This should sink her, but IMHO it probably won’t.
Rubio on religion
I’ve seen a lot of talk about this answer of Rubio’s, so I thought I’d post it here:
The most extreme weight-loss TV show of all
It’s called “Fit to Fat to Fit,” and I happened across it by chance when channel-surfing the other evening.
The show is scary, but I was riveted. It features a fitness trainer—a new one each week—who contracts to gain an enormous amount of weight in order to then go through a weight loss program along with a really fat client, both to show the client how it’s done and to gain empathy for the plight of the overweight.
How much do they pay these people? I like my chow as well as the next person—maybe better—but the specter of force-feeding oneself like a Strasbourg goose (see also this) fills me with dread. But there was a certain morbid fascination in watching (I only saw the first episode) a person with about 7% body fat take on the proportions of a more average human being, and then go back again to his formerly ripped state.
And yes, the show appears to be on the up-and-up. You see the trainer without his shirt on, and there’s no question this is happening (you also see him downing several pizzas at a time, and a hamburger the size of a human head). It’s scary, but supposedly the trainers are closely monitored for health problems during the process.
I also observed some things that I found interesting. In this first episode, when the initially hyper-slender-and-fit trainer introduces himself to the client (who at the time weighs in the high 300s), the client is so flabbergasted he’s silent for a while, and then says, very seriously, something like, “I don’t think you should do that” and “You don’t know what you’re getting into.” But he is so moved that, while the trainer is taking a few months to gain the requisite adipose tissue, the client loses 46 pounds on his own. He figures it’s the least he can do.
Another interesting point to me is that, even with 60 extra pounds on his frame, the trainer doesn’t look all that fat. Maybe a bit, but really not all that much. It just proves to me how rigid these people have to get with diet and exercise to achieve the extremely low body fat percentage they ordinarily maintain.
Another thing is that, since this particular trainer was a person who’s never had a tendency to gain weight and has never been fat, he has to eat an inordinately large amount of food to get to what most people would consider normal-ish slight-overweight. In this episode, it involved at least 6,000 calories a day and no exercise, day after nauseating day. The rest of us can manage to maintain that normal-ish slightly-overweight state with a lot fewer calories. In my case, I can easily manage to be 10-20 pounds overweight while eating about 1700-1800 calories a day and exercising on a daily basis.
By the way, not all the trainers in future episodes have no history of overweight; some do. And if you want some photos, that link features quite a few, such as this:
[NOTE: And please, please, I beg of you, don’t go on and on about Atkins or Taubes or very-low-carb diets. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, doesn’t work for me and makes me sick to boot. I won’t bother to link to the many previous posts and discussions of the topic on this very blog, but you can search for yourself.]
Cruz, Trump, and the “establishment”
Bob Dole didn’t exactly endorse Trump, but he prefers him to the dread pirate Cruz.
In the process, Dole (who is now 92) had this to say:
“I question his allegiance to the party,” Mr. Dole said of Mr. Cruz. “I don’t know how often you’ve heard him say the word ”˜Republican’ ”” not very often.” Instead, Mr. Cruz uses the word “conservative,” Mr. Dole said, before offering up a different word for Mr. Cruz: “extremist.” . . .
But Mr. Dole, 92, said he thought Mr. Trump could “probably work with Congress, because he’s, you know, he’s got the right personality and he’s kind of a deal-maker.”
The remarks by Mr. Dole reflect wider unease with Mr. Cruz among members of the Republican establishment, but few leading members of the party have been as candid and cutting.
Watching this video of Dole, I notice another telling remark: Dole says that Cruz called McDonnell a liar on the Senate floor, and “You don’t do that; it violates the rules of the Senate.” Well, we can’t have that, can we? Even (or maybe especially) if McConnell is a liar. Then Dole says he “might oversleep that day” if Cruz is the Republican nominee. So Dole is saying that perhaps Hillary or Sanders or Biden would be better than Cruz.
And then Dole cuts to the chase. Speaking of Cruz, he says, “He used to make those speeches—‘remember President Dole? Remember President McCain?’ The inference was that we’re all a bunch of liberals, and only he is a true conservative. And he uses the word ‘conservative’ more than he ever uses the word Republican. So, it would be difficult [to vote for Cruz if nominated].'”
Wow.
By the way, if you watch the clip of Cruz that’s featured on the same video, Cruz follows up his “President Dole” remark with this: “Those are good men, they’re decent men, but when you don’t stand and draw a clear distinction, when you don’t stand for principle, Democrats celebrate.” And yet, if Cruz were nominated (by the voters of the Republican Party to which Dole claims devotion), Dole would rather that Democrats celebrate a Cruz loss.
It seems clear to me that, in addition to the personal animus Dole bears Cruz for what were actually pretty mild remarks on Cruz’s part (although they probably rubbed a sore spot for Dole, his loss in 1996), Dole doesn’t like Cruz because Cruz is a conservative before he’s a Republican. Dole is not only a Republican before he’s a conservative (if he’s a conservative at all), but he’s a Republican over nearly everything (including Republican voters), and he would rather Clinton (or whoever Democrats end up nominating) win than vote for Cruz, Republican betrayer—with whom, by the way, Dole doesn’t seem to have mentioned a single ideological quarrel. Dole’s quarrels are all about party loyalty.
If ever anyone needed a demonstration of why so many people can’t stand the “establishment,” Bob Dole could not have provided a better one.
[NOTE: I found some interesting comments on all of this at Legal Insurrection, and here’s one of them:
The Republican establishment is willing to go whole-hog in order to defeat Cruz, because they know that a Cruz Presidency will truly be an end to a lot of the executive largess that the establishment GOPe have come to covet. A Trump presidency would tolerate, if not condone, a lot of that executive largess, because that is the way of BIG business (it simply IS: I’ve BEEN there and DONE that). One of my former tax professors put it very well: the individuals have to maintain the ”˜trappings of wealth’ in order to appear successful to their colleagues/peers and clients.
The GOPe would rather be a minority party with the perks, than actually govern like grownups. That was the whole reason that the Congress was lost in 2006 and with it the Presidency in 2008, leading to the debacle that we currently face. The only redeeming quality of that was that it finally pissed off the base sufficiently for the TEA-Partiers to form into a (reasonably) coherent group and started electing candidates.
Trump is a Crony-Capitalist. PERIOD. Anybody who tells you differently is selling you a cart-full of horse manure. His principles change with the direction of the wind on what is in his (or his organizations) best interest…
The GOPe knows that within Cruz’s mental framework, they have no place and no power, and they cannot tolerate so much as the thought of that outcome, thus they seek to destroy Cruz as the agent of their doom.
Also see this, as well as this, and this related piece on Trump’s sucking up to ethanol special interests in Iowa.]
Who to believe?
Here’s Kirsten Powers writing about the movie “13 Hours”:
In an interview, three of the former elite military officers portrayed in the movie ”” Mark “Oz” Geist, Kris “Tanto” Paronto and John “Tig” Tiegen ”” told me the movie was completely true to their experience on the ground.
“We wanted the movie to ”¦ just tell the truth and tell the story as we lived it,” Geist said. “Don’t make it into something political.”…
“The words were said to me. I heard him say, ”˜Stand down’,” Tiegen told me. Paronto added, “I saw (him being) told to stand down and we were told twice to wait. Saying (this) happened didn’t bring us any love. It’s the truth.”
Americans can decide who they want to believe: the people who actually lived through the 13-hour attack or the bungling and partisan bureaucrats who have yet to take full responsibility for the tragedy that happened on their watch. “The truth is not partisan,” Paronto told me. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
I know who I believe.
Stock market falling…falling…
The stock market was down over 500 points earlier today, but as I type this it’s “only” down 286. Don’t know how it will end up for the day, but it’s been very jittery:
The sell-off that has engulfed global stock markets early in 2016 intensified Wednesday, with the Dow plunging as much as 565 points and oil breaking below $27 a barrel for the first time since 2003, Japanese stocks skidding into bear market territory and European shares shedding more than 3%.
“It is fear based selling,” says Nick Sargen senior investment advisor at Fort Washington Investment Advisors. But it is not yet “panic selling” like back in 2008, he adds.
Well now, that’s reassuring.
There’s a bad feeling in the air about the future. Actually, it’s been there for many years, but it’s intensifying:
For now, as many Wall Street pros have been saying, “As oil goes, so goes the stock market.” Unfortunately, signs of stabilization in the oil patch have not appeared amid a supply gut, slowing global growth and Iran bringing on more supply after economic sanctions were lifted.
Not to mention China’s problems.
Those who have investments in the market have long realized the iffyness of it. But for a long time it’s been one of the few ways to get any decent return at all in terms of income flow, particularly for retirees. A real dilemma.
Trump on de Blasio, circa 2013
I’m just curious.
Calling all Trump supporters. Please read this article about the things Trump said about de Blasio when Bill was running for mayor of New York.
For those who don’t feel like clicking, here:
I think pretty strongly that he’ll end up being a good mayor, maybe a very good mayor and I don’t think he’s going to want to kill the golden goose.
I think he’s a smart guy that knows what’s going on really big league and I think he is not going to want to destroy New York,” Trump said. “I think he is going to want to make New York great.”
So, what do you think? Is it this?
“It’s okay because he has to say that stuff to do business in New York.”
So, he’s a whore for money? Do you care? Is money all he cares about? How do you know what his principles are? This is no isolated incident, either; this is the way he rolls, praising whoever he thinks will gain power, no matter how pernicious or destructive, and he’s been doing it for decades. Can you trust him? Do you actually think his money insulates him from corruption? If so, why did his money cause him to say this? Or do you think he really thought this, and now he’s changed his mind? Can you imagine supporting anyone else on earth who said this sort of thing? Do you support him no matter what because “WALL!” and DESTROY GOP!”? If he’s your battering ram, do you really think you know what he would do once he’s gained the most powerful position in the world?
NOTE: By the way, those of you who say that Trump’s the only one who’s been talking about a wall, see this from 2011:
Ted Cruz was fighting illegal immigration (and his own party) when Donald Trump was not even a candidate. For example, see this (datelined 10/29/2013):
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has shaped the view of Republican leaders on immigration reform, and his sway with grassroots conservatives will make passing comprehensive legislation significantly more difficult.
Cruz scored a victory in the battle for the hearts and minds of his party over the weekend when Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) backed away from the Senate’s overhaul of immigration laws.
GOP leaders, after President Obama’s reelection last year, sounded more open to moving broad legislation on immigration, but their interest in doing so has waned as Cruz’s power has grown.
“There are going to be a lot of Republicans who don’t want to be on the other side of Ted Cruz,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations at NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for reduced immigration flows.
See also this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and there are lots more, too.
[ADDENDUM: After reading some of the comments, it occurs to me that I need to highlight something, which is that those statements of Trump’s were made while de Blasio was running for mayor, not after he was elected. If it had been after the election, at least you could say Trump was accepting it and trying to make the best of it and to ingratiate himself with him because it was a fait accompli. Before the election, it amounts to an endorsement.
The article says:
Trump’s enthusiasm might seem unlikely amid reports that the business and finance sectors of the city worry what a de Blasio tenure might mean for their industries.
So, other business people didn’t seem to feel the need to prostitute themselves at that point and endorse de Blasio. Just that great old truthteller, Donald Trump, who said before the election that de Blasio was “a smart guy that knows what’s going on really big league.”
What politician wouldn’t Donald Trump praise, if it could get him some money and advantage? These sorts of comments from Trump are exactly the sort of thing that in anyone else would draw the wrath of any conservative. But Trump gets a pass on them from a lot of people because he does it for money?
Okay, here’s a little more analysis of Palin’s endorsement of Trump
Yesterday I was being a bit cute when I wrote an entire post that went like this: “‘Palin endorses Trump’….well, naturally.”
Today I’m going to say a bit more about it, but only a bit more. It doesn’t interest me all that much, perhaps because that “naturally” is what I truly think. I wouldn’t have expected anything else, despite the fact that Trump’s opponent Cruz would be the person most in line with Palin in terms of conservative principles—at least, it would seem that way.
But just think about it. Palin has lost a lot of support from the rank and file right over the years. Her stint as a reality star, her increasing family chaos, but perhaps most of all her initial resignation from the governorship—all have taken a toll on her reputation for seriousness in the political realm. Despite that, she has many many die-hard supporters, and they are, for the most part, the very same people who support Trump.
Not all Trump-supporters are Palin-supporters, but I would guess that nearly all of Palin’s recent supporters are Trump-supporters. And in endorsing Trump she was not just playing to her own base, or even riding on the coattails of a popular media figure and he on hers. It’s that Palin was always a populist and Trump is a populist, and she’s supporting her fellow-populist. That’s their bond, and it’s a strong one.
Populism transcends political philosophy for both of them. Populism, and that “maverick-y” quality. Both enjoy saying things that shock and jar, and which their followers consider brave. Both have followers rather than supporters, although they have supporters too. Both thrive on celebrity. Cruz is too wonky and could never be considered a populist, and although he’s a maverick of sorts he’s a very controlled and cerebral maverick with a very different style. Palin could support him as senator, but in a national race that Trump had entered and was seeming to dominate, for Palin it was no contest.
Those of you who have read this blog for many years know that I’ve defended Palin from the start, despite the fact that she’s hardly my favorite politician and I’m never been a big fan. But you could look long and hard on this blog if you wanted to find criticism of her, much less a hit piece. And this post isn’t a hit piece either, although I completely disagree with Palin’s choice. But the choice doesn’t surprise me, and it makes sense for her, despite the fact that Trump goes against many of the conservative principles she espouses. For whatever reason, a lot of people who support Trump are able to ignore his liberal qualities because they think he will do One Big Thing, something no one else can do. It doesn’t even matter what that one thing is—for some, it’s ending immigration. For others, it’s ending PC speech. For still others, it’s causing the demise of the Republican Party (okay, maybe three big things). I’m not sure which is foremost for Palin, or maybe all three, but they are things she wants, and things she may believe Trump can do. At the very least, she wants to hitch her wagon to him, and maybe there’s something in it for her in the future.
I don’t happen to think Trump would accomplish any of those things if he were elected, and certainly not in the way his followers think he will or with the benefits they think will come. I’m not going to turn this post into one about Trump, though—do a search and you can find plenty of those on this blog (notice, though, that I’ve still resisted making a separate category for him, although I realize I should).
So in closing I’ll just repeat—Palin endorses Trump, naturally.
Palin endorses Trump
Well, naturally.
Hitler the racial anarchist
I think there’s something to this theory about Hitler, as described in an interview with Timothy Snyder, author of a recent book on Hitler, the Holocaust, and WWII (I haven’t read the book, by the way). I don’t completely buy Snyder’s ideas as expressed in the interview, but they’re certainly of interest.
What Snyder’s theory suggests is that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was even more weird than “ordinary” virulent anti-Semitism, and that Hitler had a full-fledged theory of history and its trajectory—a very very dark one, as one might expect:
Snyder: So what Hitler does is he inverts; he reverses the whole way we think about ethics, and for that matter the whole way we think about science. What Hitler says is that abstract thought””whether it’s normative or whether it’s scientific””is inherently Jewish. There is in fact no way of thinking about the world, says Hitler, which allows us to see human beings as human beings. Any idea which allows us to see each other as human beings””whether it’s a social contract; whether it’s a legal contract; whether it’s working-class solidarity; whether it’s Christianity””all these ideas come from Jews. And so for people to be people, for people to return to their essence, for them to represent their race, as Hitler sees things, you have to strip away all those ideas. And the only way to strip away all those ideas is to eradicate the Jews. And if you eradicate the Jews, then the world snaps back into what Hitler sees as its primeval, correct state: Races struggles against each other, kill each other, starve each other to death, and try and take land…
…So as I see it, it’s not so much that Hitler built up the German state in a conventional sense. He built up this new capacity to impose a racial worldview on other countries. And the paradox is that he couldn’t really do it in Germany. I mean, what happened to German Jews was dreadful, but German Jews were not actually killed in significant numbers in prewar Germany. The total is a couple hundred. Jews could only really be killed once Hitler got himself out of the box of Germany and used this German racial power that he created over the six years to wipe out other states. It’s at that point that all kinds of things are possible in those other states. But also, you can then send German Jews east, to places like Minsk or Riga where you’ve wiped out the political order, and have them be killed there. That’s one of these things that I think Holocaust historians have to explain. Sure, there was lots of anti-Semitism in, for example, Vienna, but the Jews of Vienna were murdered in Belarus. Why is that? And the answer is that the German state couldn’t actually murder them inside Germany””not in very large numbers. To carry out mass killing, it had to first create this zone of anarchy out in the east and then physically take the Jews and send them out there. ”¦
Actually, I think it’s somewhat simpler than that. Hitler needed the cooperation of the German people (at least for a while) in order to wage war. He didn’t want Germans to revolt against him or refuse to cooperate with him. He used fear to induce obedience, but he needed the death camps and the killings there to be far away for the most part, under subject slave peoples, because real knowledge of them might cause unrest even among Germans, who had not signed up for this. Snyder sort of alludes to that here, but doesn’t tie the two together:
Hitler’s goal is to spread anti-Semitism within the German population, and he succeeds in doing that, but he comes to power much more radical than the population, and he comes to power in part by concealing just how anti-Semitic he is.
Locating the death camps far away was an effort to conceal them from the German people, or at least to not rub their noses in them so much.
Also, Snyder’s theory is in accordance with the fact that Hitler did not seem to care what happened to the German people once they had been found wanting by losing the war and going down to defeat. Death was preferable, if the Germans had been found wanting by losing. Hitler’s political last will—a vile document he wrote shortly before his suicide, in which he repeatedly blames the Jews for everything, and calls on the German people to continue the war and fight for the Nazi cause unto death—seems to both support and contradict Snyder’s theory somewhat. Hitler’s hatred of the Jews is certainly paramount, and you can tell that from the document. But even if he does support the obliteration of nations, it seems that he makes an exception for Germany, which will go on to triumph, even if it takes centuries—although come to think of it, in the will Hitler writes about the German people more than about the nation of Germany itself.
SCOTUS will be ruling on whether Obama overreached on immigration
This promises to be very interesting:
The Supreme Court announced Tuesday that it will take up a case challenging the legality of President Barack Obama’s executive actions aimed at granting quasi-legal status and work permits to up to five million people who entered the U.S. illegally as children or who have children who are American citizens…
The justices are expected to hear arguments on the issue in April and to hand down a ruling by the end of June. Illegal immigration has already been a hot topic in the presidential contest, but the high-profile attention brought on by the Supreme Court fight could amp up the debate even further as the campaign plays out this spring and summer.
In their order Tuesday, the justices added one question to the case: whether Obama’s actions violated the Constitutional provision requiring him to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed” ”” in essence, whether existing law bars the president from making the kinds of enforcement changes he sought to make.
That issue will be added to three laid out by the Justice Department in the petition asking the justices to take up the case: whether states have legal standing to challenge the deferred actions grants by providing benefits to such immigrants, whether the actions Obama ordered in 2014 were arbitrary and capricious under federal law, and whether the administration was obliged to go through a formal notice-and-comment period before proceeding with its plan.
This is an important case, not just because it’s a test of Obama’s immigration policies and the methods by which he has arrived at them, but because it is a test of the chief executive’s ability to override Congress and the will of the people. That has repercussions way beyond Obama, and is of the utmost importance to those who are interested in liberty and the future of the republic.
I wish the decision would be 9-0 for liberty, but I fear it will be only 5-4, either way.
The hype about how Trump could win: what are the facts?
Now, don’t get me wrong. Maybe Trump could win the election against Hillary. In fact, maybe any of the candidates could, if she gets weak enough.
So I’m not doubting the possibility of it. But I doubt the motives of the NY Times or Politico or other left-leaning periodicals when they continue to say he will do well against Clinton, in the absence of evidence that he would do any better against her than other Republican candidates, and the presence of evidence that he would actually do worse against her than they would.
It’s also curious to me that none of these articles seem to actually analyze the polls to come to their conclusions. I have looked at the polls, and continue to do so, and have come to the conclusion that, at least so far, they indicate that Trump would be the weakest candidate of the GOP frontrunners in a head-to-head against Clinton.
That doesn’t mean it couldn’t change—it most definitely could. But so far it hasn’t. Everything else is speculation.
So here’s the latest from Politico on the subject. The author asserts that Trump would do well with blacks; I’ve seen that said before, but I’ve never seen a poll that indicates Trump does better than the other GOP candidates with black voters in a one-on-one contest with Hillary. Wouldn’t you want to see that evidence in order to believe that it’s true? I would. After all, there’s no reason it couldn’t be true. If I had to guess, without looking at any polls, I’d say it certainly might be true.
But what’s true is that, although I’ve looked at many polls, I’ve not found one that supports it. Notice also that the Politico article on how Trump could win (entitled “How Trump Defeats Hillary Clinton”) talks about how Trump might or could defeat Clinton, according to his supporters and to “Republican pollsters,” but doesn’t link to any polls that show it or that show his support from blacks. The most you read there about it is that Frank Luntz says he’s talked to some black people who voted for Obama and who say they would consider voting for Trump. How many? What percentage? How many of them said they would consider voting for the other Republicans? Crickets.
And despite the fact that opinions are all the article cites to support the idea, the article’s lede goes like this:
If Donald Trump becomes the next president of the United States, there will be plenty of surprises along the way. One of the biggest will be the help he gets from black voters.
According to Republican pollsters and Trump’s allies, the GOP poll-leader ”” who has been dogged by accusations of racism, most recently for tweeting out a chart that exaggerated the share of murders committed by blacks ”” is poised to out-perform with this demographic group in a general-election matchup with Hillary Clinton.
I can’t escape the idea that the liberal/left press is pushing a Donald Trump candidacy because they feel he’s actually the weakest candidate.
As far as polls that actually attempt to measure the amount of black support for the various candidates go, I recently analyzed the numbers here:
If you look closely at questions 22-25 in that poll, which was taken January 4-7 and involved a sample of 1006 respondents queried by telephone (cell and landline), you will see that Trump does slightly worse against Hillary among Democrats and among black voters than the other leading GOP candidates do. Take a look if you don’t believe me””and these are typical of results I’ve seen in earlier polls.
In a matchup against Hillary, Cruz gets 11% of those identifying as Democrats, whereas Hillary gets 6% of people who say they are Republicans. Rubio gets 12% of Democrats against Hillary’s 5% of Republicans, a trifle better. Bush (remember him?) gets 10% of Democrats to Hillary’s 7% of Republicans, a tiny bit worse. And Trump gets 9% of Democrats to Hillary’s 8% of Republicans, which is a bit worse, although they all cluster rather closely together and the differences are not so very significant.
Against Hillary, Cruz gets 5% of the black vote, but Rubio gets 9% of the black vote. Could be significant, I suppose. Bush gets 6% of the black vote against her. And Trump? 4% of the black vote. Again””except perhaps for Rubio””they all are very similar, but Trump does slightly worse.
Most polls don’t break the support of each candidate down by race, which is what enables people to speculate airily on the subject. But some polls do, and that’s what they say.
The most recent national poll available doesn’t have a breakdown that measures black support for each GOP candidate, either. But it does have head-to-head numbers for the GOP lead candidates against Clinton. The news for Trump there certainly contradicts the Politico piece and all the hype—because once again Trump does very poorly against her (the questions were asked by NBC/WSJ between January 9-13).
In a matchup against Clinton, here’s how the candidates do. I’ve reported the Clinton figure first in each case:
Clinton/Trump 51/41
Clinton/Rubio 47/46
Clinton/Cruz 49/45
This is consistent with every single poll I’ve seen during the last few months. Sometimes all the Republicans win, sometimes they all lose (except Rubio, who consistently beats her). But Trump always does the worst. Now it’s possible there’s some poll I haven’t seen, but I’ve been following this fairly closely for a long, long time, and the trends are extremely clear. One poll or another tends not to tell the whole story, but the average tells you a lot more, although nothing’s infallible.
That NBC/WSJ poll had some other interesting figures, too. In the same poll, Sanders beats Trump 54/39 (the pollsters didn’t ask about Sanders versus the other candidates; at least, I didn’t see any questions about it.). Also, respondents who were likely to vote in the GOP primary were asked about 2-person battles within the primary. If the only choice were Trump vs. Rubio, Trump would win the primary 52 to Rubio’s 45. That seems to reflect the conservative distaste for Rubio, although Rubio polls best against Clinton. But if the two-person primary race were Trump versus Cruz, Cruz would beat Trump 51 to Trump’s 43. That indicate that, if people were to drop out of the race (if they ever manage to do so), Cruz would probably get the nomination, if this poll is accurate and trends remained the same.
I haven’t noticed any newspaper highlighting that finding. I wonder why (that’s sarcasm, by the way).