Join me from 1-3PM today on the NARN!

Today on the show:

• John Augustine of the Legislative Evaluation Assembly n the upcoming session.
• Berg’s Fourth Law
• A Year Of Trump
• You Can Call Him Gone

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is  on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.

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Woman bumped from United (what else?) flight by the imperious Sheila Jackson Lee (D, TX)

Jackson Lee accuses her victim of…wait for it…wait for it…racism.

Woman – Jean-Marie Simon – fires back:

“That could have been Donald Duck in my seat,” Simon, a Democrat, told Fox News on Thursday. “I could not see who had boarded the flight. I didn’t even know who she was.”

It could happen to you:

At first, Simon didn’t know who was in her seat as she argued at the gate. United eventually gave her a $500 voucher and reseated her in the economy plus section. In her original Facebook post, Simon said another Texas congressman then informed her a fellow member of the delegation was in her seat, and “regularly does this” to passengers.

Of course she does.

And if yoiu say “boo”, she plays the race card.

On the one hand, if Simon weren’t a female Democrat, the media wouldn’t be carrying the story.  If she were a white male, the “racism” charge would be carried uncritically.

On the other hand?  More of these spurious charges of racism, misogyny, “mansplaining” and the like need to be jammed back down the accusers’ throats.  Preferably with ball-peen hammers.

TANGENTIAL NOTE:  This is the 15,000th post on this blog since November 2006 (whien I switched to WordPress).

Apropos not much.

Gun violence prevention control grouips are fond of whipping up “popular” anger against “the gun lobby” – portrayed as an immense, boundlessly wealthy group of heartless white guys with three piece suits and cigars, cackling with glee at the deaths of innocent children.  Big Left has worked overtime to try to demonize civil rights groups, especially the NRA, as 900 pound gorillas that the plucky criminal-safety advocates can’t possibly compete with.

So what’s the truth?

As always – read 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.”.

And the Law will lead you to the truth.    It always does:

After compiling the numbers we discovered pro-gun control candidates received more than six times more money than pro-gun rights candidates on the issue.

Last year, the largest recipient of campaign cash from pro-gun rights groups in Oregon was Laura Morett. The Republican candidate for state representative and former “Survivor” reality show contestant received $10,132.86 total from the Oregon Firearms Federation and the National Rifle Association (NRA). Despite the infusion of cash, Morett was not successful in defeating state Rep. Paul Evans, D-Salem.

“But Mitch – that’s Oregon!”

The ration is even more lopsided in Minnesota, where the antis outspent the good guys nearly 10:1 in the 2016 legislative elections.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Trump’s tax reform means other countries will have to cut taxes, too.  It will be a global tax race to the bottom.

From their lips to God’s ears.

Joe Doakes

I actually saw a local “progressive” posit that as a Bad Thing last week.

…as this writer does to Dianne Feinstein, for being not merely “too old”, but too militaristic to serve in the Senate…:

Dianne Feinstein was recently seen at a town hall doing some truly remarkable mental contortions advocating regime change in Syria while simultaneously trying to distance herself from the politically unpopular phrase “regime change” itself. She has supported US military interventionism at every turn, has advocated all new cold war escalations with Russia, at a time in her life when she should really be leaving potentially world-ending decisions like that to the people who will still be here to deal with their consequences.

…well, you know what’s gonna happen, right?

Nothing.  Seniority equals power.  She, like Robert Byrd before her, will be “serving” in the Senate until her the jar holding her brain falls over and breaks.

It’s called “Berg’s Fourth Law”, and not “Berg’s Fourth Joke” or “Berg’s Fourth Wry Quip”, for a reason.

It’s about time.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Trump issued an Executive Order.  Human rights abuse and corruption are a threat to national security, so if you’re on our secret list, we can bar your entry into the country and if you’re already here, we can seize your assets without notice.

Wow, that’s a big step, worse than the No Fly List.  Just on general principles, I’m uncomfortable with the President giving the bureaucracy that kind of power.  What brought this on?

The order is somehow related to the Magnitsky Act, which is named after some Russian who died under suspicious circumstances.  The Russian government hates the Magnitsky Act and wants it repealed.  Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton didn’t enforce the Act because they wanted favorable relations with the Russians.

Remember Natalia Veselnitskaya, that Russian lawyer woman who met with Donald Trump Junior before the election?  She claimed to have dirt on Hillary so he went to the meeting but she had no dirt, it was a pretense to lobby him to repeal the Magnitsky Act.

Turns out that same woman was given special permission to enter the US by the Obama Department of Justice, tricked Junior into taking hermeeting, and also met with Fusion GPS – the people who made the fake dossier paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign – before and after hermeeting with Junior.  She came, got instructions, executed them, reported back . . . mission accomplished.

That meeting and the Fusion GPS dossier are the Democrats’ reasons for claiming Trump was colluding with the Russians to steal the election.  On the contrary, it’s beginning to look as if the whole thing may have been a team effort between the Russian government, the DNC and the Clinton campaign to smear Trump and thereby help Hillary get elected.  And the proof is this Executive Order – had Trump not been elected, Hillary would have continued to go soft on Russia, so plainly the Russians had no interest in defeating her.  Trump is their worst nightmare – a politician they can’t buy.

The special investigator should be looking at collusion, all right, he’s just not looking in the right place.

Joe Doakes

Now that Trump has nominated a good SCOTUS justice, if all he accomplishes is further undercutting the respect for the media and the federal bureaucracy, I’ll consider his presidency a success

Big Left seems to thrive on misery.  They seem to love to cling to the notion that things have never been worse, in the nation or the world (or at least they do when there’s no Democrat in the White House).

For example – ask a typical liberal, and they’ll say that “gun violence” is at an all time high.  It’s not – nationwide, it’s at sixty-year lows, and even in Democrat-controlled major cities it’s lower than it was 25 years ago.  And yet if you ask a “progressive” what’s going on in the world, they’ll to a person insist “violent crime is out of control”.

And that’s not the only area.

I mentioned the other day the church service I went to on Christmas Eve, featuring a homily that made it sound like the world was teetering on the the brink of collapse – notwithstanding the fact that, for most of the world, things have never been better.

Don’t get me wrong – the human condition is an ugly thing.  I’m of Scandinavian descent, so optimism and pollyannaism don’t come naturally.   And the arc of the universe, while long, curves inexorably toward tyranny and barbarism.  It could all go south someday.  And there certainly  are wars going on, refugees in camps, pockets of malnutrition.

But for now, for most of the world’s people, things have never been better. As evidence, I submit this:   for the first time in the history of humanity, obesity is a bigger problem than malnutrition, as reported by those noted conservative crazies in The Lancet, in this case via both CNN and an actual news organization (which notes that obesity kills three times as many people worldwide as malnutrition).

This, not fifty years after “experts” like Paul Ehrlich “proved” that mankind was headed for an unavoidable date with Malthusianism ; that poor countries in South Asian and Africa were beyond hope and would need to be “triaged”; that India was, inevitably, going to plunge to a stable population of 100 million, and Subsaharan Africa was going to mostly die off as well.

Bear in mind that throughout all of human history, mankind has always been one bad crop away from mass starvation.  This is the first time in history most people on this planet can take a deep breath and think about a future that goes past the net harvest.

And this is almost entirely due to the success of the free market – even in places that have repudiated free markets!

Again – not that life is a picnic everywhere on earth.  It’s not.  But it’s also never been less dire and threatened.

There’s just no telling that to Big Left.

It’s fun, sometimes, to go back and read headlines rom 2005.

CORRECTION:  My apologies.  The headline was from over the weekend.

I am sorry for any confusion.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Raul Castro stepping down as Dictator of Cuba in April.  Maybe he and Al Franken can have a joint going-away party?

Joe Doakes

They’ll throw them both a party in the ocmmunity room at Westminster Presbyterian Church.

The Strib’s Maya Rao writes about the push for national carry permit reciprocity.

The funny part?

The record numbers of Minnesotans who hold permits to carry concealed guns could soon be able to carry their firearms in all 50 states, a move advocates said would preserve the right to self-defense wherever people travel in the country.

But law enforcement leaders in Minnesota and around the country are raising concerns that the proposal, which passed the U.S. House this month, could harm public safety and mean looser regulation of guns in states like Minnesota, with stricter permit requirements than other places.

That’s been the comic irony of the “debate” on this issue ;”progressive” Minnesotans who favor federal control over schoiol lunch menus suddenly turn into Randians on this issue.

And did you catch that muted praise for Minnesota’s carry permit law?  [1]   A law the Strib did its dishonest worst to try to scupper this time 15 years ago?

“If you are a law-abiding citizen with a permit for a concealed carry … you shouldn’t have to turn around every time you reach the bridge to Wisconsin,” said Rep. Jason Lewis, a Republican who helped vote the bill off the House floor this month. It passed 231-198, largely along party lines.

Lewis is largely right; while gun laws should be maintained by the states, there is no rational reason why someone who is a model citizen in Minnesota should be treated as a felon in Illinois, New Jersey or DC.

Other than demigoguery and catering to left-wing prosecutors love of “discretion”, which is a polite word for “the power of life and death over plebeians”.

The proposal has put Republicans at odds with prosecutors around the country. Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman, the president of the National District Attorneys Association, said most prosecutors — particularly those overseeing large urban areas — do not support conceal carry reciprocity “because it’s a dive to the bottom” in terms of oversight of guns.

It’s baked wind, of course.   Carry permit holders are not the problem.  Anywhere.  Ever.  The only thing people with carry permits “dive for the bottom” at is crime stats, where they are two orders of magnitude less likely to commit any kind of crime than the general public.

But Mike Freeman maligning law-abiding citizens to preserve is precious discretion?  Thats “dog licks dog”.

The Strib holding up Minnesota’s carry permit law as a model of how it should be done?

That’s man licks dog.

[1] Which is, by the way, not “strict”; it’s reasonable.  It demands training, which has never been actually correlated with public safety, but does make people feel better, which is what “progressivism” cares about.

Yesterday, when the US used its Security Council veto to scupper a General Assembly resolution condemning Israel moving its capitol to Jerusalem, Ambassador Haley – the best UN ambassador since Jeanne Kirkpatrick – told the General Assembly that the US was going to start “taking names” of those who piddled on our shoes, especially come budget time.

The multilateralists who infest the media, academy and commentariat huffed and puffed.

Let them, I say.  We‘re the ones who’ll blow the house down:

But there are two things wrong with the liberal huffing and puffing. The first is that the administration’s threats are bound to be immensely popular even among Americans who aren’t Trump fans. The second is that it is high time that someone reminded the inhabitants of the U.N. that while the U.S. may be considered the dull child in the classroom in their realm, the balance of power in the real world is very different, even on issues where Trump has supposedly isolated the U.S., such as Jerusalem and the Arab–Israeli conflict.

Those Who Know Better – the think-tankers who infest most of the United Nations – roundly condemned us (and, perforce, Israel).

But Haley isn’t taking the attempt to isolate the U.S. lying down. As she did in her eloquent defense of the American position before the Security Council, the ambassador said not only that Trump had done the right thing when recognizing Israel’s rights in Jerusalem, but also that other nations had no business telling the U.S. where to put any of its embassies.

“But!  But!  War in the Middle East!”

…the main players in the Sunni Muslim world, such as the Egyptians and especially the Saudis, have made it clear to Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas that they are uninterested in backing him on the issue outside of purely symbolic U.N. theater. Reportedly, Abbas was summoned to Riyadh to be told to accept a peace deal that Trump may propose giving the Palestinians far less, especially in terms of Jerusalem, than past offers they’ve received — and rejected — from Israel.

So while the double-breasted suits who party their careers away in New York have the official vapours about Trump’s policies in re Israel and the UN, it’d seem that on the ground, Trump’s “intransigence” may be showing some actual, possible, maybe, sorta, results?

And if either is the case – movement on the Palestinian situation and on neutering and perhaps ditching the UN – happen to come to pass, I, a non-fan of Trump, will be pretty darn impressed.

First, the Trump administration slashed the Obamacare advertising budget by nearly 90 percent.

Obamacare advocates predicted disaster.

Then, the Trump administration cut the open enrolllment from three months down to six weeks – right around half.

Obamacare advocates predicted disaster.

The result? With less time, less money and less churn, Obamacare signed up…

… the same number of people as last year.

Why, it’s almost as if people will seek out freebies without the aid of bureaucrats, or pictures of Pajama Boy urging them to talk healthcare with their relatives over the holidays.

Crazy as that may sound.

With the entry into the workforce – at least in “creative” fields – of a generation of people who’ve come to see their feelings as inviolable arbiters of how the world is and should be, the holiday season has become just a little more fraught.

I”m here to help.

Im’ attaching a list of the types of colleagues you can expect to encounter in the modern workplace this time of year.

The NPR Malaise-o-holic:  If you listen to National Public Radio, you’d think the nation was gripped by a wave of depression from Thanksgiving through New Years every year.   In the world of public broadcasting, the holidays seem to be perceived as a shared ordeal of awful food shared with un-hip, conservative, crassly-commercial relatives that is at best endured and at worst, succumbed to.  Don’t believe me?  Just ask them.  They’ll be happy to share.

The PC Warrior:  “Merry Christmas”.

“A-HEM.  It’s happy HOLidays“.

This one will also be happy to inform you that “Christmas is really pagan“, smugly unaware that that’s the point, if you’re a Christian.  Nobody is born Christian (except Christ, maybe); we’ve all converted from something else, or from nothing.

The Humbug:   They hate the holidays    And they’ll tell you every time the subject comes up.

The Triggerer:    “Merry Christmas!”

“What’s so merry about it?”

Christmas is part of the aggressions foisted on indigenous societies by white male Christianist conquerors, donchaknow.

Father Festivus:  Yes, yes, we get it; your mocking of other peoples’ traditions and petty joys is just as big a laugh now as it was when George Costanza talked about it in Seinfeld, what, 55 years ago?

The MacroAggressor:  The Macro aggressor combines all the above – the theatrical assumed depression, the Urban Progressive Privilege, the roiling fog of fatigue, the intolerance and the self-adoring – and wraps it with a layer of overt hostility.  The MacroAggressor hates the Holiday season, especially Christmas, and anyone who partakes.  And, like all the above, they’ll be happy to vent about it at the slightest opportujnity – or even without it.

Anyway – to all the rest of you, may you and your family be blessed by the joy this season brings.

And for the six groups I list above?  MERRY CHRISTMAS.  In your face.  Over and over.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Democrat IT aides ran a fake car dealership to launder money to terrorists in Pakistan, while also drawing congressional salaries.  Democrats are obstructing the investigation.

The question is not “Were the aides corrupt?”  Obviously, yes, they were.

The question is not “Did the Democrats who employed them, know they were corrupt?”  I think that’s a safe assumption.

The question is not even “Where did the money go?”  It’s gone and we’ll never have an actionable answer, nothing to recover.

The question is “Which Democrats got paid off?”  You know they did, that’s the only reason Democrats would be stalling.  They couldn’t care less about missing computers or stolen national secrets, they only care about staying out of prison to enjoy their bribes.  Find them.  Expose them.

Start looking into draining that swamp, why doncha?

Joe Doakes

Is it too early to guess “all oif them?”

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A college classmate went on an Alaska cruise.  She loved it.  I look at the advertising photo and think: “Seriously?  You’re all lined up to look at a snowbank?

Where the hell are you from, that a snowbank is a big deal?”

I could make a fortune showiing people snowbanks along rural North Dakota highways…

In Saint Paul, on top of the feds, the state, the county and the city, we have a de facto fifth level of government, the “Community Council”.   They’re not technically “government”, but they administer much of the city’s planning agenda, and serve as a group of ready labor for cajoling, shaming and bludgeoning neighborhood businesses into line.

Their boards are “elected”, but the elections are kept a fairly closely guarded secret to avoid any dissenting voices joining.  They are essentially training grounds, and sometimes salaries, for the DFL farm club in Saint Paul.

And some of them go through money they don’t have like it’s going out of style.

The Pioneer Press is covering the ongoing collapse of the Dayton’s Bluff Community Councijl, on the lower East Side.   In the report – you can read it here – you can see a lot of the hallmarks of DFL control writ small; a paid administrator with big ambitions and dubious command of finance; a “cultural director” with a mutual-back-scratching arrangement with the council, and a board elected by a neighborhood that bleeds blue and wouldn’t know what “dissent” is in a one party town.

The results?  Among many others (and you should read the whole thing):

In an interview, Abbott-Foster acknowledged that the council’s 2017 proposed budget was about $470,000 — and they’ll likely only pull in $300,000.

“It was probably a crazy budget proposal. But every year we’d gone up. That was on trajectory,” she added, noting the 2016 actual budget was in the $400,000 range.

She said her own salary was $83,000.

“When I started we were on a $70,000 budget. And each year I was there, we increased the budget by $70,000,” she said.

She blamed the shortfall on several factors: two regular funders, including the St. Paul Foundation, pulled out this year. Their radio station didn’t get any significant underwriting.

DFL governnance:  cover the luxuries, and the necessities will take care of themselves.

…it’s because they want you to focus on the one big “conservative” failure of state governance in recent years [1] – and ignore stories like North Carolina, whose economy is booming under conservative leadership and policies.

Or North Dakota, which weathered the deflation of the oil boom in style (the unemployment rate has never gotten less than a half point lower than Minnesota’s, even at the worst of the deflation).

Or Wisconsin, which after years of heckling from DFLers urging people to compare Mark Dayton’s performance with Scott Walker’s, are pretty silent these days; it took Wisconsin a few years to shake off the dross of six decades of “progressive” control of the economy, but today it’s unemployment rate is statistically identical with Minnesota’s.

Or that of solidly-red Idaho – the nation’s fastest-growing state.

Of course, percentage growth differs from numeric growth — that top title went to Texas, [Huh.  Don’t that beat all? – Ed] which brought in an additional 400,000 residents between July 2016 and July 2017, bringing the Southern state’s total population to 28.3 million people.

Warning to Idahoans:  screen for people fleeing California, Seattle and Denver.  Even as they flee the results of progressivism, they bring the contagion.  Build a wall.

As contrasted with the jewel i the “progressive” crown, Illinois, which is losing about 300 people a day.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

On the phone, waiting to talk to my bank.  They play ads during the hold Muzak.

“Need extra money this holiday season?  Whether it’s to take the family out of state, buy gifts, or host that holiday party, we have holiday loans available.  Whatever the additional expense may be, use the funds to stretch your budget further.  Qualifications apply.”

Wait – you’ll give me a loan to host a holiday party?  Cars and homes, sure, nobody can save up enough to buy one for cash.  A party?

If lending standards have loosened this far, the nation must truly be prosperous.  What could possibly go wrong?

Joe Doakes

Perhaps…Bitcoin?

That story that Trump has instituted a list of “banned words” at the CDC?

The one the WaPo reported on?

You might as well be reading Buzzfeed.

The terms are “fetus,” “transgender,” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “evidence-based” and “science-based,” according to a story first reported on Friday in The Washington Post.

But Fitzgerald said in a series of tweets on Sunday said [Note to correspondents at PBS:  check your work.  Sic. Ed] there are “no banned words,” while emphasizing the agency’s commitment to data-driven science.

Oh, there was substitution suggested…:

A group of the agency’s policy analysts said senior officials at the CDC informed them about the banned words on Thursday, according to the Post’s report. In some cases, the analysts were reportedly given replacement phrases to use instead.

But in follow-up reporting, The New York Times cited “a few” CDC officials who suggested the move was not meant as an outright ban, but rather, a technique to help secure Republican approval of the 2019 budget by eliminating certain words and phrases.

In other words, it was internal PR.

I know a few reporters. I know they try hard to get facts, even partisan facts – sometimes even partisan facts that jostle their own partisanship – correct.

But people who believe the mainstream legacy media doesn’t operate from systematic political bias are starting to rank down there with moon landing deniers.

is it bad that I take so much joy in watching the Left eat its’ own?

Two days ago I happened to write an article about the amazingly stupid conspiracy theory that the Green Party, which has run a presidential candidate every election since 1996, ran a presidential candidate in 2016 because of a Russian plot to sabotage American democracy. Today, Buzzfeed News reports that the Senate Intelligence Committee has asked Jill Stein’s campaign to comply with a document search.

This is what Russiagate has come to. This psychotic conspiracy theory is now so desperate to turn this endless fountain of nothing into something that it is rifling through the documents of a campaign which received one percent of the popular vote because its candidate had dinner in Russia two years ago.

Jill Stein – who took the same one percent from Democrats that the Libertarians took from Trump – is coming in for some of the same weaponized wrath that befell the Greenies in 2000.

Minnesota Gun Owners  Caucus has initiated a new feature – “Anti-Leaks”.   As the GOC describes it, the feature will show leaked communications between gun-grabber groups, documenting the depth and depravity of the conspiracy against your Second Amendment rights.

Yesterday’s installment was a funny one; former Maplewood police chief Paul Schnell – who has been the cop for hire on many of “Protect” Minnesota’s dog and pony shows – got an email from a PR firm working for Gabby Giffords’ organization:

They are, in effect, putting words in the chief’s mouth:

No, I didn’t expect better.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Senate Republicans can rejoice that the pervert lost. They should rename themselves The Purity Party: only the truly virtuous may apply.  If they get choosy enough, they can save on convention expenses – meet for coffee at the local Denny’s, plenty of room for The Chosen Few.

92% of Democrats voted, only 50% of Alabama Republicans. Disheartened? The Establishment, the media, everyone against them, and some people probably had legitimate concerns about the allegations.  Still, it was close.  Democrats learned the tactic will work but they need to adjust the timing. Republicans learned . . . what?

What everyone in The Purity Party forgets is that Democrats vote as a unified monolithic block, marching to the same party line with no thought of principles or morals. Senate Republicans are like herding cats, which is why even with a majority they can’t get anything accomplished. One fewer person in their saintly congregation isn’t going to make it easier to roll back Obama’s successes.

Which makes one wonder: do Rockefeller Republicans care about that?

Joe Doakes

On the one hand, I’d very much like to see the GOP get a lot better both at vetting candidates (if Moore did do what’s been alleged, I find it hard to believe it surprised everyone) and defending against this sort of thing (why did Moore not sue every single accuser for defamation, as fast as possible, if only to get their statements – perjured statements? – on record immeidately?)

On the other?  I thinks this is a continuing lesson to Republicans that are paying attention – especially if the charges against Moore wind up being frauds.  I say “continuing”, because the election of Donald Trump itself proves that an awful lot of voters are starting to ignore the noise machine.

We’ve fallen a little behind on our World War I series.  Over the next few months, we’re going to work to get caught-up to the calendar.

For the better part of a year and a half, the British General Staff had tinkered with the plan.  The lessons of failed offensives and technological innovations had repeatedly changed Sir Douglas Haig’s tactics but not his overall strategy.  On June 18th, 1917, the commander of the British Expeditionary Forces signed off on the most ambitious amphibious attack since Gallipoli – an invasion behind the German line via the beaches in Belgium.

Massive newly designed landing crafts would drop off 13,500 British troops, tanks, artillery and even a motorized machine-gun unit.  Coupled with a joint British/Belgian/French offensive from Ypres, Haig had envisioned a quick strike behind the fearsome new Hindenburg Line, driving deep the behind German front to sow confusion, forcing what the British believed were weary German defenders to abandon their fortified trenches.  For a commander who was already earning the gruesome moniker of “Butcher” for his seemingly callous disregard for British lives, Haig appeared invested in finding a solution to the trenches short of yet another frontal assault.

The offensive had been silently built up for months, hence the codename of Operation Hush.  Yet for all of the supposed secrecy, within 24 hours of the offensive’s approval, the Germans would know exactly what the British intended – and would counter it.

Operation Hush – a naval-based flanking maneuver designed to finally circumvent the German trenches, the operation would be batted around the halls of the London War Office for almost two years

Since the earliest days of the Great War, Britain had obsessed over the opportunities that the Belgian coast provided their armies.  As early as October of 1914, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill had advocated for a naval landing behind the recently occupied Belgian front.  Even officers as relatively cautious as the British Expeditionary Force’s first commander, Sir John French, backed the concept until it was shelved for the similar Gallipoli operation.    (more…)