Canada tells father what pronouns he must call his own child

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an example of how far the left—and some courts—are willing to go in the fight to offer physical (hormonal) treatments to children who identify as transgender, despite parental objections to the hormones at such a young age:

Last Wednesday, the Supreme Court of British Columbia (B.C.) ruled that a 14-year-old girl may undergo transgender hormone “treatments” to support her transgender identity as a boy — without her father’s consent. The court went so far as to threaten to penalize the father’s speech. If he calls his daughter a girl, that would constitute “family violence,” which would be punishable by law.

The B.C. Supreme Court ruled that the girl (referred to as A.B.) “is exclusively entitled to consent to medical treatment for gender dysphoria and to take any necessary legal proceedings in relation to such medical treatment,” and that “attempting to persuade A.B. to abandon treatment for gender dysphoria; addressing A.B. by his birth name; referring to A.B. as a girl or with female pronouns whether to him directly or to third parties; shall be considered to be family violence under s. 38 of the Family Law Act.”

According to the Family Law Act, “family violence” includes “psychological or emotional abuse of a family member, including intimidation, harassment, coercion or threats, including threats respecting other persons, pets or property, unreasonable restrictions on, or prevention of, a family member’s financial or personal autonomy.” Such an action is considered “family violence” along with “physical abuse of a family member” and “sexual abuse of a family member.”

Indeed, the court may even have considered the father’s attempts to convince his daughter to reconsider her transgender identity to be “physical abuse,” since that includes “deprivation of the necessities of life.”…

News outlets have referred to the girl as Maxine (not her real name) and her father as Clark (also a pseudonym). Maxine was encouraged by her school counselor to identify as a boy while in seventh grade. Dr. Brenden Hursh at B.C. Children’s Hospital decided that Maxine should take testosterone. Clark disagreed, filing an injunction to stop the hormone “treatments.”

You think it’s just Canada? Not in the least:

In a blow to advocates of parental authority, last week a visiting judge in a juvenile court in Hamilton County, Ohio stripped parents of custody of their teenage girl, who wants to identify as male, because they would not allow the 17-year-old to begin hormone replacement therapy.

The judge awarded custody to the teen’s grandparents who were, in the court’s eyes, more accepting of the teen’s wishes and who will now be allowed to make medical decisions for the teen. This case, which might be the first of its kind in juvenile court, should be disturbing to any advocate of parental rights and freedom of religious expression…

In 2016, the teen’s parents — the judge will not release the names of the family members — took her to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital for psychiatric treatment for anxiety and depression, where she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria. The teen wanted to continue with hormone replacement therapy, to help her appear male, but according to court testimony, her parents objected…

Based on their unwillingness to allow their child to go through with the treatments, which was based at least in part on their Christian beliefs, Judge Sylvia Hendon ruled to give the teen’s grandparents full custody, including the ability to make medical decisions and provide insurance (they’re accepting of her desire to identify as a male).

This is a case about parental rights to determine the medical treatment of a minor in an arena in which the answers are not the least bit obvious, and in which there is currently a war going on among “experts.” It’s also about religious freedom.

I’m not planning to make this post a lengthy discussion of the pros and cons of treating young people—if you’re interested in that, do some Googling. Suffice to say that it’s an area of tremendous controversy and even greater political agendas (this article—caveat: I’ve only read the first 200 words or so—looks as though it might be a pretty thorough and evenhanded treatment of some of the issues involved).

I’ve spent a goodly time on YouTube watching at least a few minutes of a number of videos from transitioning young people who identify as transgender. I’ve also watched at least the same number of videos of young people who have undergone what’s called “detransition.” They are young people who previously identified as transgender (sometimes they were over eighteen when they began treatment and sometimes they were younger than that). The detransitioners I’ve watched are most often people who were born female, and then transitioned to male and back to female. The speakers are often quite impressive in many ways—articulate, and often marked (at least those among them who had been female-to-male transgenders) by some irreversible sequelae of their experiences in taking male hormones and even at times having had surgery of various kinds: for example, some have permanently lowered voices.

Rather than continue to explain, I’ll just post two videos so you’ll see examples of what I’m talking about (there are plenty of others). All the people featured in these videos were born female, transitioned to male, and then detransitioned back to female:

Cloward-Piven at work on the border

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There’s a new record being set:

Illegal immigration continues to break records on the southwestern border — and they’re not good ones.

The number of families snared trying to sneak into the U.S. soared by 50 percent in one month alone, setting an all-time record with more than 36,000 family members apprehended, Homeland Security officials announced Tuesday.

The government has also encountered some 70 groups of at least 100 migrants during the first five months of the fiscal year, shattering records and placing new challenges on Border Patrol agents.

The mini-caravans are being funneled to some of the remotest parts of the border, where there is little in the way of medical help and it takes hours to process and transport the groups. That takes agents off the line, and drug smugglers use the distraction to send across their shipments, top border officials said.

Indeed, the formation of mini-caravans is a tactic used by smugglers, officials said Tuesday. The same cartels control drugs and human smuggling, and they use migrants as a distraction by sending a large group of people to occupy agents’ attention and then try to slip drugs into the U.S. in another location.

The idea is to overwhelm the system and make it easier to get through. But paradoxically, the situation also helps to bolster Trump’s argument that what’s going on at the border constitutes an emergency.

Obama paved the way for anti-white rhetoric

The New Neo Posted on by

You think I exaggerate? I do not.

As soon as I read Woman’s March activist Linda Sarsour’s comment about Nancy Pelosi, I thought, “Obama and his grandma!” In case you haven’t seen Sarsour’s statement yet, it goes like this:

Nancy is a typical white feminist upholding the patriarchy doing the dirty work of powerful white men. God forbid the men are upset – no worries, Nancy to the rescue to stroke their egos.

I discussed the statement in today’s previous post, but now I want to say something different about it. The phrase “typical white” as a form of criticism by people in public life (particularly on Twitter) has been normed and is quite common. And it goes without saying that if the roles were reversed, and a prominent white person (other than an ostracized neo-Nazi) derisively called someone a “typical” anything else (black, Muslim, whatever protected victim identity one can think of), the sky would fall on the person issuing the statement. But “typical white person” is rather typical these days, and merits hardly a squeak of protest—except, of course, from “typical white people.”

And it was none other than Barack Obama who began this trend. I well remember the moment he began to describe his white grandmother as a racist—it made me gasp when he said it. Obama was trying to do damage control when the nature of his mentor Rev. Wright was being publicized during the 2008 campaign:

I can no more disown [pastor Wright] than I can my white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

That was followed by a radio interview in which Obama called that same grandmother a “typical white person”:

He was asked about his grandmother’s reaction to his potentially being president.

“She’s extremely proud,” he said. “The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she’s a typical white person who — if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know — there’s a reaction that’s been bred into our experiences that don’t go away, and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society. We have to break through it. And what makes me optimistic is you see each generation feeling a little less like that.”

Sounds so very gentle compared to Sarsour, doesn’t it? But it is a demonization of white people as typically being racists, which opened the door to what is now a far more extremely-stated version of that sort of “white people bad” sentiment.

It could have gone differently. Obama didn’t have to do this. But he chose to do this. It wasn’t just about defending himself regarding Wright, either. There were numerous other occasions during the 2008 campaign on which he played the race card, as I described here.

Anti-Semitism: it’s all the rage

The New Neo Posted on by

Mark Steyn has a catchy phrase about it: “Jew-hate junction”:

As Laura Rosen Cohen likes to say, everyone meets at Jew-Hate Junction: excitable young Mohammedans, secular polytechnic Euro-lefties, anti-globalist conspiracy theorists… It’s getting pretty crowded over there.

The list is not an exhaustive one, but right now the left is leading the way in the US. Anti-Semitism has a long and protean history; if you think it’s about one thing, then you’ve got another think coming. That’s why it attracts so many adherents, even those who might be at odds on other issues. And it keeps morphing through space and time.

It’s been on the ascendance in Europe for several decades, and the roads that lead to Jew-hate junction there consists of generous portions of the left, of Islamic new-arrivals, of old-guard European anti-Semites—a sentiment that didn’t die but just went into postwar hibernation for a while—and a new strain of anti-Semites who don’t like being made to feel guilty about the Holocaust perpetrated/abetted by their grandparents and are heartily sick of hearing about it.

In this country, those first two elements (the left and a portion of some of the newer Muslim arrivals) are the main protagonists. And in people such as Louis Farrakhan, for whom anti-Semitism never went out of style, we have a different form of Islam combining with a strain of anti-Semitism that I first noticed after the civil rights movement had morphed into the black power movement.

The present-day US type has entered Congress as what you might call anti-Semitism with a young and pretty (and female) face. It’s main practitioner is Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a telegenic Muslim woman, and to a lesser extent Rashida Tlaib of Michigan (a Muslim of Palestinian background who has made the “dual loyalties” accusation against Jewish lawmakers), and to an even lesser extent AOC (who has defended Omar) of New York.

House Democrats considered responding by passing an anti-anti-Semitism resolution, but couldn’t quite muster the votes and it is currently postponed, although the vote had been scheduled for today.

I don’t think Democrats much care if they lose the Jewish vote, because the number of Jews in the US is small and highly concentrated in places that are and will remain Democratic enclaves even without the Jewish vote. Plus, many Jews today are secular and have replaced any allegiance to Judaism with an allegiance to leftism, so perhaps this won’t even alienate them. I also believe that most of the Jewish donors to the Democratic Party are probably more of that latter frame of mind, and therefore perhaps the calculation is that the party can afford that, too—although I would imagine some of the leaders of the party (Pelosi and Schumer) are none too happy about the possibility of the loss of support.

Anti-Israel sentiment is not the same as anti-Semitism (and yes, “Semites” includes more than Jews, but “anti-Semitism” is a phrase whose meaning is always “anti-Jew”). But anti-Israel sentiment based on having completely different rules for Jews than for other people is most definitely anti-Semitism, as is anti-Irael sentiment that trades in and promulgates lies about Israel and Jews, as well as the ancient “dual-loyalty” accusation.

But among Democrats in general these days, there’s no great love lost for Israel:

According to a Pew survey, in the dispute between the Israelis and Palestinians, only 27 percent of Democrats side with the Jewish state. Almost equal numbers of Democrats side with the Palestinians, and the subset of left-wing Democrats are pro-Palestinian by almost two to one. So it is not at all controversial for Omar to trash the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for its pro-Israel advocacy, especially among progressives.

The now trendy Democratic Socialists of America have even called for Israel to be eliminated.

Linda Sarsour is not an office-holder but she’s an activist and leader of the Woman’s March and another outspoken Muslim (with Palestinian parents) as well as a Farrakhan supporter. There’s no love lost between her and Nancy Pelosi:

“Nancy is a typical white feminist upholding the patriarchy doing the dirty work of powerful white men. God forbid the men are upset – no worries, Nancy to the rescue to stroke their egos,” she wrote.

The lessons of identity politics and intersectionality have been well-learned by Sarsour. See how it all comes together there? Nancy Pelosi may be a woman and a feminist (victim points there) but she’s a “typical white feminist” supporting the “dirty work” of “powerful white men.” That’s all Nancy Pelosi really is, according to Sarsour. Despite Pelosi’s bona fides as a woman and a feminist, she’s just a white man enabler, the worst of the worst. Sarsour outdoes her in every way that counts: woman, feminist, Muslim (which somehow de-whites her—but Sarsour is every bit as white as I am, I can assure you), and white-man-hater, as well as Jew-hater. A veritable cornucopia of intersectional points on Sarsour’s end.

You think I’m being facetious? I am not. The only question here in the Democratic Party is (in the immortal words of Humpty Dumpty, about something a bit different) who is to be master—that’s all—the new radicals or the old guard? The Jews are, as usual, just the canaries in the mine.

Marrying your soulmate

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve already confessed that I watch the TV show “The Bachelor.”

Some of you—all of you?—may ridicule me for this, but for me the show has a great combination of factors. It entertainingly takes my mind off heavier things. It’s got beautiful travel locations, and the people aren’t exactly hard on the eyes, either. The directors and/or producers and/or editors are very skilled at quick cutting (sometimes even witty quick cutting), and also at creating a certain amount of tension and suspense. The show has its traditions and conventions—including, for some reason, a near-complete confusion about the use of “I” and “me” when employed in phrases such as “him and me” or “she and I”—phrases almost universally rendered on the show as some hybrid form such as “him and I” or “she and me.”

And the show has drama. You may think it’s false drama, but it’s not all false. Plenty of marriages have emerged from the show, which is surprising considering the incredible artificiality of its setup situation, and the obvious opportunities for jealousy that arise when the show airs and the chosen mate-to-be watches all that footage of his or her significant other passionately kissing a host of different people.

But I digress.

This week The Bachelor featured The Most Dramatic Episode Ever (fans of the show will get what I mean). So, why am I bringing it up, considering that I assume that most of you don’t watch it and probably actively disdain it, if you think about it at all? Because an issue that arose amidst last night’s drama—the issue that sparked the drama, actually—is one that I’ve often wondered about: do marriages that are built on the idea that the couple are soulmates who fell in love at first sight (or almost first sight), and who never had any doubt that they were made for each other, do better than marriages that result from relationships that began more slowly and perhaps even hesitantly? Is that kind of strong and immediate knowledge of the other person’s rightness necessary for a good and lasting marriage? Does it correlate generally with a better marriage than a situation in which love grows slowly, or does the difference not matter, or is the latter situation actually better long-term than the former?

In last night’s episode, Bachelor fans (and the Bachelor himself) were faced with a contestant who sent herself home because, although she was starting to “fall in love” with the Bachelor, she wasn’t “in love” with him, and she wanted a love like her parents had—in which they fell in love instantaneously and never have had a moment’s doubt since.

I contend that if that what she’s holding out for, she risks being alone for the rest of her life. Not because such a relationship isn’t extremely desirable, and not because it’s impossible that it can happen just that way. I think it is both desirable and possible. The question is: how likely is it? Do you give up something rather good in order to wait for it? Is the perfect the enemy of the good?

Just now I did some Googling to find out whether people who begin marriage with that situation of soulmate-certainty end up with happier and more stable marriages over time, and also just how common that initial state of affairs is. So far I haven’t found research on the topic, which surprises me. I haven’t looked all that long, so perhaps you can locate something.

And of course, feel free to opine on the topic in general.

[NOTE: For what it’s worth, I fell in love at first sight many and many a moon ago, and I married that person although I already knew there would be problems. The bond was just that powerful. And we stayed together for many many years because of the strength of that bond, and yet ended up divorced.]

The Democrats re-enact Animal Farm

The New Neo Posted on by

Victor Davis Hanson has written a great many excellent articles, but this one is one of his wittiest and most well-written.

A small sample:

At 86, six-term U.S. senator and lifelong liberal Dianne Feinstein should have no reason in her twilight years to remind progressives that she has been a front-line social justice warrior, most recently as an inquisitor during Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. After all, to bring down Kavanaugh, she had her staff improperly leak the accusations and name of the once anonymous accuser Christine Blasey Ford, while doing her best to present as fact 35-year old uncorroborated rumors and allegations.

Omnis effusus labor as the poet Virgil once wrote. “All labor for nothing”—given that Feinstein recently grew snarly with some school-age kids who were being used as props by a radical green group called the Sunrise Movement to embarrass her into accepting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s unhinged “Green New Deal.”

Feinstein, in apparently white-privilege establishment style, barked at her multiethnic visitors that she would not be bullied (“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’m doing. You come in here and you say, ‘It has to be my way or the highway.’ I don’t respond to that.”) She added that she had just won a sixth term by 1 million votes, and had had enough of their whining. In other words, she was a dinosaur expecting deference due to her age, her office, and her progressive bona fides.

Instead, she was roundly denounced as emblematic of last-generation Democrats heading for the tar pits. As the 2020 race nears, Feinstein only confirmed that identity politics will be the new Democratic gospel, and that being a fabulously rich, elderly, and in-the-way politico makes one a rather low rung on the new intersectional ladder pole of progressive authenticity.

Senator Bernie Sanders, 77, also does not get it that the socialist moment of 2016 is now ancient history. Its ephemeral icons have largely been devoured by 2019 identity politics revolutionaries.

Hanson is correct. The Democrats are moving left at such dizzying speed that they’re leaving behind most of their former power players in a cloud of dust, with the possible exception of Nancy Pelosi, who has been given an infusion of energy by the fact that she’s managed to head the Democratic House majority once again, and knows her way around a power gavel.

But the Democratic Party, which has spent a great deal of time railing against the oldness and whiteness and maleness of conservatives, has discovered that only its youngest and most intersectional and leftist of candidates will do anymore.

Will the leftist views of these candidates backfire on them in the general election?

Sandmann’s lawyers respond to the WaPo

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s something intensely satisfying about reading this, even though I know that letters don’t change a thing, and even in a case of such egregious wrongdoing by the WaPo it isn’t all that likely that Sandmann will win his case against them.

But still, very well done:

The Post ignored its own culpability and wrongdoing. Mr. Kennedy’s letter stated that the Post “provided accurate coverage.” It did not and its belated public relations efforts change nothing and fool no one. The Post made no effort to retract and correct the lies it published.

The Post did not have the integrity to unequivocally admit its negligent and reckless violations of fundamental journalistic standards documented by its complete failure to investigate the incident at the National Mall before publishing lies about a child. One need only review the Post’s published list of its own Policies and Standards at https://www.washingtonpost.com/policies-and-standards/?utm_term=.ec515ec8b6aa to find violation after violation after violation.

The Post did not have the character to apologize to Nicholas and seek his forgiveness.

Highlighting its arrogance and lack of contrition, the Post announced its “deletion” of one of its false and defamatory tweets about the incident and Nicholas by re-posting the tweet so that its lies will also forever remain available on the Internet and in social media.

False accusations against an adult destroy a lifetime of accomplishments. False accusations against children forever rob them of their inherent right to define their lives for themselves and force them to suffer a life tainted and damaged by the permanent shadow of the lies.

Last Friday night the Post made clear that it has learned no lesson and remains willing in the future to falsely attack others to further its political agenda, including false attacks on children.

The Post has now double downed on its lies. As Nicholas’s lawyers, we will now double down on truth and aggressively continue our legal efforts to hold the Post accountable and obtain justice for Nicholas in a court of law.

With Sullivan, the standard of proof required for a public figure to successfully sue a newspaper for defamation became almost impossibly high, which gave the MSM a sense of tremendous power and invulnerability. Now, while it’s true that Nicholas Sandmann is not a public figure (that is, although the WaPo helped him to become one, he wasn’t one when the entire sorry episode began), and is in fact a minor as well, it’s also true that courts wish to give a great deal of leeway to the press because of the great need to protect press freedom.

The WaPo has a ton of money and a stable of high-powered lawyers, and you can bet they know their defamation law much better than I do. I would guess they feel they are protected by the sorts of arguments you can find here, the gist of those arguments being that the paper was only quoting other people.

So it is by no means an open-and-shut case for Sandmann. Nevertheless, every word of that letter from the lawyers gives me the satisfaction of at having the WaPo called out in no uncertain terms. This lawsuit was necessary, because even if it’s lost, it publicizes the fact that Sandmann is innocent and was falsely accused.

And there will be other lawsuits—against more legally vulnerable non-press private citizens—offering many more opportunities for Sandmann’s lawyers to remind the public of his innocence and to drive home the idea that there might actually be negative consequences for those who spread lies about young people.

Meanwhile, there’s trouble in our socialist heroine AOC’s camp

The New Neo Posted on by

We have some evidence of possible campaign finance violations by AOC’s chief of staff, a man I discussed in this previous post on the so-called “Justice Democrats”:

Two political action committees founded by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s top aide funneled over $1 million in political donations into two of his own private companies, according to a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission on Monday.

The cash transfers from the PACs — overseen by Saikat Chakrabarti, the freshman socialist Democrat’s chief of staff — run counter to her pledges to increase transparency and reduce the influence of “dark money” in politics.

Chakrabarti’s companies appear to have been set up for the sole purpose of obscuring how the political donations were used.

Fancy that.

It really does seem, as many have speculated, that this is being revealed now because leading Democrats like Pelosi realize what a liability AOC is:

Evan Le, pianist

The New Neo Posted on by

Kids can sometimes demonstrate incredible technical facility at playing a musical instrument at a very young age. I bring you Exhibit A, Evan Le, playing the piano at four after reportedly only studying it for a number of months (try to ignore the MC’s attempts to upstage him):

It’s a lot more unusual for a young child playing a musical instrument to exhibit technical prowess plus artistic sensitivity and even some sophistication. I bring you Exhibit B, Evan Le, playing piano at the age of seven, three years later:

The House launches its expected fishing expedition against the Great Orange Whale, Moby Donald

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This was one of the known consequences of Democrats taking the House:

A key House committee with the power to impeach President Donald Trump kicked off a sweeping new investigation on Monday with document demands from the White House, Trump’s namesake company, charity, transition, inauguration and 2016 campaign, as well as several longtime associates and the president’s two adult sons.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat, opened his much-anticipated probe with letters to 81 individuals, companies and government entities seeking a wide range of materials that go to the heart of allegations against the president — including abuses of power, corruption, and obstruction of justice.

That net is very wide, isn’t it? But hey, they’ll do anything to harpoon Moby Donald.

I can’t recall anything even remotely like this, in terms of scope, against a sitting president. Watergate was mainly about Watergate, as far as I know. Even Whitewater was relatively circumscribed in nature, and mostly was handled by a succession of independent counsels. The Lewinski investigation was, likewise, comparatively limited and also involved an independent counsel (Ken Starr, who had originally started with the Whitewater matter).

The analogy to those investigations is the Mueller investigation. That’s been going on for nearly two years, and during that time Mueller has had access to the same people Nadler is pursuing, and has not found much of anything to implicate Trump. Democrats are upset about that, so they are going to try again. Whether their plan is to impeach Trump (they probably have the House votes to do that, but it would be dumb without some sort of smoking gun that could gain enough votes in the Senate to convict him) or whether they just want to try to engage in constant innuendos and smears from now to the 2020 election in hopes of damaging him further (that’s my leading theory at the moment), this is a deeply troubling although completely expected development. Another goal of this investigation—and one I would think had already been sufficiently met, but I guess the Democrats see no reason not to make the point ever more clear—is to frighten anyone away who might even consider working under Trump.

More:

By initiating the wide-ranging demand for documents, the Judiciary Committee signaled it is creating its own insurance policy in the event that all of Mueller’s findings are not made public and it finds the kinds of evidence that would be grounds for trying to impeach Trump from office. Public hearings and closed-door interviews based off the materials will begin in a matter of weeks, a senior Democratic committee lawyer said.

The list of letter recipients reads like a who’s who of people in and around the president’s orbit, notably all of Trump’s senior 2016 campaign leaders, including Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner and Brad Parscale, the current campaign manager for the 2020 re-election effort…

Democrats aren’t just limiting themselves to obstruction of justice allegations tied to the Russia probe. The committee also plans to examine potential violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution that prohibits a president from personally enriching himself while in office, as well as witness intimidation, and the dangling of pardons to senior Trump officials caught up in federal investigators’ cross hairs.

Nadler’s wide-ranging information requests come on the heels of Michael Cohen’s public testimony last week before a different House committee, in which the former Trump attorney and fixer implicated Trump in numerous alleged crimes and opened the floodgates for Democrats’ investigations by name-dropping Trump associates who may have been involved in crimes Cohen has pleaded guilty to, including lying to Congress and committing campaign-finance violations tied to hush-money payments.

So one of the purposes of squeezing Cohen, the noted perjurer, and getting him to testify against Trump in the absence of any proof except the word of a known flagrant liar, is to set the scene for further investigations based on Cohen’s allegations. It’s a bit like the Steele dossier, isn’t it? You take a lie and make it the basis for an investigation to trap more little fish in your net in hopes of finally catching the big fish.

People who hate Trump—and they are legion—will be overjoyed. I’m wondering, though, how the vast middle will respond to this. I also wonder how vast the middle actually is anymore.