Category: Political issues

Who, and what, deserve our attention now?


If you ask me, boring government is the best kind of government, though, judging by the grin on his face, Biden is far from bored by rides on Marine 1. White House photo.

Scott Rosenberg has a very good article at Axios this morning: After Trump, the attention economy deflates. Rosenberg writes, “Donald Trump used social media to provoke and distract Americans around the clock, rewiring the country’s nervous system…. Now we’re going to learn whether our fried collective circuits can recover.”

The article, I think, is a must-read. According to Rosenberg, those who want our attention fall roughly into two camps: those who want to keep ranting at us, making us angry, trying to scare us, and exploiting us; and those who want to change the norm, “believing that a pandemic-exhausted public yearns for simpler, straighter talk at lower volume.”

In the first camp Rosenberg puts those who want to continue the Trumpian pig circus, such as Sen. Josh Hawley and huckster Elon Musk. The Biden administration is leading the second camp.

Speaking only for myself, I’d amend Rosenberg’s words a bit. I’m not pandemic exhausted. I’m Trump exhausted and Republican exhausted. I’m sure I’m not the only one who burned out from checking the news two dozen times a day out of fear that the world might fly apart at any moment. We knew that we were being exploited, we knew it was getting to our mental health, and we knew that the attention industry was taking it to the bank.

My morning routine, with coffee, was (and still is, for the moment) to make the rounds of a fairly long list of web sites to get a feel for what’s going on — the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, The Atlantic, the New Republic, Axios, Politico, Salon, the Guardian, Vox, New York Magazine, the Irish Times, Herald Scotland, the Economist, and even Huffington Post. I get zero percent of my news from apps and social media, though Heather Cox Richardson’s daily dispatches on Facebook have been a must-read for many months. Also on Facebook I regularly check the work of a former colleague at the San Francisco Chronicle, Debra Saunders, who is now a White House correspondent for the Las Vegas Review Journal. Debra’s work is a way of checking the thinking of those who are still Republicans but who have preserved some ability to reason. Many of the comments, though, were from Trumpian zombies. It took Debra a long time to abandon Trump and to stop writing confirmation bias for Trumpers, but she seems to have finally done it, and she’s taking heat for it from those who remain addicted to the Trump pig circus. “Biden might also put Sominex out of business,” wrote one commenter, as though that’s a criticism rather than a compliment. I’m guessing that Debra finds herself in a rough spot right now — going with principle and reason at the risk of losing readers who aren’t getting their red meat anymore.

Twitter has proven itself to be a big part of the problem. The idea that anything useful in public affairs can be said in 140 (or 280) characters was a dangerous idea from the start. Trump proved how easily Twitter can be exploited as an instrument of low-information, highly inflammatory propaganda. A better world would abandon Twitter. If President Biden uses Twitter, I’m not aware of it.

Another thing that needs to be abandoned is the idea that apps are designed to exploit, the idea of “news feeds,” as though news is something to be chosen for us and then fed to us after we’ve been captured in an app. I never fell for that. I feed myself, which is why I use a web browser, bookmarks, and links and spend very little time in apps. Axios has written about this, too: Publishers see new life in the old open web. But some of us, refusing to be captured, never left “the old open web.”

It’s clear that even news sites that merit trust are struggling for material post-Trump. I’m seeing a lot more of the kind of material that is typical of Huffington Post — television, new chicken sandwiches, royalty news, celebrity news, and the latest trends in relationships.

Rosenberg writes in the Axios piece: “Team Biden isn’t the only force trying to downshift the public conversation…. The new wave of subscription-based newsletter and podcast enterprises aims to put media creation on a less fickle footing, funded by longer-term commitments from readers rather than volume-driven ad revenue.”

The key word there is “subscription.” As I rethink my media diet, I’m not willing to pay just anyone for news, but I’m willing to continue to pay the New York Times and the Washington Post. And I’ll probably continue to check some clickbait sites such as Huffington Post, for the same reason that I sometimes watch the ABC evening news — because I want to see what people are consuming and what kind of information low-information types are working with. (I draw the line at watching Fox News, just because brazen propaganda and Republican red meat are so damaging to one’s health, no matter where one is on the political spectrum.)

But, as choosy and news-savvy as I am as an old newspaperman, I realize that I’m not in control. What matters most is what happens next in what Rosenberg calls the attention economy. Surely we can assume that a media divide will continue to exploit the political divide. We high-information types will continue to have good sources of news and commentary, especially if we’re willing to pay for it. For the news to be more boring would be thrilling, in a paradoxical sort of way. As for those who love a pig circus, we can hope that hard times are on the way, since it seems very unlikely that a Josh Hawley, or an Elon Musk, or a Marjorie Taylor Green, will ever be able to out-pig the greatest pig in American history, Donald Trump.

If I had my way, the news hereafter would be much more boring, and all those movies and series available for streaming would be less so.

And I thought it was spring fever


Pale greenhouse basil bought from Trader Joe’s gets a boost from some rays before it goes into pesto.

Where did all this energy come from? Why am I spending more time outdoors instead of in front of the computer doom-scrolling? At first I thought it was an ordinary case of spring fever, because January has been mild. But then I realized that it’s relief, and that I feel safe again now that the country has clawed its way back from the brink of fascism.

The news is three parts boring, three parts worrisome, and four parts encouraging — a welcome change from ten parts terrifying.

This time a year ago, the abbey grounds were a mess, with locust, copel, and briar creeping in from the woods and springing up everywhere the mower couldn’t reach. Ken did a lot of clearing last March, so it was only a day’s work for me to whip the yard back into shape with a bow saw and a pair of loppers. The daffodil shoots are two inches high. The garlic is up about three inches. The birds seem very happy, because it has been an easy winter for them so far. Mrs. Squirrel has been climbing on the house, trying to get back into the attic, no doubt because she’s ready to build a nest for her spring babies. I talk her back into the woods with a slingshot (no squirrels are harmed). I saw Mrs. Possum on a recent evening, and she was plump — probably pregnant. Out in the front ditch by the road, I pulled a blackberry stalk out by its roots, and a well-nourished earthworm came up with it. I still have some pruning to do — apples and grapes. The countdown to daffodils is about thirty days.

I can’t wait to start scratching in the dirt. The garden had a good clearing and tilling back in the fall, so it’s looking good for spring — dark, friable, and winter-fallow. I’ve bought all the seeds I need. To get an earlier start, I’m going to experiment with a kind of cold frame bought from Amazon. It’s just metal hoops with a clear cover, enough for one short row of early greens and lettuce.

For the first few years here, the challenge was building up the soil and establishing a landscape. Now the problem is managing the fertility and fecundity — holding back the woods and managing the overgrowth. In one wet summer, the place could turn into a jungle.

Keeping up the yard, garden, and orchard would be impossible without machines. The tiller, which had not worked quite right for two or three years, runs as good as new now that it has a new carburetor, which a neighbor helped me install (or, more accurately, I handed him tools and he installed it). The Snapper mower is now eleven years old and breaks down too often. It will now become a backup mower, replaced by a new zero-turn Ariens mower that I had to order from the factory and that arrived in December. Zero-turn mowers are the new must-have item for homeowners. I’m hoping that a zero-turn mower will save me some mowing time and give me much better options for mowing around trees and obstacles. The chain saw normally gets some exercise only when Ken is here. But I lent it to a neighbor to cut up the beech tree down by the bridge that fell during a storm last March, knowing that the neighbor would return it all shiny and sharpened and with stabilized fuel. (I learned the hard way that one winter is all it takes for gasoline to go bad and gum up carburetors in small engines.) I helped split and load the firewood for the neighbor. These days, though, splitting wood means operating a hydraulic splitting machine.

But we can’t yet totally avert our eyes from the pig circus that was Trump. Over at Lawfare, my old friend Jonathan Rauch, a recidivist centrist if there ever was one, argues that President Biden should pardon Trump. Jonathan’s arguments are reasonable, as long as you can stomach the idea of overlooking a minor matter like an attempt at a fascist coup and treason that served the interests of Putin’s Russia, treason the details of which we still don’t know. I cannot stomach those things. Trump must be neutralized by vigorous application of law and justice. All his crimes must be exposed, as well as whatever it was that Putin was holding over his head. Trump’s children — baby sociopaths, as the New Republic called them — must also be neutralized. They’re a crime family, after all. It was inevitable that, once we wrestled the reins out of the hands of right-wingers and fascists, that radical centrists would want to steer the ship of state again, as they did during the Clinton and Obama administrations. That’s the challenge for progressives now — not letting anyone forget that we progressives earned this, that even Georgia has turned a corner, and that our time has come. For Republicans, “unity” means acting as though they didn’t lose, and continuing to make the rich richer while fattening the livers of authoritarian white people by force-feeding them with propaganda. We have been waiting a long, long time for progress. Centrists and right-wingers have had their way for more than 50 years. This is our last chance to do something about inequality and environmental catastrophe.

I’m ready for some progress. And I’m ready for spring.

Meanwhile, to better prepare you for spring fever, here’s a beautifully produced video on Swedish winters.

The return of sanity and decency

Though it happened only yesterday, volumes already have been written about the violent desecration of the U.S. Capitol. All sane and decent Americans understand what it means, so there is hardly anything that I can add. But I am reminding myself that, in spite of the obscenity of what we witnessed yesterday, and in spite of the rage that we still feel, we have won. Congress went back into session and certified the election. In Georgia, two Democrats were elected to the U.S. Senate. The fascist Republican Party, come Jan. 20, will be out of power.

If any doubt remained about what the Republican Party has become, or what Donald Trump is, yesterday’s events erased that doubt. It will be years before we really understand what has happened. Investigations can now begin, including congressional investigations and criminal investigations. Republicans now have little power to obstruct or corrupt those investigations, or to conduct sham investigations of their own. Many books will be written, both by those who will add to the truth and those who will try to rewrite history with their lies. History will get it right, even if a frighteningly large percentage of the American population, from their self-made hell on the trash heap of history, invent and believe an alternative history in which the very worst of us are great.

One of the immediate difficulties for many of us is figuring out how to deal with the people around us who voted for Trump, those who are unable to recognize what the Republican Party has become, and those who continue to believe in a future in which a repugnant minority of people who have lost all claim to decency can return to dominating, bullying, insulting, and baiting the rest of us as they work to destroy the American democracy and kick down the people they hate. They were unable to complete that work. The institutions of American democracy withstood the attack. The Southern state of Georgia just sent a Jew and a black man to the U.S. Senate. Given four more years, the dismantling of our institutions and the rule of law would have been completed. Some of them won’t give up. Already there is a competition, as Trump goes down, to lead the fascist movement in America. That competition, of all places, is largely in the U.S. Senate.

For now, though, I’m going to try to stop gritting my teeth, savor the fact that a free and fair election has removed the fascists from power, and wait to see what happens as sanity and decency return to American government. What happened yesterday was not really a threat. It was instead a kind of theater, a ghastly public display of infantile bitterness at the fact of their defeat. The world saw what they are in pornographic scenes that will blacken American history forever, scenes that shock the civilized world and that children do not understand. We all knew that Trump would smash furniture on the way out, though we didn’t foresee just how literal that would be.

Those who supported this deserve our ongoing contempt. They deserve to be shunned. They deserve much worse, actually. And yet the everyday activities of life must go on. What next? Your thoughts and comments are welcome.

Could it happen again?

Decent Americans are horrified by the fact that 45 percent of American voters would vote for a con man like Donald Trump. Having lived in the American South for much of my life and having known many Republican jackasses, and having observed as these people have been manipulated and misled since the televangelist days, I believe I’m as qualified as anybody to describe what’s wrong with Trump voters and to make some guesses about how dangerous they will be in the future.

I have written here in the past about what’s wrong with authoritarians, whose moral and cognitive defects find a home with their own kind in the Republican Party and evangelical churches. I have argued that authoritarians are not just morally different, they are morally defective. I have argued that one of their most dangerous defects is the inability to judge character. A short way of saying it is that they have low moral IQ’s. Incapable of understanding the thinking of people with higher moral intelligence, they project their own inner ugliness onto others. They seem to truly believe, as they try to steal an election, that the people they hate are stealing the election from them. For an academic view of what’s wrong with authoritarians, I recommend the work of Bob Altemeyer, a Canadian psychologist who made a career of studying authoritarians. It was Altemeyer, for example, who described the creepy submissiveness of authoritarians, the factor that makes them crave a Big Man (it’s usually a man) to submit to and to be commanded by. You see this craving for submissiveness in their churches, too — the deep need to grovel before an all-powerful god and to “submit to God’s will.”

Yes, they have always been with us. But how dangerous they are outside their own families depends on who winds them up and leads them. Their abilities are too limited to self-organize. Most of them, with modest natural gifts and modest educations, never achieve much. Even in small, localized aggregations such as a lynch mob, you will find a leader, and the rest are just a mob. That leader will be one of the worst of them, someone with a special gift for incitement and manipulation. Comparing Trump’s Republican Party with the Nazi Party is entirely fair. Psychologically they’re the same people. The big difference is that Trump is incompetent, and he didn’t have a plan. But Hitler was a genius, and he did have a plan, which is why the scale of Hitler’s catastrophe was so much greater. In the U.S., it would be interesting to track the behavior of authoritarian mobs all the way back to the Civil War. But I’m not a historian, so I would presume to track them based only on what I’ve seen in my lifetime. My view is that though morally defective people are always with us, they become a threat to all of us only when they have a Big Man such as a Hitler or a Trump.

They were certainly active, and violent, during the Civil Rights era. But I was just a boy then. It was during the 1980s, during the rise of televangelists, that I really began to notice them. Jim and Tammy Bakker were a classic example. It was clear that people could be separated into two categories — those who would laugh and see instantly that Jim and Tammy Bakker were frauds and grifters, and those who saw God in them and sent them money. The televangelist era, though, was just a business operation, a way of separating the gullible from their money.

The danger to the nation began in 1996, with Fox News. Fox News — owned, of course, by a billionaire oligarch — went to work, profitably, creating a propaganda narrative that would turn the gullible into an angry base for the Republican Party. That base was too dim to realize that they never got anything out of it, other than scapegoats, fears, the bliss of their hatred and rage, and solidarity with their fellow authoritarians. The true agenda was the agenda of plutocrats and oligarchs. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer. Authoritarians ate it up, feasting on right-wing red meat that would gag their dogs. When Trump came along, they finally had their Big Man. They got their hands on the highest office in the land — the presidency. To do it, they all had to work together — the propaganda arm (Fox News), the Republican Party, authoritarian churches, and just enough gullible voters to achieve minority rule. The rest is history, and I need not try to recite it here.

So the question is, can it happen again?

In a Nov. 6 piece in the Atlantic, Zeynep Tufekci writes that America’s Next Authoritarian Will Be Much More Competent. He is right. And his warning implicitly acknowledges that the gullible masses are dangerous only when they have a Big Man. But the Big Man can’t do it alone. As in 2016, a high level of organization is required, involving Fox News and the Republican Party, in addition to enraged authoritarian voters and a Big Man.

I’m of the view that what Trump does hereafter doesn’t matter. Trump is doomed, though someone will try to take his place.

What matters now is: What will Fox News do? What will the Republican Party do? Will they find and anoint another Big Man and try to pull off another 2016? Or will 2020 have taught them that that won’t work anymore, because decent America is onto them? I have no predictions on that, because neither Fox News nor the Republican Party is rational. If they were, they’d modify their strategies to try to appeal to a larger number of voters and stop trying to maintain minority rule. They surely must realize that everything they did during the 2020 election to fire up the base backfired by motivating decent Americans to see the emergency and go vote.

With Trump doomed (and headed to prison), the vast right-wing conspiracy is like a snake without a head. The useless thrashing and rattling are now dominating the news. If they try for a repeat of 2016, then we must wait to see whether they are able to find and raise up another Big Man. If they do, then we must take him down, quick and early. We were far too slow in recognizing the danger of Donald Trump, because to decent people Trump (like the early Hitler) is just a clown and con man.

Goodbye, Donald Trump. Your doom will be a joy to watch, as justice and the law and your debts catch up with you. As you go to join your good friend Adolph and wait for your children and your party lords to come burn with you, try not to let the gates of hell hit you in the ass on the way in.

One of the services that the church provides to the sorriest and most demented of human beings is that it allows them to believe that they are morally superior to the people they hate.

 

Georgia on our minds

It’s Friday night, and we’re still waiting for the media to call the election. Once we’ve won the White House, all civilized eyes will turn to the Georgia Senate runoffs in January, America’s only hope for a Congress that will work with President Biden.

Everyone seems to be listening to some version of “Georgia on My Mind” tonight.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6 …


Jake Gyllenhaal in “October Sky”

The past two days have been among the most stressful and miserable days I can remember, as we all wait to find out whether the American democracy will live or die. I don’t plan to write about this until the election has been called, and after I’ve had a little time to think about what comes next.

For tonight, though, while waiting for votes to be counted in Pennsylvania, my therapy will be watching “October Sky,” a very fine feel-good movie. If the counting goes on long enough, I might even have to watch “Love, Actually,” even if that’s a Christmas movie.

хор мальчиков хорового училища им.М.И.Глинки

Russia, just now — as has often been the case — is poorly regarded and even feared in the West. But we might do well to keep in mind that the Russian people and the Russian oligarchs in the Kremlin are two very different Russias.

While watching a great many music videos on YouTube for a future post on the hymn “Abide With Me,” I came across this. It speaks for itself, though I don’t understand a word of it. Maybe, someday, we in the West will be able to engage the people of Russia without being turned aside by their terrible governments.

“хор мальчиков хорового училища им.М.И.Глинки,” I believe, translates to the Glinka Choral College Boys’ Choir.

A musical note: This piece keeps us contained almost to the point of suffocation in minor harmonies. But it ends softly on a major chord — a tierce de Picardie, or Picardy third, leaving us, at the end, with a feeling of hope.

In the end, what did they gain?


These photos were lifted from Facebook, sources unknown.

There are, I would say, five classes of Trumpers:

1. The Trumps themselves

2. Elites, such as U.S. senators, who enabled and shielded Trump

3. Those who voted for Trump in 2016

4. Those who are voting for Trump again in 2020

5. The super-rich, who got the tax breaks

What did each group gain, from four years spent ripping America apart so that the Republican Party could lie its way through one last election before ending up on the trash heap of history?

1. The Trumps: They got to indulge their narcissism and talk their trash in the spotlights and on television, living free in the White House at taxpayer expense. They got to act out their delusions of grandeur among the elites of Europe, too crass and too dull to grasp that they were making fools of themselves and were being laughed at. The Trump children cut some good deals in global markets and put millions of dollars in their pockets. Trump, broke and deeply in debt, reduced to having to grub for a measly thousand here and million there, was able to hold off his final (and seventh and most spectacular) backruptcy, not to mention holding off the law and the courts, for four more years.

But thus passes the glory of the world. Because when this vile family is at last ejected from the White House, they will quickly become a family in tatters and ruins. Not to mention in prison. No wonder Trump has started to joke at his rallies about leaving the country. Yesterday, at a rally in Georgia, he said: “Could you imagine if I lose?… I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country, I don’t know.”

That would be the wise course for the Trump family, if they can borrow enough gas money to fly the Trump 747 to Russia before it’s repossessed. Why did they wait so long? Why didn’t they cut a deal when they could have gotten better terms than prison?

2. Elites and senators: It’s less than three weeks before the election, for heaven’s sake. Why now, when what Trump is has been clear for years? Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, in a “town hall” conference call on Oct. 16, expressed the new senatorial wisdom brilliantly:

“The way he kisses dictators’ butts…. The United States now regularly sells out our allies under his leadership. The way he treats women and spends like a drunken sailor…. He mocks evangelicals behind closed doors. His family has treated the presidency like a business opportunity. He’s flirted with white supremacists…. If young people become permanent Democrats because they’ve just been repulsed by the obsessive nature of our politics, or if women who were willing to still vote with the Republican Party on 2016 decide that they need to turn away from this party permanently in the future, the debate is not going to be — you know, Ben Sasse, why were you so mean to Donald Trump? It’s going to be, what the heck were any of us thinking that selling a TV-obsessed narcissistic individual to the American people was a good idea? It is not a good idea….”

So, senators, what do you have to show for it? You are within an inch of destroying the American democracy. You’ve helped to drive a stake through the heart of the Republican Party. You’re probably going to lose the Senate. Some of you will lose your seats. And you’ve all lost your souls, though most of you no doubt are richer than you were four years ago. Why didn’t you cut a deal months ago to get Trump to go away, when you still had time to put up a half-decent candidate?

3. Those who voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020: Some of us have known all along what you are — your gullibility, your meanness, your sorry religion, your ignorance of the world and your ignorance even of the causes of your own squalid cirumstances. Now the whole world knows, because you put yourselves on display. If the election on Nov. 3 buries you in a landslide, then you will only have gotten what you deserve and brought upon yourselves. May you savor the aftertaste of your years of gloating, because that’s all you’ve gained. Are you better off? Other than doing your bullying and trash-talking for you, what has Trump done for you? What in the world ever made you think that a narcissistic New York City crime lord and con man gives a blip about you or would ever let the likes of you into places like Mar-a-Lago?

4. Those who voted for Trump in 2016 but not in 2020: There is some hope for you, if you reflect long and hard on how you were deceived and misled, and if you learn how not to let such a thing happen to you again. But look what you brought upon yourselves and your country. You share the responsibility for that. Can you find ways to make amends? Start by turning your back on the Republican Party and never voting for any Republican ever again.

5. The super-rich, who got the tax breaks. Congratulations. Your plan worked. You raked in more and more billions and paid no tax on it for four more years. You continued to manipulate democracy, but you revealed that your intent is to kill it. If you can’t find a new way for a minority of easily deceived voters to hold both the Senate and the White House, and whole new lines of lies and propaganda that can enrage and deceive 45 percent of the population (which is all you need since you have gerrymandering and the electoral college working for you), then you’re done. And, thanks to the last four years, millions of people who previously weren’t paying attention now realize who truly owns, and runs, the country, and who is eating their lunch. They’ll be beating down the doors of their representatives in Washington, demanding that you be taxed out of existence.

Four precious years have been lost. We’ve been backsliding, making no progress against the true existential threats of our age — inequality and environmental catastrophe. Progress will be harder now, because Trump and Trumpers have stacked the courts with theocrats and autocrats corrupt enough to cut a deal. Those who have held us back have shown us — in fact they have rubbed it in our faces — what they are and what they want to do. They deserve to be left behind, given only the barest minimum of the goods that law and fairness and decency require — goods of which they actively and ruthlessly deprive others. They deserve hardball now, at the other end of the stick. They’ve forfeited any claim for being heard hereafter, because we’ve heard enough.


Yours too, buddy.

Authoritarian governments

Authoritarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know. Erica Frantz, Oxford University Press, 2018. 200 pages.

My expectations for this book probably were a bit off. What I wanted was a kind of theoretical understanding of authoritarianism, or a kind of model from which predictions could be made. This book, though, is more a statistical study of authoritarian governments.

The format of the book is clear enough. The book first sets up a number of categories, such as the types of authoritarian governments. Some examples in this category are: a single strongman leader, a dominant party, or military. The book then poses a series of questions, then answers the questions with statistical frequencies.

For example: How do authoritarian leaders leave power? Answer:

“From 1950 to 2012, there were 473 authoritarian leaders who left power. Regime insiders were responsible for the majority (65 percent) of these exists, with coups and ‘regular’ removals from office each accounting for about a third of all leader exits. Twenty percent of authoritarian leaders died in office, and only 10 percent were kicked out at the hands of the masses.”

So then, after you’ve read many dozens of questions and answers, you become acquainted with the history of authoritarianism. Other than that, I can’t say that I learned anything very profound from this book.

The big question right now, of course, is where the United States stands with Donald Trump. There is nothing about Trump in this book, and there is almost nothing about the United States. The cutoff for the research in the book was 2015 or so, I believe. However, the author, Erica Franz, has written some articles about Trump, and she has been interviewed about Trump. You can find this by Googling for her name plus Trump.

But yes. It would seem clear enough to me that Trump is on a clear course for the “authoritarianization” of American democracy using common authoritarian tactics — seizing additional power wherever and however he can, co-opting institutions to serve his own ends, defying norms, flouting the law, installing unqualified loyalists while demonizing expertise, attacking the media while pushing propaganda, using multiple methods of corrupting elections to prevent a fair vote, lining his own pockets while directing spoils to insiders, and so on.

We should know before long what Trump’s fate is going to be. Personally I think he is doomed, though the next three or four months probably are not going to be easy. Americans — at least those Americans who are on the side of law and democracy — have learned something very important from the past four years, though. That’s that it can happen here, which begs the question: What are we going to do to make sure that it never happens again?