The Shrinking Middle Class

This, about a new Pew Study on the middle class,  is a few days ago but still worth pointing out:

The Pew study is just the latest indicator of a long-term trend of widening U.S. income inequality. The Census Bureau reported last year that income fell for the wealthiest — down 1.2 percent to $180,810 for the top 5 percent of households. But the bottom fifth of households — those making $20,000 or less — saw incomes decline 4 percent.
The new study reviewed 2010 data from the Census Bureau and Federal Reserve, defining "middle class" as the tier of adults whose household income falls between two-thirds and double the national median income, or $39,418 to $118,255 in 2010 for a family of three. By this definition, "middle class" makes up about 51 percent of U.S. adults, down from 61 percent in 1971.
In 1970, the share of U.S. income that went to the middle class was 62 percent, while wealthier Americans received just 29 percent. But by 2010, the middle class garnered 45 percent of the nation's income, tying a low first reached in 2006, compared to 46 percent for upper-income Americans.
Since 2000, the median income for America's middle class has fallen from $72,956 to $69,487.

From The Republican Weirdness Files

I don't usually do this kind of writing but it seems deserved,  what with the recent Republican platform's Personhood Amendment (which, to me, appears to have the power to ban abortion even when the aquarium pregnant woman will die if the pregnancy is continued) and that National Review story (see post below) about how cruel age is to women and how cruel not being allowed to be the boss is to men and how the value of a man is in how many sons he sires and how daughters are truly icky and a sign that a man is not a Real Alpha Male.

But given the way all this seems to have turned our public conversation on that Pesky Woman Question into ponderings about whether a raped woman can ever conceive and whether Rapists' Fatherhood Rights are also going to be on the Republican Platform, I think it's time to cast a sharp light on some other aspects of the fringes of that party.  Though it does appear, these days, to consist mostly of weird fringe elements, rich old white men being one of those (though of course the one in power).

So here it goes:  The weirder news about Republicans in this country.

First,  in New Hampshire a  Republican candidate for Hillsborough County Sheriff Frank Szabo promises to use lethal force against doctors who perform abortions.  To uphold the Constitution, you know:

In the face of criticism from both New Hampshire Democrats and high-ranking members of his own party, Republican candidate for Hillsborough County Sheriff Frank Szabo is not backing off his comments that deadly force is an appropriate means to prevent abortion.
"Just because a law is on the books does not mean that it's lawful," said Szabo. "I talk about the difference of 'legal' and 'lawful.' It used to be legal to own slaves, but that didn't make it lawful. It used to be legal to restrict someone of color to the back of bus ... Just because a piece of legislation says it's legal to murder the unborn doesn't make it lawful."
Szabo contends it's the responsibility of the sheriff to protect the lives, property and citizens of the country and the state.
"The big issue here is the sheriff is supposed to protect all of its citizens," he said. "Just because a person is not born yet doesn't mean he or she shouldn't have same level of protection. Someone needs to stand up and tell federal and state officials they're wrong if it's in the best interest of citizens ... but my main point is deadly force is always a last resort."

Some Republican leaders, at least, have disowned Frank Zabo.

Second, in Lubbock County, Texas, a judge called Tom Head  worries about how he is going to cope with the violent revolution which would inevitably result if Obama gets a second term:

Judge Tom Head and Commissioner Mark Heinrich told the station this week that a 1.7 cent tax increase for the next fiscal year was necessary to prepare for many contingencies, including Obama's re-election. He also mentioned to the station that the county needs a pay increase is needed for the district attorney's office and more funds to pay for more sheriff's office deputies.
"He's going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the (United Nations), and what is going to happen when that happens?," Head asked the station during a Monday interview. "I'm thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we're not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations, we're talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy."

Third, and this is really below the belt, a  masturbation story having to do with an anti-gay Republican pastor in New Orleans.  This story matters, because the pastor, Grant Storms, disapproves of the consensual sexuality of gays and lesbians:

A prominent Louisiana-based Christian pastor known for his anti-gay stance was convicted of obscenity yesterday after being caught masturbating at a public park near a children's playground last year.
As NOLA.com reports, Rev. Grant Storm was sentenced to three years' probation after the incident in Lafreniere Park. Storm is quoted as calling public masturbation "a thrill" in his confession. However, despite an eyewitness account cited by the New Orleans Times-Picayune which stated that 55-year-old pastor had been "looking at the playground area that contained children playing, with his zipper down" at the time of his arrest, authorities denied any suspicions that he was a pedophile.

I could go on.  These are low-hanging fruit, true, and I almost always leave them alone.  But when the higher fruit consist of Akin and Ryan and their other brothers-of-heart there's not that much difference in what I pick.

Any point to this post?  Perhaps to show you that I could do this.  But mostly to point out that it's someone else who sets the topics for public debates in this country, and that someone else is far too often a Republican game lord.  Thus we now discuss whether women who have been raped should have the right to an abortion if they so wish.  We actually discuss which exceptions to the abortion bans are possible!

And The Next Version of the Republican War On Women

The Republicans really do fight a war against women and all things with female cooties!  I find this truly fascinating!  Well, not the war on women but that the Republican women go along with it.  Perhaps the ability to ignore un-ladylike things is an evolutionary adaptation in them?

Just kidding.  I've been reading a National Review article on essentially why having daughters is icky and horrible and why having sons shows that one is a successful man.  The background is probably Kanazawa's work which has been shown to be false.  https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/313504/boss

What do women want? The conventional biological wisdom is that men select mates for fertility, while women select for status — thus the commonness of younger women’s pairing with well-established older men but the rarity of the converse. The Demi Moore–Ashton Kutcher model is an exception — the only 40-year-old woman Jack Nicholson has ever seen naked is Kathy Bates in that horrific hot-tub scene. Age is cruel to women, and subordination is cruel to men. Ellen Kullman is a very pretty woman, but at 56 years of age she probably would not turn a lot of heads in a college bar, and the fact that she is the chairman and CEO of Dupont isn’t going to change that.
It’s a good thing Mitt Romney doesn’t hang out in college bars.
You want off-the-charts status? Check out the curriculum vitae of one Willard M. Romney: $200 million in the bank (and a hell of a lot more if he didn’t give so much away), apex alpha executive, CEO, chairman of the board, governor, bishop, boss of everything he’s ever touched. Son of the same, father of more. It is a curious scientific fact (explained in evolutionary biology by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis — Willard, notice) that high-status animals tend to have more male offspring than female offspring, which holds true across many species, from red deer to mink to Homo sap. The offspring of rich families are statistically biased in favor of sons — the children of the general population are 51 percent male and 49 percent female, but the children of the Forbes billionaire list are 60 percent male. Have a gander at that Romney family picture: five sons, zero daughters. Romney has 18 grandchildren, and they exceed a 2:1 ratio of grandsons to granddaughters (13:5). When they go to church at their summer-vacation home, the Romney clan makes up a third of the congregation. He is basically a tribal chieftain.
Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.

Hilariouser and hilariouser!  

I'm not sure why the Republicans are so keen on making it absolutely clear that, yes, they do indeed hate women.

Dancing on the Edge of the Abyss. The Republican War on Women.

That would be the Republican platform on abortion:

The draft official platform strongly supports a "a human life amendment" to the Constitution:
"Faithful to the 'self-evident' truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed," the draft platform declares. "We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment's protections apply to unborn children."
Let's be very, very clear that such an amendment—which Mitt Romney has said unequivocally he would sign—would not only criminalize abortions of any kind for any reason, but also would outlaw many forms of contraception, in-vitro fertilization, and treatment of pregnant women with life-threatening conditions such as cancer. Moreover, it would also criminalize miscarriage.

I know that the Republican powers-that-be don't mean any of this quite seriously.  They rely on someone else pulling them back from the abyss, the one which is the desired destination of the forced-birthers in their party.  But let's look into that abyss, shall we?

What do the most extreme anti-choice forces in the Republican Party say?  They say that raped women must have the child if they become pregnant (even though that's almost impossible, given all those secret weapons women have).  They also say that the contraceptive pill, the Morning After Pill and the coil are all ways to kill a zygote or a fetus, and thus equal to abortion.

That means that in their extreme abyss-world all the ways women could protect themselves against becoming pregnant from rape would be illegal.  All female-managed contraception (except perhaps for the female condom which a rapist would naturally let you insert before rape) would be banned.

Put that all together,  and what do you get?  A world where any fertile woman could be made to carry a child to term without any consent from her.  Yes, this would be an extreme case but the Republican platform draft does not allow any alleviation of it.

Or put in another way, all rapists would have fatherhood rights.  The right to become a father, even if the woman doesn't want to become a mother.

As I mentioned above,  the Republicans don't really mean to enslave women this way.  Or rather, they don't really care, either way.  They are after the votes of the forced-birthers in general, and the forced-birthers do desire women to have no choice at all.  Even keeping your legs firmly crossed will not help you, given that a pregnancy arising from rape Must.  Result.  In.  Giving.  Birth.

Those are the folks the Big Money Republicans are in bed with, and nobody tries to limit what they can do in those bedrooms.

WOW. On When Magazine Covers Show Generic Women

WOW.


The things I learn by going through my posts for 2012 (so far) all in a row!  This is the way a woman gets on the cover of a general interest magazine in the United States of America, anno 2012:

Added later, some text which is most likely not necessary.

Note that these are generic women.  Not individual women when the story is about that individual.  Do these magazines use generic men this way on the covers?  To highlight a story about the trouble of, say, working men?  Fathers?

The answer is a firm and resounding no, naturally.  Because men are the default gender, women are the other, and it's perfectly acceptable to discuss the other as an outside group. 

Then note the baits.  They are all about women's proper roles, where those might be found and what they consist of.  Also, wimmenz are always in deep shit about everything.

And one more post about David Brooks

I almost forgot this post about David Brooks.

David Brooks On Gender. Through The Ages.

I do tend to dissect Brooks' writings often, don't I?  But the truth is that I stopped reading him so obsessively some years ago and mostly forgot what he actually says about women, girls and the wider question of gender. 

Working in my archives reminded me why I dislike him so.  Here's a smorgasbord of Brooks on the question of gender:

March 2006:

According to David Brooks, thymos is the secret ingredient in men, the thing that makes them tick. Not the puppydogs' tails, after all. Had there ever been a female Freud she might have had her question about what men want answered easily: men want to be recognized:*

Let me tell you what men want. Let me tell you why some middle-age men wear the sports jerseys of semiliterate behemoths half their age while others customize their cars with so many speakers they sound like the hip-hop version of the San Francisco earthquake as they roll down the street.

Recognition. Men want others to recognize their significance. They want to feel important and part of something important.

Some people believe men are motivated by greed for money or lust for power. But money and power are means to get recognition. They are markers of success, and success makes men feel important and causes others to pay attention when they walk in the room.

Plato famously divided the soul into three parts: reason, eros (desire) and thymos (the hunger for recognition). Thymos is what motivates the best and worst things men do. It drives them to seek glory and assert themselves aggressively for noble causes. It drives them to rage if others don't recognize their worth. Sometimes it even causes them to kill over a trifle if they feel disrespected.

Brooks is trying to hedge his bets about whether women might want similar things, too. On the one hand, he has just read a really fun and supportive book about Manliness. On the other hand, he wants recognition from women as the kind of guy who might not bash them on the head and drag them back to the cave for some... recognition.

April 2006:*

All great scandals occur twice, first as Tom Wolfe novels, then as real-life events that nightmarishly mimic them. And so after "I Am Charlotte Simmons," it was perhaps inevitable that Duke University would have to endure a mini-social explosion involving athletic thugs, resentful townies, nervous administrators, male predators, aggrieved professors, binge drinking and lust gone wild.
...

The educators who used this vocabulary several decades ago understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That's why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.

Furthermore, it was believed that each of us had a godlike and a demonic side, and that decent people perpetually strengthened the muscles of their virtuous side in order to restrain the deathless sinner within. If you read commencement addresses from, say, the 1920's, you can actually see college presidents exhorting their students to battle the beast within — a sentiment that if uttered by a contemporary administrator would cause the audience to gape and the earth to fall off its axis.

Today that old code of obsolete chivalry is gone, as is a whole vocabulary on how young people should think about character.

The concept of "chivalry" is offered to women in lieue of equality on several MRA sites, by the way.  So far we have learned that men want recognition and that they should be taught chivalry.

June 2006 (note that I wrote two posts on one column there), to analyze in greater detail this Brooks column:

Over the past two decades, there has been a steady accumulation of evidence that male and female brains work differently. Women use both sides of their brain more symmetrically than men. Men and women hear and smell differently (women are much more sensitive). Boys and girls process colors differently (young girls enjoy an array of red, green and orange crayons whereas young boys generally stick to black, gray and blue). Men and women experience risk differently (men enjoy it more).
It could be, in short, that biological factors influence reading tastes, even after accounting for culture. Women who have congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which leads to high male hormone secretions, are more likely to choose violent stories than other women.
This wouldn't be a problem if we all understood these biological factors and if teachers devised different curriculums to instill an equal love of reading in both boys and girls.
The problem is that even after the recent flurry of attention about why boys are falling behind, there is still intense social pressure not to talk about biological differences between boys and girls (ask Larry Summers). There is still resistance, especially in the educational world, to the findings of brain researchers. Despite some innovations here and there, in most classrooms boys and girls are taught the same books in the same ways.

That's a wonderful stew of all sorts of observations, some clearly proven false!   Brooks wants sex-segregated schools, of course, and believes that things like color preferences (pink!) are innate.   That Iran, with its sex-segregated schools, geared towards boys most likely, shows the same gender differences as the US doesn't matter to Brooks.  Neither does the fact that schools were created for boys, not for girls, initially, and that the sitting quietly in classrooms was a feature of all those boys' schools. 

September 2006:

That would be a good name for a movie, starring David Brooks as the earnest and impartial neuroscientist who finds, after all, that girls are icky. Brooks has written yet another column about how the old sexual stereotypes are all validated by science:

Over the past several weeks, I've found I can change the conversation at any social gathering by mentioning Louann Brizendine's book, "The Female Brain." Brizendine is a neuropsychiatrist and the founder of the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic in San Francisco. She's written a breezy — maybe too breezy — summary of hundreds of studies on the neurological differences between men and women.

All human beings, she writes, start out with a brain that looks female. But around the eighth week in the womb, testosterone surges through male brains, killing cells in some regions (communications) and growing cells in others (sex and aggression).

By the time they are three months old, girls are, on average, much better at making eye contact with other people and picking up information from faces. During play, girls look back at their mothers, on average, 10 to 20 times more than boys, to check for emotional signals. Girls can also, on average, hear a broader range of sounds in the human voice, and can better discern changes in tone.

...

This shift in how we see human behavior is bound to have huge effects. Freudianism encouraged people to think about destroying inhibitions. This new understanding both validates ancient stereotypes about the sexes, and fuzzes up moral judgments about human responsibility (biology inclines individuals toward certain virtues and vices).

Once radicals dreamed of new ways of living, but now happiness seems to consist of living in harmony with the patterns that nature and evolution laid down long, long ago.

That's pretty hilarious, given the criticism Brizendine's books have received!  She is not a neuro-scientist, by the way.

October 2006:

This is a tale of two predators. The first is a congressman who befriended teenage pages. He sent them cajoling instant messages asking them to describe their sexual habits, so he could get his jollies.

The second is a secretary, who invited a 13-year-old girl from her neighborhood into her car and kissed her. Then she invited the girl up to her apartment, gave her some vodka, took off her underwear and gave her a satin teddy to wear.

Then she had sex with the girl, which was interrupted when the girl's mother called. Then she made the girl masturbate in front of her and taught her some new techniques.

The first predator, of course, is Mark Foley, the Florida congressman. The second predator is a character in Eve Ensler's play, "The Vagina Monologues."

Enough said.  A fictional story and actual events are treated as equal.

July 2007.

This was in response to a column where Brooks worried about the anger of women.

August 2007.

This, in turn, was a reaction to Brooks' attempt at creating a masculine mystique.

At this point I stopped following Brooks so obsessively and my mental health instantly improved.  I even spotted him changing some of his ingrained opinions on gender:

June 2009:

In 2000, Geoffrey Miller, a leading evolutionary psychologist, published a book called "The Mating Mind," in which he argued that the process of sexual selection among early human groups hardwired many of the behaviors we see in humans today. Some of the traits are physical. Men generally prefer women with a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio (that's a 24-inch waist and 36-inch hips, for those of you reading this at the gym). Women generally prefer men who are taller and slightly older.

Some of these traits are more subtle. Men, Miller argues, tip better in restaurants, because they've been programmed to show how much surplus wealth they have. The average American adult knows 60,000 words, far more than we need. We have all those words because we like to mate with people who caress us with language.
....
 

But individuals aren't formed before they enter society. Individuals are created by social interaction. Our identities are formed by the particular rhythms of maternal attunement, by the shared webs of ideas, symbols and actions that vibrate through us second by second. Shopping isn't merely a way to broadcast permanent, inborn traits. For some people, it's also an activity of trying things on in the never-ending process of creating and discovering who they are.

The allure of evolutionary psychology is that it organizes all behavior into one eternal theory, impervious to the serendipity of time and place. But there's no escaping context. That's worth remembering next time somebody tells you we are hardwired to do this or that.

The allure of evolutionary psychology is actually in the fact that anyone can do it, over a cocktail wiener, and that it can be bent to support any bias one might have, given that evidence is impossible to obtain.  But I take whatever crumbs fell of Brooks' table here.

December 2010, however, shows Brooks back in his old form.

And in January, 2012, he seems to recommend wage subsidies for men so that they can get married to us the gold-digger females of Evolutionary Psychology.

Finally, in July 2012 Brooks was back to arguing that social engineering is an absolute necessity to save boys at school.

OK, that looks a bit like a laundry list.  It most likely omits many similar pieces, given that I stopped keeping a snake eye on our David, what with finding enough irritation elsewhere in my life.

But there are certain general patterns, more easily discerned in such a list.   Brooks believes in innate differences as the explanation for all gender-based stereotypes (which he regards as the truth), and he fishes in the rivers of academia for those studies (or pseudo-studies) that would support that belief.

Thus, what is is for reasons of biology and no government policies are necessary to correct it.  Women don't enter mathematics and the sciences because of innate gender differences, for instance.

The one exception to this can be found in Brooks' concern about boys at school.  There he urges social engineering of a type, albeit one based on his presumed gender stereotypes.

This contradiction is an interesting one and worth thinking about.  After all, evolutionary psychologists have argued that anything widespread across various cultures has a good chance of being innate.   Girls are doing better than boys in essentially all countries which allow girls entry to the school system.  Given this, one might propose that the observed gender differences in school success are innate, right?

That's rubbish, and I only present it here to point out that Brooks picks selectively from his menu of possibly biological sex differences.  The ones that hurt women are clearly biological, the ones that hurt men must be cultural or environmental and need correction.

So.  I was also struck by Brooks' pining for the golden era of chivalry.  Doesn't it sound wonderful?  Chivalrous men holding doors open for you and letting you get the best jobs going and so on? 

That's not what chivalry is all about.  From the column Brooks wrote it sounds more like a promise not to assault or rape someone, to be honest.
-----

The links to dates are to my old posts.  The links attached to the direct quotes go to Brooks' columns.
*I couldn't find the links to two of Brooks' original columns except as dead ones.

When Rape Is Not Legitimate

Rep. Todd Akin explains what he means by "legitimate" rape:

Akin explained — during a follow up interview with Dana Loesch — that he meant to argue that women sometimes lie about being raped:
AKIN: You know, Dr. Willke has just released a statement and part of his letter, I think he just stated it very clearly. He said, of course Akin never used the word legitimate to refer to the rapist, but to false claims like those made in Roe v. Wade and I think that simplifies it….. There isn’t any legitimate rapist…. [I was] making the point that there were people who use false claims, like those that basically created Roe v. Wade.

Mmm.  And this means that we could use pregnancy as a check on whether the rape was legitimate or  a false accusation?  If a woman becomes pregnant from a rape then it couldn't have been rape!

I knew what Akin meant when he used the term "legitimate".  Of course I knew!  I also visit the vicious types of misogynist sites!

This case reminds me of the earlier wingnut arguments about what constitutes a "legitimate" rape victim.  She's a virgin, young and attacked by someone rushing out of the bushes while she is coming home from church.   Come to think of it,  she should also be either dead or close to death to truly qualify.  If she isn't dead but becomes pregnant!  Perhaps she enjoyed it, after all?

It's all quite medieval,  in several ways.  The perfidy of women reminds me of the writings of some medieval Catholic priests and the assumption that women's bodies have secret weapons which keep them from conceiving while raped is also akin to various medieval beliefs.
----

Added later:  This song also explains when rape is legitimate....

Still Wallowing in My Archives! Or My External Memory

It's such fun, honest, except for also being extremely hard work.  I used to be very smart once, sigh.  And those archives can stand as my life's work, should I decide to enjoy my remaining life instead of always wearing the war helmet of the wrathful goddess.  Fighting for you, my sweet readers.

I'm researching my literary blog output for a longer-term project.  But as I mentioned before, this has had some really fun side-effects!  There will be posts on the  consistency of certain misogynists and also on their free access to Pulpits in High Places!

On the  negative side-effects:  I must stop complaining every time I get a head cold or a migraine.  It's most unattractive, as the archives tell me.  I must also stop pretending that I will ever do anything about this messy blog and all its problems.  I like the writing bit and the reading comments bit but I hate housekeeping of all types.  Though I will try to fix the most obvious problems (list: get a commenting system, find out how to solve the blog's appearance in other countries).  You might have to remind me to work on that.

Assuming that the archives will contain future posts.  I often wonder if I have anything left to say that I haven't already said much better before.  Of course, that didn't stop me on the first three or four posts on the same topic before.

What Todd Akin Said

You must have heard about the Todd Akin statement by now, right?   This:





A summary:

Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri who is running against Sen. Claire McCaskill, justified his opposition to abortion rights even in case of rape with a claim that victims of “legitimate rape” have unnamed biological defenses that prevent pregnancy.
“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Akin said that even in the worst-case scenario — when the supposed natural protections against unwanted pregnancy fail — abortion should still not be a legal option for the rape victim.

Garance has written an excellent history of similar claims among the forced-birthers in the past.

It is very funny, of course, Rep. Akin's views on those unnamed biological defenses that women have!  Could it be vagina dentata he thinks of?

Let's not go that way.  Let's, instead, look at what this statement reveals about Todd Akin otherwise.

Note the reference to "legitimate rape."  What does "illegitimate rape" look like?  What Akin really means here is that women cry rape when they are not raped, that many rapes (perhaps most?) in his mind are not real rapes at all but just an excuse for a woman to get an abortion or to punish an ex-husband in divorce proceedings:

Akin previously was the cosponsor of a bill to redefine rape, and it was recently reported that Akin opposed a state law against spousal rape because it might be used as a tool against husbands in a "messy divorce."

 Smells a bit of some MRA arguments, don't you think?

Then there's Akin's statement about who should be punished in the case of a "legitimate" rape:

But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something. You know, I think there should be some punishment. But the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.

Akin's desired punishment, of course, falls on the pregnant rape victim.  It is she who must go through nine months of a pregnancy and then a forced birth.  This can be dangerous.  It also means that the rapist's crime is allowed to continue, that the rape victim is made to give birth to a child the rapist decided she might as well  have, and to face all the health risks, physical as well as psychological, that the situation carries.

But that's not where Akin's sympathies lie, of course.

How odd that some wingnuts argue rape is an adaptation, something men practice because the mysterious genes for rape have survived from the distant past!  That view of rape ties it intimately with fertility.  Then there's this view of rape where someone who is raped doesn't even need contraception to protect her against pregnancy!

The two views have a connection, of course.  You can figure that one out easily enough.

I can't believe I wrote a serious post on this!