Month: February 2014

Poor Joe the Plumber, victimized once again

by digby

I don’t know how they live with the chaos and dissonance inside their minds:

Samuel “Joe” Wurzelbacher – a.k.a., “Joe the Plumber” – announced today on Facebook and earlier on his Web site that he has landed a union job with Chrysler Group LLC.

Mr. Wurzelbacher, 40, of Springfield Township, who once was vilified as an “unlicensed plumber,” said he was on his fourth day today and taking a smoke break at the time, when he was accosted by a co-worker as a “teabagger,” a derogatory term used for Tea Party members.

In long message, Mr. Wurzelbacher said, “I was just recently hired on at Chrysler,” and explained that while he’s known as a conservative, he’s not an enemy of private unions.

“In order to work for Chrysler, you are required to join the Union, in this case UAW. There’s no choice – it’s a union shop – the employees voted to have it that way and in America that’s the way it is,” he wrote.

“I had three days of orientation, and now I’m “on the job” over here at Chrysler and on Day 4, I’m outside on a break smoking a cigarette and right on cue – some guy calls me a ‘teabagger,’” he said.

He said the man called himself a “journeyman,” and then quickly walked away.

“I asked him if he recognizes the training we receive in the military in the trades as legitimate, but he didn’t seem interested in a serious discussion and just rushed off…” Mr. Wurzelbacher said. Mr. Wurzelbacher has said that he learned plumbing in the Air Force.

I think what I find most amusing is the fact that he’s claiming victimhood in the first week because some journeyman gives him a little shit for being a newbie. I guess JoeSam hasn’t ever worked in a plant before. God what a whiner.

But it’s interesting how “open” he is to a union now that he’s got a nice union job, isn’t it?

Honestly, I have more respect for the Tennessee wingnuts who declined to join the union saying:

“I’m a Christian and a conservative and I refuse to give my [union dues] to things I oppose, like Planned Parenthood, gun control and the Democratic Party.”

I think that’s self-defeating and silly, but he’s living his beliefs. JoeSam, on the other hand, is a bit less principled. But then he’s a failed wingnut welfare recipient, which I didn’t think was even possible.

(I got that Dallas Morning News quote was from this must-read piece by Rich Yeselson about the VW vote.)

Racism is dead in America, right?

by David Atkins

This isn’t the first video like this, but it’s certainly one of the best. Two guys, one white and one black, film themselves trying to break into a car.

A police car drives right on by the white guy and doesn’t even stop to ask him any questions. But the cops show up within minutes to handcuff the black guy once it’s his turn. Watch:

This is a big problem we have to work on as a country. But you know what certainly doesn’t help? Throwing a bunch of deadly guns into the mix.

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QOTD: Ta-Nehisi Coates

by digby

American legacy:

When Michael Dunn killed Jordan Davis, he obliterated a time-stream, devastated an open range of changes. And somewhere on that American jury, someone thought this was justice, someone believed in the voodoo of shotguns and teleportation. Michael Dunn killed a boy, and too robbed a man of his chance to be.

And this will happen again, must happen again, because our policy is color-blind, but our heritage isn’t. An American courtroom claiming it can be colorblind denies its rightful inheritance. An American courtroom claiming it can be colorblind is a drug addict claiming he can walk away after just one more hit. Law and legacy are at war. Legacy is winning. Legacy will always win. And our legacy is to die in this land where time is unequal, and deeded days are unequal, and blessed is the black man who lives to learn other ways, who lives to see other worlds, who lives to bear witness before the changes.

Heartbreaking. And beautiful. Read it all.

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A great big barrel of rotten apples blowing off steam

by digby

I did not know that there was literally a fraternity for the .001%. But there is. And a reporter snuck in to their annual bash and recorded what they said and did. Here’s a little taste:

• Paul Queally, a private-equity executive with Welsh, Carson, Anderson, & Stowe, told off-color jokes to Ted Virtue, another private-equity bigwig with MidOcean Partners. The jokes ranged from unfunny and sexist (Q: “What’s the biggest difference between Hillary Clinton and a catfish?” A: “One has whiskers and stinks, and the other is a fish”) to unfunny and homophobic (Q: “What’s the biggest difference between Barney Frank and a Fenway Frank?” A: “Barney Frank comes in different-size buns”).

• Bill Mulrow, a top executive at the Blackstone Group (who was later appointed chairman of the New York State Housing Finance Agency), and Emil Henry, a hedge fund manager with Tiger Infrastructure Partners and former assistant secretary of the Treasury, performed a bizarre two-man comedy skit. Mulrow was dressed in raggedy, tie-dye clothes to play the part of a liberal radical, and Henry was playing the part of a wealthy baron. They exchanged lines as if staging a debate between the 99 percent and the 1 percent. (“Bill, look at you! You’re pathetic, you liberal! You need a bath!” Henry shouted. “My God, you callow, insensitive Republican! Don’t you know what we need to do? We need to create jobs,” Mulrow shot back.)

• David Moore, Marc Lasry, and Keith Meister — respectively, a holding company CEO, a billionaire hedge-fund manager, and an activist investor — sang a few seconds of a finance-themed parody of “YMCA” before getting the hook.

• Warren Stephens, an investment banking CEO, took the stage in a Confederate flag hat and sang a song about the financial crisis, set to the tune of “Dixie.” (“In Wall Street land we’ll take our stand, said Morgan and Goldman. But first we better get some loans, so quick, get to the Fed, man.”)

A few more acts followed, during which the veteran Kappas continued to gorge themselves on racks of lamb, throw petits fours at the stage, and laugh uproariously. Michael Novogratz, a former Army helicopter pilot with a shaved head and a stocky build whose firm, Fortress Investment Group, had made him a billionaire, was sitting next to me, drinking liberally and annotating each performance with jokes and insults.

“Can you fuckin’ believe Lasry up there?” Novogratz asked me. I nodded. He added, “He just gave me a ride in his jet a month ago.”

There’s more, so much more. And it’s all on tape.

The author points out that this hideous display just shows the social distance and fear that pervades this society of millionaires and billionaires. And that is, of course, true. They are no longer in touch, if they ever were, with the way most people live.

But what they really remind me the most of is these guys:

At the time of Abu Ghraib people rationalized it by saying these people were under pressure and needed to blow off some steam:

“This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it, and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?”

And no, the Masters of the Universe didn’t literally torture naked prisoners (at least not at this event.) But they act out similar rituals and humiliation rites for fun and entertainment. Homophobia and weird sexual allusions abound. The casual cruelty and grinning sadism is quite similar. (And just as with Abu Ghraib, women have now been included in the group, so I guess that’s “progress.”) In the end these wealthy, educated elites are just as crude, just as dumb and just as embarrassingly primitive as those “bad apples”. They take joy in the pain of others and demand that they be respected and revered for doing it.

I suppose this ultimately means that the human species, regardless of class, is fatally flawed. Which it is. But it also means that the one thing that gives people the most freedom to be cruel is an accepting environment, social isolation and power over others. These are situations which a decent society would try to mitigate.

Lyndie England has no remorse for what she did either, by the way:

“Their lives are better. They got the better end of the deal.They’re trying to kill us, and you want me to apologise to them? It’s like saying sorry to the enemy.

Of course, the US Government sent her to jail for her cruel deeds. The MOUs all got big bonuses.

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Remember that thing called the Unitary Executive Theory, Republicans? Obviously not.

by digby

I’m amused by all the sturm und drang these days over executive overreach coming from the Republicans. Needless to say their crocodile tears are just a little bit hard to believe in light of this:

The unitary executive theory “asserts that all executive authority must be in the President’s hands, without exception.”

President George W. Bush “has been asserting from the outset of his presidency” that presidential power “must be unilateral, and unchecked.”

“But the most recent and blatant presidential intrusions on the law and Constitution supply the verse to that refrain. They not only claim unilateral executive power, but also supply the train of the President’s thinking, the texture of his motivations, and the root of his intentions.

“They make clear, for instance, that the phrase ‘unitary executive’ is a code word for a doctrine that favors nearly unlimited executive power. Bush has used the doctrine in his signing statements to quietly expand presidential authority.”

According to “Dr. Christopher Kelley, a professor in the Department of Political Sciences at Miami University, as of April 2005, President Bush had used the doctrine 95 times when signing legislation into law, issuing an executive order, or responding to a congressional resolution.”

“The President announced in these signings that he would construe provisions in a manner consistent with his ‘constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch.’ While the President clearly has the authority to supervise the executive branch, it is unclear how far he might construe this authority under the unitary executive theory.”

Bush administration “Fourth Branch” of government?

In June 2007, Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that he is neither a member of the executive branch of the U.S. government, nor required to comply with executive orders issued by President George W. Bush. In turn, President Bush—consistent with his claim that presidential power “must be unilateral, and unchecked”—also claims that he is not required to comply, as neither the president nor the vice president are “agencies” of the executive branch.

Since 2004, Cheney’s office has refused to “allow” the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), “a department within the National Archives, to conduct an on-site inspection of how classified material is handled there, as it is authorized to do under an executive order issued by President Bush.” Additionally, Cheney “prevented his office records from going to the National Archives, as required by federal law, according to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.)”, who is “now challenging the legality and rationale behind Cheney’s decision in a letter[12] sent to the vice president” on June 21, 2007. Waxman also said that Cheney’s office “stopped supplying data to the Information Security Oversight Office on its classification and declassification procedures in 2003.”

Following a threat by Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) to defund[15] “$4.8 million in executive-branch funding”, “senior administration officials” told The Politico Cheney’s office “will not pursue the argument that it is separate from the executive branch … Two senior Republican officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the rationale had been the view of the vice president’s lawyers, not Cheney himself.”

Emanuel said the defunding “vote is still planned, and said the new position means the vice president needs to comply with National Archives requirements.”

Cheney and Addington

Jan Frel wrote in October 28, 2005, AlterNet that Bush had, however, used this “unitary logic, including [in] many of his ill-fated choices relating to torture and the Geneva Conventions.”

“And who was the author of the infamous ‘torture memo?’,” Frel asked? It was David S. Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney since October 2005 and Cheney’s counsel since 2001, who “believes in the Unitary Executive theory. If you guessed that this meant the power of one CEO who decides liberty and justice for all, you wouldn’t be far off,” Frel wrote.

Addington was the “vice president’s point man,” Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank wrote October 11, 2004.

“Cheney has tried to increase executive power with a series of bold actions — some so audacious that even conservatives on the Supreme Court sympathetic to Cheney’s view have rejected them as overreaching,” Milbank wrote.

Bush Documents

News Release: “President Signs Justice Approps Authorization Act,” Statement by the President, November 4, 2002: “The executive branch shall construe section 530D of title 28, and related provisions in section 202 of the Act, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authorities of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, the national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive, or the performance of the Executive’s constitutional duties.”

News Release: “President’s Statement on H.R. 199, the ‘USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005’,” March 9, 2006: “The executive branch shall construe the provisions of H.R. 3199 that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch, such as sections 106A and 119, in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive, or the performance of the Executive’s constitutional duties.”

Signing Statements

“Presidential signing statements: Similar to the line-item veto is the presidential signing statement, in which the President signs a bill but also specifies which parts of a bill he or she actually intends to enforce.

“Until the Reagan administration, only 75 signing statements had ever been issued.”
Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton “issued a total of 247 signing statements.”

“President George W. Bush alone has issued 130 signing statements, which tend to be more sweeping in scope than those of his predecessors.”

In July 2006, Sen. Arlen Specter filed legislation that would allow a chamber of Congress to file a lawsuit to determine the constitutionality of presidential signing statements.

Now, I certainly have big problems with the Obama administration’s approach to civil liberties and the “commander in chief” powers. In many respects, it’s taken those Bush directives and run with them. So, if the Republicans have decided to see the light on this abuse of power, I welcome them to the land of the sane.

Unfortunately, most of them don’t care at all about any of that. Their handwringing about presidential overreach is all about the president using his executive power as the head of the domestic agencies. Which is as normal standard operating procedure as it gets. This “constitutional” issue is not about usurping the Bill of Rights (well, except for the 2nd Amendment which is actually one of the Biblical commandments so it’s different.) The “constitutional” issue they’re wringing their hands over is whether or not the Executive Branch has regulatory power. 

Here’s their list of things that they find to be impeachable (if not literally, then figuratively):

Forty-three Republicans have co-sponsored the resolution since Obama’s State of the Union address, where he threatened to enact policies if Congress didn’t act. 

The Stop This Overreaching Presidency (STOP) measure, introduced by Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.), now has 104 co-sponsors, including Senate GOP hopeful Reps. Jack Kingston (Ga.), James Lankford (Okla.), Steve Stockman (Texas), Paul Broun (Ga.), Steve Daines (Mont.) and Phil Gingrey (Ga.). 

In an interview with The Hill, Rice explained the STOP resolution is aimed at reversing Obama’s delay of the employer mandate, enactment of the Dream Act, extension of “substandard” health insurance plans and ending work requirements for welfare.

(As if they really want that employer mandate or care about “substandard” insurance plans …)

These things are all well within the province of the executive branch and can easily be reversed once the Republicans get a majority of the people of the United States to put it back into their hands. In the meantime, regulations and interpretations of how the law the law is to be administered is in the hands of this equal branch of government.  Someone could file a lawsuit and get the other branch to weigh in.  But there is nothing unprecedented or particularly aggressive in the administration’s use of its power in these matters.

I just can’t get over people who think that ending work requirements for welfare is more of a power grab than taking on the right to assassinate American citizens or collect and store communications of every person in the world just in case they might want to use it someday. But that’s the difference between civil libertarians and libertarian/conservatives. When push comes to shove their top priority is always the protection of their bank accounts over anyone’s individual freedom.

That’s why most libertarians vote for Republicans, a Party which has about five elected officials who really give a damn about the Bill of Rights. But they all care about low taxes and keeping the poor in their place and that’s what rally matters.

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Even just a mention from David Brooks would be like, killer


by digby

I’m sure you’ve all heard by now that the Junior Randroid Fiscal Scold group “The Can Kicks Back” spent all their millions and are now in debt. Huffingtopn Post has the emails that lay out their decline. Here’s an example:

In October 2012, The Can Kicks Back gang discovered Internet memes. Game changer! Executive director Schoenike was pretty enthusiastic about the discovery, telling the group that he was way, way into such memes as “the most interesting man [in the world], Y U no, condescending wonka, futurama fry” — you know, the sort of images that have long drowned Tumblr dashboards to the point that everyone is numb to them.

Eisenstadt was quick to demonstrate how hip he was to the #trendz: “I’m not too familiar with how these work.” He went on to express some concern that their message wouldn’t translate: “Shouldn’t we do something more like that, where the Can is the centerpiece? When I see the Most Interesting Man in the World, I think of Dos Equis … and so on for the others.” Memes are hard, I guess!

If there was a viral trend, you could count on these super-geniuses to spot it long after it had passed. Perhaps the group’s best known attempt at achieving something that resembled a “viral sensation” was their December 2012 “Gangnam Style” video, in which they forced Codger King Alan Simpson to lamely gallop along to the Psy hit from the previous summer.

They did a few more of those which people like me enjoyed immensely as comedy gold. The idea that they were using Alan Simpson and Alive Rivlin to appeal to young people was almost beyond parody.

Read the whole thing and you will never again have to yourself why the right is having so much trouble relating to young people. It’s the existing right wing young people.

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The Right’s “Crony Capitalism” dodge–and how it shows the Left is winning the argument

by David Atkins

There’s been a tonal shift in American politics recently, but you would have to be paying very close attention to the conservative Wurltizer to notice it.

One thing you might have noticed lately is that while conservative hostility toward even the mildest Democratic principles remains at a fever pitch, the accusations of “Socialism!” and “Communism!” have been less frequent. A new term has started seeping into the conservative lexicon: Crony Capitalism. If you’ve been in an argument with a conservative on a newspaper website or Twitter, you’ll probably have seen it quite a bit recently.

A libertarian PR guy did a series of marginally viral videos on The Kronies, taking pot shots at unions, Wall Streeters and Ethanol as agents of the all-powerful Big Government (no really, it’s that juvenile) which has been the toast of the conservative blogosphere. Townhall had a piece on “crony capitalism” yesterday, accusing attorneys prosecuting asbestos and tobacco cases of being Big Government cronies attacking the poor smokers and housing manufacturers. This stuff is all over the place, and it’s pretty recent.

A recent op-ed in the conservative Telegraph states the new conservative position most succinctly:

Real business people, who make their money in open, competitive markets, are entitled to their vast wealth but crony capitalists, who rely on state privileges, don’t deserve our support. The Left and the Right have both got it wrong here: the former wrongly attack all inequality; the latter wrongly defend all of it.
The blunt reality is that all societies are highly unequal, even supposedly communist ones. What really matters is the source of the inequality: are the wealthy rich because they looted everybody else, as was inevitably the case in feudal, pre-commercial societies, or are they prosperous because they profited from serving the needs of others in a competitive market? Is a society open to new talent and ideas, and encouraging of social mobility, or is it controlled by a small economic and political aristocracy that doesn’t let anybody else climb to the top?
Whether inequality is good or bad depends on the answer to those questions; merely bashing the top 0.1pc, as has become fashionable once more, is to substitute clear thinking for destructive, simplistic demagoguery…

This is what the likes of Sir Richard Branson, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or the financier Warren Buffett have achieved and their vast wealth is their just reward. We need more of these kinds of people and we must incentivise them to be as successful as possible.
Most business people and entrepreneurs in the UK fit in this category and, contrary to what many believe, finance, when practised properly, honestly and prudently, is a socially useful activity like any other and should not be singled out for opprobrium.
The second way that businesses and investors can make money is by getting the government to rig markets in their favour – by erecting barriers to entry to restrict competition, by providing them with cheap credit or by allowing them to use their political connections to grab contracts and other privileges. These gains are not the fruit of value-adding economic activity. Rather than helping to grow the economy, they often merely redistribute wealth.
There have been far too many examples of this kind of behaviour in recent years in the West, in Russia, in Latin America and in most other parts of the world. Tragically, our economic systems have been moving away from commercial relationships and becoming ever more politicised.

Get it? Our rich people are awesome. Their rich people are corrupt. And rich people in and around Washington, D.C.? Corrupt cronies.

Two things are going on here. The first is that Anglo-American kleptocrats feel very threatened by the even wealthier kleptocrats in Russia, South America, the Middle East and elsewhere.

But the second and more important development is the acknowledgment that the plutocrats have lost the battle of ideas. The injustice and inequalities of modern capitalism are so transparent and so grating that it no longer works to scream that wanting better wages or universal healthcare is “socialism.” The word has lost its sting. Nobody cares anymore. If better wages, universal healthcare and higher taxes on plutocrats is socialism, then so be it. It could be Mithraism for all most people care. If capitalism is defined as a system in which wealthy corporations and their executives make infinite money even as wages for real workers fall, then capitalism starts to become a bad word.

That’s a danger sign for the right. Government is clearly not the big bad wolf anymore, big corporations are less popular than ever, and people are getting angrier. Conservatives have lost the argument.

Rather than give ground and acknowledge the failure of their ideology, however, conservatives have a habit of simply changing the language and fighting back harder than ever. “Crony capitalism” is their parry and counterattack.

It’s not that unrestrained capitalism is the problem, you see. It’s that government favors certain corporations and not others. If we only had a true free market, none of this inequality would happen. This outlandish argument is very similar to the No True Libertarian argument in which every breakdown of government leading to violence and anarchy is dismissed is not true libertarianism. In a true free market, competition would somehow always prevent monopolies and workers would be well compensated. This clueless ideology conveniently ignores child labor, company stores, degradation of workers, murder of striking workers, pitifully low wages, animal cruelty, 16-hour days with 7-day weeks, indentured servitude, mass pollution and environmental destruction, vertical integration, megamergers, the historical inevitability of monopolies absent intervention, and so much more.

To argue that “crony capitalism” is responsible for the predation of the modern corporation and the impoverishment of the middle class is the desperate move of an ideologue whose argument has run its course and whose audience is no longer listening. It’s the rhetorical move of a debater backed into a corner with nowhere left to turn for support.

It’s an acknowledgement, in short, that the Left has already won the argument. All the Right has left is gerrymandering, legislative rigging, and firehouses full of corporate cash design to distract the voters.

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Wallowing in the fever swamps

by digby

Well yeah:

In the past few years, the science of Internet trollology has made some strides. Last year, for instance, we learned that by hurling insults and inciting discord in online comment sections, so-called Internet “trolls” (who are frequently anonymous) have a polarizing effect on audiences, leading to politicization, rather than deeper understanding of scientific topics.

That’s bad, but it’s nothing compared with what a new psychology paper has to say about the personalities of so-called trolls themselves. The research, conducted by Erin Buckels of the University of Manitoba and two colleagues, sought to directly investigate whether people who engage in trolling are characterized by personality traits that fall in the so-called “Dark Tetrad”: Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), psychopathy (the lack of remorse and empathy), and sadism (pleasure in the suffering of others).

It is hard to underplay the results: The study found correlations, sometimes quite significant, between these traits and trolling behavior. What’s more, it also found a relationship between all Dark Tetrad traits (except for narcissism) and the overall time that an individual spent, per day, commenting on the Internet.

If you are a person who has spent any time online over the past few years, this is self-evident. There is little doubt that internet trolls, whether in comment sections or on twitter or forums, are psychopaths of some form or another. What’s always interested me more than that obvious observation is how otherwise normal people sometimes turn into such trolls when they feel marginalized or misunderstood. For some it’s clearly a very short trip from being a regular person just mixing it up for entertainment and becoming an internet terrorist. For others the journey is more circuitous. But I suspect that many of us could get in touch with an inner Dark Tetrad given enough time crawling around the fetid fever swamps of internet argument. I’ve seen it happen.

Overall, the authors found that the relationship between sadism and trolling was the strongest, and that indeed, sadists appear to troll because they find it pleasurable. “Both trolls and sadists feel sadistic glee at the distress of others,” they wrote. “Sadists just want to have fun…and the Internet is their playground!”
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I haven’t read the paper, but I wonder if they found any data concerning what happens when these people find others who appreciate their trolling. My experience is the witch-hunt mentality comes out strongly — where everyone in the mob then becomes a troll.

It’s an interesting psychological subject. But I’ve done enough “field work” for a lifetime. I’ll let others figure it out.

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Presidential aspiration

by digby

There are always lots of great presidential speeches to choose from on President’s Day.  But I’ve always been fond of this one: Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech:

“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. 

The first is freedom of speech and expression everywhere in the world. 

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world. 

The third is freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world. 

The fourth is freedom from fear — which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”

These freedoms have advanced throughout the globe since that time. But not at once or in any permanent sense. Indeed, there are many days in which it’s obvious that all of these freedoms are under attack, even here. But the aspiration is meaningful and important. It’s really the basis for all of modern American liberal ideology.  Maybe if we embraced it more fully and forthrightly, we might even accomplish its goals.

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A pretty good view of where we’re headed, courtesy Tom Tomorrow

by David Atkins

This is both brilliant and depressing:

Conservatives and libertarians don’t really have a counter to this argument, except that the magic of the “free market” prevents things like this from happening without “crony capitalism.” Which is a bunch of nonsense, and most people know it.