Month: January 2013

Viral insanity

by digby

David wrote about the deeply creepy conspiracy theorizing about Sandy Hook the other day, but it’s worth noting that it seems to be on the verge of going mainstream. If that happens we are sicker than I thought:

There are two kinds of conspiracy theories: The ones, about the Illuminati and about mysterious “chemtrails,” that lurk forever in the online twilight zone, favored by a hard core of fringe believers; and the ones that, like the equally ludicrous speculation about Barack Obama’s nativity, break into the nation’s political conversation.

The repugnant and absurd theories about the massacre of children in Newtown, Conn. last month seem like an obvious candidate for the first category, simply too insane to gain any sort of wide acceptance. But some of the factors that can bring theories in from the fringe appear to be driving its unexpected surge this month: A connection to America’s intensely polarized political culture in general, and a message that appeals to a longstanding fear among gun owners, in particular.

The leading version of the “Sandy Hook Hoax” theory, such as it is, holds that the incident was staged by the White House as a prelude to disarming America. Many of its claims are rooted in contradictory and confusing media statements that came out of the chaos of the first hours of the shooting, and which are virtually always present in such chaotic moments. (Similar confused media reporting served as the basis of the 9/11 Truth movement.)

The theory is ludicrous, but there is hard evidence that it has begun to go viral. The leading, anonymous, 30-minute video created by YouTube user ThinkOutsideTheTV had been viewed 10.6 million times by Friday morning. The search engine Topsy, which measures Twitter conversation, shows discussion of the video rising fast this week starting on Sunday and then, as those conversations peak and drop, discussion of a “Sandy Hook hoax” largely continuing to rise, with only a slight dip. And Twitter is just a tiny slice of a broader social space that includes Facebook, YouTube, and, in particular, email forwards, which typically are the key communication channels for conspiracy theories.

“It’s by far the hottest topic of the moment,” said David Mikkelson, the co-founder of the popular fact-checking website Snopes.com, which offers a detailed and extensive debunking of the theory’s various planks.

The term “Sandy Hook conspiracy” was also a “hot search” on Google this week.
And it has begun to pop up around the edges of broader American culture. On Jan. 16, Washington Nationals center fielder Denard Span tweeted, “I was watching some controversial stuff on YouTube about the sandy hooks thing today! It really makes u think and wonder.” His followers quickly responded with criticism: “c’mon man be smarter than that…” and “NO, man. Don’t go into the conspiracies. They’re garbage, cooked up by truly sick people.”

Span apologized in a series of subsequent tweets, concluding with: “For the record if I truly offended anybody, I AM TRULY SORRY! I’m not in the business of hurting people. I’m ok twitter to have a good time.”

This is the one that gets me:

And Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has launched an internal investigation of a communications professor, James Tracy, who has claimed the Obama Administration may have hired “crisis actors” who would grieve on camera and shape public opinion in favor of gun control.
[…]
The theorists claim some of the parents and witnesses are paid actors who, because they don’t shed tears on camera, are pretending their children died. The “Sandy Hook Shooting – Fully Exposed” video shows a photo of children hugging Obama during a visit to Newtown. The theorists claim one of the little girls is Emilie Parker, who was killed in the shooting. The little girl, who shares many of Emilie’s features, is her sister.

That’s just …. god, it’s just so sick.

I have received emails from people claiming that the police found the semi-automatic in Lanza’s car so the whole story doesn’t make sense, but the fact is that they found a shotgun in his car, not the semi-automatic.

A lot of this stems from erroneous early reporting which these loons latch onto as proof that the “story has changed.” I suppose that’s a hazard of our super fast media world in which we hear all kinds of things in the early aftermath of any event. But that doesn’t excuse the utter stupidity of people believing that the government they believe is so inept that it cannot be trusted to administer the most benign regulation is competent to stage a conspiracy of such complexity just in order to create a groundswell of support for some very mild gun control. If they were that good, I’m fairly sure they’d have found a way to get these morons to hand them over voluntarily.

The paranoid strain is really lively these days. And that’s not good for anybody.

Here’s the video millions are watching and believing:

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GOP Leadership caves. For now.

by David Atkins

The Republicans have caved on the debt ceiling hostage threat, at least for now:

House Republicans announced Friday that they will vote next week to authorize a temporary extension of the debt limit, pushing off a politically unpalatable fight in the hopes of extracting further spending cuts from Democrats in a new budget deal.

The new offer, announced at the conclusion of a three-day retreat, represents a modification of the Republican leadership’s previous demand that any debt limit increase, temporary or otherwise, must include equivalent spending reductions. The temporary increase this time comes with the stipulation that it will “give the Senate and House time to pass a budget,” something the GOP notes that the Democratic-led Senate has failed to do so for years.

But if Republicans are willing to release the hostage now, there’s no reason to believe they’ll be able to hold onto the hostage later. They hope to use the sequester itself as extra ante, but as Greg Sargent notes, that’s not likely to work for them:

Here’s why this matters: This increases the debt ceiling to authorize borrowing to pay the country’s bills well into April. That punts the debt limit deadline until after the deadline for funding for the government to run out, which is on March 27th. In other words, Republicans will now use the threat of a government shutdown along with the coming expiration of the sequester to extract the spending cuts it wants. Presuming this all gets resolved by then, or soon after, it means the threat of default is no longer a factor. This will all but certainly get resolved in advance of this three month deadline, and a long term debt limit hike will get attached to that agreement.

On the debt ceiling, at least, this is a complete cave. As noted below, the mere willingness to raise the debt ceiling temporarily was itself an acknowledgment by Republicans that the threat of default gave them no leverage and that they had essentially lost this fight. Now the three month extension means that in practical terms, it’s essentially been removed from the talks entirely.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with Greg here. The threat of default does give the GOP leverage by definition (if it didn’t they wouldn’t have threatened it), as long as they’re willing to threaten the nation with default to get what they want. Democrats would theoretically have the same leverage if they played the game that way, but making the government catatonically dysfunctional hurts Democratic ideas and interests (as well as, obviously, the entire national and global economy.) But there are still apparently enough sane Republicans left, combined with big money interest in avoiding default and worry about the collapsing public approval for the GOP for them to rethink taking down the entire American economy.

And, for what it’s worth, it means the Republicans took seriously the President’s statements about refusal to negotiate over the debt ceiling–meaning that Republicans don’t necessarily see the President as a total pushover. All of that is good news. What’s more, the momentum of negotiation is now on the other side, with Democrats now demanding a clean debt ceiling hike with no funny business attached. This would force Boehner to come up with at least a Hastert Rule majority of Republicans for the three-month extension, which will be no easy task with the rabid Tea Party faction demanding immediate default absent spending cuts. After the Plan “B” fiasco, it’s not clear that Boehner could achieve that.

The two major concerns at this point are 1) whether Boehner can maintain his leadership position while constantly undercutting the Tea Party crowd; and 2) what sort of concessions Democrats will be tempted to make in order to take the sequester off the table.

All in all, though, today’s news is good news. Democrats called the GOP bluff on their threat to destroy the economy for ideological gain, and the GOP folded. There’s no reason to believe they won’t fold again when the pressure’s on. That leaves Democrats in the driver’s seat.

At this point, if there are cuts to Social Security, Medicare or other important programs, it will be entirely on Democrats’ heads unless the GOP finds a different, more credible hostage. I’m sure the search is already on.

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Funny right wing video of the day

by digby

Watch Sean Hannity deflate before your eyes.

Hannity seems to be genuinely confused by Mukasey’s belief that not everything he disapproves of can or should be litigated in a court of law or that a presidential “abuse of power” might be a political rather than a legal or constitutional issue. That does not compute.

But let’s talk executive orders. There’s the alleged abuse of power in the president telling his agencies to selectively enforce certain immigration laws or to take a particular approach to dealing with the proliferation of guns.

And then there’s stuff like this:

National Security Presidential Directive 51, the Bush administration’s plan for keeping the government functional in the case of a catastrophic crisis. The policy is not technically an executive order, but we’ll allow it. The national-security presidential directive is a close-enough cousin and highly worthy of revocation.

What the order says: The public part of NSPD-51 grants broad authority to the president in a time of emergency, explicitly stating, “The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government.” The rest of the order is fairly bureaucratic, appointing a national continuity coordinator and directing agency heads to develop their own plans.

But that’s not all. Not only has the White House classified most of the annexes to the directive, it has refused to show them to the members of Congress on relevant committees. As the Oregonian reported, the White House stonewalled efforts by Rep. Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat and member of the homeland-security committee, to gain access to the classified parts of the directive.

And this:

Executive Order 13440

July 20, 2007

What the order says: After the Supreme Court pushed back against the Bush administration’s efforts to hold the Guantanamo detainees indefinitely and without charges, doubts arose about the legality of the CIA’s use of coercive interrogation techniques (or torture, if you think water-boarding amounts to that). For a time, the CIA’s interrogation squeeze was on hold. Then Bush issued Executive Order 13440, and the interrogators started rolling again. The order isn’t explicit about which practices it allows—that remains classified—but it may still sidestep the protections in the Geneva Convention against humiliating and degrading treatment. According to the New York Times, water-boarding is off-limits, but sleep deprivation may not be, and exposure to extreme heat and cold is allowed.

(There is a list of some of the other of the more heinous Bush Executive orders here.)

The Obama administration has also used executive orders in the national security arena to circumvent the congress. This is what president’s do and it’s a huge part of our imperial problem. But for the right wing to suddenly be upset about executive power grabs is hilarious. They’re the one’s who institutionalized it many moons ago.

But even in the domestic arena they’re champs. Remember this one?

Executive Order 13435

June 20, 2007

What the order says: In August 2001, Bush issued a rule limiting federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research to existing colonies of such cells. Five years later, he expended the first veto of his presidency to reject legislation served up by a Republican Congress to ease those restrictions. This subsequent executive order a year later, issued the same day he vetoed the legislation a second time, encourages research into alternative measures of creating pluripotent stem cells. The order directs the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health to prioritize research consistent with Bush’s previous directives and devote resources to finding other means of creating human stem cells.

I admit that abuse of executive power is a problem regardless of which president does it. And Democrats have certainly used (and misused) the powers of the office in this way. But I’m just not particularly impressed with the right’s sudden concern about it. They like presidential power very well, and for its own sake, not just as an expedient way to get around a recalcitrant congress. They believe the president should have imperial powers. They just don’t believe that anyone but a conservative should ever be allowed to be president.

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RIP Dear Abby

by digby

Rick Perlstein has a lovely tribute to Dear Abby, who died today. Be sure to read the whole thing:

Sometimes we feel so alone, we liberals, in this country where a massacre of children wins 100,000 new members for the National Rifle Association, where politicians and pundits’ answer to a middle class drowned by predation by plutocrats is to preach a squeeze on government spending, where a president heard in the voices of 3,000 people slaughtered by Al Qaeda an injunction to invade Iraq. The beacons, however, are out there—everywhere, and sometimes where we least expect them. I’m not saying Pauline Friedman Phillips, who published her advice column in some 1,400 newspapers under the pen name Abigail Van Buren, was some Emma Goldman or something. But for millions of ordinary Americans who trusted her, she was frequently a voice of progressive decency on the cutting edge of subjects on which most voices of authority were saying very different things indeed. We lost her yesterday. So here’s an example of what I mean.

In August of 1980 the director of the ballet company of which Ron Reagan, son of the presidential candidate, was for some reason moved to put out a statement that both Reagan and all the other men in his group had “nice girlfriends.”

In the notion that ballet dancers must be gay, and that this was a shamefully horrible thing, he spoke to a fear shared by Ron Reagan’s father, who when Ron dropped out of college in 1977 to become a dancer immediately phoned up Gene Kelly to ask if that meant he was gay. Later, his adopted son Michael helped him process a disturbing discovery: he caught Ron with a woman in his and Nancy’s (gross!) bed. Said Michael, “The bad news is that you came home early and you caught him. The good news i that you found out he isn’t gay.”

“Dear Abby” had a different view. Of the ballet director, a reader wrote in to decry the “sad commentary on our society’s attitude toward human sexuality that such a statement was made at all. Implicit in that announcement were the following erroneous assumptions: 1) That male participation in ballet requires lengthy justification lest it threaten our traditional views of masculinity; 2) that all male ballet dancers are suspect and therefore proof of their masculinity is required—i.e., having girlfriends; 3) that without proof of their manliness, people might think they were gay; and 4) that being gay is bad.”

I read Dear Abby avidly from the time I was a small child. I recall her giving advice to young girls about being strong individuals and thinking for themselves long before I’d ever heard it from anyone else. She was decent, compassionate and smart and a very keen observer of human nature. And, thank goodness, her influence was huge.

RIP Abby.

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Mooks with guns


by digby

Does this make you feel safe?

This is at a JC Penney. When we had open carry in California I occasionally saw some mooks, usually in a group, descend on a Starbucks or a mall and it would always scare the hell out of everyone. Conversation would stop, a lot of us would move away or leave. After all, it was impossible to actually know whether they were “bad guys” or “good guys.”  That’s why the police wear uniforms. (And even then …)  I always thought it had to be bad for business.   Probably not the crazy man with the arsenal who’s planning to gun down a bunch of strangers, though.

Gotta Laff has this particular guy’s story.

Pwnd by faceless bureaucrats


by digby

I’ve never understood why so many people think the Social Security actuaries have always been innumerate morons, but perhaps that’s just a result of the decades of propaganda about government workers.  The fact is that from the very beginning the SSA accurately predicted the rise in life expectancy and population growth. The baby boom was unanticipated, but once it happened they were not so stupid that they didn’t take into account that bulge in the population. And they have always factored int the obvious fact that the worker to retiree ratio would shrink once everyone came into the system.   But that doesn’t stop everyone from acting as if they have no idea how to do their jobs and have consistently missed the mark, causing the system to nearly implode until someone comes along as saves it by cutting benefits and raising the retirement age.

The most recent attack was this recent  NY Times op-ed suggesting that they had made a horrible mistake and that the system was actually going broke much sooner than expected. I’m sure Pete Peterson had an orgasm. But today the Social Security Administration issued a little report that basically rips that piece to shreds:

In their op-ed, King and Soneji state that the combined Social Security Trust Funds will deplete their reserves in 2031, which is two years earlier than shown in the 2012 Trustees Report under intermediate assumptions. They assert that this difference is attributable to the Office of the Chief Actuary’s use of mortality projection methods that “were outdated and omitted crucial health and demographic factors.” These are serious charges and deserve exploration. 

The essence of King and Soneji’s assertion is their misimpression that the Office of the Chief Actuary’s mortality projection methods do  not reflect the effects of smoking and obesity. In fact, both smoking and obesity are already reflected in historical data and the actuaries’ projection methods. King and Soneji develop a projection they refer to as “Crazy Death Rates” by, in some way, adding their estimated effects for smoking and obesity to the actuaries’ projections. This addition therefore “double counts” the effects of smoking and obesity and yields truly “crazy” results. Panel 4 below shows both
these “crazy” results and King and Soneji’s own projections, which they call “better forecasts.” This panel is copied directly from material accompanying the op-ed. 

The comparison provided in Panel 4 is highly misleading and inaccurate. For example:
• The left panel of mortality projections bears no resemblance to the mortality projections the actuaries developed for the 2012 or prior Trustees Reports.
• The label for the data values is “chance of death in one year.” However, the values presented are probabilities of death in five years.
• Values shown for historical years of “better forecasts” do not agree with actual historical data.

Ouch. That’s just the beginning.

These people are very good at their jobs.  And none of the problems that confront Social Security over the course of the next quarter century have been unanticipated.  The problem isn’t the Social Security administration.  It’s the political system which insists on pretending that the system is always in crisis and fighting over how much and who to cut. If it wasn’t such an ideological battle ground, we could deal intelligently with whatever problems arise. For instance, the one facing the brief period of anticipated shortfall 25 years from now could easily be dealt with by a hike in the payroll tax cap on earnings.

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The Debt President. Or Not.

by David Atkins

Haven’t you heard? President Obama is driving us deep into debt! Republicans must stand their ground and prevent him from bankrupting the country! Or something like that.

Back on Planet Earth, here’s the reality:

It’s a crisis, I’m telling you.

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Exploiting the snowflakes

by digby

As you listen to the crocodile tears of right wingers protesting the use of children to make a political point, remember this:

In the first ever veto of his administration, President Bush has killed legislation that would have expanded federal support of stem cell research by making available to scientists new “lines” of such cells that experts generally agree are needed to move forward in finding treatments for spinal cord injury, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other life threatening diseases.

The veto was announced during a carefully staged ceremony at the White House, where the President was surrounded by families whose “snowflake babies” began as “frozen embryos” created by in vitro fertilization. No longer needed by the families who produced them, such embryos were available for “adoption.” 

The president said: “We must remember that embryonic stem cells come from human embryos that are destroyed for their cells. Each of these human embryos is a unique human life with inherent dignity and matchless value. We see that value in the children who are with us today.”

“These boys and girls are not spare parts,” said the President.

Nothing manipulative about that at all.

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What were the founders really afraid of?

by digby

Now this is something I didn’t know. From Thom Hartmann:

By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings. As Dr. Bogus points out, slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.

If the anti-slavery folks in the North had figured out a way to disband – or even move out of the state – those southern militias, the police state of the South would collapse. And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the slaves of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery, and the southern economic and social systems, altogether.

These two possibilities worried southerners like James Monroe, George Mason (who owned over 300 slaves) and the southern Christian evangelical, Patrick Henry (who opposed slavery on principle, but also opposed freeing slaves).

Their main concern was that Article 1, Section 8 of the newly-proposed Constitution, which gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia, could also allow that federal militia to subsume their state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing institutions into something that could even, one day, free the slaves.

This was not an imagined threat. Famously, 12 years earlier, during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, Lord Dunsmore offered freedom to slaves who could escape and join his forces. “Liberty to Slaves” was stitched onto their jacket pocket flaps. During the War, British General Henry Clinton extended the practice in 1779. And numerous freed slaves served in General Washington’s army.

Thus, southern legislators and plantation owners lived not just in fear of their own slaves rebelling, but also in fear that their slaves could be emancipated through military service.

At the ratifying convention in Virginia in 1788, Henry laid it out:

“Let me here call your attention to that part [Article 1, Section 8 of the proposed Constitution] which gives the Congress power to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States. . . .

“By this, sir, you see that their control over our last and best defence is unlimited. If they neglect or refuse to discipline or arm our militia, they will be useless: the states can do neither . . . this power being exclusively given to Congress. The power of appointing officers over men not disciplined or armed is ridiculous; so that this pretended little remains of power left to the states may, at the pleasure of Congress, be rendered nugatory.”

Henry then bluntly laid it out:

“If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress . . . . Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia.”

And why was that such a concern for Patrick Henry?

“In this state,” he said, “there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states. But there are few or none in the Northern States. . . . May Congress not say, that every black man must fight? Did we not see a little of this last war? We were not so hard pushed as to make emancipation general; but acts of Assembly passed that every slave who would go to the army should be free.”

So Madison, who had (at Jefferson’s insistence) already begun to prepare proposed amendments to the Constitution, changed his first draft of one that addressed the militia issue to make sure it was unambiguous that the southern states could maintain their slave patrol militias.

His first draft for what became the Second Amendment had said: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country [emphasis mine]: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

But Henry, Mason and others wanted southern states to preserve their slave-patrol militias independent of the federal government. So Madison changed the word “country” to the word “state,” and redrafted the Second Amendment into today’s form:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State [emphasis mine], the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

I’m not entirely sure that it clears anything up with regard to whether the right to bear arms was meant to be an individual right or one directly related to the need for militia, but it’s very interesting nonetheless. The original sin of slavery just filters through our entire cultural and civic foundation, doesn’t it?

I can’t say that I’m completely surprised that the 2nd Amendment had a strong pro-slavery component considering the cultural fault lines. The idea that everyone was running in fear of the future government they were creating never rang true, despite Jefferson’s musings about the need for revolution every once in a while. The need to raise a militia to repel foreign invaders? Of course. Especially since they expressly provided for no standing army. But there was always something else in there. And this makes sense.

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Paul Krugman also calls out the stupidity of equating climate and deficits

by David Atkins

On January 9 I wrote a post mocking Tom Friedman for equating climate change and long-term deficits as if they were equivalent issues. From that post:

But there are a few enormous differences between the two. Pundits like Friedman claim that progressives don’t want to do anything about the deficit because interest rates are low at the moment, so the deficit “problem” won’t rear its head for quite a while. In this way we are compared to conservatives who refuse to act on climate change.

But that’s not the actual reason most progressives oppose short-term austerity. The big differences between the two issues are:

1) Unlike runaway greenhouse effects, deficits will mostly decline naturally with economic growth. The biggest cause of the major debt-to-GDP ratio increase since 2007 is not surprisingly the Great Recession. Most of that problem will disappear with a robust, demand-driven recovery. Yes, there are certain problems to solve as the population ages, but those are almost entirely due to rising healthcare costs that are best controlled with a universal single-payer system. In the case of deficits, the “problem” really will mostly resolve itself by doing nothing. Not so with climate, which will spin out of control if nothing is done.

Paul Krugman today makes the same point:

So, let’s start with climate change. Serious people are and should be deeply worried, indeed horrified, by the lack of action on greenhouse gases. But why? Why not just assume that when climate change becomes undeniable, we’ll do whatever is necessary?

The answer, first and foremost, is that each year we fail to act has more or less irreversible physical consequences. We’re pumping around 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually; this stuff will stick around for a very long time, and its consequences for warming and sea level rise will last even longer. So each year that we fail to act has a direct physical impact on the future…

Now ask, what in the debate about “entitlements” corresponds at all to this kind of impact? Nothing physical, clearly. You could argue that it would have helped to prepay some of our future costs by paying down debt and indeed having the government acquire assets while the demography was favorable – not because this would have directly increased future resources (debt is money we owe to ourselves) but because it would have reduced the need for higher taxes, and hence the distortionary effect of those taxes. And this argument was, indeed, the reason people like me wanted to protect the Social Security lockbox way back when.

But we didn’t; Bush squandered the surplus on tax cuts and unfunded wars (and was, with notably rare exceptions, cheered on by the very people now lecturing us solemnly on the need to cut entitlements). Now the baby boomers are retiring fast, and as far as I can tell none of the deficit scolds are pushing for a big effort to pay debt down over the course of the next few years.

Instead, they’re pushing for things like a gradual rise in the retirement age and a change in the formulas used to compute benefits – things that will cut future rather than present outlays. Or to put it differently, they aren’t really trying to cut debt; they’re simply trying to lock us in now to the spending cuts they think we’ll eventually have to make anyway. And they never, as far as I can tell, really ask why it’s important to do this now…

The point is that there’s a pretty good case for letting the future of entitlements take care of itself. It’s not a slam-dunk case, but the case for urgency right now is quite weak, and nothing at all like the case that we need to stop pouring all that CO2 into the atmosphere as soon as possible.

Now, you might ask whether it’s really possible that the whole Serious consensus about the budget is based on such weak logical underpinnings. Don’t the great and the good think things through before getting all committed to their views?

Amen. The “serious consensus” isn’t serious and has never been serious. I suppose some climate change advocates welcome the attention of the Pete Peterson deficit crowd to the issue. But I just find it incredibly insulting. To equate the two issues is an insult to the magnitude of the climate problem, and gives lawmakers entirely the wrong impression how quickly, urgently and strongly it must be dealt with. There’s no “sequester” on climate for which a can can be kicked down the road. And using the urgency of climate activism as an excuse for cutting social security benefits is terribly, terribly wrong.

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