Category: Uncategorized

The growing problem of immigration

Once more proving that the USA is not, and has never been, “a nation of immigrants”:

Proponents of immigration to the United States often contend that the country is a “nation of immigrants,” and certainly immigration has played an important role in American history. Nevertheless, immigrants currently represent 13.5 percent of the total U.S. population, the highest percentage in over 100 years. The Census Bureau projects that by 2025, the immigrant share of the population will reach 15 percent, surpassing the United States’ all-time high of 14.8 percent, reached in 1890. Without a change in policy, that share will continue to increase throughout the twenty-first century. Counting immigrants plus their descendants, the Pew Research Center estimates that since 1965, when the United States liberalized its laws, immigration has added 72 million people to the country—a number larger than the current population of France.

Given these numbers, it is striking that public officials in the United States have focused almost exclusively on the country’s 11 to 12 million illegal immigrants, who account for only one quarter of the total immigrant population. Legal immigration has a much larger impact on the United States, yet the country’s leaders have seldom asked the big questions. What, for example, is the absorption capacity of the nation’s schools and infrastructure? How will the least-skilled Americans fare in labor market competition with immigrants? Or, perhaps most importantly, how many immigrants can the United States assimilate into its culture? Trump has not always approached these questions carefully, or with much sensitivity, but to his credit he has at least raised them.

Notice that the intrinsic dishonesty of the civic nationalists rears its head again when they claim second-generation Mexican immigrants are NOT immigrants, because paperwork, but fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-generation American colonists somehow are. How could the USA ever have been “a nation of immigrants” when, dating back to the American Revolution, the majority of white Americans of English descent were citizens born in the United States?

Where was George Washington born? Where was Thomas Jefferson born? Where was John Adams born? From where did they emigrate?

The dead end of rap

I was talking to a young girl who intensely dislikes rap the other day. When I asked her why she disliked it, she said, “it’s so boring”. And, despite being a fan of Public Enemy since the “Sophisticated Bitch” and “98 Oldsmobile” days, and having been one of the very few non-Africans at the PE/NWA concert at First Avenue in 1988, I had to admit that she is absolutely right. Rap simply hasn’t gone anywhere musically since NWA’s innovation of posing as modern gangsters and dropping f-bombs every fourth word; how can anyone who has ever heard Chuck D bear to listen to Jay-Z ruining yet another lovely song with his inept, droning monologues?

Seriously, is there a bigger pop music abomination than the massive steaming dump that Jay-Z inexplicably slathers all over Alphaville’s “Forever Young”?

But when I got to thinking about it, I realized that this musical dead end was inevitable. It was always going to be the case. Most of the early “rap is crap” critics were committing a category error when they complained about “rap music”. Their instincts were right, but their sneering arguments were mostly off base and therefore unconvincing. The fact is that rap is not, technically speaking, music at all. To call it music is akin to describing “scatting” or “falsetto” or “rhythm” or “electric guitar” as music. It is, rather, a non-melodic vocal styling; it is an element of music, or if you prefer, a musical tool, rather than a form of music in itself.

And while that vocal styling can be utilized in a broad variety of music, from metal to ambient, it is not music in itself. What is often known as “rap music” is a degraded, primitive form of music created mostly by non-musicians, which is necessarily going to be either sample-based (Public Enemy), childishly simple (Dr. Dre), or an additional vocal track added to existing music (Puff Daddy, Jay-Z).

In other words, “rap music” was never anything more than a proto-SJW seize-and-ruin operation and an exercise in branding. That’s why it hasn’t gone anywhere. It can’t go anywhere because there is no actual vehicle to do so.

This isn’t to say that rap hasn’t contributed anything to actual forms of music as a vocal styling. Dave Draiman does not rap, but his staccato delivery and multi-syllabic lyrics made Disturbed a better, more interesting metal band. I also suspect that the move from one bass drum to two, such as one sees in bands like Disturbed and Babymetal, represents a real advance in rock drumming that stems in part from the influence of faster, more complicated vocal stylings.

And who hasn’t enjoyed Beck or twentyonepilots making use of the various possibilities presented by it? But as a musical form in itself, it simply does not exist.

BOOK REVIEW: The Collapsing Empire

An established author who wishes to remain anonymous became interested in Scalzi’s latest as a result of the various shenanigans surrounding it and sent me his review of the book for posting here. His opinion of it is modestly more positive than mine, but I post it here, unedited, for the record. I also sent him a copy of Corrosion, so it will be interesting to see his perspective on that if he happens to read and review it.

The Collapsing Empire started its career as a published book with a major disadvantage – it had a great deal of hype.  Depending on who you believe, The Collapsing Empire is either the greatest space opera since Dune and Foundation or a millstone around Tor Books’ collective neck.  John Scalzi, known for Old Man’s War and Redshirts, has the problem that his latest novel will be judged against the hype, instead of being judged on its own merits.  In writing this review, I have done my best to ignore both sides of the ongoing culture wars and judge the book by its own merits.  You can judge for yourself if I have succeeded.

In the far future, interstellar travel is only possible through the Flow – an alternate dimension that allows FTL travel between colonised star systems.  (The science explanation is highly dubious, but I wouldn’t hold that against anyone.)  Humanity is united by the Interdependency, a network of colonies that are (mostly) dependent on each other to survive, and ruled by the Houses, led by the ‘Emperox.’  Unfortunately for the inhabitants of this universe, the Flow is actually changing – it’s either shifting routes (what the bad guys believe) or collapsing completely (what the good guys fear).  Either way, humanity is going to be in for some pretty rough times.  The Interdependency is so interdependent that only one world is habitable without massive tech support.

This sounds like the basis for a great space opera.  Humanity can – humanity must – find a way to survive when the Flow vanishes and all of its scattered star systems suddenly find themselves on their own.  (The tech base described in the book should certainly be up to the task.)  A lone star system can work to survive when the Interdependency vanishes.  Or humanity can find a way to travel FTL without using the Flow, or find a way to bend the Flow to humanity’s will.  Or …

These don’t happen.  Maybe they will in the sequel (the book ends on a cliff-hanger) but they don’t in The Collapsing Empire.  Instead, we get a mixture of local politics, interstellar shipping concerns and interstellar politics.  Some of these blend seamlessly into the story line, others don’t quite make sense.  I think it’s fairly safe to say that the most exciting part of the story is the mutiny in the prologue, which honestly doesn’t make sense (the mutineers are taking a terrible risk) and is completely unnecessary.  I’m happy to enjoy a Game of Thrones-style story about mighty aristocracies battling for supremacy, but that wasn’t what I was promised when I downloaded this book.

The book flows well – I read it in an hour – but it was oddly choppy.  There are aspects that really needed an editor’s touch – the mutiny in the prologue stops long enough for the author to lecture us on his universe, which isn’t necessary as all the main points are covered in CH4 – and others that needed more consideration.  I had problems following the flow – hah – of time within the universe; we are told, on one hand, that it takes months to move from Hub to end, yet Marce leaves Hub (after a largely pointless escape sequence) and in the very next section he’s on Hub.

Cardenia Wu-Patrick is probably the most likable character in the story, although she takes pointless risks and is generally ill-prepared to assume the post of ‘Emperox.’  (Her aide quips that nice people don’t get power, which misses the point that Cardenia inherited her power – she didn’t earn it.)  Marce Claremont is young and overshadowed by his sister, who I felt would have made a more interesting POV character.  And Kiva Lagos is – put bluntly – a potty-mouthed bully and a sexual predator.  Her good aspects are overshadowed by her bad points.

I admit it – I cringed when I read the first section, where it is clear that Kiva has pulled a very junior member of her ship’s crew into sexual congress.  Consent is dubious at the very least – there isn’t even a sense that he’s using her as she’s using him.  And then, she comes on to Marce later in the book in a manner that, if she were a man, would be considered borderline rape.  To call her ‘problematic’ is to understate the case.  This might not be a problem if she was the villain – or the text even acknowledged the issues – but it does not.

There are other issues, deeper issues, that offend my inner critic.  On one hand, Count Claremont – the physicist who first realised that something was wrong with the Flow – makes snarky remarks about the lack of peer review, yet his own work has the same problem.  While this is acknowledged, it makes no sense.  Modern-day governments have no problem finding qualified scientists and putting them to work on secret government projects.  Why can’t the Interdependency do the same?  And on the other, the bad guys – who have also realised that there is something wrong with the Flow – have a plan to take advantage of the crisis, but don’t seem to realise the potential of their own technology.  It suggests, very strongly, that no one takes the crisis completely seriously.

And yet, it is made clear that the Flow has shifted before.  Humanity has lost contact with Earth – in the distant past – and a relatively small colony world in the more recent past – but this does not appear to alarm anyone.  Is Earth really that insignificant?  One may draw a comparison between the Flow’s slow collapse and global warming, but the loss of two entire worlds is a little more significant than anything we’ve seen on Earth.  I would have expected a serious effort to reduce the degree of interdependency since that disaster.  If nothing else, shipping foodstuffs and suchlike between star systems must be an economic nightmare.  (And the ‘lie’ that binds the Interdependency together is obvious from the setting.)

To be honest, the text tries to balance humour with story and fails.  The fact that there is a legal way to mutiny – which no one bothers to follow – make me smile and roll my eyes at the mixture of humour and absurdity.  There are moments of banter that are oddly misplaced or unintentionally ironic.  The ship names sound as though they have come out of Iain M. Banks – Kiva’s ship is called the ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’ – but they have a very definite air of absurdity.  Banks made it work because the names suited the Culture – they don’t work so well in The Collapsing Empire.  And the very first line in the book is stolen directly from Scooby Doo.

In the end, The Collapsing Empire left me feeling oddly disappointed.  It’s shorter than I expected, given the price, and very little is resolved in the first book – the bad guys have taken a few blows, but the good guys haven’t even started to come to grips with the real problem.  I know that most books are set up as either trilogies or open-ended series these days, but there should be at least some resolution.  (If only because the second book might be delayed, increasing reader frustration.)  Off Armageddon Reef and The Final Empire, both also published by Tor, show how this can be done.

The Collapsing Empire is not the best SF novel of the decade, nor is it the worst.  It has high ideals and grand ambitions, but it doesn’t live up to them (nor the hype).  I probably won’t be picking up the sequel.

Upheaval in South Korea

Those massive protests have finally borne fruit:

Former South Korean President Park Geun-hye, who was removed from office earlier this month, was arrested Friday on charges related to abuse of power and accepting bribes.

“Major crimes have been ascertained and there is a concern that the suspect might attempt to destroy evidence,” Judge Kang Bu-young said in a text message to reporters. “The court recognizes the need, necessity and reasonableness of the suspect’s arrest.”

Prosecutors announced Monday that they were seeking to arrest Park on charges relating to abuse of power, accepting bribes and leaking important information. “The suspect abused the mighty power and position as President to take bribes from companies and infringed upon the freedom of corporate management and leaked important confidential official information,” said the statement from the Seoul Central District Prosecutor’s Office.

The level of international instability seems to be getting increasingly out of control. But is it the globalists losing control, or is it instigated chaos out of which order will be ever-so-helpfully offered?

Or, as is most likely the case, is it some combination of the two?

How is that diversity working out for you?

Not so well, according to Marvel:

Part of it, but I think also it seemed like tastes changed, because stuff you had been doing in the past wasn’t working the same way.  Did you perceive that or are we misreading that?

No, I think so.  I don’t know if those customers with the tastes that had been around for three years really supporting nearly anything that we would try, anything that we would attempt, any of the new characters we brought up, either they weren’t shopping in that time period, or maybe like you said their tastes have changed.

There was definitely a sort of nose-turning at the things that we had been doing successfully for the past three years, no longer viable.  We saw that, and that’s what we had to react to.  Yes, it’s all of that.

Now the million-dollar question.  Why did those tastes change?

I don’t know if that’s a question for me.  I think that’s a better question for retailers who are seeing all publishers.  What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity.  They didn’t want female characters out there.  That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not.  I don’t know that that’s really true, but that’s what we saw in sales.

We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up against.  That was difficult for us because we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out and nothing new really worked.

I’m sure we’re all shocked that She-Thor and SuperBurqahGirl didn’t work out for them. Notice that all that equality and diversity didn’t bring in any of the much-vaunted diversity market either. It never does. Diversity always destroys, whether it is a society or a comic book series.

You can’t domesticate ferals

It doesn’t work on an individual level and it doesn’t work any better on a societal level. This couple’s lethal experience is an apt metaphor for the cataclysmic error of Western societies:

A 23-year-old homeless man who was taken in by a woman and given a job by her husband has been charged with attacking and killing her and her 13-year-old son at their family home.  Former ballroom dancer Tracey Wilkinson, 50, was pronounced dead inside her £440,000 detached property in Stourbridge, West Midlands, while her company director husband Peter, 47, was found in the garden with stab wounds to his chest and back.

He is continuing to fight for his life and is understood to be in a critical but stable condition in hospital. The couple’s teenage son Pierce died in hospital. It has since been claimed that the alleged killer may have been given a home by the family just before Christmas and was also offered a job at Mr Wilkinson’s firm. Friends suggested the Wilkinsons had been taking in ‘down and outs’ and police say they are probing the claims as a ‘line of questioning’.

This afternoon Aaron Barley, of no fixed address, was charged with murder and attempted murder.

There is a reason the Good Samaritan put up the injured traveler at an inn. He didn’t take him home or adopt him.

On the plus side, no doubt the couple felt very good about themselves right up until the time their feral pet started stabbing them. I have zero sympathy for people like this. They were so intent on doing “good” that they failed in their primary duty as parents, which is to protect their children from the world.

Crumbling infrastructure, crumbling society

It’s interesting to drive over medieval and Roman-era bridges in Europe, then witness reports like these coming out of progressive Not-America:

Atlanta’s notoriously tangled commutes were thrown into disarray Friday after a massive fire caused a bridge on Interstate 85 to collapse, completely shutting down the heavily traveled highway through the heart of the city.

Traffic was bumper to bumper on nearby streets as people scrambled to find alternate routes after the fire broke out during rush hour Thursday afternoon. However, officials said no one was hurt despite dramatic images of towering flames and plumes of smoke.

“This is about as serious a transportation crisis as we can imagine,” Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said.

As a result of the interstate damage, many commuters in some of Atlanta’s densely populated northern suburbs will be forced to find alternate routes or ride public transit for the foreseeable future.

Georgia’s top transportation official said there’s no way to tell when the highway, which carries 250,000 cars a day, can be safely reopened to traffic in either direction following the collapse in the northbound lanes leading out of the city.

“We will have to continue to evaluate the situation and adjust as we do,” Department of Transportation Commissioner Russell McMurry said. “This incident — make no bones about it — will have a tremendous impact on travel.”

McMurry said Friday in a news release that bridge inspectors have determined the southbound lanes of I-85, adjacent to the section that collapsed, also were damaged by the fire and will need to remain closed for the foreseeable future.

It is average IQ that is the prime determinant of what a society will be like. And according to my calculations, the average US IQ has declined by at least eight points since 1965. If you don’t maintain your population demographics, both in terms of quantity and quality, your society will decline. And if you don’t maintain your infrastructure, it will collapse.

Unfortunately, addressing either problem, let alone actually doing anything to fix them, is presently considered unthinkable. That will change, sooner or later, but how soon it changes will play a significant role in the shape of the eventual outcome.

Jailing sanctuary city sheriffs

Texas Gov. Abbott is making a strong case to succeed the God-Emperor in 2024:

On Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show,” Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) said he will confront the issue of cities that refuse to comply with immigration law by signing legislation that could jail sheriffs of sanctuary cities.

Abbott said, “We have been pushing a piece of legislation in Texas that is going to pass that I will be signing into law that imposes even sterner penalties on counties. It will include things such as further defunding them. It will impose fines. And it could impose jail time for these sheriffs to enforce the laws. Oddly enough these sheriffs could wind up behind the very bars they are releasing these criminals from.”

I know nothing about this guy except that he’s coming out strong on both corporate interference in state politics and sanctuary cities. It’s good to see.

The issue of States’ Rights was settled in 1865. Ignore the mendacious appeals to federalism by the Left. Hell, ignore all of their mendacious appeals to our ideals. We don’t have any ideals any more because we don’t live in Pangloss’s ideal world.

Victory first.

Diversity in comics

Jon Del Arroz surveys the political diversity of Marvel:

Marvel has a diversity problem.

In that they have none in terms of diversity of thought. They are a pure social justice propaganda arm. This is dangerous when it comes to creating art, as if you have everyone thinking in lockstep, unable to get outside the box, you’ll have creative stagnation. More than that, when you turn children’s adventure fiction into adult message browbeating, you lose any semblance of fun that a product formerly had. It’s no wonder that sales have dropped by about half, when they have an entire writing core of every single one of their monthly writers hell-bent on a crusade of alienating half of the country in some social engineering through comics.  I don’t exaggerate my numbers either, and I did some leg work for you all so you might better make educated purchases, or lack thereof, of Marvel Comics.

Just looking on the comics rack, you can see where Marvel has decided to make a foolish stand. No sane person would go and buy these comics anymore, there’s nothing of value there. All they have left is legacy purchasers who have made such a habit of picking them up that they can’t drop it. Even those have been dwindling because Marvel’s taken their political nonsense to more of an extreme than Tor Books or Hollywood itself. Stories themselves don’t exist in a vacuum, however, it stems from their editorial and who they hire to write, which are no longer the brightest creative minds, but SJWs who yell the loudest and who purposefully virtue signal at every turn.

According to marvel.com, there are 18 writers on the current releases. I went through each and every one of their twitter accounts to give you a summary of where they spend their time on social media in terms of politics. I don’t mind people getting political occasionally, or even necessarily holding left wing views, but when it’s constant beating the drum of anger and hate, that’s what makes an SJW, and that’s where one needs to stay away (and is a primary reason for Marvel’s steep sales decline in recent years).  Here’s a brief summary of the writers’ twitter feeds, as I’ve gone through all of them for you:

Mike Costa – Constant Anti-Trump posts.


Jason Aaron – Anti-Trump, has #resist greenpeace retweet from inauguration. However, he doesn’t post politically very often, not pushing some anger crusade all the time.

Brian Michael Bendis – Anti-Trump posts, but posts so much it’s not a large percentage of his tweets.


Cullen Bunn – Rabid anti-Trump.


Becky Cloonan – a couple of snarky anti-Trump posts pre-election, but no political posts since. From the feeds, appears to be the sanest of the Marvel staff.


Gerry Duggan – Constant Anti-Trump posts, retweets Bernie (he can still win!).


Al Ewing – British, and doesn’t seem to post a lot of American politics, but very heavily steeped in globalism in immigration “rights” in his posts. Anti-Western civilization. 


Roxanne Gay –  Constant rants about feminism, anti-Trump posts. 


Zac Gorman – Complains about Republicans as “joke”, but only one recent post as such. Low percentage of political tweets.


Derek Landy – Anti-Trump, not overwhelming in political posts. Mostly sticks to posts about writing.


Kate Leth – Regular anti-Trump posts. Constant complaints about some boogeyman “privilege”, rambles at racist, sexist, etc., “white dudes”.  Rants about queer issues.


Stuart Moore – Regular posts anti-republican, anti-Trump.


Greg Pak – Complains about “representation” of different races. Lots of anti-Trump posts.


Dan Slott – Anti-trump rants all the time. 


Charles Soule – Constant anti-trump rants.


Nick Spencer – Rants about trump/republicans and calls anyone who disagrees with him flat out evil.


G.Willow Wilson – “Muslim” Ms. Marvel writer, rants anti-Trump posts all the time.


Chip Zdarksy – Constant anti-Trump posts.

UPDATE 3/22/17: Found another crop of Marvel writers: http://delarroz.com/?p=687  still batting 1000%. Looks like blackballing is real as the sample size becomes far less coincidental.

18/18 Marvel writers, 100%, are extreme left wing ideologues who hate half of the country, have nothing nice to say about the USA or its president ever.

So, here’s the question. What do we do about it? We are working on a graphic novelization of QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted, as you can see below. And we do have the rights to a considerable quantity of stories. But we have one – precisely one – self-appointed volunteer who is creating this as a labor of love in his spare time.

Is this something where a Kickstarter would make sense? I don’t like the idea of relying solely upon the Dread Ilk for this, as you are already supporting more vital projects such as Gab, Infogalactic, and Castalia House. Those are strategic projects of general interest, whereas something like this is more specific to a single converged market.

My thought is that it would be interesting to subvert the current superhero genre with a group of nationalist superheroes who are totally opposed to the evil would-be rulers of the world; they’d be seen as villains, of course, by those who romanticized saving the UN every Saturday morning in the 1970s and 80s.

They’d be hunted relentlessly by the conventional superheroes as well as by the UN, Interpol, and all the globalist organizations. Marvel occasionally flirts with this sort of thing, except their themes are incoherent because they want their heroes to be personally rebellious and independent while at the same time being slavish servants of the global government and SJW ideology. We could call it Alt-Hero; typical scenarios would be foiling attempted assassinations of populist politicians, rescuing conservative speakers from antifa and Black Bloc mobs, and preventing mad corporatist schemes to do terrible things to large populations in the name of progress.

The advantage of the Kickstarter approach is that if there was not sufficient interest and the project failed as a result, there would be very little waste of time, effort, and money. What do you think? Is it something you’d find of interest? Is it a ridiculous idea? Is it worth looking into? The thing is, Castalia is going to publish at least one hardcover/softcover graphic novel anyhow, and so the writing, production and distribution elements are already in place. And every de-convergence starts with one small step.

Enjoying their tolerance

It’s always mildly amusing to see progressives forced to face the consequences of their moral posturing, however disastrous those consequences may be for everyone.

I’ve lived in Los Angeles for over a decade and have seen my fair share of transgender/gender fluid people. They in no way offend me. I’d consider myself pretty progressive and tolerant of most things…except maybe people who identify as a person wearing socks with sandals. We all have our line in the sand and that’s totally mine. But how transgender people feel, how they choose to dress or any surgeries they get, don’t infringe on any parts of my life, so I support their decision to live as they see fit. I’ve also seen my fair share of transgender women in the women’s restroom before. Not ALL the time. But over the past few years, I’d say 4-5 that I noticed. Men…who were in some stage of transition and making every attempt to be a woman from mascara to heels. Transgenders who certainly felt comfortable in the women’s room and probably frightened to go into the men’s. At these times, I smiled…I peed…and life went on. But 2 weeks ago something very different happened.

I was at Disneyland with my son, my friend and her son. We were over in California Adventure in the food court area. We’d just finished eating and decided to pee before we headed out to The Little Mermaid. I went to the bathroom while she watched our boys in their strollers, and then I did the same. (For anyone who’s tried to fit a stroller in a bathroom stall, you get it).

I was off to the side waiting with the two boys, when I noticed a man walk into the restroom. My first thought was “Oh shit, he’s walked in the wrong restroom by mistake. lol” He took a few more steps, at which point he would’ve definitely noticed all the women lined up and still kept walking. My next thought was, “Maybe he’s looking for his wife…or child and they’ve been in here a while.” But he didn’t call out any names or look around. He just stood off to the side and leaned up against the wall. At this point I’m like, “WTF? Ok there is definitely a very large, burly man in a Lakers jersey who just walked in here. Am I the only one seeing this?” I surveyed the room and saw roughly 12 women, children in tow, staring at him with the exact same look on their faces. Everyone was visibly uncomfortable. We were all trading looks and motioning our eyes over to him…like “What is he doing in here?” Yet every single one of us was silent. And this is the reason I wrote this blog.

If this had been 5 years ago, you bet your ass every woman in there would’ve been like, “Ummm what are you doing in here?”, but in 2017? The mood has shifted. We had been culturally bullied into silenced. Women were mid-changing their baby’s diapers on the changing tables and I could see them shifting to block his view. But they remained silent. I stayed silent. We all did. Every woman who exited a stall and immediately zeroed right in on him…said nothing. And why? B/c I and I’m sure all the others were scared of that “what if”. What if I say something and he says he “identifies as a woman” and then I come off as the intolerant asshole at the happiest place on earth? So we all stood there, shifting in our uncomfortableness…trading looks. I saw two women leave the line with their children. Still nothing was said. An older lady said to me out loud, “What is he doing in here?” I’m ashamed to admit I silently shrugged and mouthed, “I don’t know.” She immediately walked out, from a bathroom she had every right to use without fear.

It’s always informative to spot the exact point at which the progressive virtue-signaling stops. It’s invariably somewhere between “violence directed at me” and “potential violence directed at my children.” Adjust your rhetoric accordingly.