Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Mea Culpa


The John Edwards Campaign fires two bloggers after being attacked by a right wing conservative lobbyist and then rehires them with a mea culpa.

Is there a lesson in this for the moderators at Progressive Bloggers and their capitulation to similar pressure from certain of their bloggers?

Or am I being to obtuse? Again.




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Cherniak vs. Chomsky

In another slagging debate about Robert McClelland of My Blahg

Jason Cherniak says the following;
... I think (assume) he means the extreme left. People who follow the likes of Chomsky.

So I said:
"I think (assume) he means the extreme left. People who follow the likes of Chomsky." Once again Cherniak you are equating principled anti-Zionism/Anti-statism with antisemitism, as usual with you a cheap shot.

Then he said:
Jason Cherniak said...

Eugene, Chomsky is a Holocaust denier.


This is not factual it is an old slander from the right wing much like this one;Red Baiting Chomsky

"I have always supported a Jewish ethnic homeland in Palestine. That is different from a Jewish state. There's a strong case to be made for an ethnic homeland, but as to whether there should be a Jewish state, or a Muslim state, or a Christian state, or a white state — that's entirely another matter." Noam Chomsky

You have said you see a "hint of anti-Semitic implications" in the work of Robert Faurisson, the notorious French Holocaust denier. Is Jew-baiting merely a hobby of yours, or is it vocational? LAURENCE COLE, KENT

The facts and the principle have been spelled out dozens of times since 1980 (so it is a bit boring), but once again, briefly.

The last time I had anything to do with this affair, Faurisson was accused of raising questions about gas chambers. Several years later, he was tried and sentenced for "Falsification of History", but there was no charge of Holocaust denial or anti-Semitism (according to Le Monde). The only issue concerning my connection with this sordid affair is whether we should adopt the Goebbels-Zhdanov doctrine that the State has the right to determine Historical Truth and punish deviation from it. As I wrote then, and am happy to repeat, it is a gross insult to the memory of victims of the Holocaust to adopt the doctrines of their murderers. The remark you are misrepresenting is from a personal letter - an interesting source. It reviewed the facts and went on to point out that even denial of huge atrocities would not in itself be evidence for racism, giving a few of the many examples. Thus neither you, nor I, conclude that Americans are vicious racists because they estimate Vietnamese deaths at about 5 per cent of the official figure, or because for centuries even scholarship vastly understated the scale and character of the destruction of the indigenous population. The point generalises to England and others, of course. There can be many reasons for denying horrendous crimes, even in the cases that are the most serious on moral grounds: our own. One special case - purely hypothetical in this personal correspondence - was that denial of the Holocaust would not establish anti-Semitism, for exactly the same reasons.


Cherniak is a Zionist
. As I have pointed out before Zionism is just another right wing nationalist ideology. Being Jewish is irrelevant to his defense of Zionism and Israel. Just as it is for his pal Warren Kinsella who is not Jewish but defends Zionism and the 'State' of Israel.

Cherniak is a politically a right wing statist and a nationalist. Being a Liberal he is also a statist when it comes to the Canadian State. And as I have pointed out before he is a right winger when it comes to progressive left issues in Canada.

He hates the left and he hates the anti-statist left especially. And he despises and disparages the Jewish Left, especially those who do not equate Israel and
Zionism with being Jewish and do not equate Anti-Zionism with knee jerk painting of ones opponents as Anti-Semites.


With regard to anti-Semitism, the distinguished Israeli statesman Abba Eban pointed out the main task of Israeli propaganda (they would call it exclamation, what's called 'propaganda' when others do it) is to make it clear to the world there's no difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. By anti-Zionism he meant criticisms of the current policies of the State of Israel. So there's no difference between criticism of policies of the State of Israel and anti-Semitism, because if he can establish 'that' then he can undercut all criticism by invoking the Nazis and that will silence people. We should bear it in mind when there's talk in the US about anti-Semitism. Noam Chomsky

Being Jewish is all for Cherniak, yet like many Jews his roots like Chomsky's are in the Slavic community, Cherniak being a common Russian/Ukrainian last name.

Chomsky was born in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Hebrew scholar and IWW member William Chomsky, who was from a town in Ukraine. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (born Simonofsky), came from what is now Belarus, but unlike her husband she grew up in the United States and spoke "ordinary New York English".

But Cherniak never embraces this aspect of his cultural heritage. When I first read his Blog I considered Cherniak a fellow honky, as in Bohunk, that self depreciating racist epithet used for Ukrainians, Hungarians and Poles. The fact is that in the North American Diaspora one can be both, a honky and a Jew.

By emphasizing his Jewish roots and denying his Slavic ones
he is selective in his cultural identity. In defining himself as a Jewish Nationalist a Zionist, hence a right winger he has made a political decision and a statement of his realpoliticks.

He has made his Jewishness a political fetish.One with which he uses to bash other Jews to his left. Depreciating them as crazy, nuts, etc.

His Zionism is anti-semitic, he hates Jews who disagree with him with a passion. Hence his specific attack on Chomsky. He posted his canard and link to a right wing anti-Chomsky blog because he wants to discredit Chomsky while avoiding arguing about Chomsky's politics; anarchism.

What makes Mr. Chomsky unique is that his criticism of the capitalist economic order takes its point of departure from the classical liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment. His heroes are not Lenin and Marx but Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt. He argues that the free market envisaged by these thinkers has never materialized in the world and that what we have gotten instead is a collusion of the state with private interests. Moreover he has repeatedly stressed that the attacks on democracy and the market by the big multinationals go hand-in-hand. The rich, he claims, echoing Adam Smith, are too keen to preach the benefits of market discipline to the poor while they reserve for themselves the right to be bailed out by the state whenever the going gets rough. As he puts it : “The free market is socialism for the rich. Markets for the poor and state protection for the rich.” He has spoken positively about the work of Peruvian liberal economist Hernando De Soto who sees the problem of poverty in the Third World as being related to the fact that the poor usually lack clearly defined property rights.

Chomsky has repeatedly stressed that the attacks on democracy and the market by the big multinationals go hand-in-hand

Another aspect of his political work that has been overlooked by foes and critics alike is Mr. Chomsky’s fight against the forces of irrationality that tend to dominate the humanities in the universities. His dismissal of Marxism as a religious “pseudoscience” devoid of all scientific pretensions is one such case. Another is his insistence that the social “sciences” and economics do not meet the methodological criteria that would qualify them as sciences and should thus give up any pretence to being so.


Cherniak hates the left, whether it is the Jewish left or Canadian left, he hates socialism and socialists as his attacks on the NDP in his blog show. But he dresses up his conservative religious and political/social values as progressive because he is a Liberal.

But the only difference between him and the social conservatives on the right is well, actually not much. He is in good company with Stockwell Day, a 'good friend' of Zionism and Israel. Birds of a feather.

Accusations of anti-semitism

Partially because of these criticisms, Chomsky has been accused of being anti-semitic on many occasions. The most outspoken of his critics include writer David Horowitz, who has toured college campuses distributing anti-Chomsky pamphlets, attorney/professor Alan Dershowitz, with whom Chomsky has engaged in many verbal battles through the media, and sociology professor emeritus Werner Cohn, who has written an entire book; Partners in Hate about Chomsky's relationship to Faurisson One of the most common charges is that the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is theoretical, and in practice anti-Zionism is a manifestation of anti-Semitism.

Chomsky's support for Israel Shahak, author of Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, a book that claims that Judaism is a fundamentally chauvinistic religion, has led to more accusations of anti-semitism.

Chomsky rejects charges of anti-Semitism, citing that the definition presented by Israeli apologists is itself racist and ethnocentric. Claiming to speak out against bigotry of all forms, including anti-Semitism, Chomsky is nevertheless often accused of anti-Semitism, which he dismisses as "ad-hominem attacks" and "typical propaganda."


QUESTION: I ask you this question because I know that you have been plagued and hounded around the United States specifically on this issue of the Holocaust. It's been said that Noam Chomsky is somehow agnostic on the issue of whether the Holocaust occurred or not.

CHOMSKY: My "agnosticism" is in print. I described the Holocaust years ago as the most fantastic outburst of insanity in human history, so much so that if we even agree to discuss the matter we demean ourselves. Those statements and numerous others like them are in print, but they're basically irrelevant because you have to understand that this is part of a Stalinist-style technique to silence critics of the holy state and therefore the truth is entirely irrelevant, you just tell as many lies as you can and hope that some of the mud will stick. It's a standard technique used by the Stalinist parties, by the Nazis and by these guys.

QUESTION: There's tremendous support for Israel in the United States at least in elite groups. There's also on another level a very steady, virulent anti-Semitism that goes on. Can you talk about that?

CHOMSKY: Anti-Semitism has changed, during my lifetime at least. Where I grew up we were virtually the only Jewish family, I think there was one other. Of course being the only Jewish family in a largely Irish-Catholic and German-Catholic community--

QUESTION: In Philadelphia?

CHOMSKY: In Philadelphia. And the anti-Semitism was very real. There were certain paths I could take to walk to the store without getting beaten up. It was the late 1930s and the area was openly pro-Nazi. I remember beer parties when Paris fell and things like that. It's not like living under Hitler, but it's a very unpleasant thing. There was a really rabid anti-Semitism in that neighborhood where I grew up as a kid and it continued. By the time I got to Harvard in the early 1950s there was still very detectable anti-Semitism. It wasn't that they beat you up on the way to school or something, but other ways, kind of WASP-ish anti-Semitism. There were very few Jewish professors on the faculty at that time. There was beginning to be a scattering of them, but still very few. This was the tail end of a long time of WASP-ish anti-Semitism at the elite institutions. Over the last thirty years that's changed very radically. Anti-Semitism undoubtedly exists, but it's now on a par, in my view, with other kinds of prejudice of all sorts. I don't think it's more than anti-Italianism or anti-Irishism, and that's been a very significant change in the last generation, one that I've experienced myself in my own life, and it's very visible throughout the society.

QUESTION: How would you account for that?

CHOMSKY: How would I account for it? I think partly that the Holocaust did have an effect. It brought out the horrifying consequences of anti-Semitism in a way that certainly is striking. I presume, I can't prove this, but there must be, at least I hope there is, a kind of guilt feeling involved, because the role of the United States during the Holocaust was awful, before and during. They didn't act to save Jews, and they could have in many respects. The role of the Zionist organization is not very pretty either. In the late 1940s there were plenty of displaced persons in the Jewish DP camps. Some survived. It remained awful, they stayed in the DP camps, in fact, for a while they were dying at almost the same rate they were under the Nazis. Many of those people, if they had been given a chance, surely would have wanted to come to the United States. There are debates about how many, but it's just unimaginable that if they'd been given a chance they wouldn't have wanted to come here. They didn't. A tiny scattering came. There was an immigration bill, the Stratton bill, which I think admitted about 400,000 people, if I remember, to the United States, very few Jews among them. Plenty of Nazis, incidentally, straight out of their SS uniforms. The reason that bill passed, I think it was 1947, was that it was the beginning of the Cold War and priority was being given to basically the Nazis, because we were resurrecting them all over the world, a lot of them were brought in, a lot of Nazi war criminals, and others, but very few Jews. That's not a very pretty sight. You say, during the war you could have given some argument, not an acceptable argument, but you could have given at least a not ridiculous argument that you had to fight the war and not worry about the people being sent to the gas chambers, but after the war you couldn't give any argu- ment. It was a matter of saving the survivors, and we didn't do it. I should say the Zionist organization didn't support it either, they didn't even lobby for the bill. The only Jewish organizations that lobbied for the admission of Jewish refugees to the United States were the non-Zionist or the anti-Zionist organizations. The reason was that they wanted to send them off to Palestine. Whether they wanted to go there or not is another story, the same matter being relived today, incidentally, with the Russian emigres. The Zionist organization wants to force them to go to Israel. Most of them, especially from the European parts of Russia, want to come to the United States, and all sorts of pressures are being brought to bear to prevent that. It's kind of a reenactment at a less hideous level of the same story. I suppose there's some element of guilt, certainly over the Holocaust and maybe over the post-war matter.


See:

Chomsky

Cherniak


Israel

Zionism

Anarchism


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Angus Reid On Line Poll


Does Canada need a federal election in spring? Give us your opinion nowAngusReidForum.com

Do you want a federal spring election?
YES36%


NO64%


Please note that these survey results are of website visitors who voluntarily take the survey. These results are not necessarily representative of the larger population.


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Monday, March 05, 2007

Poster Girl for Anorexia

Anne Coulter "I'm a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative" and the poster girl for Anorexia.

One can only pity those who suffer from such psychological disorders.


http://www.i2i.org/files/graphics/ANn%20COulter%20Books.JPG

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History of Slavery


A blog after me own heart, matey's.

Slavery is the origin of the primitive accumulation of capital.



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Jack Was Right, Again

NATO should talk to Taliban because military victory impossible: report Video: Heather Hiscox interviews Gordon Smith of the University of Victoria for CBC-TV
Gee Jack Layton said that back in September.

Nyah, Nyah.
Whose Taliban Now

See

Jack Layton

Taliban Jack


NDP

Afghanistan



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Sunday, March 04, 2007

State Security Is A Secure State


A secure state is not a secure people, it is in fact a secure state against the people. At all costs the state must be kept secure,or anarchy will be unleashed on the world. Often the state claims that its own self interest is the same as the peoples, that a secure state is the publics security the security of its citizens. Such is NOT the case.

One of the most fundamental responsibilities of a government is to ensure the security of its citizens. This may require it to act on information that it cannot disclose and to detain people who threaten national security.Yet in a constitutional democracy, governments must act accountably and in conformity with the Constitution and the rights and liberties it guarantees. These two propositions describe a tension that lies at the heart of modern democratic governance. It is a tension that must be resolved in a way that respects the imperatives both of security and of accountable constitutional governance. Supreme Court Decision To Strike Down Security Certificates

Canada’s Long History of Criminalizing Dissent


Deportation from Canada for political radicals who threaten the State is not new. It was done in 1918 against members of the Industrial Workers of the World, IWW, the Wobblies, and anarchists. It was used against the Ukrainian and other Eastern Europeans strikers who were involved in the 1919 General Strike in Winnipeg. It was used between 1921 and 1937 against immigrants who were members of the Communist Party.

We did not have a Canadian Constitution during this period. The U.S. did but it too passed similar security acts to detain and deport foreign radicals. Such was the plight of the anarchist; Emma Goldman.

Contrary to the assertion of the Supreme Court Chief Justice and the various hacks in parliament, State Security laws are not required to protect the citizens, they are required by the State to protect it from its enemies. And as the executive class of capitalism to protect capitalism from its enemies. Whether the State calls its enemies; aliens, anarchists, or terrorists.

Washington Post Calls for the Execution of All Anarchists

The wave of anarchist bombings in the United States and Europe in the 19th Century led to the origin of the first international police organization still with us today; Interpol.

The governments of the time feeling threatened again called for extraordinary laws that would protect them from attack. Not their citizens but the state.

In the United States, despite its self created mythology, the FBI was more interested in countering anarchism and communism, then dealing with organized crime, through out most of its history.

Several journalists made a link between the history of the anarchist bombers and modern terrorism after 9/11. All of it was spurious because it did not look at what the differences were between the anarchists and the later Jihadists. It would be like equating the Black Handand Black September with the Black Bloc because they all had black in their names.

Common tactics were compared rather than ideologies. It would be like saying that since the Nazi's had an Army and the US had an army they were the same. Opps.. maybe that is the case... As Major General Smedley Butler warned at the time.

The anti-terrorism act is still in effect in Canada as are the Security Certificates, as is CSIS as is Echelon the secret information gathering efforts of the defense establishment.

The defeat of the Sunset clauses in the ATA last week was NOT a defeat of the Act itself, which the Conservatives deliberately obfusticated last week.

The ruling — and the broader issue of anti-terrorism legislation — has created considerable attention in Canada, as well as the United States.

A Globe and Mail editorial noted that the court still maintains it is legitimate to detain, indefinitely, non-citizens suspected of being terrorists “as long as they have a meaningful review process.”

Meanwhile, an editorial in the New York Times praised the ruling.

“Lawmakers have only to look to the Canadian court for easy-to-follow directions back to the high ground on basic human rights and civil liberties,” it states.

The issue goes beyond “legal niceties or technicalities,” said Evans.

“What is at stake are the basic human rights that we all depend on and take for granted: the right to be presumed innocent, to have legal counsel and to challenge the legitimacy of your detention before a judge, the right not to be tortured, the right to let your family know that you are alive,” he said.

In fact it is the courts, contrary to the Harper government claims, that have struck down the governments security acts.

In October, Rutherford struck down a portion of Canada's Anti-Terrorism Act
defining terrorism as a criminal act committed for religious political or ideological reasons. He found it violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but said Khawaja's trial could go ahead.
Greenspon said he began a process of obtaining new disclosure in November. He said he was given 23 volumes of disclosure that the government had "redacted."Portions of evidence were blacked out and labelled with a code identifying the justification for censoring the evidence.

And since it is the courts that have challenged the laws, the Conservatives have pushed to have their right wing allies including the police now on the committee to appoint judges. That's a way to make sure we have no more liberal decisions like these that restrict draconian measures to protect the state and its police. Because in reality that is exactly what these security laws are, they allow the State and it's police to engage in illegal activities and then to hide them under a bushel from public view. They are not laws for the protection of the citizens of Canada, nor for public safety. They are laws to protect the State and its Police from transparency and investigation when they act illegally.



I wd. say emphatically that in recent years the Police have succeeded only by straining the law, or, in plain English, by doing utterly unlawful things, at intervals, to check this conspiracy; & my serious fear is that if new legislation affecting it is passed, Police powers may be thus defined, & our practical powers seriously impaired.

—Robert Anderson, Home Office minute, 12 December 1898
Which is the irony of the Harpocrites using the Air India families as their hand puppets last week. Because the same security laws are being used to cover up the alleged malfeasance of the RCMP and CSIS and their possible role in acting as agent provocateurs in the Air India bombing.

Of course political sub-text of what the Conservatives were saying was that the Liberals are supporting terrorists in the Indo-Canadian community, that is Sikh's, while the Conservatives support non-Sikh Indo-Canadians, the Air Canada families. Just as they have linked the Liberals to the Tamil Tigers because of Tamil community support for the Liberals.

The Conservative Party now that it has state power has abandoned all its so called libertarian philosophy. It is beholding to its social conservative base, so it gave a contract to a far right think tank opposed to greater citizen participation in politics, to study parliamentary and election reform.

It has appointed right to life advocates on the board examining reproductive technologies including stem cell research. It has shut down the Status of Women long a bugaboo of its supporters in REAL Women. Now it is appointing right wing judges.


But its real face has been shown for the past year, that this is not the old Reform party of Western populism, nor a neo-liberal or libertarian party, rather it is a good old fashioned conservative, right wing party of Law and Order. As such Harper has declared the next election will be fought on two issues, Law and Order and Terrorism.

These are of course the traditional values of the right wing, despite its toying with capitalist libertarianism, from the old Tory days in England to modern Fascism.
All right wing governments regardless of their labels are parties of Law and Order. And Law and Order means power to the police and the creation of a secure state, a police state.

It means going to war for war's sake. In this case supposedly to protect Canadians from terrorism. And thus we see our Law and Order government promoting the rearmament of the Armed Forces and transforming them from liberal peace keepers back to conservative fighting forces.

Through out the debate on the Tories allowing police to appoint judges, and the debate around the sunset clauses in the ATA, the Tories in QP and through statements in the media declared that they supported the police and their opponents were opposed to the police.

The opposition was either silent or in the case of the Liberals quick to deny they were anti-police. No one said, yes sir I am opposed to the police, since they exist as agents of the state ABOVE the citizens they are supposed to protect. The police sir are empowered to defend the State AGAINST it's citizens.

Ask any cop they are the thin blue line of the state, of law and order, against anarchy and chaos. They are not citizens nor a citizens milita, they are agents of the State and thus above the laws they supposedly enforce. That is why they ignore paying for parking meters or donuts, and are always right and you and I are always wrong.

That is why they are allowed to use force including deadly force like Tasers, and the courts will uphold their rights to do so. While the higher courts may rule in favour of civil liberties they still support law and order as they are part of the State themselves. Thus their rulings will always be in favour of the police and even draconian legislation for security and secrecy as the recent rulings on Security Certificates and the Anti-Terrorism Act show.

They are only as liberal as the laws passed by parliament. They do not rule by the doctrine of natural justice, that would be libertarian. The are an arm of the state and if the state has not passed laws to defend the individuals rights or human rights then woe betide you and I.


To the police we are 'them', some of us are good guys but mostly we are bad guys, and even good guys can be bad guys. Thus all laws to give the police more powers, are laws allowing for a police state.

The Conservatives have created a not so new political paradigm in Canada, a militarized police state. And the last time I checked that paradigm was spelled F A S C I S M.

And the only voices that will oppose that are truly libertarian ones.





See:

Anti-Terrorism Act

Spying

Statist Anti-Terrorism Act

Paranoia and the Security State




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Thursday, March 01, 2007

The Only Poll That Counts


The latest poll shows that the Harper attack ads and attacks on Dion and the Liberals has had an impact in the ROC. But the real poll is what their impact has been in Quebec, because Quebec is the key to any Liberal or Conservative victory. And their impact has been a big fat Zero.


Decima's poll, provided to the Canadian Press, showed the separatist Bloc Quebecois, which runs candidates only in Quebec, stood at 35 percent in the province, with the Liberals at 23 percent and the Conservatives at 15 percent.

And for those who think we are going to have a spring election sprung on us, think again...not with these numbers we ain't.


In an average of the last three weekly polls, the Conservatives have 33 per cent, the Liberals 30 per cent, the NDP 14 per cent, the Bloc nine per cent and the Greens 11 per cent.


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The Ape Will Lie Down With The Tiger

NO MORE PALM OIL!

Both these species are endangered thanks to Palm Oil plantations. And as cute as they are together they are endangered by man and imprisoned by man, to protect them from man.

See my Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright













































  • Feb. 28: Dema, a Sumatran tiger licks Nia a baby orangutan in a nursery room at the Taman Safari Zoo in Bogor, Indonesia.

  • Global warming hits world's largest tiger reserve

    See:

    Cargill


    Borneo

    Orangutan

    Apes


    Primates

    Monkeys

    Great Apes



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    Liberals Scab


    Liberals are not the party of workers in Canada.

    When in power provincially Liberals oppose a living wage.

    Now the Federal Liberals under Dion have flip flopped on anti-scab legislation Bill C-257.

    A private members bill from the BQ supported by the NDP and until today, supported by the Liberals.

    And like the flip flop on the Anti-Terrorism Act, Mr. Dion does it again. But will he whip the vote? Probably not. Without the Liberals support the bill will die on third reading. When they were the government the Liberal majority voted against previous private member anti-scab bills.

    My what a friend business has in Mr. Dion. I guess two controversial votes in a week would be a bit much for Mr. Dion's fragile leadership. The infighting in caucus would be even more virulent than it was over the Anti-Terrorism Act. After all the Liberals are the party of Bay Street as much as the Conservatives are.

    By flip flopping on this bill, which has been placed before parliament five times now, the Liberals prove they are not just pro-business but pro-scab. Which means anti-union. I hope they don't plan on trying to solicit funds from their old friends in the General Workers Union in Toronto.

    Progressives? In name only.

    Green? Sure thats the colour of money.

    Friends of Buzz Hargrove? Only during elections.

    Labour has a political party and it is the NDP. All others are pretenders and fair weather friends.

    See

    Dion

    Buzz

    Gomperism

    Liberals

    Unions



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