Category Archives: Men and Women

Relationships, Sex, Marriage, Love, Hate and Dating

Thoroughly Modern

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SCENE:  Mitch BERG is waiting for the train at University and Hamline.  

Suddenly, a group of 20 through 60-something women with protest signs and pink “feline” caps rushes across the street, waving signs and chanting chants.  One of them is Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK, a twenty-something graduate of Saint Olaf, and of Camp Wellstone.  She works as a telemarketer for “Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes”. 

She notices BERG.

BIRKENSTOCK (Loudly, aggressively):  Merg!

BERG:  Um, hi, Moonbeam…

BIRKENSTOCK:  Women are strong!  We are invincible!  A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle!  We will eclipse masculinity!  We will smash the patriarchy!

BERG:  Huh.  So women who make any sort of claim of abuse…

BIRKENSTOCK:  Must be believed without question or reservation!

BERG:  Huh.  You don’t think that’s already a big contradic…

(But BIRKENSTOCK has already run down the platform, joining a mob stomping on a roll of MEN-tos. 

BERG:  Huh.

(And SCENE)

Advice For Modern Life

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Top ten red flags that pop up in sexual assault claims that juuuuust might be more about revenge, control, money or power than justice:

Without naming any particular accusation, I offer these factors for consideration to the fair-minded who remain open to the possibility that guilt or innocence is not simply a question of politics. I also remind the reader that politicizing these accusations have allowed men like Harvey Weinstein, Al Franken, Matt Lauer, Les Moonves, Bill Clinton, and Keith Ellison to escape accountability. Nobody seems to care if they walk the walk so long as they talk the talk.

Read the whole list.  This one grabbed me:

4. When the accused’s opportunity to mount a defense is delegitimized.

The Duke Lacrosse coach was fired just for saying his players were innocent. When the players dared to protest their innocence, the prosecutor painted their stories in the press as “uncooperative.” If either the accused or the accused’s supporters are attacked for just for failing to agree with the accusation, it’s a red flag.

Apply it to current events.

Pass it on.

Anyone Remember #MeToo?

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Either does the Minnesota DFL Central Committee:

Ellison received 326 votes, or 82 percent of delegates on hand at the party’s state executive committee meeting Saturday, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.

The endorsement comes after Ellison won the Democratic primary just days after Karen Monahan said Ellison had once dragged her off a bed by her feet while screaming obscenities. Ellison has denied the allegation. Monahan has said she has video footage of the 2016 encounter, but has declined to release it. Ellison says the video does not exist.

People are innocent until proven guilty.   Domestic abuse is itself abused in this country.   We should take accusers seriously – but guilt until proof of innocence is a notion worth fighting – rhetorically, politically, legally and if necessary militarily.

But I come not to bury Ellison (more later).   I come to pillory the MNDFLCC.  #MeToo was never anything but a virtue-signaling cudgel to use against conservatives (until it largely backfired, taking out Al Franken, Garrison Keillor, Dan Schoen and perhaps Ellison).

It’s the moral equivalent of Al Gore flying to Indonesia in a private jet to lecture the world about the climate;  it’s a moral imperative for the rest of us, an inconvenience to them.

Off Script

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Minnesota Democrats and the media that work for them will be and to some on natural angles to justify the behavior of Democrat politicians – especially virtue signal sponges like Keith “Thumper” Ellison.

But once in a while, you get surprised:

If the allegations are true, Keith Ellison has no right to serve as the state’s chief legal officer. And he had no right to run under false pretenses, as a man standing wrongly accused. Voters had only his word on that claim, and the investigation is ongoing.

In the meantime, Keith Ellison must withdraw from the race and not put Minnesotans through another cycle of political scandal. They’ve been through enough.

It’s very simple. We believe survivors.

Politics doesn’t matter. We believe survivors.

Keith Ellison says he wants to protect women from domestic violence and sexual assault. That starts by believing survivors.

As a matter of fact, I believe that people are innocent until proven guilty.

Given that representative Allison as often supported policy is (especially on domestic violence and gun control) that repudiate that idea, I don’t feel a lot of sympathy for him.

Maybe It’s “Common Core” Biology

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Two boys won the Connecticut state track meet.  The Girls track meet.  It’s “controversial.”  It shouldn’t be.

A human being having two X chromosomes is biologically Female, while a human having one each X and Y is biologically Male.  This is Sex, it’s science, it’s universally agreed to be true.

Over the last 5,000 years, human civilizations developed acceptable roles for members of the sexes.  Women raised children, men hunted and fought.  These were Gender Roles.  Until very recently, these were universally agreed to be sensible and appropriate.

The biological difference in chromosomes results in physical differences in reproductive organs, musculature, and hormones, Male and Female sexes.  Then societal difference results in differences in behavior, Masculine and Feminine.  Sex led to Gender but they are not identical and not interchangeable.  An individual biologically Female human may reject playing with dolls (training to raise children) preferring to roughhouse with boys (training for war) but being a Tomboy doesn’t change her from being a Girl.

All human attributes are distributed on a bell-shaped curve so yes, some women are stronger than some men; but at the competitive end of the curve, women simply cannot physically compete against men.

And everybody knows it.  That’s why there are two leagues, Men’s and Women’s.  That’s why Anika Sorenstam competing in the PGA was a publicity stunt.  That’s why John McEnroe was entirely correct to say Serena Williams is a great women’s tennis player but wouldn’t stand a chance against the top men’s tennis players.  She wouldn’t.  You can see the difference for yourself – watch Boy’s state championships in any sport, then watch the Girls’ championships in the same sport.  Boy champions are always stronger and faster than Girl champions.

Boys claiming to be pre-operative transgender Girls have been winning athletic contests in the Girls division for the last few years, in Alaska in 2016, in Connecticut last year, and two of them came in first and second in Connecticut this year.  They are defended by LGBTQ activists who point out transgender people have hard lives because of societal expectations on dress, behavior and even bathroom use.  Maybe so, but that doesn’t address the biological advantage of being born Male but competing against Females.  Defending against Biology using the defense of Societal Role is bait-and-switch.  People who refuse to acknowledge biology are science deniers.

If biological differences justify having two different leagues, then gender preference is irrelevant and those boys should go back to being losers in the Boys’ State meet.  Otherwise, if we let them compete against Girls, then there are no Girls’ sports anymore, there are only Boys’ sports – some won by boys who admit it, and some won by boys who pretend not to be.

Joe Doakes

I look for the quality of WNBA basketball to improve a lot in about a decade…

More, Faster.

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False rape accuser headed to prison:

Last year a young woman from Long Island who was attending Sacred Heart University in Connecticut came to the police with a harrowing tale. Nikki Yovino told the authorities that two football players from the school had trapped her in the bathroom at a party they were attending and raped her. Police immediately began investigating the horrible crime and quickly identified the suspects. They claimed that the sex was consensual but the victim was adamant. Or at least she wasadamant until others came forward to testify that the football players were telling the truth.

Eventually, Yovino retracted her story and admitted that she had engaged in sex with the boys at the party willingly. Later she decided to make up the rape story to win the support and affection of a different boy she had wanted to date. Then, in a shocking turn of events which we rarely if ever see in such instances of false accusations, Yovino was charged with a crime over her lies. Now, following a very generous plea deal, she’s heading off to prison. (Legal Insurrection and the College Fix)

Swine like this deserve, and should get, exactly the same sentence as the rapists themselves.

Toxic Feminization

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For all the caviling the LGBT community makes about being misunderstood, it’s a fact that even when I was in high school, psychology knew that the worst thing you could do with a gay kid was to force him/her to act straight.  The problems it caused were utterly intolerable.

And yet today, making boys act like neutered non-boys is generally accepted, at least in academia and the public schools.   And the effects are both identical and much more societally more sweeping:

Doesn’t it seem a little odd that masculinity gets blamed when some kid without a dad turns into a rapist or ends up in prison? Doesn’t it seem weird that masculinity would get blamed for a feminist ally like Harvey Weinstein, “who championed older actresses like Meryl Streep and Judi Dench, joined a Women’s March, donated to Democratic candidates, raised money for Planned Parenthood and publicly venerated Gloria Steinem”?We take a young man and kick his father out of his life, send him to school where he has mostly women teachers, barrage him with negative messages about masculinity, then turn him loose at college where we treat him like a guilty-until-proven-innocent rapist, and after all that, we blame “masculinity” when he goes off the rails despite the fact that he spent a lifetime bathed in femininity. Unsurprisingly, the more women try to change masculinity, the more negative and toxic it actually becomes. Yet, articles explaining how masculinity needs to be changed and rewired—written by women or feminized males—are practically a cottage industry these days.

The problem isn’t masculinity .It’s the forcing of genuine masculinity underground.

Berg’s Seventh Law In The Headlines

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Berg’s Seventh Law: “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.”

Remember during the campaign, when Donald “The Donald” Trump’s history of sexist japes, braggadocio and womanizing went from being a Hollywood inside joke to grist for a desperate Clinton campaign to dig out of a hole?

Of course you do.  You couldn’t escape it.

And as I saw that unfolding in Hillary’s attempt to claw her way into office, I kept thinking;  “Yes, it’s about drawing attention away from Bill and her history of committing and abetting unspeakable horrors upon women to the winking and chuckling of their buddies in high lefty places”.

But I  also thought “it’s gotta be more than this”.

And with the juxtaposition of Roseanne Barr (whose show was tanked within a day of her racist jape on Twitter) and Samantha Bee (who will be a cause celébre on the left, just you watch), it became clear; the borg that is Big Left just doesn’t think their own (the “elite” at the top of the prog pile – the Clintons, Emmanuels, Feinsteins, Waterses and the like) can be guilty of anything.  

Case in point:

When you have a movement whose “elite” (koff koff) takes private jets halfway around the world to conferences where they tell everyone else to move into apartments and take transit? That sends its kids to private academies but hectors you for putting yours in a charter school? That parks its money in tax shelters run by rooms full of tax lawyers and tells you you’re unpatriotic for wanting your taxes lowered?

Who tell you “Misogyny is bad” while excusing…ugly stupid misogyny (in terms so patronizing and sexist that they’d have gotten any Republican politican exiled to rural Alaska)?

I guess I can see why they deflect to “Racism” when talking about why Trump won.

Behold

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Everything that’s wrong with modern feminism…:

Advertised as a “rejuvenating and a safe space where women can reinvent themselves and their desires,” an island off the coast of Raasepori in southern Finland is being touted as an all-inclusive, testosterone-free luxury resort. According to the Supershewebsite, the island can accommodate ten women in four newly-renovated cabins.

…and modern PC-entrepreneurship…:

Spending time in a “man-free” milieu is an expensive treat, as Benny Smeds has put the starting price for a week’s stay at “several thousand euros.” The price, however, includes food, service and even tailor-made programs.

…and casual sexim…:

Advertised as a “rejuvenating and a safe space where women can reinvent themselves and their desires,” an island off the coast of Raasepori in southern Finland is being touted as an all-inclusive, testosterone-free luxury resort. According to the Supershewebsite, the island can accommodate ten women in four newly-renovated cabins.

…and the modern social welfare state…:

Roth admitted scrapping plans for further investments in Finland, voicing her frustration over the difficult time she’s had as an entrepreneur in Finland, which she dubbed a “negative country that sucks energy and money.”

“My experience as an outsider and investor in this beautiful country led me to reconsider future plans,” Roth said…Meanwhile, Aija Valleala from the equality ombudsman’s office has said their investigation into whether a women-only business classifies as illegal discrimination hasn’t been completed yet.

…all in one story that you’d almost think was from The Onion if you didn’t know better.

Sexist But True

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I suspect the reason Stormy Daniels’ interview didn’t hurt Trump was because of the subconscious comparison it caused.
Look up the women Trump has sex with, compare them to the women Obama and Clinton married, then tell me who the Big Dog is.
Joe Doakes

He’s got a point.

Counterintuitive?

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Given the vigor with which Scandinavian countries (and those who romanticize their welfare states with all the subtlety of Swedish Chef Night at Karaoke Hut) play up the “gender equality” card, you’d think they’d have the whole “gender equity” thing figured out.

You’d be wrong.

Comparing the Nordic countries with each other, a pattern emerges: Those with more extensive welfare-state policies have fewer women on top. Iceland, which has a moderately sized welfare state, has the most women managers. Second is Sweden, which has opened up welfare services such as education, health care, and elder care for private-sector competition. Denmark, which has the highest taxes and the biggest welfare state in the modern world, has the lowest share of women in managerial positions.

The rise of the welfare state has been a double-edged sword for women’s advancement.Essentially, the rise of the welfare state has been a double-edged sword for women’s advancement. On the one hand, it has created jobs in women-dominated fields such as health care and education, and aided the labor-market entry of women by offering day care and other family-related services. On the other, the attendant high taxes have reduced the economic incentive for both parents to work full-time, and have also made it difficult for families to purchase services that alleviate household work (such as cleaning). Parental-leave policies have given women an incentive to take long breaks from working. And state monopolies in female-dominated sectors such as health care and education have limited women’s career choices.

Also worth noting – Scandinavian societies going back to the Vikings gave women rights they wouldn’t have for centuries elsewhere in the world – the rights to own land, inherit property, and file for divorce.   An astonishing level of gender equality predated the Scandinavian social state by centuries.  Not that that stops the left from claiming credit they dind’t earn.

ivvIf you’ve been readint thias blog any length of time3, you know how “unintended conse3qiuences” work.

Not This Again

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About thirty years ago, Big Media spread the word; forget the bars, meet the next significant other at…

…the supermarket.

Which sent millions of lonely hearts trudging through the aisles, finding nothing but, well, food.

The meme is back.  And I’m pretty convinced it’s a PR stunt by the National Supermarket Marketing Council.

Where Have All The Nice Things Gone?

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Powerline runs an occasional column “The Week in Pictures.”  A while back, they started to end each column with a photo of a beautiful woman holding a gun and wearing very little.  Come on, relax, it’s innocent fun.  Then some female reader complained – there should be photos of hunky men holding guns, for fairness.  That was added and the women holding guns got more clothes.  Not as much fun.  This week, a female reader complains in the comments that the hunk isn’t hunky enough and the girls are still too hot.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Joe Doakes

On this, I have no comment.

De-Stalinization

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In 1996, Christina Hoff Summers and Camille Paglia – two embattled minorities in the feminist academy – predicted feminism, as a worst case, was going to slide into a form of intellectually and morally dystopic Orwellianism.

In 2016, they – now more “endangered species” than embattled minorities in the modern feminist academy – reprised the discussion to note that things were worse than they’d predicted.

It’s well worth an hour.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

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And to think they say the left is utterly clueless about economics;   Feminist Business School promises to remove the profit motive from the free market

The Feminist Business School, founded by Evergreen State College graduate Jennifer Armbrust, teaches that capitalism is an “economy that values masculine traits” such as “meritocracy,” “competition,” and “individualism.” The California-based site recently launched two more online courses to coach aspiring businesswomen on how to “topple the patriarchy” and promote a more “feminist economy.”

Shunning the “profit seeking motive” of traditional commerce, the Feminist Business School advocates that businesswomen adopt more “feminine traits” such as “gratitude,” “intimacy,” and “connecting with nature.”

Did we mention it started at Evergreen State?

Some Mysteries May Never Be Solved

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A friend of the blog writes:

I laugh every time I go past Common Good book store. I wonder where all of the #metoo protesters are. You know, the ones who are having a fit every time Trump even looks at a woman now. Why are they not picketing the book store owned by Garrison Keillor, especially now that we have more information on his creepiness?

The #MeToo protesters wrenched their backsk performing logical gymnastics avoiding criticizing the Clintons.  Their doctors told them to go easy on Keillor.

Never Gonna Fall For Modern Love

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The conclusion to a Healther Wilhelm piece in NRO on how feminism is taking women back to the VIctorian era had me chuckling:

Clearly, our “sexual ethic” is a train wreck mixed with a dumpster fire mixed with a five-hour toddler birthday party with unlimited cookies and soda at your local Chuck E. Cheese. Today’s feminists are right about one thing: Our culture is in desperate need of repair. The first step, however, involves ignoring a large chunk of their advice. No offense, but I suspect their “help” will only make things worse.

As the “Sexual Revolution” spirals into its “Great Leap Forward” phase, the whole thing – in re the Aziz Ansari flap, which may not have been designed to caricature modern identity feminism, but could have been – is worth a read.

We Never Had This Problem With Willard Scott

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails in re Matt Lauer:

The biggest name on your most popular program routinely engages in sexual assault in his office but nobody in the world’s largest news organization knows anything about it?  Is everybody in management related to Sergent Shultz?

And yet the media insists I should trust them to fairly and accurately report the news because they have legions of professional investigative reporters and editors with layers and layers of fact checkers.

Joe Doakes

Funny, isn’t it?

The Ballad Of The Pink Beret

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We knew the decline had been ongoing for a while.  This is simply the Army adopting the St. Paul school method.  The student didn’t fail, there is no fail, there is only quit. If the student didn’t quit, then the student must have passed.  Good job, here’s your participation award.

The author deplores lowered standards but misses the point – none of the standards matter.  What matters is: can you do the job?  For that, we must define the job.  If it’s going hand-to-hand against elite enemy soldiers, then yes, these girls are going to die.  But is that the job of the Green Berets anymore?

Maybe the job of modern Green Berets is to parade around wearing the uniform to convince congresswomen who are fixated on feminism that they should siphon money away from the Neanderthal Marines so the Army can buy more tanks and helicopters for men who do the actual fighting to use in combat.  Okay, yes, that means Green Berets are now little more than props for the budget presentation, but so what? Advertisers dress up pretty girls to sell products all the time. Congresswomen are the Army’s “customers;” give the customers what they want.

If you’re really interested in debating whether physical standards matter, find some enterprising businessman to organize a reality show.  People who graduated from Green Beret school during the past year will compete against equally ranked recent graduates of other programs.  The best female Green Beret might have placed fifth in her class, for example.  She will parachute into a forest, land-navigate two miles carrying a ruck and rifle to find the target location, then “kill” sentries and destroy an enemy supply dump before escaping a mile away to build a shelter for the night.  Judges will time the run, effectiveness of the attack (grenade, shooting, etc), dump rain on the shelter and score the results.

Next up, the fifth best Force Recon Marine.  On deck, the fifth-best graduate of the equivalent course of the military in the Philippines.  In the hole, the fifth best graduate from Israel.  People love those silly ninja obstacle courses on television.  Let’s see how modern female Green Berets stack up against potential allies and enemies, doing things we would expect actual combat troops to do in the field.

If American girls suck as badly as this author seems to think they will, I bet the show would be a gigantic hit in China and Russia. The only remaining question is: swimsuit competition, or not?

To play devil’s advocate for a moment here – the “Green Berets” (‘ mission is as much about “unconventional warfare” – in other words, going into enemy territory and creating guerrilla groups – as it is about killing sentries and blowing things up (although there’s plenty of that as well).  Part of the job is being able to go deep into enemy territory and use language and cultural skills to create the relationships needed with the indigenous guerrillas.    And women are just fine at language an culture, so that when a team parachutes in to deal with an indigenous culture that has high respect for women, like in Afghanistan or Yemen or…

…oh.

Let me start over.

If we ever have to fight a war against Cambridge, San Francisco or Portland, female Soecial Forces operators could be useful.

This Sends A Tingle Up My Leg

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I hate to indulge in Schadenfreud.

But I”m going to make a gleeful exception in this case; the Sexual Cultural Revolution has pulled its tumbrel up in front of MSNBC, and the Red Guards are looking for…

…uberliberal chanting point bot Chris Matthews:

 

Two former NBC producers independently alleged Matthews would rate the looks of his female guests on a scale and said Matthews was so abusive that staff joked about being battered women. The interviews in total paint Matthews as a tyrant liable to fly off the handle at the slightest mistake, who was eager to objectify women and made inappropriate sexual comments appear to be a matter of course for someone in his position.

Liberal Men with Power: “Rules Are For Mortals”.

Anyway – while I don’t like Schadenfreiud, watching Christ Matthews hoisted by the cultural petard he’s spent the last decade cheerleading for will be glorious.

Faster, please.

 

 

Since We’re Talking About Harassment

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Al Franken resigned so that the full weight of the Democrat noise machine can turn its attention to attacking Roy Moore – thereby returning the narrative to “The Republican War On Women”.

Speaking of which – has there ever been a better Berg’s Seventh Law violation than “The War On Women”?

Anyway – this past few months, our society’s been focused incessantly on the various grades of “Sexual Harassment” – the use of un-consented flirting, “blue” conversation, touching and more aggressive sexual contact, especially that which takes place in the context of a power disparity.    Whether it’s feeling entitled to grab a little “no go zone” anatomy without consent, to trading sex for advancement, to using the resources of the state you govern to silence people who complain about what you do, and everything in between, the genera consensus is “It’s bad”.

So our society’s been lingering for a few months on every possible permutation of sexual harassment, and how society deals with it (“due process”?  “Always believe women!”?  “Always believe women, unless they’re accusing men who are key votes for abortion rights legislation”?), I think it’s time to look at another version.

On The Plantation:  “Progressivism” heaps especial scorn on apostates – Afro-Americans, Latinos, Asians and women wno leave the Progressive plantation.

And no, the right doesn’t do the same thing.    Have you ever heard a conservative rip on, say, Paul Thissen or Tom Bakk for “betraying middle aged white guys” [1] by not being a conservative?   No.  And you never will.

But you do hear mainstream “progressives” tear into black, Latino, asian and female conservatives for, I kid you not, “betraying” their race and gender.  [2]

And if any of them run for office?  They turn psychotic (which brings us to Berg’s Eight Law).

In particular, I’ve talked with a number of female conservatives who’ve related a similar pattern to me; they’ve thought about running for office, or for higher office – but demurred…

…because they knew the Democrat smear machine was going to do in terms of splashing their private life, current, past and long-past, in public.

So let’s get this straight:  to “Progressive” “feminists”, “slut-shaming” women who have had more than one partner in their lives, or who’ve gone out in public dressed as someone other than Hester Prynne, is completely unacceptable –  unless one has:

  • Accused a Democrat politician of some sort of impropriety, in which it will be used to discredit you
  • Run for office as a non-Democrat, in which case it will be used to assassinate your character.

Which, put another way, is using sex to preserve disparate power.

[1] Their narrative about conservatives and conservatism.  Not mine.

[2] Conservatism is never, ever about identity.  Anyone who says it is is driven by narrative, not fact.