Should conservatives help Obama's campaign?

He says he's a fresh face who wants to end the partisanship in Washington and solve problems, sounds good but behind his moderate mask is a doctrinaire liberal who reflexively criticizes recent conservative Supreme Court rulings having to do with affirmative action and late-term abortion. The question before the Board today - should conservatives help his campaign anyway in order to defeat Hillary? This is purely a pragmatic calculation and it's been done before, support a liberal against another liberal because you like that liberal even less, and even if Obama is the Democratic nominee any Republican contender worth his weight should make short shrift of his inexperience in the Congress and his naivete regarding foreign policy. And he's not all bad, he talks about blacks taking on personal responsibility which sounds like he has Coz as a campaign advisor, that's more than can be said for Hillary who just this past March took money from a rapper who used the n-word at least 20 times in a song. A Hillary presidency would definitely revive Rush's radio career which, let's face it, has been in the doldrums of late. Though he denies it to this day Bill launched his career and Hillary can ripen it but what's in it for the rest of us?

The New York Times has noted a small but fledgling movement of young Republican conservatives who have decided to help Obama and says it may be a harbinger of things to come. I think these people are attracted to his character not his policies, they would agree that Bill's recent condemnation of Bush's "pardoning" Scooter Libby only shows how arrogant this Washington power couple still is despite them living with the owls in Chappaqua. Barack is like opening the window to some moldy and cobwebbed attic and letting the sunshine and fresh air in, that musty old yearbook of the Clinton scandals lying in the corner, just put it on the sidewalk with the rest of the recyclables.

So please help the brother. Make checks payable to Barack Obama.....

The weight of the evidence

We've all been brought up to believe that stereotypes are

a bad thing

and so we go through life and come across situations that seem to bear out their truth at least to a degree but we know this is

a bad thought

and so we put it out of our heads until you're a chef let's say and your new black co-worker comes in everyday and the first thing on her mind is "did you make the fried chicken yet?" and you say "I saved a piece for you" and then you're frying some chicken tenders just to give them some color before you shoot them in the oven but she's bothering you again and you say "they're still raw, just wait 10 or 15 minutes."

I've heard many chefs say that Jewish customers in restaurants kvetch all the time. Jackie Mason even jokes about this, they complain about EVERYTHING even the salt and pepper shakers. Now this ain't a prejudiced thing 'cause I hear even politically liberal chefs say the same thing or

Spanish guys and their libidos which never seems to take a holiday.

Gays never talk effeminate of course or have limp wrists,

feminists are all fun and games of course and just love men in between all the heavy politicking. Just don't follow them around or have your florist send them a bouquet.

It's just the weight of the evidence, know what I'm saying?

I know I'm supposed to blog about Scooter Libby

this is what some talking head said last night on "The Jim Lehrer Newshour", that the blogosphere would be going wild, rightie bloggers and liberal bloggers shootout at the OK Corral, but I'm an independent blogger, ok? Bush did the right thing by commuting Libby's 2 1/2 year prison sentence and so let's put it to bed. If this is the sexiest thing the blogosphere can come up with these days then I'll go elsewhere for my kicks. I really think Bob Novak rocks though.

Here's the deal. If electing a woman president is so important why don't the other male Democratic candidates get out of the race altogether, and that includes you Barack, and throw their weight and resources behind Hillary? No primary, ok, just achieve the last crowning achievement of the women's rights movement and put her in the Oval Office already or maybe this is just paying lip service to feminism. It's like step aside guys and put into practice what you've been saying all these years. Why does Hillary even have any male competition? This is so sexist. It's like Barack saying he's all for a "woman's right to choose" even to the point of partial-birth and then he picks up the abortion instruments and says "I can't do this, you're killing me."

How 'bout the Republicans putting up Condi Rice and making the race a real catfight? Rudy's face looks like that skull and crossbones emblem you used to see on the bottle of rat poison under your Mom's sink that used to scare you as a kid. We can do better than this and we must. Jungle fever, make it a chick thing is all I'm saying.

Affirmative action

As a conservative I'm naturally against it but a better deal for everyone would be if, instead of a government program based on race we had an informal system based on economic need this way poor whites on welfare would benefit as well as blacks and Hispanics. At any rate one of the unintended consequences of affirmative action as it is today is that, on occasion, you do get someone who totally does not belong in that job, everyone knows it and at first you're mystified that nobody seems to talk about it and that nothing is done, it's a classic elephant in the living room moment. This is not the goal of the proponents of race-based hiring but I've seen it on at least a few occasions and that's when your Peter Principle kicks in.

Isaiah Washington, the black actor on "Grey's Anatomy" who made the gay slur against co-actor T.R. Knight, has been fired from the show and the man is angry, said he did everything they told him to re atoning and that they now want to have Knight's character as a centerpiece of the show so this is interesting, apparently gay men trump African-American men in the victim stakes only it took a while longer to fire Washington than CBS Radio did in canning the I-man, well he was just a rickety old white cowboy anyway. If T.R. had responded in kind and called Washington the n-word it would have had a kind of karmic cancelling effect or something and would have confounded and stunned the whole pc crowd, what to do? two members of historic and time-honored victim groups have engaged in name-calling! do we fire them both and so not have a tv series at all or send them both off for reprogramming? Barring that maybe all T.R. has to do is question global warming and become pro-life and he can join the growing ranks of the damned.

If Hillary wins it all you can thank Ken Starr

Had he done a better job with Whitewater and how Hillary made 200G on cattle futures instead of issuing a report on Blowjob-gate I don't even think she'd be pursuing the Grand Prize right now and yet conservatives still refuse to admit this, that it was wrong to impeach Bill Clinton for lying in a sexual harassment case when they haven't been big fans of sexual harassment law all along ever since the days of Anita Hill (neither have I but z is a very consistent writer). Travelgate, Filegate, Chinagate, any other 'gate would have done fine except for Sexgate. Makes you wonder a little about Ken Starr, was he really on their team all along? Memo to conservatives, if you haven't noticed the mores of this country have changed drastically over even the last decade. Going after a sitting president solely on a sex charge (sorry Sean, I know, lying about sex) elicits more sympathy from the voting public these days than it would have in the past. There is a reason why the GOP keeps staying the Stupid Party.

The Sean Bell shooting case should come to trial soon. He was the 23-year old black man who was shot to death on Nov. 25, 2006 by cops in Queens NY after a bachelor party at the seedy Kalua strip bar, a gun, drug and prostitute-infested joint. He was to be married that same day. Two of his friends who were also in the car with him that morning were shot but survived and two of the four officers who fired some of the 50 bullets were indicted by a grand jury. I submit this - you're minding your own business and walking down the street, you're not breaking any laws, your chances of being shot and killed by a cop are infinitesmal at best, there's a better chance of Yoko Ono putting out a good album. There's also the ambience of crime in poor black urban areas to consider and cops are on edge, an angle the black activists never focus on. NYPD guidelines say a police officer cannot fire his weapon at a moving vehicle even if it is being used as a deadly weapon. The same guidelines don't say what a cop can do to save his life in such a situation. Careerwise I would not like to be a cop, a pimp gets more respect.

I'm the Sea Captain of my porno ship

Christopher Hitchens is all the rage right now with his atheist chic called God is Not Great but he doesn't offer a workable alternative to the world's faith systems maybe because there is none. The religion of Man teaches that Work is the main purpose of Life, the true Christian would say you were not born to be a drone. This is why it disturbs me that conservatives are ballyhooing the election of French President Nicholas Sarkozy with his promise to abolish the 35-hour workweek, the cons, if they haven't forgotten their social conservative roots, would say a work state is a godless state. Man, as well, has not be able to cure the Big One yet, cancer, and so Hitchens' philosophy of secular humanism doesn't work for me, why would I put on a pedestal a creature that overworks his fellow creatures and has stopped curing the ailments that afflict them? He's entitled to his opinions, it's just a poor substitute is all.

The work state leads to that tempting voice of nihilism, that shadowy figure on a sunny day that whispers in your ear until you agree that life's a bitch and then you die. So how do atheists like Hitch give meaning to it all? The grand theme of my blog - life is to be enjoyed and not just endured - is, in this sinner's humble view, more to be fulfilled in a balanced Christian life than in any secular system. I would submit that a person who enjoys sex more than he works understands the Meaning of it All better than some executive who works late and then has perfunctory sex when he goes home. These corporations have meetings - "ok, put him in charge of cheese" - and then you're like a mouse in a maze, "go find the cheese." Tantra or Kama-Sutra doesn't interest them, how can it if you don't have time to read or watch your kid's Little League game?

I was driving through the country the other day and noticed a little cultural trendoid, porn shops sprouting up next to places of worship, schools and parks where mothers take their kids. Used to be you had to put on a raincoat and head towards the wharf past the opium dens for your jollies but there he was, the big young blond manager of his very own porn emporium, the Proud Captain, a product of a system endorsed by Hitch that shows no deference whatsoever to Christian sensibilities.

The Sea Captain, standing tall, standing proud.

Bloomy the RINO

So now the erstwhile Republican Mayor of Gotham, Michael Bloomberg, has become an Independent so he can make the run in an already crowded field. It's not just that he echoes the Cinderella morality of today's blog title that I'd never vote for the guy, he's also living proof of the eternal truth of the Peter Principle. Take his latest, his traffic congestion pricing plan. From 6AM-6PM anyone who drives a motor vehicle into Manhattan below 86th Street gets slapped with a fine, $8 for cars and $21 for trucks, and this applies every day! Now trucks need to make deliveries to businesses during these hours and his plan, if implemented, would adversely affect business. NJ Governor Jon Corzine is being polite about it all and pointing out the pitfalls from his point of view but nobody seems willing to call the guy NUTSO and so I'm watching all the pundits on the morning shows today and they're all jazzed up about this guy who doesn't even know how to manage a large metropolis.

Hill and Bill's Sopranos video, I'd be really grasping to have a problem with this. We definitely need more humor in our political process and in life in general. I give it a thumbs up, two snaps and a circle.

The mouth is the best form of birth control

(get your mind out of the gutter) Within the past few years I've worked with 2 or 3 women, they're not unattractive by any stretch, and I thought to myself why can't I fantasize about them? It all reminds me of that old Henny Youngman quip, "I know you have to be somebody but why do you have to be you?" There are too many nice looking women with bad personalities out there, you're like how the hell did you come to be you? I am now convinced it all has to be part of the Master Plan, the Divine Cosmology, to give less comely women a fighting chance.

Bad sex leads to bad choices, this is my working theory to account for our high abortion rates. It's like when you have too much Scotch on a hot summer evening and then have weird dreams all night and then wake up in the morning all out of sorts or, if you're a man, you break down and rent a porno made by some retard, which pretty much describes over 90% of porn anyway, and so now you're angry at the producer, more angry at the video store manager who buys anything, and most of all you're angry at yourself,

where is the judgement?

For me good sex should not lead to the destruction of a fetus. I cannot separate the two, they are inextricably linked, the idea of potential feticide would just kill the mood for me and I've heard many other men from all shades of the political spectrum on the issue say the same thing. It's just not

sexy

now write an article about THAT Cosmo!

The Dark Cave of the Past - 1961 was a very bad year

From the New York Post TV Week for 6/12-23, Prime Time Adam Buckman, "TV jukebox pumps up summer shows":

"...'Mad Men' is the best new show of the summer. This series depicts the world of Madison Avenue advertising in 1961...For 'Mad Men', which premieres July 19, they have recreated the chauvinistic (emphasis mine) world of mid-town Manhattan at the dawn of the 1960s. People smoke all over the place - at their desks, in restaurants, even in elevators. Electric typewriters and push-button phones are considered the latest in 'new technology.' Everybody drinks, even during the day, and the men shamelessly harass their female co-workers, none of whom are co-equals."

So there you have it, the pc view of the Past as unmitigated Evil (the only thing missing from Buckman's commentary is back-alley abortions). This is the way men behaved when left to their own devices in those days without our current progressive legislation, new laws always being a necessity of course. Men of the Past being gentlemen was all a big hoax after all like Loch Ness. Puritanism is definitely the way to go, I mean smoking and drinking and flirtation in the office?? Call Mayor Bloomberg!! You can't come up with anything good about the Past you pc'ers? like, oh I don't know, intact families and low crime rates?

and why is the New York Post, widely considered the only truly conservative paper around these days, throwing around liberal buzzwords like homophobic (if homophobic means analphobic I plead guilty, got a problem with that)? And what's up with the word "preggers" now peppering Page Six, I mean that is sooooo gay. Just the other day some gay guy was reading about the latest celeb being preggers and said "that's way too gay for me."

Today's blog

Sometimes I wish I were a recluse with money.

People who don't go to the doctors all the time only when they really really really have to have quietly accepted their mortality and come to terms. It is the secular humanists who have to protect their health at all costs, after all after this life what is there? There was once a book called The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker which had as its working thesis that practically everything we do in our culture is a denial of this very brute fact of our existence. People who die young because of bad habits like smoking and heavy drinking, is this tragic or merely unfortunate? Depends on how you view eternity I guess.

Mental disorders, are they always bad? Yes, judging by all those corny health textbooks we had to read in high school but I submit a person with OCD is a better and more efficient worker and if he runs any kind of food establishment and the health inspector is due the next day the chances are very high his business will pass. I know a chef who admits he's been hyper with ADHD ever since he was a kid and he says it helps him in the kitchen. Mental aberrations, make them work for you (caveat - though not in the Pugach sense!).

The National Review, every time some left-leaning literary figure dies they always seem to underrate his work (or is this just my overly active imagination?). Happened with the late playwright Arthur Miller of Death of a Salesman fame, he was no better than a high-school playwright at best according to an NR contributor, and now with the passing of novelist Kurt Vonnegut. I guess according to NR you can't be a great writer if you lean too far to the left so what are we to have, only right-wing lit? Don't bash greed, better to write about nothing, certainly not your own passionate convictions.

Young male Spanish deli managers - they're on top of you, they're behind you, they're humping you, you're taking a dump and they're paging you. Is this how they are in bed?

RE Today's Blog, to quote Dennis Miller, "of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong" (it's a blog after all).

Memorial Day

OK, pet peeve time.

Put the memorial back into Memorial Day. Stores like Macy's started this a long time ago with their Memorial Day sales events and then we started celebrating the day not where it fell on the calendar but stuck it on a Monday so as our spoiled culture could enjoy long weekends and then crowd the beaches like a bunch of sardines and not even swim in the water because it's still too cold. In a word, fun.

They did this with Washington and Lincoln, attached it to Saturday and Sunday and then just whitewashed the whole thing by calling it President's Day. Um, excuse me but we shouldn't honor all presidents like this, most of all Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. It's like they wanna break everything down from its original meaning. Kind of like a, ahem.....

conspiracy

(calling Robodoon)

Who will be the next poor mofo sent up sh*t's creek without a paddle?

Mel Gibson
Michael Richards
Isaiah Washington (almost up the creek if he does the right thing, if you know what I mean)
Don Imus

we're due

Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, is safe, and that includes our beloved Bob Newhart (careful Bob).

The man was definitely controversial, no question about that

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, 1933-2007, RIP

If you're controversial this simply means that not everyone agrees with you so in this sense all of us are controversial to a degree. The late Rev. Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority made it his business to add his very passionate voice regarding issues of life and death, porn and gay "rights", so it's only logical that many many people would take issue with this just the same way that a person who advocates for the things he was against is also by definition controversial since many people will disagree with him but, for the msm, it's as if controversy only cuts one way. A conservative is always controversial but a liberal never is. Got it now? libs are by nature non-ideological peacemakers and conservatives are polarizing figures. Now I never agreed with everything Falwell stood for, I think boycotts of tv shows smack of censorship and draw needless attention to otherwise worthless products, but he never did anything outside the law here, boycotts are our constitutional right as the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are always calling for them when it suits their own political liberal agendas.

Just my .02 on the Rev. Falwell's passing.

Is it all just a case of bad karma?

See, this is why I could never be an atheist/secular humanist, is THIS all there is? This is definitely not IT. Secular humanism promises a paradise on earth so unless you feel that grabbing your lunchpail at 5:30 in the morning and catching the bus to work is what IT's all about you're missing the BIGGER PICTURE. This ain't IT and all the major world faith systems understand this.

Someday someone will explain it all to us. Some guy'll be in the mall and some strange and enigmatic figure will approach him and they'll sit at a table in the food court and talk. "Do you know why your job sucks and you can't get a woman?" The poor slob is all ears now as for years he's been searching for a workable theory to explain it all. "It's because in a former life you were (a) Ghengis Khan, (b)Attila the Hun, or (c)a lowly guard at Auschwitz." You feel better now and go off to the cineplex to catch "Spider-Man 3" or some other escapist flick. It's at least more tolerable now to know that you're in the flip-side to The Secret and in your next life you'll be getting that poolside massage by that Asian whore...sorry, Asian beauty, never mind, it's hard to think in a pc world but you get the point.

However, if, on the other hand, you wake up in the morning and go to the bathroom and have a clean break you just know it's going to be a good day.

Conservatives are now fully Sarkazmic

Nicknamed "Sarko" by the Right, Nicolas Sarkozy won the French presidential election Sunday night over socialist Segolene Royal. In today's New York Post Ralph Peters writes: "Nicolas Sarkozy, the president the people defiantly chose, is the most inspiring French leader since Charles de Gaulle's fall from power 40 years ago." Um Ralph, inspiring French leader? I thought he was still president-elect but no matter, the Right has a full-blown case of Sarkastic Priapism (you know, it won't go down in 4 hours so see a doctor). Peters then quotes Sarko and this chestnut: "It is hard to exaggerate the damage done to France by the 35-hour work week. How can anyone think that you're going to create wealth and jobs by working less?" Almost echoing this verbatim the Post editorial itself (May 8) says: "He (Sarko) says, rightly, that France's 35-hour work week has devastated the economy - producing a nation of slouchers" (emphasis mine). So, if you decide to work 9-4:30 everyday, that's seven hours of work minus, say, a half hour for lunch, for five days out of seven, you're a sloucher ruining your nation's economy. You see Beth, it's not just conspiratorial thinking on my part, Republicans really do get off on work and invalidate those, like their more religious-minded conservative brethren, who rightly point out that overwork is now the leading cause of divorce in the U.S. The materialistic secular conservatives, whom Bill O'Reilly never mentions, now rule the party and the more social conservatives are the only members of their own party that take that Darn Book too seriously, that work is a punishment from God for the original defiance of Adam, and you're not supposed to enjoy it that much, it's a little weird and not normal.

Beth, the more I listen to the Right these days the less I like the Right. I'm moving out of the Macabre House on the Right, maybe become a political recluse who never votes. Where do I belong?

Everybody jumps the shark sooner or later

It's the natural progression of things as in

"24" - it's always the same, Jack in a bind, Jack working outside the playbook, "your first priority is to arrest Jack and bring him back to CTU", the Big Dilemma - "Jack, this is Chloe, the president's head is going to explode and you have exactly 30 seconds before it does Jack" all the while he's on top of some train about to go through a dark tunnel, an archvillain who somehow escapes the tightest security at CTU, but this season's there's a twist, Jack's bro and Dad turned out to be evil working behind the scenes with the terrorists, Jack even tortured his own sibling and Pops murdered him with an IV injection 'cos he felt he was gonna spill the beans. Even the two executive producers now confess this season sucks.

Bill O'Reilly - insinuated in not so subtle terms that Rosie should be fired from "The View" instead of taking the earthy view that free speech sometimes comes with a small price tag and so move on.

Rosie - can't seem to settle down at any one gig. Maybe add ADHD to her depressive state as gets bored easily and can't stick with one job. Not the best judgement either, leaves "The View" shortly after her famous feud with Trump and so gives the illusion of his omnipotence. After her announcement he went home and Melania caught him grinding into the bed.

WCBS News in NY - last night had on "5 Sex Tips to Save Your Sex Life", it must be hard on the anchorperson who thinks he/she may have landed a serious journalistic job and then is forced to make cutsie-poo jokes after the report airs, "harharhar, get that Barry White music out." 5 Sex Tips you can read about in any Cosmo, #4 will give him a heart attack.

Any Matrix sequels

Sean Hannity - there are other subjects besides the war, take suggestions and stop acting like anyone who disagrees with you is evil.

...to be continued...

The average person is clueless, put it that way

I've had people say to me over the years I'm very smart, intelligent. You get this at work sometimes, ooh he's a really bright boy but I am convinced that most of us use only about 10% of our minds as they say. I would say that on my brightest days I rise to the mid-level on the intelligence scale but maybe I come across as a genius, an intellectual supernova because the rest of the people I come across are so dumb. I know this can be seen as a hubristic blog but I don't know how else to put it. I'm no George Will but people continually put me on some kind of pedestal. It's like the person at work who asks you a simple question, "how do you spell cat?" - well, kat of course. Maybe it's all the mind-numbing porn out there. On its May 1st broadcast the "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric" had a segment on all the millions of men out there who are addicted to Internet porn. Now the real problem for me is not that there are millions of men out there surfing Web porn but that they have no aesthetic standards at all to judge the stuff, they are addicted to the mindless. At least an obsessed devotee of Marilyn Monroe has a loftier ideal in place, him I can talk and relate to.

Lucifer playing chess with a bunch of idiots, that's how I see the world at the moment. We had a recent tragic case in NY where a man who was to go on trial for rape killed the woman who was to testify against him. The logic of a psycho, of course it never dawned on our wronged man that rape is wrong in the first place but now to prevent his rape trial he is now going on trial for murder. Or Muslim radicals blowing themselves up when their leaders never do. It's like Lucifer going on "Jeopardy" with the clueless and blowing them all away.

Beam me up Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here.

I am a solipsistic, self-absorbed, self-pitying, narcissistic and vindictive gay American

I am so not on Jim McGreevey's side in his nasty custody battle with ex-wife Dina Matos McGreevey regarding their young daughter Jacqueline. McGreevey, former Democratic governor of New Jersey, resigned the statehouse in August 2004 when scandal swirled when he, um, tapped his lover Golan Cipel for the job of Director of the NJ Dept. of Homeland Security. He wrote a coming out book about it all called simply The Confession in which he admits that, even when he was acting governor, he had quickie and anonymous gay sex at various rest stops along the Interstate. His ex-wife has now come out with her own version of their marriage, Silent Partner. McG wants little Jackie to spend at least half her time with him and his male lover, Australian money manager Mark O'Donnell, and in court papers filed he says her intent to block this shows her "irrational fears of his sexuality" (or perhaps all too rational fears). Quoth he:

"She is in deep denial. Why would she question what I have made clear? To try and lessen my gayness by making me bisexual is a clear form of homophobia." So now calling someone a bisexual is some kind of slur? and how did he have sex with her all those years?

What is going on in this guy's head?

How to push people right or left, political mind games

Rush bashing liberals, the liberals say we're not like that and so even they get pulled rightward instead of saying everything he says about us is true. The more they insist they are not pro-abortion the more obvious it is they are but they get sucked into Rush's rightward vortex and will say things like abortion is a bad thing, I don't know anyone who is for abortion, do you? never met the guy, must be a psycho or something to be for feticide. So you go against the criticism by moving in the direction of the critic and the same thing happens to the conservatives, the more the libs paint them as rabid anti-abortionists the more reasonable, dare I say, liberal they become, "oh no, even if Roe is overturned tomorrow rest assured most states will still allow the procedure and the whole country was moving in the direction of, em, reform on abortion policy, wait a minute, did I just say reform."

Beth is the only one I understand.

The masculine/feminine culture debate revisited

I blogged about this not too long ago but it has resurfaced in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy. Conservatives Michelle Malkin and Jay Nordlinger and now libertarian Neil Boortz are saying that when a group of people are threatened by one long gunman you're going to die anyway and so the best course of action would be to rush the guy and thus limit the carnage. Makes sense to me but Lionel, who recently said that he wants to hear and read EVERYTHING, said this is beneath contempt. Maybe his point has to do with how Malkin, Nordlinger and Boortz presented their argument as somehow blaming the victim or what he called "the wussification of America" but I sure hope he's not actually criticizing the validity of their point. It's true fear is a great paralyzer in such a situation and you almost need a telepathic consensus to pull this thing off, hey wait a minute, that happened on Flight 93 that was headed straight to Washington on 9/11, the heroes on board all gave up their lives but a far greater tragedy was averted (hard to see it this way in the context of the other similar events of that day). In a way we have become a nation of victims and I don't mean this disparagingly in any way, it's simply a statement of fact whether Malkin and company present it politely or not. So why is pushing people to defend themselves more so controversial? Why can't schools hold classes in how to defend yourself and others in such a situation? This is another reason why I much prefer a masculine to a feminine culture.