet and videos like the ones we talked about today can make us feel like we have this window into these global economic relationships that

really, we don't. Not the full picture anyway. Yeah, I think what's challenging here is that we supposedly are getting so much more information than we used to, supposedly, thanks to the fact that the modern internet allows us to upload video from all over the world. And in a way, that is true. We are getting way more information. I never would have learned anything about the long and complicated history we just went through without seeing some viral-ass video, right? So thanks R. Trashy for leading to my edification, truly. But the problem is also that you really need way more context than our modern experience

of this kind of media offers. And the comments, which don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the comments and the threads. The endless threads. The endless threads. You know, unlike endless thread, the comments often don't help us. We need the context. So, you know, put a damn caption on your repost of the viral video for crying out loud. Old man yells at World from Rocking Chair.

And bring me a blanket and some tea. This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter and co-hosted by myself, Ben Brock Johnson, and my good friend. Amory Sievertson. Mix and sound design by Paul Vycus. The rest of our team is Emily Jenkowski, Summata Joshi, and Dean Russell. Special thanks to the team behind the BBC Africa-I documentary Racism for Sale, including Runaku Salina and Henry Mahongo. You can watch the full documentary on the BBC's website. We'll link to it in our show notes and on our website, WBUR.org slash endless threat.

Endless thread is a show about the blurred lines between R-slash-Trashy and the defining geopolitical forces of the modern era. Oh, God. Please don't let those lines get any blurrier, folks. Please know. If you have an untold history or an unsolved internet mystery that you want us to solve for you or tell, you know what to do. Email us, endless thread at wbUR.org. See you next week. Bye.