Free Speech- Canadians Stand Up!

Free Speech is an absolute necessity for a free society. It is a right and an obligation. Like all rights Free Speech carries with it a counterweight of responsibility. The only binding responsibilities of free speech should be honesty and accuracy. Imagine a world in which physicians could not refer to sociopaths, sexual predators and serial killers as "mentally ill" or "dangerous" or even "in need of treatment" because it might hurt their feelings. That would be suicidal for a society.

In Canada, legislation that was originally well intentioned, has been used to an even more suicidal effect. Some of the fellow bloggers I admire most have been brought before the Human Rights Commission as a means of punishing them for speaking freely, accurately and honestly about real threats to the safety and integrity of their country. As an American, I want to express my solidarity with them and their cause. They are currently engaged in supporting an effort to change the flawed laws that have put the power to persecute them for their opinions and statements of undisputed fact into the hands of people with very destructive intentions.

Human Rights Commision is an ironic name for an organization that can be used to squelch an absolute and essential right like free speech in favor of a non existant right such as the "right not to be hated" or "the right not to be offended"

I urge any of my Canadian readers who are not aware of this effort (not likely, I know) to help in this effort and all you Americans, Aussies, Israelis and others who have Canadian friends and relatives to urge them to get behind it too.

Here are some interesting and relevant thoughts from Solzhenitsyn's Harvard speech in 1978- He saw a lot of this so clearly back then because he knew a lot more about the reality of Human nature, the value of freedom and the sanctity of responsibility than anyone born in America (or Canadia) ever could.

First, what he says about the balance between legal rights and values:

The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse.

Then he talks about what a "statesman" (it applies to any citizen- especially Canadian bloggers) has to put up with in order to do anything of real value:

...has to move cautiously and even timidly; there are thousands of hasty and irresponsible critics around him, parliament and the press keep rebuffing him. As he moves ahead, he has to prove that every single step of his is well-founded and absolutely flawless... The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

I believe that honesty, accuracy and the responsibility to publicly identify and speak out against threats to the system that provides the right of Free Speech are the greatest of those obligations. That is why it is important to support My Canadian friends in this effort!

Finally, here is the declaration of support for the changes that a group of bloggers released today. I am honored to post here in support of every honest, self-reliant and plain-speaking soul in Canada. God bless you all!

We strongly support those members of the Conservative Party of Canada who seek to repeal Sections 13 and 54 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Sections 13 and 54 of the Canadian Human Rights Act are a direct attack on the freedom of expression guaranteed to us under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The provisions of these sections allow the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal to prosecute anyone alleged to have said or written something "likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt" whether there is a living, breathing victim or not.

Vague concepts such as speech or writing "liable to cause hatred or contempt" are the basis of expensive state-funded prosecution of individuals. The statute provides no objective legal test for "hate" or any objective means of determining what constitutes "contempt". As a result, the CHRC is used by various groups and individuals, as a risk-free taxpayer funded method to silence their critics and those they disagree with. CHRC investigators have testified that that "freedom of speech is an American concept" and therefore not valid in Canada . Such statements are contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms but are standard operating procedure at the CHRC.

Commissioners of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, who are not judges and are often not even lawyers, have held that "truth" is not a defence against prosecution under Section 13. Intent or fair comment are also not defenses. In fact, there is not a single listed defence under Section 13! Because of the lack of any defenses, the Tribunal has a 100% conviction rate since 1978. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal routinely ignores the principles of fundamental justice, such as the rules of evidence, and these kangaroo courts, even allow hearsay evidence. The CHRA provides for each Tribunal to make up the rules as they go.

Every journalist, writer, Internet webmaster, publisher and private citizen in Canada can be the subject of a Human Rights complaint for expressing an opinion or telling the truth. Given the ambiguity of Section 13, it is virtually impossible for any individual to determine if they might be in violation of Section 13. Arbitrary censorship and punishment are wrong, and cannot be justified in a free society."

Kathy Shaidle has a book about it all The Tyranny of Nice
Blazing Cat Fur writes often and intelligently about it.
Also see:
Small Dead Animals
Covenant Zone
Free Canukistan
Ezra Levant
Ghost of a flea

The Terrorism of Deconstruction

There is an old joke about a missionary and a cannibal. If it seems a little silly at first, let it sink in a little…

One day the missionary was trying to explain why cannibalism is bad. He says to the Cannibal, “God created man to be but little lower than the angels. For that reason alone it is wrong to kill and eat people.”

The cannibal thought for a moment and said, “Then why did he make them out of meat?” This joke is not about real missionaries and cannibals, it is about the heart of Western Civilization confronting the Agélaste Left.

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” he was setting forth a broad and revolutionary presumption - Humans have rights. Jefferson attributed the source of those rights to God as did many philosophers of his time but they were never actually rights in the real world until they were codified and written into The Bill of Rights which is the cornerstone document of the United States of America- more critical even than the Constitution.

I am not saying that Jefferson invented the idea of rights. He was, obviously, building on the principals of respect for the individual that spring from the book of genesis, derive from Greek Philosophy and were firmly established in practice the Magna Carta. But Jefferson crossed the last significant frontier by turning the view of rights around. He viewed the rights of man as the signal aim of governmental structure rather than an adjunct and a foil to the rights of a king.

Prior to the rise of the United States and the other constitutional democracies of Western Civilization there were no rights for the common man. There were only the divine rights of kings and churches which were enforced by the application of power. The concept of rights evolved slowly as the human race evolved culturally. At every other evolutionary level of cultural complexity, from the family, to the hunting/gathering group, to the tribal society, to the monarchy and all the way up to the despotic rule of the totalitarian state, the rest of human experience has been and is without rights as Jefferson understood them. Until the American experiment there were only functions and duties to be fulfilled with the occasional “favor” of some small freedom. It is only in the upside-down logic of the left that rights are assumed to exist independent of the deity and/or government.

Here is a short definition of the word “citizen” that I like. I found it on a kid’s web site that is run by the House of Representatives. “A native or naturalized member of a state or nation who owes allegiance to its government and is entitled to its protection.” Right alongside the protection, which includes the assurance of the citizen’s rights, there is that often forgotten but crucial bit about the allegiance owed. Allegiance is scoffed at in some circles these days but the protection of rights is a two way street and the government can’t protect anything if it can’t count on allegiance.

Unlike Jefferson, most on the left do not believe in a God that "endows" men with rights, neither do they believe in the government that grants and protects them. They seem to believe that rights exist as inviolable, innate properties on their own. This, of course is absurd. Even a cursory look at any society that is not a western democracy will show that rights are only ephemeral and exist at the whim of the ruler. Without a Bill of Rights, a Constitution to give it detail and strong safeguards including an independent judiciary and controllable military a right is just an idea.


If Jefferson wrote The Declaration today he would find himself having to defend that original presumption in the media. This is because the mass media is in the grip of the liberal left and the left in turn is in the grip of a peculiar, post-Soviet nihilism that has become the prevalent dialogue style of the modern left. The left used to be predictably pedantic. They would lecture you about the coming worker’s utopia and excuse all the excesses of Russia, China and North Korea by telling you that the goal of paradise had to be won over the objections of the vestiges of the capitalist and religious power systems.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, and now with the slow capitalization of China, they can no longer point to the steady evolution of the utopia. To avoid admitting that their ideology is now officially not a candidate for “survival of the fittest” but rather a victim of “extinction of the least fit”, they have sunk into a kind of glib but effective, antic nihilism in which allows them to take advantage of their right of free speech to deconstruct and weaken the culture from within its vital institutions.

The glibness of the left is based on a kind of intellectual guerilla deconstructionism. They start with a patently false accusations and assertions and then, when challenged with information, fall back on a series of lines of defense consisting of reasonable-sounding requests for more information that are designed to eat away at the validity of the assumptions behind the information. A question that one of these might have thrown at Jefferson would be “So if you say the creator endowed us with these rights but later on you insist that there must be no official religion- how can you then use the deity to justify your claim to these rights?” This is an example of a question that is also really an accusation in disguise. Then, if you take the time and energy to argue with them, they just fade back behind more of those kinds of questions . When that last line of defense is breached they simply go back to the beginning and assert some other naive and obviously uninformed anti-western slogan thereby entrapping the unwary and sincere in an endless loop of fruitless talk.

Now, look back up at the joke I began this post with. If you substitute “intelligent citizen” for “missionary” and “modern leftist” for “cannibal” in the joke above, you have the idea.

The effect of this tactic is a “no lose” situation for the nihilist progressive because even while he understands that, if we know what we are talking about, he will be disproved on every point, he has put us on the defensive while engaging us and wasting our time in the futility of “educating the in-educable”. On the off chance that one of his insipid questions stumps us, he wins the whole table without really having risked anything.

Wikipedia says:

“Those writing sympathetically about deconstruction tend to use an "idiosyncratic" (sometimes in fact imitative) style with numerous neologisms, a bent toward playfulness and irony, and a massive amount of allusion across many corners of the Western canon."

If you consider that "idiosyncratic" can be taken to mean that the style is not just individual but actively counter to accepted styles of thought (usually, but not always known as wrong) and "massive amount of allusion across many corners of the Western canon" is a euphemistic way of saying "overly broad generalizations taken out of context" then this is pretty thin support from your sympathizers.

Wikipedia goes on to say:

"Critics assert that when one takes the time to deconstruct writings about deconstruction one discovers it was not worth the effort. Deconstructionism is ultimately and literally a meaningless philosophy. It is devoid of meaning and is, in fact, a direct attack on any possibility of meaning, because if the reader alone creates meaning there can be no truth; one person’s meaning is equal to another’s so there is no possibility of reasoned discourse leading to actionable conclusions. Deconstruction leads nowhere and means nothing.”

Deconstructionism, as practiced in the arguments of the left, is the intentional reduction of accepted values and ideals through spurious comparisons and arbitrary relativism. Such absurdities as the equation of the moral value of our culture and that of the Caliphate Islamists fall easily from their lips. While it is possible to argue every point that the deconstructionist makes down to the finest detail, it is impossible to make any progress doing so because every time you prove a point, the creative and agile deconstructionist asks another intentionally ignorant question that forces you to go back over the same ground. They don't care about the wasted time because they have nothing to gain the emptiness of their tatics mirror the emptiness of their philosophy. Without some self-evident truths, you wind up stuck defending that which should need no defense while the important work of extending the reach of rationality, liberty and true tolerance lies undefended.

A deconstruction stretches the rights of free inquiry and speech to illogical extreme. (It is possible to over-stretch a right because rights exist within systems and are thus responsible to the limitations of the system they operate within) Denying the power, moral authority and prerogative of the culture that grants that right, it places itself outside of the cultural framework.

At this time of challenge and danger, Western Civilization can ill-afford to be paralyzed by the internal rot that this deconstructionism. As I pointed out on a comment thread at Augean Stables:

This…, all reminds me of Yul Brynner. When I was a kid I remember seeing him on one of the old “talk shows”. I never had the patience for those shows- Merv Griffen, Dick Cavett etc.. My parents were watching and I was floating through the room and the raw charisma of Brynner held me for a little while. The host, whoever he was asked Brynner why he never seemed to get drawn into Hollywood squabbles. Brynner said that he had been given a bit of advice as a young man- (I wish I could remember who had told him this and the exact words) It went something like this: “Never fight with an idiot. When you fight with an idiot, he can’t rise to your level so you have to sink to his level. At his level he will beat you every time!”

We need to find a way to stop wasting our time and effort on the losers of history who have found new and inventive ways of insinuating themselves virus-like into our schools, academies and mainline religions. We also need to guard against doing this without adequate safeguards against losing the benefit that comes from hearing valid criticism that we find painful. The discrimination is not easy but the comment thread I cited above is a good example of they way in which way too much effort is spent by way too many good and sincere thinkers when they encounter just one of these losers who is determined to pervert the process. These discussions become the equivalent of intellectual IEDs that bleed the commitment and energy from honest efforts to understand and persuade. This is really what the left and al Qaeda have in common, they know that they have the weaker (that is to say, non-existent) hand on all rational matters so they just want to blow people up, render rational discussion impossible, hack off heads, frustrate the sincere engagement of ideas and spill blood randomly hoping to drive the intelligent opposition into disgusted retreat. Whether it is physical violence or the passive-aggressive deconstruction of discourse by the flood of words that negates ideas it is terrorism. They call this terrorism “Resistance”. When you see them use the word “Resistance”, they mean resisting the inexorable reality that they are wrong.

It would help if the media would realize that this is their game and stop promoting them to the unwary public. Every time Noam Chomsky is presented to the world as anything but a linguistic theorist whose writings are impenetrable, he becomes a leader of Resistance. When Ward Churchill’s lunatic ravings are published anywhere he becomes a magnet to the loser resistance, a terrorist of words. But, then, the Main Stream Media is rife with leftists and their liberal enablers who pay more attention to losers like Chomsky, Zawahiri, Guevara, Nasrallah and Churchill than to true heroes of progress like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Walid Shoebat, Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes.

The media, as I pointed out in my last post, also appoints obviously biased organizations like Amnesty International as the authority on Human Rights. If they understood rights and their provenance at all, they would realize that while Amnesty and their ilk focus their attention on trumped-up offenses and the occasional (mostly benign flaw) of Israel and the U.S., they are, by weakening the Wests moral authority, actively participating in the murder, torture and enslavement of millions who live under Islamic and other non-Western governments.

Here’s one last unfunny joke:

One day the civilized westerner was trying to explain why terrorism (with words and ideas) is bad. He says to the Resistor, “God created man to be but little lower than the angels. For that reason alone it is wrong to kill people either by blowing them up or by deconstructing their ideals.”

The Resistor thought for a moment and said, “Then why did he make them out of meat?”

Amnesty International and the Self-Serving Avarice of the Left

“If the fire department in your town thought the way Amnesty International does they would send all the trucks and ambulances down to take care of the burning toaster in the mayor’s kitchen and keep them there to make sure the fire is out while a 727 crashes next to the elementary school and burning children run into the street igniting five high-rise apartment buildings where mothers are forced to throw their babies out their windows to passers-by.”

I knew I needed to write about Amnesty International when I saw this post on Solomonia . It cites a report from NGO Monitor in which they analyzed the content and subject matter of Amnesty International’s publications and statements over the past year. The study plainly shows how biased and politically partisan AI really has become. The evidence is voluminous and damning. Solomonia also cites a Ynet article about the NGO Montor study.

It was not so much the NGO Monitor report that made it necessary for me to write about AI as it was a quote in the Ynet article Sol cites in the same post. Ynet’s Yaacov Lappin quotes Amnon Vidan, the Director General of Amnesty International’s Israel Department as saying this, when asked about the results of the NGO Monitor analysis:

“There is an expectation of Israel and other democratic states to abide by a higher standard than Sudan. I would suggest NGO Monitor address the content of documents, rather than count their words. That way they will be able sympathize with the suffering of non-Jews," Vidan said.”

The implications of the statement are stunning. Here is a highly placed official in the organization that represents itself as the world’s pre-eminent guardian of Human Rights specifically admitting that they employ a double standard. The use one set of criteria for democratic countries and another for the rest of the world.This confirms what advocates for Israel and defenders of western civilization in general have been saying for some time. It explains why Amnesty focuses excessively on the difficulties and occasional tragedy caused by the reasonable law enforcement and self-protective military actions of Israel and the US than on the offensive and intentional horrors of the rape, murder and enslavement of Darfour or the horrific, government sanctioned repression and murder of women throughout the Islamic world.

His chief problem with the NGO Monitor study seems to be that he feels that it lacks the proper focus and distribution of sympathy. That’s odd because the Amnesty International mission statement doesn’t mention anything about sympathy allocation being part of the job. Here is the mission, right off the web page

“Amnesty International's vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards.

In pursuit of this vision, AI's mission is to undertake research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity, freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination, within the context of its work to promote all human rights.

AI is independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government or political system, nor does it support or oppose the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect. It is concerned solely with the impartial protection of human rights.”

See that? Not a single mention of telling the world for whom it should have sympathy. In fact they specifically say, “the impartial protection of human rights” not the preferential protection of human rights of those impacted by democratic countries. Perhaps Mr. Vidan thinks that Amnesty International should change its name to Sympathy International and spend its time telling us who to feel sorry for and why, if so he should state that instead of attempting to convince us he is being fair. My guess is that he has, simply dropped the veil momentarily and given us an inadvertent glimpse into the hypocritical ideological/psychological make up of the leftist/socialist cabal that rules Amnesty International.

Of course, readers of Breath of the Beast will not be surprised that a highly placed Director in AI should betray such a blatantly subjective, hysterically emotional bias. We’ve discussed the underlying kitsch, emotion and Agélastic bathos that dominates the left.

Amnesty has been an enormously powerful force on the international scene and although its own bias and arrogance has begun to eat away at that power, it is still the most recognizable franchise name in The Human Rights Business. This power is part of what drives people like Vidan mad.

I am referring to frankly leftist activists who populate such groups and their liberal enablers who fall for their marketing campaigns. The very core of their belief system is fear and disdain for those who wield power in the real world. Their entire identity is that they are the champions of the “under-classes”. Least you think I am exaggerating about the leftist orientation and agenda here is a description of the Poverty and Human Rights campaign found on the AI website. It says, in part:

Everyone, everywhere has the right to live with dignity. That means that no-one should be denied their rights to adequate housing, food, water and sanitation, and to education and health care.
Amnesty International is increasingly documenting how human rights violations drive and deepen poverty. People living in poverty have least access to power to shape the policies of poverty and are frequently denied effective remedies for violations of their rights.
AI is working to hold governments, big business and other powerful actors to account for human rights violations which target the poor, and which deepen poverty.

This, of course, is a thinly veiled call for the redistribution of wealth in classic “From each according his ability; to each according to his needs” Communist style. It sounds compassionate and reasonable when swathed in human rights yard goods but history has proven that it does not work and leads to far greater tyranny than it proposes to replace. As C. S. Lewis wrote, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”- a perfect description of the socialist totalitarian terrors of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot.

They claim to stand up for the powerless but they are betrayed by their own human frailty. They love power. Vidan gets to say who is and who isn’t a human rights violator. He doesn’t have to answer to anyone. He “reports” on violations as he sees them and when there is a considered and intelligent challenge to his judgment, he arrogantly dismisses it by decree. He doesn’t feel obligated to answer the questions raised in good faith but, rather, flings them back, accusing anyone who would question his “moral” authority of callousness toward “non-Jews”.

The mantle of power rests uneasy on such a creature, though. Even leaving aside the question of what his motivation might be as an Israeli who would engage in the biased and unfair singling-out of his own country when the forces arrayed against it are committed to its destruction and are far worse violators of human rights, he is caught in an inescapable spiral of self-loathing. You see, when do-gooders like Vidan get themselves into organizations such as Amnesty International and rise to high positions, they get a glimpse of themselves as the very thing they loath and become that most pitiable species of anomaly, a Leftist, Fat Cat, Powerbroker. There is nothing so loathsome as self-loathing.

The hypocrisy and self-loathing doesn’t end there. Several paragraphs ago, I used the word “franchise” to describe Amnesty International. This might be jarring to some; others might have understood it as a metaphorical use of the words that is a specific term of a commercial nature. I used the word more precisely than that. Amnesty International is, for all its being a “non-profit” institution, is actually a marketing and money driven enterprise. It is true that the organizing principal is “Human Rights” as set forth in the mission statement quoted above but Vidan and all of his associates are well-paid professionals. Their continuance in that profession is dependant on a substantial flow of cash. This is where they really get themselves tied in knots. Both Solomonia and Little Green Footballs have blogged this little beauty of a fundraiser:


The ghastly jape of a poll is bad enough but then the text of the appeal are almost unbelievable:

All joking aside, the U.S. government, once perceived as a beacon of hope and justice, no longer leads the world on Human Rights.

The continuing allegations of U.S. torture, use of secret prisons, ghost detainees, and indefinite and unconstitutional detention at Guantanamo calls into question the U.S. commitment to fight torture and adhere to international law. The U.S. now lacks the credibility needed to improve human rights abroad.

By violating some international laws, the United States undermines all international law and promotes the idea to other countries that some laws are acceptable to ignore in the pursuit of “security.”

Check out Amnesty’s annual report to learn more about rights abuses in 2006 and find out what you can do to improve human rights in 2007 in the United States and elsewhere.

This is naked Marketing obfuscation. They imply in the first paragraph that here was a time in the past that Amnesty acknowledged America as “a leader on Human Rights”. This is designed to trick the liberal and uninformed reader that the actions of recent leadership are responsible for losing the approval of the Human Rights arbiters. This is a canard, as will be obvious to anyone who has followed Amnesty International’s reports over the years. Here is just one example from the World Socialist Web Site of an article published almost 2 years before 9/11 and a year before the current president came to power. They have never considered America a beacon of hope, that phrasing is there only to hook new visitors (or visitors with no long-term memory) and to inspire them to think that a donation to AI would help to restore the status of “beacon of hope”. The truth is that, in the upside-down world of Human Rights franchising, there can be no such thing as good. As soon as “good” exists the Human Rights Crisis is over and the donors and their money will be on to the next crisis. No, it impossible for them to be positive or even hopeful about Human Rights- their livelihood depends on it. So this admission of the late, lamented leadership of the US is just as fake as the poor record they accuse her of. They never admitted that the US was the beacon in Human Rights and never will because to do so would be to forgo a great lever for separating soft-hearted, uncritical American liberals from their money.

When Vidan implied that we have not enough sympathy for non-Jews he implies that he either thinks that Jews are, for some reason, intrinsically unworthy of any more sympathy than has already been expended on us, presumably because we have had far more than our share of sympathy already and don’t require any more. It is obvious that the liberal and leftists in democratic countries are the primary marketing target here Sudanese nomads and Palestinians (whether they launch Qassam rockets themselves) or not are not going to be big donors to AI. On the contrary it is only by tweaking the interest of the west will they raise enough money to paid their own salaries.

When he said that democratic nations should be held to a higher standard than non-democratic ones, he discounts the suffering of human rights victims of any country he does not consider “democratic”; but he appeals to the largest, most likely pool of donors.

At some level Vidan and the other Human Rights Marketers (read: charlatans) at Amnesty International must feel the cognitive dissonance that their double standard and use of Human Rights for their self-promotion and career enhancement causes but their emotional, intellectual and economic self-interest blinds them to it. They will never understand how much harm their deconstructive moral relativism does both to the world and to themselves because, in the words of Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”


As a result, while hundreds of thousands are raped, murdered and sold into slavery by undemocratic Sudan, their suffering is somehow accounted as less acute and noteworthy than the day-to-day inconveniences and economic deprivations imposed on Palestinians as Israel attempts to protect her innocent civilian population from the murderous terrorists that those “poor Palestinians” provision, harbor and aid in their attacks. Like wise the true horrors perpetrated in Iraq, where heads are hacked off with butcher knives, victims are tortured with blow torches and power tools and suicide bombs are killing 20-50 people at a whack every day by al Qeada and an assortment of other “undemocratic” groups Amnesty International focuses on the idiotic but admittedly humiliating antics of some prison guards at Abu Graihb. Does this make sense?

Only if you understand that AI is driven by fund raising first, socialist/progressive agenda second, the personal advancement of the "Human Rights Professionals" who run it and a deformed mutation of concern for human rights somewhere down the list.