Some Pushback On The Frum Front

I wish the US government would treat the State of Israel the same way it treats the Islamic Republic of Iran as well. So maybe K-Lo is a secret anti-Zionist? After all Joseph Sobran used to write for National Review back in the 1980s. At the time he was one of the very few journalists of any ideological background willing to question the “special relationship” between the US and Israel.

Seconding rea, here.

As for Frum – the AEI and NRO have negative credibility, so Frum’s account is thereby proven. And I love AEI’s new definition of ‘quit’. If I worked for them, and said that I’d still collect a paycheck, but not do any work, would they accept that?

As for Frum himself, he’s still a hard-core right-winger, always enthusiastic for helping the rich and f*cking everybody else. Frum has merely failed by the latest redefinition of ‘hard-core right-winger’, which excludes anybody who notices that a tactic is failing, and would like to change to better tactics.

A stopped clock is right twice a day, and a parrot can accidentally say something at just the right moment, and a mindless repeater of talking points can occasionally remind us of a valuable part of the truth held by the other side.

And then there’s KLo, who can somehow manage to subtract the partial truth or valuable insight from even the most mindless of talking points.

Frum is the one who accused Jimmy Carter of being a ‘traitor’ on national radio after Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. This guy is not a scholar, he’s a hired thug in a suit.

Norman Ornstein, by contrast, is a scholar, who somehow manages to come up with thoughtful stuff despite his affiliation with AEI. Why they ignore him but make Frum walk the plank is beyond me.

Point taken. On the other hand, how long would the Oilers or the Kings have kept paying Gretzky’s salary if he kept scoring own goals? I remember Ornstein being pretty public in 2008 with some of the conclusions he was reaching about electoral politics that were severely at odds with GOP talking points.

6:Does anybody still think this is a political party capapble of engaging in small-d democratic politics?

Do you mean can it win elections? Obviously it can, at the very least 40% of elections nationwide.

Should we let it win elections? We can at least approach this theoretically, even presuming we have insufficient practical power to prevent it. There are many historical instances of liberalism, in its self-admiration, allowing anti-liberal factions to attain some degree of power through democratic processes with catastrophic consequences.

I might claim that California, and the US to a lesser degree, are already suffering the consequences.

Billmon on disinformation and the “mirror image” technique. March 25

Just as some speculated that the purpose of the Clinton Impeachment was to make a Bush impeachment politically impossible. I have long believed that the Republican Party uses various accusations of eliminationism and delegitimization etc in order to preempt and disarm its opponents (and enable itself) of illiberal means to save the country after Republicans have driven it over a cliff and are the only political faction left willing and capable of taking control illiberally.

After decades of claims that liberals are totalitarians, won’t we look silly when we protest Republican totalitarianism?

“D) And now its premier policy institute, which are at least supposed to allow some intellectual freedom to debate, what the party stands for, what policies it thinks would be good for the country etc. is purging itself of scholars who refuse to toe the party line in their work.”

That’s not ‘now’; AEI has been a hacktank for many, many years. Remember, these were the guys who hired Charles Murray *after* he wrote ‘The Bell Curve’; this is where both authors of ‘Dow 36,000’ work. This is where the Chalabi Cartel lived and worked; AEI pushed hard for the invasion of Iraq.

Re: Norm Ornstein. My theory is that he’s the ‘one honest man’, kept there just in case God would otherwise smite AEI with a rain of pigsh*t. Of course, this leads to the question of why an excellent scholar with an excellent research and publican record and good contacts would stay at AEI.

some speculated that the purpose of the Clinton Impeachment was to make a Bush impeachment politically impossible.

Just as Obama won’t allow Bush and Cheney to be prosecuted for war crimes, because if he did, sooner or latter the R’s would trump up some bogus charges on which to prosecuted Democratic ex-presidents.

hahahahaha! welcome to the free market, Frummy boy! I like the link on the FrumForum to the commentary “Frum may need Obamacare.” If only!

wankers the lot of ’em.

is that Frum’s team?

i trust he’ll play for free, though?

Of course, this leads to the question of why an excellent scholar with an excellent research and publica[tio]n record and good contacts would stay at AEI.

The words “no undergraduate teaching” spring to mind, for some reason.

(I have an excellent publican record, as all the local publicans will tell you, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what you meant.)

After decades of claims that liberals are totalitarians, won’t we look silly when we protest Republican totalitarianism?

Um, if and when things get to that point, “looking silly” will be the least of our worries. The technique you describe will get us there, certainly … but I don’t think they’ll actually hang onto it once they’ve achieved their goal. Though, upon reflection, they might, because even after they’ve swept away the last remnants of the old republic, they’ll need to be able to whine about something.

Given what happened to Frum, Norm has best be looking, because it’s clear that the BS has hit the fan.

In that case, he needs to start blogging here.

It is funny, though (in the usual antibiotic-resistant TB sense), that the craziness has reached the point that not even David fits in with the modern The Handmaid’s Tale crowd. Is there no Frum in Gilead?

My take on the Cantor ‘attack’ was that it was not random, that stretches credibility too far. For a Jewish member of Congress to have their office hit by a stray bullet after engaging in brownshirt rhetoric against Democrats just strains coincidence too far.

I think the point of the ‘attack’ was to legitimize the hoped-for attacks on Democrats. There is no definitive proof that the bullet was a spent bullet that had been fired upwards and come down in a random location. It could equally well have been a bullet fired from a catapult at short range. Same effect, break the window, but guarantee no likelihood of lethal injury should someone get in the way. The attack also gives Cantor cover for his claims that the Democrats are to blame for the hostility he is directing against them.

At the moment the GOP have got their supporters whipped up into a frenzy. Before long one of them is going to kill someone. Remember that the last round of hate radio came to a close when McVeigh set the OKC bomb. The hate radio jocks were quickly thrown under the bus after that. To protect their position, they have to lay a false narrative in which they can claim that the Democrats ‘started it’. So a fake attack on their own office, after hours, makes a good start.

The Italian neo-fascists attempted that particular tactic when they murdered almost as many as McVeigh in the Bologna station massacre. And the troubles in Ulster were started by a Protestant group that murdered a Protestant woman and were attempting to blow up a dam in a scheme designed to lay the blame on the IRA. This type of false flag activity is not at all unusual in terrorist organizations.

The Tea Party is not a terrorist organization. But it has been designed to attract as wide a raange of angry people as possible. As a result there are few far right organizations that are not actively engaged in Tea Party activity.

The Cantor incident reads to me as being designed to tell the fascist fringe that the line has now been crossed and they should move from threats of violence to acts of violence.

As with the loathsome ‘Reverend’ Ian Paisley, and Gerry Adams, Cantor will steadfastly respond to demands to denounce violence by his supporters by condemning the violence of his opponents.

The whole cantor incident is hardly Bologna or a strategy of tension or whatever taht was called, It rather reminds one of the tall tales Palin likes to tell. Cantor was desperate and remembered : “Hey, wasn’t there a funny incident near one of our offices recently?”. and then he put the full Palin on.

We should applaud Cantor anyway: he is fighting prejudice by proving that Jews can be as dumb as a rock.

Frum is easy to explain: He was a speech writer who isn’t willing to spin anymore. So he was fired.

Ornstein the white raven of the AEI is more difficult : AEI needs him as fig leaf. But why isn’t he just going to Brookings or some other centrist think tank?

At least he is not willing to spin according to the latest AEI talking points on health care. Instead he gets uppity and wants to make his own spin. And AEI then said: Not in our paid time! I can understand that.

Would have helped if it was Cantor’s actual office too.

Not only was it not the window of the actual office in that building that Cantor has sometimes leased for his fundraising operation, but even THAT office is in no way shape or form his “campaign office”, has nothing visible to identify it with Cantor, in fact I don’t believe it’s even in his district!

Cantor was telling what our British and Irish friends would call a “porky”, bigtime. For the purpose of creating a false equivalence with real violence coming from his side. What a scumbag.

IM: Just before the OKC bombing I received emails from Timothy McVeigh. They were pretty unpleasant gun-nut stuff, but no nuttier or more threatening than any other gun nut stuff.

I think a lot of people in the US underestimate just how dangerous their nut-jobs are and overestimate how clueful foreign terrorists were. ‘Strategy of tension’ sounds just like the sort of whacked out notion that some amphetamine addled tea party militia kook would think up. These things always look somewhat goofy if they don’t put them into practice.

Looks to me as if Frum wanted to jump ship and engineered it so that he was pushed. Now he has got out away from the tea party crazies before they kill someone. They have already made the GOP unelectable. Sooner or later the pendulum will swing back. Frum is betting on having a position when it does swing back.

Frum is betting on having a position when it does swing back.

You think this is why he quit? It doesn’t strike me as a likely motive. You get a better position with a reputation of loyal and reliable hack, not one of those who jump the ship.

The Tea Party is not a terrorist organization. </cite

Not least because "it" is not an organization.

weserei @ 41

The defining characteristic of a terrorist organization is not the actual use of violence but the threat of violence against political opponents.

The Tea Party has not yet got up to actually committing the violence, but they are definitely tolerating and encouraging threats.

@43: It wasn’t the term “terrorist” that I objected to; it was “organization.”

“Cray person” — hmm, by the typo above I did not mean to imply that Frum was being replaced by a humanoid fron New Crobuzon. Even though that would be a lot more interesting.

As for Frum, I don’t know how things work in think tank land, but it could be that offering someone the opportunity to keep their position, but at no pay, is just the polite face saving way of firing someone. It’s an offer that you are expected to refuse. The think tank gets to save face (in terms of intellectual independence) and claim “We didn’t fire him because of his views. We just weren’t able to come to terms on the conditions of his employment.” Or it could be that the donors just said, “We’re not going to pay for this guy. Do whatever you want to do, but if he stays, we don’t write checks” and allowing to stay without pay was regarded as some sort of acceptable compromise to the donors but obviously not to Mr. Frum.

@48: Actually I think “group” is also too strong. There is no central leadership or regulating authority, no command structure at even the smallest scale, no official policy on anything, no financial cohesion, etc. “Tea Party” is a public-domain brand associated with a very nebulous milieu of people, ideas, and Facebook groups. There is no entity “The Tea Party.” This strikes me as quite a bit less organization than, say, ETA–or even al-Qaeda for that matter.

Well, if indeed they are replacing a crazy person with a professional, it makes perfect sense.

‘AEI, AEI?’, I was thinking, ‘Where do I know that from?’ Then it hit me: it’s where Ayaan Hirsi Ali wound up.

Read the Mainstream Science on Intelligence.

Or better yet, check the list of signatories and find, as expected, J Phillippe Rushton

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Philippe_Rushton

Sorry: meant to shout out to the memory of Stephen Jay Gould, another critic of Herrnstein and Murray, also clearly ‘ignorant and politically motivated’.

@60: Yes, once you’ve determined to start from an untenable premise about intelligence that incorporates your conclusion in advance (viz., black people are naturally less intelligent than whites, and hence not worth spending extra education dollars on), as Herrnstein and Murray did, it’s amazing how wrong wrong wrong everyone who doesn’t start from that premise suddenly is revealed to be.

JL, it hardly helps a defense of M&H against racism to claim that the book is ‘mostly’ about the differences in intelligence among whites. At root the problem with their research is that it makes untenable (racist) assumptions about intelligence and the genetic boundaries of ethnic and racial groups, gathers data based on those assumptions, and not surprisingly reaches untenable (racist) conclusions. The fact that they may have spent literally more pages in the book discussing their conclusions about the variances between white ethnics and between whites and Asians–I haven’t counted them–is of no consequence except to show how questionable his work is in re other ethnic and racial groups.

But I’m sorry about derailing the thread. Back to the part of your response that was on point: Perhaps we can’t blame AEI for not knowing in 1990 that Murry was going to come out with a huge piece of junk research in 1994. But he had already published Losing Ground in 1984, and he and Herrnstein must have been working on their book in 1990, so had AEI been inclined to reject him on such grounds, they would have had plenty of notice. Of course, Barry’s point is that they were not so inclined–that the fact that Murray has making a career of providing a thin academic veneer for racial bias and racist public policy was to AEI a feature, not a bug.

Since Barry flubbed the timeline, though, I guess I’m forced to call into question all his claims about AEI and Murray–and probably, by extension, the claims made by anyone who agrees with them, and any related claims about Ornstein and Frum. Because how can we trust anything said by people who would associate themselves with such an erroneous claim about Murray’s employment history at AEI?

That used to be an option that some cheaper companies did to salaried workers. However courts have routinely held such behavior to be constructive discharge, so the few companies that used to do it have since stopped as the costs of court action and legal fees outweighs the cost of severance packages.

As to (non-union) hourly workers, having one’s hours reduced to 0 is not considered constructive discharge, and is a very common way of shedding seasonal workers without “firing” them. The book Punching In has some examples of how this happens in retail.

What a nice person Charles Murray is.

@JL “While the book was criticized by the ignorant and politically motivated types, it was endorsed by top experts in intelligence research.:

Always nice to see a good troll. Note here how he comes out with calling detractors from Murray ‘ignorant’ and then comes in with endorsement by un-named ‘top experts’.

This is the type of bullying rhetoric that Frum and the AEI exist to spread. They don’t want to engage in an argument, they want to win by intimidation. That way they can be sure that whoever agrees with them and joins the movement can be relied on to believe whatever the party needs them to believe next week as well.

The facts of the matter are however very clear. Stephen Jay Gould wrote the definitive work on the origins and abuse of IQ testing long before the Bell Curve. IQ testing was originally developed as a way to test the response of mentally handicapped patients to various forms of therapy. It was then co-opted by the US military when it discovered a need to quickly filter large numbers of recruits when the US entered WWI. Almost from the very start, IQ tests were being employed to support theories of eugenics and the history of academic fraud encompasses much of their work.

Contrary to Murray’s claims, IQ is not a invariant characteristic of human subjects. Measured IQ varies substantially over the course of a lifetime. Measurement is highly dependent on social factors. And measured IQ has been steadily increasing over the years, a fact which is almost certainly due to the fact that more children are now schooled in mathematical puzzles at an earlier age.

When I was 10, I practiced IQ tests every week for the senior school examination. As a result my ‘IQ’ increased from the 130 or so range to in excess of 160. What does this mean? Nothing more than that I had spent a lot of time doing mathematically oriented puzzles in my view. My intellectual skills are primarily mathematical and linguistic. But I scored pretty badly on English tests due to mild dyslexia. There are plenty of intellectual skills that are not easily tested.

All an ‘IQ test’ is, is a glorified form of brainteaser, they are presented in the form of science, but really there is nothing more ‘scientific’ than there is in a crossword puzzle. Clearly there is a correlation between ability to do crossword puzzles and ‘cleverness’. But rather less than most would imagine.

OK, so not to bore everyone here, I took apart the Murray post on my own blog:

http://dotfuturemanifesto.blogspot.com/2010/03/scholarship-at-aei.html

Murray demonstrates the AEI technique of lying by omission and commission with his insistence that Frum ‘resigned’, knowing full well that his salary was being witheld involuntarily. He also demonstrates considerable brass neck by setting out what he admits to be an attack on Frum that he has no evidence for, then attacks Frum for besmirching the AEI without a shred of evidence (ignoring the inconvenient fact that Frum’s statement was a first-hand account and thus evidence).

Thank goodness there’s no violent ideation on the left, is all I can say.

Sarcasm detector fail.

Now that’s nasty talk, but it’s only talk.

I’m pretty sure no significant number of people on the left is or will be upset about that guy getting arrested, arraigned, tried, and convicted. Loons are loons. And frankly, what kind of left-wing person would use phrases like “judgment time” or calls anybody “Lucifer’s abominations” ?

LEBOON further stated that he is the “son of the god of Enoch” and that his father speaks through him.

He’s a loon. And frankly, I’m worried that extremist, even revolutionary, rhetoric from the halls of Congress and on the radio will be enough to trigger a lot of loons to do loony things like this.

I don’t think it’s appropriate to characterize loons as left-wing or right-wing or what. They’re loons. They’re basically sociopaths. I do think it’s a concern that one political party has chosen to escalate rhetoric about a health-care bill (and about the President’s legitimacy, etc) to the point where this kind of sociopathic reaction is basically in keeping with the words those folks speak.

All over the map.

“In one video he addresses President Obama, Vice President Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid by name and says, ‘Your punishment is coming, the swine, it will be severe, and you will beg for mercy to your god, it will be severe, you will know god’s swine, god has warned you.'”

Yeah, he’s on “the left,” alright.

Smarter trolls…please?

Sarcasm detector fail.

Mine, or yours?

I’m pretty sure no significant number of people on the left is or will be upset about that guy getting arrested, arraigned, tried, and convicted. Loons are loons. I don’t think it’s appropriate to characterize loons as left-wing or right-wing or what.

Agreed. But just in case, let’s prepare the ground to characterize loons as right-wing…

I do think it’s a concern that one political party has chosen to escalate rhetoric about a health-care bill (and about the President’s legitimacy, etc) to the point where this kind of sociopathic reaction is basically in keeping with the words those folks speak.

No, no, no, it’s a trickle-up phenomenon! Republican leaders are merely trying to establish or maintain their hater bona fides with the swastika-carrying, filthy-plutocrat-funded-astroturfing, woman-and-poor-people-enslaving, planet-destroying racist totalitarian non-litterbug testicle-chomping mercenary secessionists in the Tea Party.

All over the map.

God damn it, if there’s anything I can’t stand it’s a loon who doesn’t fit the narrative! Cantor was supposed to fake an attack on his own office so that I could hit the streets with my sniper rifle. Now that it turns out some crazy person may actually have taken a shot at Cantor’s place*, I don’t know what to do!

And now, in all seriousness, I’m going to go just a little way to legitimize political violence. I do find it embarrassing that people on my side of the debate are sending death-threats, breaking windows etc. to express their displeasure with Obamacare. I bet those people have personal problems that go beyond mere politics. But there is a real sense in which our democratic institutions appear to have failed, and our traditional response to that has always been tar-and-feathers. We see the passing of legislation of vast consequence; legislation which, on balance, is passionately opposed by the people. We know that many of the votes to pass it were simply bought, which is antithetical to democracy; and various novel procedures, presumably corrupting to our highest institutions, were at least considered in the process. We anticipate the forced taking of our money and our health, and the irreplaceable loss of faith in our government. In short, no word short of violence can describe what our legislature has lately done to us, though no blood is immediately seen to flow as a result. And, well, violence begets violence.

Now, we still have the soapbox and the ballot box, and we’re at least several elections away from the point where sensible people should resort to the cartridge box. And I repeat that I’m embarrassed by these premature brickbatulators on my team and wish they’d go away. But violence begets violence. It seems to me, if you’re going to mash your groaning constituents with the heavy hand of the law while enjoying the best security money can buy, you ought to swagger and grin as you do it, and not “express concerns for your safety”. By which standard, I guess Nancy Pelosi has done pretty well.

* I know very well the FBI didn’t charge Deboon with any shooting…yet. And there is (or was, anyway) reason to believe the shooting at Cantor’s office was random. But if it turns out Deboon was responsible, I’m sure there will be sighs of relief from some commenters on this thread, that the vast right-wing conspiracy isn’t going all Tonkin just yet.

There were no unusual or special procedures used to pass the HCR bill, none.

The first bill was passed by majority vote under regular order following a cloture vote which gained 60 votes. The second was passed under standard reconciliation procedures.

The President was elected on a mandate to pass the bill. The Democrats in Congress were elected on a mandate to pass the bill. There is absolutely nothing unfair, improper or undemocratic about that. Unlike his predecessor in 2000, Obama actually won the popular vote. And moreover all the votes cast by the electors were counted in accordance with the laws of the respective states – something the Republican party intervened to expressly prevent in 2000.

I suggest that rather than getting steamed up about this, Republicans should retire to the nearest bondage night club for an evening of booze and flagellation to get it out of their system. The fact of the matter is that in a Democracy the minority party does not get a veto on passing legislation, not even when they tell such despicable lies about it as Palin and the rest of her party hacks have about Health Care Reform.

I note that in common with his Republican party leaders, MM is unable to give the categorical, unqualified condemnation of violence that every politician should be able to give in a Democracy. Instead we have the same statement of reproach followed by qualifications legitimizing calls for violence rehearsed by every terrorist leader in the 20th century. Only with rather less substantive qualifications than the political wing of the IRA, UVF, ETA or the like would give.

Exercise of the democratic process is not justification for anyone to call for people to throw bricks through opponents windows, place sniper rifle targets on their location, send threatening faxes, make threatening phone calls or any of the other actions that Palin and her supporters have engaged in over the past week. The fact that she is unable to make a categorical denunciation of such tactics speaks volumes. Instead she attacks the people who the threats of violence were aimed at for bringing it on themselves and the media for reporting the fact that they were made.

The conclusion is unfortunately rather clear. Sarah Palin is not merely a liar, she is willfully encouraging her supporters to do violence on her behalf.

And, well, violence begets violence.

How very fortunate for you that you are able to contemplate with such equanimity the violent injury and death at the hands of a mob whipped into an irrational fury by liars and demagogues.

I don’t entertain many illusions about the intrinsic benevolence of the state, but there are people with vastly more pressing, well-documented, and justifed claims to having suffered violence at the hands of their government than a bunch of middle-class white people whose insurance companies will no longer be able to cut off their coverage for getting sick. No one is going to ‘take their health’, but it’s a sign of complete political irresponsibility to play on people’s fears that someone will for political gain.

We see the passing of legislation of vast consequence; legislation which, on balance, is passionately opposed by the people.

What does “on balance” mean? It doesn’t mean “on its merits”. Maybe it means the opposite. “The people” don’t know what’s in the legislation. Your side, as you call it, has prevented them from knowing what’s in it.

Musical Mountaineer, you don’t believe anything you say. How do I know? When the Iraq War, an event of immense consequence, one that that opposed by a majority of the people and one that triggered protests on a scale that the Tea Partiers can’t possibly match, I didn’t see you coming around here to talk about how terrible it was and to intimate the necessity of political violence.

No, no, no, it’s a trickle-up phenomenon!

Like hell it is. But it is definitely an exploitative, destructive, sociopathic trickle-down phenomenon.

Your comment #77 is easily the craziest thing to appear on CT in 2010. (And yes, I’m fully aware of your sarcasm.) Sorry, I can’t respond to it further. It’s just beyond the pale. No, I take that back. It’s beyond beyond the pale. It crossed the pale several miles ago, and has discovered an entirely new shade of luminosity to travel beyond.

And sure, I guess “violence begets violence” is, broadly speaking, true. (That’s not to get into what justifies what, just taking it as a statement about how people act in the world.) But. Obviously. Passing mild centrist legislation, such as that which provides money for health care to a portion of the citizenry, at the cost of higher taxes, isn’t “violence.” Period.

And calling it “violence” is just creating an excuse, however flimsy it will be in retrospect, for people who dislike the legislation to be violent in response, and it’s further encouraging them to be violent.

Passing this kind of legislation is very clearly not violence. And the whole of the unprecedented insanity of your comment stems from your implicit assertion to the contrary.

“Violence begets violence” as do false accusations of violence.

Here we see the GOP trying to wind itself up to justify violence against Democrats. Theyare not calling for the bricks to be thrown through the windows themselves, but they are quick to take the opportunity to explain why such behavior ‘is understandable’.

This tactic straight out of the NAZI playbook. The NAZI party did not officially organize Kristalnacht, they established deniability by instead talking about how attacks would be understandable before they happened and justified them afterward by claiming the victims brought the attacks on themselves.

Here we see the GOP trying to wind itself up to justify violence against Democrats.

I ain’t the GOP, for fuck’s sake. Jesus, I get tired of that. I probably hate those bastards more than you do.

I note this morning, from the front page of the NYT, that some self-styled militia types in Michigan were plotting to assassinate a police officer and bomb his funeral train, in the hopes of triggering a nationwide uprising. They got busted. Good. If it was up to me, they’d be put in the stocks so we could pelt them with dead animals and rotten vegetables, before shipping them off to the pen. I guess that’s pretty violent of me.

It crossed the pale several miles ago, and has discovered an entirely new shade of luminosity to travel beyond.

As a matter of historico-linguistic pedantry, “beyond the pale” has nothing to do with color; it means “outside the fence.” (“Pale” as in “paling” and “impale.”) The two most famous historical pales were in Russia (bounding the area where Jews were allowed to live) and in Ireland (bounding the area of direct English rule, and hence, in English eyes, the limit of civilization). According to this page, it is generally assumed that “beyond the pale” refers to Ireland, but there is no evidence.

I’d guess that MM considers himself to be a (U.S.-) libertarian of some type, because his call for violence is standard libertarian dogma. Back in the 70s, they
adopted a pledge against “the initiation of force”. And they’ve been describing ordinary democratic politics as the initiation of violence against people, which frees them to commit violence in return, ever since.