One week into President Trump’s war on Iran, the most severe shock to energy markets since the 1970s is cascading through the world economy. The disruption quickly fed into higher gasoline and diesel prices at the pump, and higher mortgage rates and borrowing costs for the U.S. government, endangering Trump’s economic priorities.
To be sure, the U.S. has more shock absorbers this time around. Oil is a far smaller component of gross domestic product than it once was, and the U.S. has become a top energy exporter in its own right.
Appearing Sunday on Fox, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that “energy will flow soon” through the Strait of Hormuz. He blamed the rise in prices on “the unknown that this could be some long, you know, drawn-out crisis. But it won’t be.”
Whew. That’s a relief.
Massive amounts of fertilizer sail through these waters, feeding crops on every continent. The few ships that have left the strait since the start of the war were mostly carrying Iranian oil. Traders say crude markets could soar even higher if the strait doesn’t open within days, either with U.S. naval escorts or because shipowners think the danger has receded
The strait’s closure is spilling through commodity markets. Aluminum prices hit multiyear highs after Middle Eastern smelters declared force majeure—a legal maneuver that means suppliers aren’t liable if they fail to deliver. Norsk Hydro, which is curtailing output in Qatar, said a full restart could take six to 12 months.
“We are looking at what is by far the biggest disruption in world history in terms of daily oil production,” said energy historian Daniel Yergin. “If it goes on for weeks, it will reverberate across the global economy.”
Here’s what the experts are saying:
“In the whole written history of the strait, it has never been closed, ever,” said JPMorgan Chase analyst Natasha Kaneva. “To me, it was not just the worst-case scenario. It was an unthinkable scenario.”
The Trump administration says there’s nothing to worry about so you can rest easy.
When a baby is born in a hospital in the US, one of the first things that happens — usually within 24 hours — is a hepatitis B shot, which prevents a virus that can cause liver cancer. The newborn shot has been a standard practice nationwide since 1991, after earlier efforts at prevention kept missing the mark. In the decades that have followed, most parents haven’t thought twice about it.
But over the past two years, more and more parents have started saying no. Because the birth dose is given inside the hospital, before the family goes home, there’s no appointment to miss, no chance of a scheduling mix-up — ways other childhood vaccines can be missed. If a newborn didn’t get this shot, in most cases, someone actively declined or delayed it.
A study published on February 23 in JAMA puts a clear number on that shift. The researchers tracked 12.4 million newborns — roughly a third of all US births — across hospitals in all 50 states that use Epic, one of the country’s largest electronic health record systems. Using years of prior data, the researchers modeled where vaccination rates should have been heading, and compared those projections to what was actually happening.
The study found that between 2023 and mid-2025, the share of newborns getting the hepatitis B birth dose fell from 83.5 percent to 73.2 percent. That translates to roughly “400,000 or more babies a year declining or delaying the hepatitis B [birth] vaccine,” said Joshua Rothman, a pediatrician at UC San Diego School of Medicine and the study’s lead author. For context, that’s roughly equivalent to the entire population of Minneapolis declining or delaying the shot every year.
Apparently, this has been happening for a while. The Hep B vaccine is declined because people don’t think a baby needs a shot against a sexually transmitted disease. But “the scientific answer — that hepatitis B can also spread during birth and through close household contact in infancy — is true, but harder to fit on a bumper sticker.” Well then, don’t bother trying because that’s all some people can understand.
The roots of this go back to the Covid pandemic, which reshaped how millions of Americans think about all vaccines — not just the Covid shot.
“This is a classic example of what we in the literature have come to refer to as a Covid-19 vaccine spillover effect,” said Matt Motta, a public health researcher at Boston University who studies vaccine hesitancy. Researchers have documented distrust of the Covid shot bleeding into generalskepticism of flu vaccines, childhood MMR shots, even vaccination for pets. Polls have sent mixedsignals about whether that skepticism is actually changing behavior — but a study like this captures what parents are doing, not what they are telling a pollster.
According to this article, Americans have been skeptical of “inoculations” since George Washington but until now we didn’t empower quacks like RFK Jr in the U.S. government to make it a policy. This is new.
Kids and adults will get sick and some will die. We’re seeing it with measles right now with some kids being permanently disabled because of it. And all because people are listening to snake oil salesmen and wellness influencers instead of the decades of scientific evidence that shows the vaccines are safe. It’s mod-boggling.
One of the reasons so many Americans never believed Donald Trump’s promise to end the “forever wars” was a simple observation. To all but his most fanatical followers, it’s clear he possesses a megalomaniacal personality and violent temperament. How could someone with such characteristics resist the urge to lead a war? It seemed fundamental to his personality and his desire to go down in history.
During the 2016 campaign the country was still dealing with fairly regular terrorist attacks from followers of ISIS, and despite Trump’s professed disdain for the leadership that took the U.S. into Afghanistan and Iraq, it was clear when you listened closely to him that he was contemptuous of their apparent unwillingness to take the gloves off. He was never some kind of peacenik. After all, Trump confessed to being a big fan of torture, casually saying, “Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your a*s I would. In a heartbeat. I would approve more than that. It works. And if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway for what they do to us.”
He repeatedly stated his belief that the U.S. should have “taken” Iraq’s oil. His supposed isolationism was nothing more than a crude way of differentiating himself from the decisions of his predecessors.
Trump was talked out of military action by his advisers more than once during his first term, and he seemed more or less content with ordering assassinations and limited bombing strikes. But there was one big decision he made in 2019 that telegraphed and previewed his true beliefs about warfare: his pardoning, over the strenuous objections of the military brass, of service members and contractors accused of war crimes.
One was known to shoot at unarmed civilians to “make them afraid” and was serving a 19-year sentence for ordering the murder of two unarmed Afghan villagers. Another was awaiting trial on charges of killing a suspected Afghan bomb maker. Then there was the Navy SEAL who had been accused and acquitted of murder but was convicted of posing with a mutilated corpse of an Iraqi soldier. Over the objections of top SEAL commanders, Trump reversed his demotion and invited him to a Christmas party at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump made his philosophy known in October 2019 when he tweeted, “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!” At the time, it seemed odd that he tagged “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host Pete Hegseth in the post. But Hegseth had been publicly and privately lobbying for the pardons, and he and Trump had a meeting of the minds on the subject.
Aside from all Hegseth’s character flaws and a lack of experience that should have disqualified him for the job, it was largely that episode that horrified so many political observers when Trump nominated him as defense secretary. Here was someone who openly supported war criminals, defended the barbarity at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and believed torture to be justified.
Now that Trump has finally let his warmongering flag fly the way he always wanted to, we are seeing exactly how dangerous this partnership may end up being.
Hegseth’s intentions as secretary were never secret. Since his confirmation he has crusaded to rid the Pentagon of “wokeness,” by which he means any desire for diversity, intolerance of racism and bigotry, and adherence to the rules of war. He has purged the military’s top brass of many of its Black and women officers, and he took an ax to the Judge Advocate General’s office, which administers the military justice system. All of this was done in service of his aim of returning the Pentagon to a “warrior ethos” — which is really nothing more than a simple-minded call to be more macho and violent. The fact that he chose to rename the Defense Department as the Department of War should settle any dispute about his worldview.
Now that Trump has launched a growing war with Iran, which he seems convinced will result in Middle East peace — something he announced he had achieved with the Gaza ceasefire deal — we are about to see how this warrior ethos works in practice.
From the carnage inflicted on Indigenous and enslaved peoples to barbarity in the Philippines during the Spanish-American war — celebrated repeatedly by Trump during the 2016 campaign — and the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, America has plenty of blood on its hands. Atrocities have been a feature of warfare since time began. But over the centuries, humans developed rules of warfare designed to, at least in theory, minimize the blood-letting. Since the horrors of the 20th-century’s two world wars and the development of technology that can deliver mass injury and slaughter, it has become more important than ever.
America used to at least give lip service to the rules of war, if only for the self-serving reasons that it would protect their own troops. But Trump and Hegseth’s overwhelming hubris seems to preclude even that as a concern, with the defense secretary callously dismissing the deaths of American service members and the president shrugging off the possibility of reprisals on American soil.
On Feb. 28, just as the war had started, an airstrike hit an elementary school in the Iranian town of Minab, near the adjacent naval base operated by Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. More than 175 civilians were reportedly killed, many of them children. According to the New York Times, the available evidence suggests it was a U.S. missile that hit the school. The administration says they are investigating.
No one has implied this was a targeted attack. One assumes that it was a mistake resulting in “collateral damage,” as the military likes to call it. But it is a perfect example of the kind of stories we are going to start seeing juxtaposed with Hegseth’s grotesque rhetoric in these first few days of the war. He has cheered the conflict as having “no stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.” The Israelis, he said, are “good partners, unlike so many of our traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force.” Hegseth’s irresponsible commentary will have the effect of robbing the U.S. military of any benefit of the doubt, as it well should.
America had already squandered most of its moral authority with the Iraq debacle, and Trump’s paeans to peace notwithstanding, it’s clear that we’ve now embraced a mercenary foreign policy in which there are no rules nor restraint. The president said as much in January when he was asked by the New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers. “Yeah, there is one thing,” he replied. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Donald Trump launched two wars on February 28. One with Iran and another among his base of true believers. Media Matters last week sketched out the rift inside MAGA that’s grown since:
Many prominent right-wing figures spoke out in praise of the war. Ben Shapiro praised Trump as “the most courageous commander in chief.” Marc Thiessen called Trump “one of the most consequential commanders in chief in American history.” Mark Levin gushed over the “humane” war. And one Fox guest even suggested that the war “could qualify him once again for a Nobel Peace Prize.”
However, a wide variety of streamers and podcasters have broken with the administration, with Tucker Carlson calling the decision “absolutely disgusting and evil.” Streamer Adin Ross called it “really fucking stupid.”
Red hats are the new black hats, and MAGA knows it. Many don’t like the look. Not one bit.
Melissa Ryan posts a few of the MM links on MAGA infighting at Ctrl Alt Right Delete:
Laura Loomer lashing out at Megyn Kelly as not MAGA (with some sexist language)
Kelly calling her former Fox News Colleague Sean Hannity a “supplicant to Donald Trump” who exists to “puff” Trump up
And (completely unrelated to Megyn Kelly), Groyper Nick Fuentes calling Donald Trump “demonic” and “diabolical.”
“It’s objectively good when MAGA fights amongst themselves. It weakens their movement and their hold on the base. It’s energy they’re spending on one another rather than harming the rest of us,” Ryan writes:
MAGA is a coalition with differing ideologies brought together under Trump’s umbrella. The Epstein files already weakened them, and Iran has the potential to do so even further. Especially as Donald Trump is a lame duck president, and given what Americans can see of his declining physical health, it seems unlikely that Trump would be able to hang on for a third term even if that’s what he very much wants to do.” But will the faithful come back?
The MAGA faithful see their very worst qualities “redeemed” in Trump. Jesus tells them to love their neighbors. Trump tells them the opposite. He models that it’s okay to lie, cheat, and steal to get ahead in this world. Guess which gospel they’d rather follow? They chose Trumpism with a Jesusy glow.
Trump has lived a privileged life under the blanket of elite impunity for nearly 80 years. He’s evaded meaningful punishment for his misdeeds both in private and public life. MAGA believers thought they’d be covered by the same unholy dispensation. But with his Iran war, Trump finally has ripped down the myth of Americans as the good guys that they learned from infancy. They considered it a birthright. Now the world is asking cult members to account for themselves. They don’t like that either. Not one bit.
We on the left have long held a more nuanced view of America’s mixed legacy. But on balance, we believed that “long arc of the moral universe bent toward justice” stuff, that American ideals and principles of equal justice still meant something. We don’t like wearing black hats either.
Canadian-born Leigh McGowan is pissed.
Now they’re floating a draft? For a war they said we wouldn’t have and isn’t justified? Congress, WTFU. pic.twitter.com/RmWB7xYZmk
The question now is will the prodigals return to Trump’s fold?
“I’m just going to be brutally frank,” adviser Steve Bannon said over the weekend. “That was not pitched in the 2024 campaign. It just wasn’t. We’re going to bleed support.”
But Trump is betting that they repent. Ryan observes:
His Regime is the path for MAGA’s more extreme influencers to have actual power, and those like Kelly who screwed up their chance for a more mainstream audience and now rely on MAGA to make a living. A fractured MAGA coalition shrinks MAGA’s political capital and the available profit from the grift instantly. These folks might all be upset at Trump over Epstein and/or Iran and hate one another, but you can argue that they still need him and one another to have influence.
Thus, rumors of MAGA’s demise may be greatly exaggerated.
You won’t have to watch “The Daily Show” tonight. Social media is filled with what you’ll see this evening.
Trump: "We will bring the price of gasoline down…We're going to get your gas prices down…You're going to spend a lot less money for your gasoline." https://t.co/EqSJQbKP5Qpic.twitter.com/71vaxcbOys
Trump: "I'm not going to start a war, I'm going to stop wars…Under Trump we will have no more wars, no more disruptions, and we will have prosperity and peace for all…I am the candidate of peace, I am peace." pic.twitter.com/L8wScQhxGP
Vote for the Black-Asian lady, warned Trump and J.D. Vance in 2024, and she’ll send your sons and daughters to war. Maybe WWIII.
Trump: "Kamala would get us into World War III…All of your sons and daughters will end up getting a draft notice, a thing called the draft. 'Dad, what's this?' 'Oh, congratulations, you've been drafted into the military. You're going to fight a war.'" https://t.co/OH4eZRqDXVpic.twitter.com/D4L8i6PCNF
As he and Trump send our young people to war in Iran, listen to JD Vance in 2024:
“When people like Kamala Harris send our sons and daughters, our young people, to fight in stupid wars, it is the young generation that carries the burden of that. We're gonna stop sending our… pic.twitter.com/f6LYOEOTMc
“If you’re worried about the world spinning out of control, if you’re worried about a military draft, if you’re worried about a world war — the best way to prevent it is to vote for Donald Trump.”
John Oliver: They claimed Iran was going to attack us, Israel was going to attack Iran, which would have led to them attacking us. Iran was going to assassinate Trump, Iran was going to have nuclear weapons, and we just did this to free the Iranian people out of the kindness of… pic.twitter.com/yK82FI2Lxg
Judd Legum at Popular Information itemizes 17 reasons the Trump administration has floated for why we attacked Iran and why now. (Trump throws lunch at the wall. His team throws spaghetti.)
John Oliver wasn’t done being stunned.
John Oliver was not prepared for Donald Trump's surprisingly lucid analysis of his own actions in Iran. pic.twitter.com/tXRVS2ql0N
“You go through this and then in five years you realize you put somebody in who was no better,” says the peace president. Wait. What?
Top clerics selected Mojtaba Khamenei as Iran’s supreme leader, despite President Trump’s warning that he was “unacceptable.” Oil prices surged to their highest levels since the pandemic, reflecting growing alarm over a prolonged war.
But no worries, say White House allies. The pain won’t last. They all got the memo.
Back in the day, I joked that if you wanted to know what Sean Hannity thought before he did, beat him to his fax machine in the morning. Now the memos are digital.
I keep returning to this ancient clip from The Anderson Tapes (1971). “It just hurts right now.” Behold, your overlords:
As more than 1,000 Iranian men, women and children lay dead after days of bombardment from U.S. and Israeli missiles, the official White House X account on Thursday evening posted a video of scenes from popular action movies spliced with actual strike footage from their war on Iran. The clip was captioned: “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.”
A real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game — it’s sickening. Hundreds of people are dead, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, including scores of children who made the fatal mistake of going to school that day. Six U.S. soldiers have been killed. They are also dishonored by that social media post. Hundreds of thousands displaced, and many millions more are terrified across the Middle East.
This horrifying portrayal demonstrates that we now live in an era when the distance between the battlefield and the living room has been drastically reduced. The moral crisis we are facing is not just a matter of the war itself, but also how we, the observers, view violence, for war now has become a spectator sport or strategy game. Indeed, the prediction market Kalshi recently paid a $2.2 million settlement related to users who were unhappy with how the company paid out the $55 million wagered on Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s ouster after his was killed.
Journalists now use the term “gamifying” the war to describe this dynamic. What a profound moral failure, for gamifying strips away the humanity of real people. Let’s not forget, a “hit” isn’t putting points on the board; it’s a grieving family whose suffering we ignore when we prioritize entertainment, and profit, over empathy.
Our government is treating the suffering of the Iranian people as a backdrop for our own entertainment, as if it’s just another piece of content to be swiped through while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store. But, in the end, we lose our humanity when we are thrilled by the destructive power of our military. We become addicted to the “spectacle” of explosions. And the price of this habit is almost unnoticeable, as we become desensitized to the true costs of war. But the longer we remain blind to the terrible consequences of war, the more we are risking the most precious gift God gave us: our humanity.
I know that the American people are better than this. We have the good sense to know that what is happening is not entertainment but war, and that Iran is a nation of people, not a video game others play to entertain us.
He may know it but I have to say that I’m afraid that only some of the American people are better than this. Maybe most. But there are tens of millions, maybe a hundred million who are not.
The Wall St Journal is doing some incredible work these days. Even their editorial page isn’t a obnoxious as it used to be, But the straight journalism is first rate. This multi-media investigation today is a great example. (gift link)It’s about the U.S. government going after U.S. citizen protesters and making their lives hell.
Protesters, observers and passersby taken into custody by federal agents were declared terrorists and attackers in hundreds of social-media posts by U.S. officials and departments since the start of the immigration sweeps in cities. This includes Minneapolis, where two citizens were excoriated by officials after they were killed by federal agents in January.
The Wall Street Journal found that the Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002 to protect Americans, has turned its force against citizens.
Of the 279 people accused by officials on X of attacking federal officers in the past year, 181 were U.S. citizens, the Journal found. Close to half of those Americans were never charged with assault. None have been convicted at trial.
Yet names, mug shots and other identifying details posted by the government put a bull’s-eye on them. They had to explain the accusations to family, friends and employers. In a few cases, their home and workplace addresses were leaked online, drawing death threats.
Federal prosecutors in cities with high-profile immigration operations said they have been pressured by Justice Department leaders to aggressively pursue assault charges, even in cases undermined by contradictory evidence or ones that fail to appear worthy of prosecution. Some have quit in response. Others say the time spent on flimsy cases takes them away from prosecuting drug cases, public corruption and gun-related crimes.
This is a Stephen Miller program. He’s in charge of DHS.
He wrote the speech that Donald Trump delivered on Veterans Day 2023 in which he said this:
‘”We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”
He’s also the guy who said this about the American left inn the wake of Kirk’s murder:
“It is a vast domestic terror movement. With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
He was talking about Indivisible and Act Blue.
Never think that Miller’s agenda ends with the ethnic cleansing of foreigners. He has a phase two.
When Trump was quoted in his recent TIME magazine interview saying “I guess” when asked if Americans should fear terrorist retribution for this war, I thought to myself, “Oh boy. There’s no way that even his miscreant incompetents haven’t discussed that possibility. He’s hoping for it.”
A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States. This would provide Donald Trump with a pretext to try to cancel or “federalize” the coming Congressional elections.
Self-terrorism might not have been the initial aim; but as time goes by, and failures and atrocities mount, its appeal will grow. Trump could think that he has much to gain; the war itself makes terrorism more likely; there are plausible vectors of terror; and the United States has let down its defenses.
Trump has already telegraphed the move. We know that he is obsessed with the fall elections, which his party will almost certainly lose by spectacular margins, and that he fears the accordant loss of power. This is clear from his own statements and actions. In a social post right after starting the war, he claimed (wrongly) that Iran had tried to hurt his cause in past elections.
We lack any other explanation for the war, at least from the American side. Trump is incoherent, and his administration is inconsistent. Much of what has been said about Iran is not true. The propaganda is contradictory. It is as though the war itself is not the main goal, but that it was simply important to somehow get the thing started.
War, famously, is the extension of politics by other means. But what are the politics? The president and especially the Secretary of Defense present the United States as a kind of war crimes central, a place where the rules do not apply. War crimes to do not win wars. Instead they provoke further war crimes and other retribution.
The Tehran regime is, so to speak, a convenient partner in the mutual provocation of terror. Iran is ruled by ruthless people with a record and a capacity for carrying out terrorist attacks beyond its borders. A terrorist attack on the territory of the United States might be a response by Iran or one of its proxies. Trump seems to have anticipated this, without seeming to care about loss of life: “Like I said, some people will die.” And if they do, he has his pretext.
I could easily see this happening. Yes, it would go to court and they would take their own sweet time and perhaps we would end up having the elections anyway, just postponed. Then they would just pull all the shenanigans they plan to pull anyway and who knows how that will all come out. But even in the best case scenario, tens of millions of people will see the election as illegitimate if Trump doesn’t win — and tens of millions of people will know the election is illegitimate if he does.
This piece in the Atlantic (gift link) discusses the potential for Iranian terrorist attacks and it is very high. They have done them for many years and even are known to have sleeper cells in the U.S.
Despite the successful record of U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies in disrupting Iranian-backed plots on American soil, and even with a more feeble Iranian proxy network, there is good reason to be concerned today. Over the past several years, the U.S. government has shifted resources and personnel away from counterterrorism and toward other priorities, including China, Russia, and immigration. Because of this, the U.S. homeland is arguably more vulnerable than it has been in a long time.
And then there’s the question of Iran’s desire for retribution. Terrorists need both capabilities and intent to succeed. Even as the Iranians’ capabilities are being attenuated, their intent to attack, if anything, is growing stronger.
I came across this on social media and it spoke to me. I think it’s right:
I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016, and then again in 2024, given how emotionally toxic and depraved he is.
I don’t wonder anymore.
I think he won for that exact reason. Because he carried at least one broken shard to reflect the broken shards in millions of others.
If you’re a racist, you found your guy. If you’re a misogynist, you found your guy. If money is your only religion, you found your guy. If your heart is armored shut, you found your guy. If you mock the disabled, you found your guy.
If intelligence makes you insecure, you found your guy. If you’re a sexual predator, you found your guy. If you trade in humiliation and conspiracy and filth, you found your guy. If you’ve never done a single hour of emotional inventory, you found your guy.
If you cheat, stiff contractors, bankrupt your obligations, and call it savvy, you found your guy. If you lie as easily as you breathe, you found your guy. If cruelty feels like strength, you found your guy. If white grievance is your comfort food, you found your guy.
If your ego is a black hole no title can fill, you found your guy. If warmongering fuels your ego, you found your guy, If empathy feels like weakness and dominance feels like oxygen, you found your guy.
If he’d only carried one or two of these pathologies, he might have been dismissed as just another loud, damaged man. But he carried a buffet of them. That was the appeal. Millions could locate themselves somewhere in the wreckage. They didn’t have to agree with all of it. They just had to recognize a piece of themselves in it. It was never really about him. It was about the validation. The absolution. The permission.
He didn’t invent the resentment; he amplified it. He didn’t create the cruelty; he normalized it. He gave millions the intoxicating relief of hearing their ugliest impulses echoed back at rally volume.
Trump is a symptom. The deeper illness is collective. If there’s one sentence that defines his power, it’s this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” And that’s the part that should chill us.
Because what does it say about us that so many were thinking those things? That tens of millions of Americans harbored resentments so deep, so seething, that they were simply waiting for a demagogue to baptize them as virtue? That after decades of supposed progress on race, gender, and equality, so many white men felt so threatened, so displaced, so furious, that cruelty became a political platform?
Maybe we were living in a fool’s paradise, mistaking silence for healing, politeness for progress. Now the mask is off. Now we know. And knowing is a far more dangerous place to stand.
– Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.
