Further thoughts on the Chauvin trial and verdict

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) There seems to be a common notion, based on early reports, that Chauvin and Floyd may have known each other from a previous job. That report was retracted/recanted early on, although I’m going to assume that far more people saw the story than saw the retraction.

(2) Many people are saying that Chauvin should have taken the stand. I disagree. Chauvin’s failure to do so is absolutely standard in trials, even when a person is innocent. Testifying by a defendant opens the door to vicious cross examination by the prosecution and the bringing up of other topics, too. It’s usually a very bad idea. Also, I doubt that Chauvin would have made a good witness for himself. His demeanor is very cold. That doesn’t mean he’s guilty, but juries don’t like it. If the defense had had him testify and he’d been found guilty (I am convinced that he would have been found guilty no matter what), then everyone would be screaming that the defense never should have done it.

(3) I believe that a great many of the limitations of the defense were caused by the difficulty of getting people to work on the case. The atmosphere of fear was present from the start, and courage is not necessarily a common commodity. This goes for lawyers, police, doctors, and other expert witnesses. Why stick your neck out? I don’t think it was possible for Chauvin to get a fair trial anywhere, but Minneapolis was probably the worst possible place in the state for this trial to occur. It had to be in the state of Minnesota, by the way.

(4) This comment from a thread at Legal Insurrection struck me as pretty spot on, except for the part about life imprisonment. Chauvin won’t be getting life imprisonment – at least, that’s not what the rules say, although I suppose anything’s possible (and of course, he also might be killed in prison, although I agree with the writer that he will probably be in some sort of isolation from the general prison population):

…[J]ust like everyone I saw the video in the beginning and was repulsed. But common sense started to make me wonder, like anyone else who uses the tiniest bit of critical thinking skills, ok well if I was going to just say, as a cop, screw this this man is black or a drug addict or whatever, but this time I’ve had enough I’m just going to choke him out and if he dies oh well. None of these other cops, or the ton of idiots screaming at me and taping me, or the paramedics or the doctors when this guy goes to the ER etc. Will ever turn me in because I’m a cop, and a white man, and we get away with openly murdering black people every day. Muh hahaha!

Its something that doesn’t happen. Even if that was a movie plot, you’d be thinking, this is nothing like real life.

Then, the defense more or less proved, everything they were saying about everything except MAYBE being reckless so manslaughter.

As I said in a past post, I’m an ex addict. I can almost GUARANTEE Floyd swallowed his stash not meaning to die but knowing he’d be going to the ER. Then he avoids possession charges,AND going to jail at least in the moment. Every cop or addict knows this happens regularly.

THEN, this whole verdict, zoomed in on Chauvin’s face as if it was the trial of Hitler/Ted Bundy/Satan was ridiculous. Then the crowds crying and sobbing, comparing Floyd to Emmitt Till, this wasn’t even someone these people know!

I’m so creeped out seeing the whole spectacle. Thinking that this dude that at best was just a dick when he’s performing something that happens all the time, cop holds junkie who is freaking out because ambulance is coming. That he probably did hundreds of times. Now gets to live, in basically solitary, in prison, for life. Even serial killers, child murderers etc haven’t been this demonized.

If anyone should have been happy about this its me, someone who lived like Floyd at one point and saw fed up police who were not very kind about junkie drama. But this was wrong. Anyone with a conscience should be very creeped out about this whole thing.

(5) As far as sentencing goes, Here are Andrew Branca’s thoughts on the matter.

(6) If the races had been reversed here (or even if Floyd had been white and the cop white), this case would have been some notations in a file somewhere and perhaps a small article in the local paper, and nothing more.

By the way, for what it’s worth…

The New Neo Posted on by

…all these public statements by people such as Biden and Pelosi and many others, about how the guilty verdicts for Chauvin were so wonderfully correct, will almost inevitably have a prejudicial effect on the pending trial of the other officers who were with Chauvin that day.

Democrat officeholders react to the Chauvin verdict

The New Neo Posted on by

Of course, they shouldn’t be reacting except to say something like, “Now that the jury has spoken, I hope the nation can heal.” And then to change the subject.

But that sort of behavior ended long ago, and so we have this from Pelosi:

So again, thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice, for being there to call out to your mom. How heartbreaking was that, call out for your mom, I can’t breathe…

It’s a bizarre comment, among other things I could say about it – as though George Floyd had any intention of sacrificing his life for justice, like an actual martyr who purposefully takes on that role. And although this is a smaller point, I doubt Pelosi watched much of the trial or even any of it except perhaps the verdict. If she had, she might have learned that “Mama” was the nickname of George Floyd’s girlfriend.

Oh, I know; even if she knew that, she’d ignore it. So maybe she did know it.

And then there was Biden:

“We’re all so relieved, not just one verdict but all three. Guilty on all three counts. It’s really important,” Biden told the [Floyd] family. “I’m anxious to see you guys. We’re going to get a lot more done. We’re going to do a lot. We’re going to stay at it until we get it done.”

Biden told the family he had been watching the verdict come in alongside senior adviser Cedric Richmond and Harris. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represents the Floyd family and posted the video, expressed optimism that the outcome of the trial could spur action on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Biden said he would fly the family out to Washington, D.C., on Air Force One for the occasion.

I could post more quotes, but you get the idea. Floyd is a martyr to the Cause, and the idea of presidents and House speakers staying neutral about a criminal trial has utterly vanished when there are political points to be made and political goals to achieve (when Nixon commented on the Manson trial, he drew criticism from both sides and it was considered a very unusual move on his part).

The Democrats can hardly believe their good luck in the manner of Floyd’s supposed murder, caught on videocam – no wonder Pelosi thanks him. And Chauvin’s personality appears to be such that it’s hard to make him into a sympathetic character.

The Chauvin verdict is many things, including the triumph of emotion over logic, and the elevation of a segment of bystander video over actual evidence about what else was going on that the video does not reveal. But overarching all of that is that it was a form of judicial reparations, in which the present-day living are made to pay for the crimes of the long-ago dead. Despite his diminutive size, Chauvin fit the public image of a nasty white overseer coldly and callously bringing a black victim to heel. He was unable to overcome that perception, and there are many powerful people who have an interest in seeing that he never does.

Who will suffer most from the effects of the Chauvin verdict?

The New Neo Posted on by

Most people want to live, and I’m going to assume that’s also true of police officers – who, after all, are people. So I’m also going to assume that the logical effect of the Chauvin verdict will be officers quitting or taking early retirement, increased difficulty in recruiting good officers, and a disengagement from confronting criminals on the part of the officers who remain.

I will further posit that the people who will suffer most from those consequences will be law-abiding black people in inner cities run by Democrats. Even gang members in such areas won’t necessarily prosper, except temporarily, because they’ll be more inclined to be left alone to kill each other.

Black lives don’t matter very much to Black Lives Matter. For example (hat tip: commenter “Kate”), we have this from black activist Bree Newsome (by the way, when I went to her Twitter account, her tweets were only on limited view. But apparently this is what that tweet said, as you can pretty much tell from the responses, which were predominantly negative):

Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons. We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon against one of the teenagers. Y’all need help. I mean that sincerely.

She’d rather one teenager kills another than that a policeman, called to the scene to stop a stabbing, makes a split-second decision to prevent it from happening by shooting the perpetrator:

Police received a 911 call at 4:35 p.m. about an attempted stabbing on the 3100 block of Legion Lane, which is located north of Chatterton Road. The caller reported a female was trying to stab them, then the caller hung up.

Officers responded to the scene and at 4:45 p.m. an officer-involved shooting was reported.

We also have this sort of thing from witnesses:

And this sort of thing from activists:

Kiara Yakita, founder of the Black Liberation Movement Central Ohio, said she is not surprised that another police shooting happened. “Why did they kill this baby?” she asked aloud.

Watch the video, Kiara Yakita, and you’ll get your answer. Or would you rather the other “baby” had been killed by that “baby”?

Or would you rather the community lose the ability to call the cops at all? Because that’s where this is headed: police “no-go” zones in major cities.

I’ve also seen cries that a counselor should have been dispatched. Good luck with that – I think we’ve entered the era of belief in the magic counselor. As a person who has worked with dysfunctional and sometimes even violent families, I have no such faith in counselors to defuse a violent situation in progress. I doubt that those who say it actually think it would solve the problem, either; it’s just something to say in order to criticize police.

The Chauvin verdict

The New Neo Posted on by

By now you almost certainly know that Derek Chauvin was found guilty on all three counts. But this case was decided long ago – probably even before Chauvin encountered Floyd on that fateful day, culminating in the death of the latter and the ending of life as he knew it for the former. The verdict we see today is just the reflection of trends we’ve been seeing in this country for years.

For example, think of the Rodney King case (I’ve written a bit about Rodney King in this post). It was the first case I can recall of alleged police brutality towards a black man that involved inflammatory video that turned out to not be telling the whole story.

But of course it started long before that. I don’t know exactly when, but for example in 1967 the Newark riots were sparked by accusations of police brutality against a black man. And that certainly was not the first riot of its kind.

As time has gone on, all sorts of remedies have been tried, such as the obvious one of more black police officers and chiefs of police. But in recent years, with the ever-leftward movement of the Democratic Party (both on the national level and the municipal level), the turning of the MSM into leftist propaganda sheets, and the growth of mass movements like BLM fostered by social media, we have reached a crescendo of anti-police sentiment that has culminated in a verdict like this.

In the comments section, “Cornhead” writes: “I respect the jury system. The jury saw and heard all admissible evidence.” I do, too. But all that means is that I wouldn’t use extra-judicial means to try to negate or overturn the verdict. I wouldn’t try to lynch someone I thought was wrongly exonerated, and I wouldn’t try to help a convict escape from jail who I think is not guilty. It has nothing to do with whether a verdict was correct in my opinion or even in terms of the evidence submitted. Miscarriages of justice happen quite frequently at the hands of juries and of judges. Sometimes they are righted by the appeals system but sometimes they are not.

In the end, as with most systems involving humans, the jury system is only as good and as fair as the people who administer it such as judges, the laws that are passed, the lawyers for each side, and the understanding of each jury about all the elements of the trial and their decision, including what will happen out in the world as a result of their verdict.

In recent years we’ve closely followed cases that somewhat resembled the Chauvin case. For Zimmernan and Darren Wilson, the initial hype from the left and the MSM was that they were guilty guilty guilty – and in fact many people still believe they were guilty. But the justice system exonerated them when the facts came out. Other officers with different fact situations have been convicted, mostly rightly.

But Chauvin is something new, in my opinion, and his fate is a reflection of the power of videos and of propaganda. Within just a few days of Floyd’s death, most of America – the press, the left, and even many people on the right – judged him guilty merely on the evidence of a 9-minute video that only told a small portion of the story. Most of them unhesitatingly called his death a murder at the hands of Chauvin – and this was even done by lawyers, including lawyers on the right, who should know better. It seemed to me that way too many people were eager to signal how righteous they were, and they saw condemning Chauvin as a murderer without knowing the actual facts as the way to accomplish that.

That was only the beginning of what happened after Floyd’s death. America, and even some parts of the world outside America, exploded with destructive riots that lasted for many months. Cities discussed getting rid of police and replacing them with something else. Mayors let their cities burn. People were injured and killed, some of them civilians and some police. Buildings were destroyed, statues were pulled down. It was rioting and chaos the likes of which I can’t remember before in this country.

The press, the left, and organizations such as BLM pushed it further and further. And meanwhile, at the same time, facts were emerging that cast tremendous doubt on Chauvin’s guilt. I’m not going to recap that evidence here, but I wrote about it in real time, and some of it came out in the trial, more than enough to engender reasonable doubt in jurors who had not been exposed to the months of previous propaganda, or the threats of riots if Chauvin was not found guilty.

It didn’t matter. Chauvin has been found guilty of all three counts, including a preposterous charge of felony murder (most states would not even allow such as a charge, in which the felony is the same act alleged to have caused the death).

I’m fairly certain there will be an appeal. I doubt it will succeed. Because the larger issue here – and one that is not just the result of this case – is that our legal system now has been increasingly corrupted by the threat of mob action. Whether it be riots, members of Congress or a president opining on what the verdict should be, doxxing or mere cancel culture, many jurors are intimidated, many judges seem timid and afraid to go against the mob opinion, and many lawyers are afraid to defend unpopular defendants. These things undermine a legal system and can destroy it; perhaps it’s already destroyed. In the Chauvin jury selection process, people who said they were afraid to be on the jury were excused. Logic indicates to me that those people were probably more likely to have been the ones at least willing to hear the evidence and vote “not guilty.” They were rightly afraid; I can’t blame them.

Not that this verdict will sufficiently appease the mob. It will merely empower them. But a not guilty verdict would have been used to empower them, as well. Our problems are way, way beyond what happened to George Floyd and what will happen to Derek Chauvin. They are legion.

[NOTE: I was just listening to Candace Owens on Tucker Carlson, saying that we have two epidemics in this country: one of ignorance and one of cowardice. That’s true – but I’d add another, which is mendacity.]

The Chauvin verdict is in…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but it hasn’t been announced yet. I will update when it has been, which should be within the hour.

[UPDATE 7PM: I wasn’t home and at my computer when the verdict was announced. I commented on it briefly in this thread, but now I’m home and am starting to write a separate post about it.]

[UPDATE 8:23 PM: My new post on the verdict is here.]

But of course this means no hung jury. My guess is that there will be a conviction on the manslaughter charges, but it could be worse than that.

I very much doubt an acquittal, which I believe would be the right verdict. But I never thought there was much chance of that, even before the trial began.

On media lies

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “steve walsh” writes the following about the press, on the Sicknick medical examiner thread:

Not only do they never suffer any consequences for telling their lies, they actually benefit from doing so. Thus lying has become a useful and common tactic.

Yes, there’s really no downside to it as far as the MSM is concerned. Now that they are activists who place party and politics above any journalistic integrity, lying becomes standard and very widespread. The fact that they back each other up in presenting a united front when they promulgate a lie is a very important part of it. Except for rogue reporters like Greenwald and a few others, the agreed-on story is told early and repeated often. After all, they’re just quoting each other – and they’re reliable sources, right? For the Sicknick fire extinguisher story, the initial disseminator was the NY Times, supposedly quoting two nameless officials. There was no other source, and yet the story spread far and wide and was assumed by most people (including many on the right) to be the truth.

It was not. It was a complete lie. And the facts that challenged it were out there from the start, and yet they were widely ignored except for rogue reporters such as Glenn Greenwald. As for Greenwald and the other rare reporters who actually are willing to question the accepted narrative and do some digging, the rest of the press gets together and accuses them of being racists and white supremacists and other such things. Once they’re been labeled that way, the public “learns” that there’s no reason to pay attention to the Greenwalds of the world.

How many times have you heard from Democrat friends, if you try to cite something from a Fox contributor such as Tucker Carlson for example, that it’s Faux News and it should be ignored because of course it’s a lie? They don’t need to see it or hear it; they simply know they can dismiss it.

And that’s what the MSM relies on. And when their stories are finally revealed to be false, they just move on to the next one. If Trump called them “fake news,” that means of course that they are truth-tellers – because we all know that Trump’s a liar, right? It still works that way for a lot of people.

Another topic that came up in the Sicknick medical examiner thread was the role of the Sicknick family. Some people are wondering why they didn’t speak up – or why they didn’t speak up more. They did speak up, but for the most part the MSM in the US would not give them the time of day, because they were contradicting the agreed-on narrative. I’m not so sure the family could have done more; I certainly saw their statements early on, but they were in places like – you guessed it – the British papers.

This phenomenon of the British papers tending to be much better than ours about reporting our news is one I’m remarked on before. It’s pretty consistent, and although I’m sure they’re not infallible, I can’t recall their having to retract anywhere near the number of stories that the US MSM gets wrong (or lies about) on a regular basis.

For example, regarding the Sicknick family and the press, please see this post I wrote on February 26. That’s about two months ago. I’ll finish up my post today by repeating the text of that February post of mine. Here it is:

Here’s a recent interview with Officer Sicknick’s mother. Note that it’s in the British paper The Daily Mail. It’s not unusual for British papers to cover events in the US more thoroughly than our own MSM, and to publish things the left wouldn’t be enthusiastic about here:

The mother of the US Capitol police officer who died following the riot on January 6 believes that her son succumbed to a fatal stroke – that he was not bludgeoned to death by a fire extinguisher as reported.

Yet more than one month after Officer Brian Sicknick’s death on January 7, she has admitted that they are still in the dark as to what exactly caused that catastrophic episode.

Speaking exclusively to DailyMail.com Gladys Sicknick, 74, was unequivocal in her assertion that Officer Brian Sicknick was not struck on the head and that as far as the family knows her son had a fatal stroke.

She said, ‘He wasn’t hit on the head no. We think he had a stroke, but we don’t know anything for sure.

‘We’d love to know what happened.’

Please let that sink in: apparently the family has not been told the results of any autopsy. Has there been an autopsy prior to Officer Sicknick’s cremation? I have never read anything that indicates an answer to that question.

More:

But in the six weeks since his death the truth has taken a backseat to the myth of the brutal attack. Democratic Impeachment Managers even brazenly cited the incident – that he was stricken in the head by a fire extinguisher – as fact in pre-trial articles filed February 2 despite already growing doubts.

Now DailyMail.com has unpacked fact from fiction in an attempt to extract Sicknick’s death from the misinformation in which it was mired before it even happened.

Please read the whole thing. You probably know most of it, because it’s been covered on this blog several times since January, but here’s an excerpt:

…January 8, Sicknick’s father, Charles, 81, told Reuters that on January 7, as they rushed from their homes in New Jersey to DC, the family were told that Sicknick had a blood clot on his brain and had suffered a stroke. He was being kept alive on a ventilator but was dead by the time they got there.

Yet these few publicly available facts were bulldozed over by political fervor and it was the unattributed account of a brutal attack, also reported by the Associated Press, that gained traction.

Less than 24 hours after his death, with no autopsy, no confirmation of any sign of blunt trauma, no investigation nor due process, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for the ‘perpetrators’ of Sicknick’s ‘attack’ to be brought to justice and vowed, ‘We will not forget.’

Despite the family’s earnest desire to the contrary, Sicknick’s death was politicized and seized on as an exemplar of all of the savagery of the pro-Trump mob’s assault on the temple of American democracy.

There’s a helpful timeline at the article, too.

The following is true of most press and pundits on both left and right, who for the most part swallowed the fire extinguisher story without checking it out or paying attention to the family’s statements of what medical authorities had told them:

…[T]he narrative continued to run unchecked with not one leader acknowledging the ongoing investigation or the complete absence of any certainty amid the melee of misreporting…

On February 2 CNN reported that investigators were ‘vexed’ by the lack of evidence linking anyone with Sicknick’s death. According to their source medical examiners had found no sign of blunt trauma.

Yet that very day Democratic Impeachment Managers filed their pre-trial articles in which they ignored all doubts and evidence to the contrary and stated as fact, ‘The insurgents killed a Capitol police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher.’

The left is now trying to work the pepper spray angle – the idea that pepper spray wielded by some of the rioters might have caused his death. In very rare cases it can cause a spike in blood pressure – perhaps that’s what happened to Officer Sicknick, although the blood clot story doesn’t seem to support that. At any rate, we’ve not heard anything about Officer Sicknick’s blood pressure when arriving at the hospital.

The Daily Mail article also mentions that pepper spray was used on January by both police and the rioters, so it would be next to impossible to say who wielded the spray that got Sicknick, and of course it was certainly a delayed reaction on his part if he had a reaction to it at all, because there were many hours between the demonstration and his collapse and in the meantime he reported feeling fine. Unless a video is found of someone spraying him directly, it may always remain up in the air, but the left is clinging to it as a possible way to continue to blame the rioters.
_________________________________________________________

That’s the end of my Frebruary 26 post. Yesterday the medical examiner also stated that bear spray did not kill Officer Sicknick.

I wonder – if you were to take a poll of your Democrat friends and ask them how Officer Sicknick died, would they continue to think it was a fire extinguisher or bear spray?

Official cause of Officer Sicknick’s death finally announced – and it’s about as you suspected

The New Neo Posted on by

No, Officer Sicknick didn’t die from a fire extinguisher to the head, thrown by Trump supporters on January 6th. Nor did he die from an allergic reaction to bear spray wielded by those same protestors. Here’s the actual story as announced by the medical examiner – which conforms to what for quite some time has seemed the most likely cause of his death to anyone paying attention to the facts:

Francisco Diaz, the chief medical examiner for Washington, D.C., told the Washington Post that Sicknick died on Jan. 7 after suffering two strokes and that he did not suffer an allergic reaction to any chemical irritants.

The medical examiner’s office told the Washington Examiner that Sicknick’s “cause of death” was “acute brainstem and cerebellar infarcts due to acute basilar artery thrombosis” — a stroke — and the “manner of death” was “natural.” The office said Sicknick was sprayed with a chemical substance around 2:20 p.m. on Jan. 6, collapsed at the Capitol around 10 p.m. that evening, and was transported by emergency services to a local hospital. He died around 9:30 p.m. on Jan. 7, the office added.

But the political damage was done by the Times reporting the lies about Sicknick’s death, and those lies almost immediately getting halfway around the world. I bet a lot of people will never read Officer Sicknick’s actual cause of death, and will instead continue to believe the lies.

And that’s the purpose of the lies in the first place.

I’ve written many times about Officer Sicknick’s death. It was already known shortly after he died that a stroke might have been involved. As early as January 11th, for example – just a few days after the January 6th event and Sicknick’s January 7th death – I wrote a post that included these words:

The cause of death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick is still unclear. Early reports that it was from an injury have not been confirmed, and there are some reports that he died of a medical condition. I assume that some day we’ll learn more.

On January 26th I revisited the case at some length. We still had no further evidence about the cause of Sicknick’s death, but the fire extinguisher story had become even more suspect. By the time I wrote this January 30th post, I had learned that the original source for the fire extinguisher story had been anonymous “officials” talking to the NY Times. I also learned that ABC had reported much earlier on the stroke possibility, although by late January the MSM seemed to have conveniently forgotten about it and instead the fire extinguisher story was stated just about everywhere as though it were a proven fact.

My writing about this back then wasn’t an example of ESP on my part. Nor did it demonstrate amazing deductive skills. I was merely relying on basic information that had been right out in the open, easily available to anyone with curiosity and the ability to do a few searches. And yet there were very few people questioning the fire extinguisher story at the time, even on the right.

The WaPo story from yesterday that announced Diaz’s findings also says this:

The ruling, released Monday, likely will make it difficult for prosecutors to pursue homicide charges in the officer’s death.

Yes indeed, it’s often “difficult to pursue homicide charges” when no homicide has occurred. But where there’s a will, there’s a way – as we’ve seen in the Chauvin trial, for example.

More:

Diaz also said there was no evidence of internal or external injuries.

No blow to the head. Nothing even remotely resembling the fire extinguisher story.

The WaPo article goes on at some length in describing the earlier reports about Sicknick having been injured. They even include this from Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey:

The senator described Sicknick’s death as a “crime” that “demands the full attention of federal law enforcement.” He said that “when white supremacists attacked our nation’s capital, they took the life of one of our officers. They spilled his blood, they took our son away from his parents. They took a sibling away from their brothers.”

I believe that is the narrative most people will continue to take away from this.

[NOTE: Glenn Greenwald, who has written a lot about the Sicknick case, has an excellent article about yesterday’s announcement, in which he states this:

It was crucial for liberal sectors of the media to invent and disseminate a harrowing lie about how Officer Brian Sicknick died. That is because he is the only one they could claim was killed by pro-Trump protesters at the January 6 riot at the Capitol…

…[C]able outlets and other media platforms repeated this lie over and over in the most emotionally manipulative way possible…

As I detailed over and over when examining this story, there were so many reasons to doubt this storyline from the start. Nobody on the record claimed it happened. The autopsy found no blunt trauma to the head. Sicknick’s own family kept urging the press to stop spreading this story because he called them the night of January 6 and told them he was fine — obviously inconsistent with the media’s claim that he died by having his skull bashed in — and his own mother kept saying that she believed he died of a stroke.

But the gruesome story of Sicknick’s “murder” was too valuable to allow any questioning. It was weaponized over and over to depict the pro-Trump mob not as just violent but barbaric and murderous, because if Sicknick weren’t murdered by them, then nobody was.

Much more at the link, including the fact that Greenwald had been derisively labeled by MSM reporters as a “Sicknick truther.” They will not be saying any mea culpas about that, either, nor about the other lies they promulgated. They will just move on to the next one.]