TRUMP VS THE LILLIPUTIANS

 

The Travesties of the Trump Trials

Tragically for the country, to stop this left-wing madness, the Trump travesties may not be the end, but the beginning of precisely what the Founders feared.

by Victor Davis Hanson  April 29/24

Do not believe the White House/mainstream media-concocted narrative that the four criminal court cases—prosecuted by Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis—were not in part coordinated, synchronized, and timed to reach their courtroom psychodramatic finales right during the 2024 campaign season. These local, state, and federal Lilliputian agendas were designed to tie down, gag, confine, bankrupt, and destroy Trump psychologically and physically. They are the final lawfare denouement to years of extra-legal efforts to emasculate him.

These local, state, and federal Lilliputian agendas were designed to tie down, gag, confine, bankrupt, and destroy Trump psychologically and physically. They are the final lawfare denouement to years of extra-legal efforts to emasculate him.

Three, most of the indictments either had no prior precedent in criminal law or will likely never be used again, at least against anyone left-wing. Moreover, many of the writs relied on manipulation of statutes of limitations.

Neither Bragg nor any other local prosecutor had previously transformed a supposedly local affidavit misdemeanor into a supposed federal campaign finance violation, a gambit so preposterous that it had been passed on by federal attorneys.

Letitia James was the first New York Attorney General to indict a state resident for the supposed crime of overvaluing real estate to obtain a loan, which was paid back timely and in full, to the profit of lending institutions. No bank, after auditing Trump’s assets and viability to pay back loans, was unhappy to loan to him. But all were quite happy to profit from the hefty interest—and would likely be happy to loan to him again.

James sought to make Trump a criminal without ever finding a crime, much less a victim. Nor, until the checkered and unethical career of Fani Willis, had any local prosecutor ever indicted an ex-president for a supposedly improper phone call questioning whether all the state’s votes had been fully counted.

Alvin Bragg’s case was nonexistent given the statute of limitations on supposed misdemeanors committed over six years prior—until Bragg transmogrified the accusations of minor crimes into felonies and, with them, extensions granted supposedly due to the COVID lockdowns.

In Carroll’s case, her unsubstantiated accusations of a sexual assault were also well past the statute of limitations until a left-wing New York legislator and unapologetic Trump hater passed a special law—a veritable bill of attainder aimed at Trump—waiving the statute of limitations for a year in cases of accusations of long-past sexual assault in the state of New York.

Four, all the indictments and suits took place in either blue cities, counties, or states. And most of the jury pools in or near New York, Atlanta, or Miami were or will be heavily Democrat. So far, the New York judges who have overseen Trump’s civil and criminal trials—Justices Engoron, Kaplan, and Merchan—were all liberals, appointed by Democrat or liberal politicians, and some have donated to Democrat causes. They were not shy about expressing disdain for defendant Trump. No changes in venues were ever allowed.

Five, all the prosecutors, Bragg, James, Smith, and Willis, are likewise either Democrats or associated with liberal causes. In the case of Bragg, James, and Willis, all three ran for office and raised money on promises and boasts of getting Donald Trump. And all three have now set the precedent that local and state prosecutors can warp the law and use it to go after an ex-president and leading presidential candidate of the opposite party for naked political purposes.

Six, all these cases were equally applicable to high-profile Democrat politicos. E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit was the most laughable of all the court dramas, but its outline and protocols just as easily could have applied to Tara Reade. She came forward to accuse candidate Biden of having sexually assaulted her years earlier—roughly about the same period’s as Carroll’s fluid timelines. Her story is about as believable or unbelievable as Carroll’s. But the difference was that whereas the media canonized the delusional and self-contradictory Carroll as a useful anti-Trump tool, it demonized Reade as a crazy loon and liar—and a potential impediment to Biden’s 2019-20 primary campaign.

Bragg had to torture the law to fabricate a federal campaign finance indictment against Trump. But Hillary Clinton clearly violated federal campaign statutes—and was variously fined—when she tried to hide her “opposition research” payments to Christopher Steele as “legal expenses.” In truth, Steele was hired and paid to concoct a fake anti-Trump dossier and likely should have been barred from working for a presidential campaign given he was not a U.S. citizen.

In the case of Smith, simultaneously with his case against Trump, his twin special prosecutor, Robert Hur, found that Joe Biden had unlawfully removed classified files for much longer than Trump (30 years plus), in a much less secure location (his rickety garage), and without a president’s authority to declassify his documents. Moreover, he had disclosed their contents to his ghostwriter, who destroyed evidence under subpoena by Hur. Yet unlike Trump, Biden was not charged, given that Hur claimed that Biden, in his opinion, was so old and amnesiac that he might win sympathy rather than a conviction from a jury.

Willis indicted Trump for supposedly trying to pressure officials to “find” missing Trump ballots, thus supposedly violating “racketeering” statutes, as he oversaw an attempt to find troves of ballots he thought had been cast for him. Of course, in the same state, Stacy Abrams, after losing the gubernatorial race of 2018, claimed she had actually won, despite losing by over 50,000 votes. She sued to overturn the election and then made a celebrity-political career touring the nation, falsely claiming she was the real governor and her victorious opponent was an illegitimate governor.

For that matter, in 2016, left-wing organizations, celebrities, and thousands of political operatives sought to overturn the Trump victory by appealing to the electors to renounce their states’ popular vote tallies and thus become “faithless electors.” In sum, there was a true conspiracy, or, better, a “racketeering” scheme, to use Willis’s parlance, to coordinate various groups to overturn the constitutional duties of electors to throw the election to Hillary Clinton. Clinton, along with the likes of ex-president Jimmy Carter and soon-to-be House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries, would continue to deny that Trump was the legitimately elected president.

In sum, the number of suits against and indictments against Trump grew in correlation to his political fortunes. They were designed in the election year 2024 to do what Democrat voters likely cannot. They are ridiculous and sui generis, and will never be used against anyone other than Trump. They have done more damage to democracy, the rule of law, and equal justice to the law than all of the antics that Trump is accused of.

Moreover, they will set in motion a dangerous tit-for-tat cycle of weaponization that threatens the very constitutional order of the United States.

If Trump is elected to restore the rule of equal justice, will a Republican special counsel revisit Robert Hur’s work and find ex-President Biden quite capable of standing trial for the crimes Hur has already investigated and confirmed?

Will then a new Republican-appointed FBI director order a SWAT-like raid, with Fox News forewarned and Newsmax reporters on the scene, to descend into the Biden beach house?

Will county and state prosecutors in Utah, Montana, and Oklahoma feel that to stop this cycle of illegality, they must charge the Biden family members by bootstrapping local indictments onto federal crimes?

Will conservative women in the future come forward in Arkansas, Idaho, and Alabama to claim that in their past, they now suddenly remember that decades ago a prominent Democrat candidate harassed them? Will their right-wing lawyers cherry-pick the proper red-state judge?

Will conservative district attorneys find ways to indict Joe Biden on the various imaginative bookkeeping and “loan repayments” used to disguise the fact his corrupt family received well over $20 million from illiberal foreign interests, much if not all of it camouflaged to avoid income taxes?

Will some South Carolina legislator get a bill of attainder passed in the legislature, ending the statute of limitations for a year for all those in 2016 who sought to undermine the electors and flip them to Hillary Clinton?

In August or September, will a right-wing state prosecutor and a conservative judge find that Joe Biden’s creative bookkeeping warrants a $450 million fine, payable before appeal?

And will Republican officials and judges in purple states move to get Biden’s name off the ballot?

Such scenarios are endless and, given the current precedents, could all be justified as desperate deterrent measures to shock the left into ceasing their efforts to sabotage our constitutional system and rule of law.

A final note. There is a divine order of balance in the world, one known variously by particular civilizations as kismet, nemesis, karma, or what goes around, comes around payback. We’ve already seen such forces at work: Sen. Schumer at the head of a mob at the doors of the Supreme Court, calling out threats to justices by name, only now finding pro-Hamas thugs circling his own home. Or Democrats during the Trump years straining to find ways to invoke the 25th Amendment, now humiliated into claiming a non-compos-mentis Joe Biden is “sharp as a knife.”

Tragically for the country, to stop this left-wing madness, the Trump travesties may not be the end, but the beginning of precisely what the Founders feared.

A NATION OF MORONS LED BY A CADRE OF PSYCHOPATHS

 Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

“The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and, instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long. The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigor of the military government was relaxed, and finally dissolved, by the partial institutions of Constantine; and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians.” — Edward Gibbon. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 38 “General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West”

“After a diligent inquiry, I can discern four principal causes of the ruin of Rome, which continued to operate in a period of more than a thousand years. I. The injuries of time and nature. II. The hostile attacks of the Barbarians and Christians. III. The use and abuse of the materials. And, IV. The domestic quarrels of the Romans.”   - Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empre, Chapter 71 "Four Causes of Decay and Destruction."

 

When talking about the decline of empires, you are really deliberating about a process, not an event. The Roman Empire did not fall on a specific day due to a specific cause. It collapsed in stages over hundreds of years due to numerous reasons, each triggering events which compounded upon each other and ultimately led to the final collapse.

We are resting on the laurels of being the sole superpower, as our empire built on debt is slowly and systematically crumbling. He cited three reasons for the fall of the Roman Republic that resonated in 2007 regarding the American Empire (formerly a republic):

There has been a decline in moral values and political civility at home. Examples include the devaluation of life, greater self-centerdness by individuals and increased partisanship and ideological divides in Congress.

We now have an overextended military around the world. While the US military is unmatched as to its capabilities, it is under stress and stretched very thin.

There is fiscal irresponsibility by the central government. Our debt ratios are set to increase dramatically when the baby boomers retire.

In 2007 the annual deficit was $160 billion. In 2020 and 2021 it only took 20 days to accumulate $160 billion. The national debt in 2000 was $5.6 trillion. In 2007 it was $9 trillion. Today it stands at $34 trillion. Interest on the national debt now approaches $1 Trillion.

Well, the debt to GDP ratio has doubled from 62% in 2007 to 124% today. U.S. unfunded liabilities total $188 trillion. Personal debts total $25 trillion, with $1.8 trillion of student loan debt and $1.3 trillion of credit card debt. 

The decline in moral values and political incivility has reached civil war instigating levels of degradation, deviancy, and treasonous political activity. Not in our wildest dreams did we envision the grooming and trafficking of children, drag queen story hour for toddlers, pushing children to be mutilated and propagandized into believing they are the opposite sex, promoting deviancy, and having this degenerate behavior jammed down our throats by the government, corporations, and the media.

The fabric of our society is being torn to shreds and the left elitists encourage lawlessness, looting and murder, and the persecution of normal white Americans. The devaluation of our lives was never more evident than during the covid plandemic, where the annual flu was weaponized to lockdown the world, create havoc and chaos, institute totalitarian measures to abscond with our liberties and freedoms, destroy the lives of vaxx dissenters, and ultimately destroy the lives of millions who obeyed and were injected with the untested, gene altering, spike producing, Big Pharma enriching concoction.

In 2007, the Neo-cons had us fighting a two-front war in Iraq and Afghanistan to enrich the military industrial complex, based on false WMD. Little did he know that twenty years after invading Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban, we would conduct a disastrous retreat and hand the country back to the Taliban, with a gift of about $10 billion in military hardware.

The defense budget in 2007, while fighting two wars, was $700 billion. Today the budget approaches $900 billion when we are supposedly not at war with anyone. With the Deep State firmly in control of both political parties, the arms dealers will always be swimming in your tax dollars, whether they are shipping their murderous wares to Zelensky, Israel, Taiwan, or any other country fighting our current mortal enemies – Russia, China, Syria, and Iran.

Winning wars to protect America has never been the goal. War is big business. The ruling class has no issue using a few hundred thousand poor patriotic useless eaters as cannon fodder in Iraq and Afghanistan to further enrich themselves. But it is much easier to create chaos and war in other countries and let their poor suckers die for a forlorn false cause, while providing weapons to both sides. 

We killed Ghaddafi and left Libya a smoking chaotic ruin, with Islamic terrorists running rampant. Obama created ISIS so we had a reason to destroy Syria and Assad. Russia obliterated ISIS and has successfully kept Assad in power, infuriating the neocons and provoking the next move on the global chessboard. All the Ukrainian Flag waving dolts who believe everything the regime media regurgitates, as instructed by their masters, are clueless as to why Biden and his neocon handlers are pushing us towards a direct conflict with Russia. Obama, Clinton, Victoria Nuland, John Brennan, McCain, Graham, and a slew of other Deep State lackeys overthrew the democratically elected president of Ukraine in 2014, because he was friendly towards Russia, initiating a domino effect in the Ukraine which has left us at the doorstep of World War III. 

The Roman economy was basically a rapine economy. Like all slave-owning societies, Rome had no middle class, a debased currency, and no export production – it lived by conquests, slave trade, and plundering the conquered provinces. Such economies can exist only as long as they expand; when the expansion ends, downfall is inevitable. See any resemblance to the American economy? When the Fed stops printing, it all comes crashing down. By the third century their currency was worthless, and a barter economy sprung to life.

Just as the Romans became fat and happy, enjoying the fruits of efforts, innovation and sacrifices put forth by prior generations, Americans have grown to believe they are the richest, freest, and most powerful nation on earth. They believe it is their privilege to rule the world. Just as the Romans hired mercenary armies to fight their wars because it was beneath their citizens to defend their vast empire, the U.S. used paid mercenaries (Blackwater) in Iraq and Afghanistan to fight their wars. Now we just outsource the dying to Ukrainians, Libyans, Syrians, and Somalis, while providing them the weapons, technology, and logistics to wage endless war on our behalf.

Tens of billions in weapons being handed to the most corrupt nation on earth – Ukraine – is simply insane. Biden acts like a Roman emperor dictator (with dementia) during the final stages of Rome’s collapse, while the feckless politicians in the House & Senate sit idly by, cheering on our descent into national bankruptcy.

Everything trends towards disorder, chaos, and ultimately collapse. Pleasure without pain, glory without sacrifice, indolence without work, degeneracy disguised as creativity, and treason portrayed as politics, led to a slow spiraling disintegration of their society and culture over the course of centuries. These exact same characteristics are rearing their ugly head in the late stages of the American Empire decline. 

“You have not tasted servitude. There is no land beyond us and even the sea is no safe refuge when we are threatened by the Roman fleet. We are the last people on earth, and the last to be free: our very remoteness in a land known only to rumor has protected us up till this day. Today the furthest bounds of Britain lie open—and everything unknown is given an inflated worth. But now there is no people beyond us, nothing but tides and rocks and, more deadly than these, the Romans. It is no use trying to escape their arrogance by submission or good behavior. They have pillaged the world: when the land has nothing left for men who ravage everything, they scour the sea. If an enemy is rich, they are greedy, if he is poor, they crave glory. Neither East nor West can sate their appetite. They are the only people on earth to covet wealth and poverty with equal craving. They plunder, they butcher, they ravish, and call it by the lying name of ’empire’. They make a desolation and call it ‘peace” ― Tacitus

It’s as if Tacitus lived among us today. His description fits perfectly in describing the psychopaths controlling the U.S. Empire, along with most of the western world, as they rape, pillage, plunder, and desolate foreign lands in the name of freedom and call it peace keeping. The U.S. Empire is willing to fight Putin until the last Ukrainian is dead on the battlefield. How noble. 

It took the Roman Empire about 1,000 years to fall. The British Empire fell in approximately 300 years. The United States has been around for 234 as a nation, but only an empire since 1946, a mere 77 years. Has the advancement of technology, speed of communications, monetary manipulations, and level of military firepower coalesced into accelerating the demise of empires? 

In case you haven’t noticed, our culture has descended into the gutter. The perversion of normalcy into glorifying pedophiles, drag queens, transgender freaks, drug addict felons, race hustlers, and organizations promoting lawlessness, looting, and killing, while persecuting and prosecuting normal, hard-working, civilized white people has left the country on the brink of chaos.

Multiple generations have now been socially indoctrinated by government schools to obey, emote, believe, and fear whatever (Covid) and whoever (Putin) they are commanded to fear. 

We are a nation of morons led by a cadre of psychopaths. Children are encouraged by their parents and doctors to cut off their breasts and penises due to peer pressure and deviants controlling the schools and media. Groomers make toddlers watch transgender freaks perform sex acts on stage. Library books for 8-year-olds describe anal sex, masturbation, and other perverted acts.

Statues portraying our history are torn down by mobs, while what passes for art and architecture today is perverted, frivolous and inconsequential. There are no masterpieces of literature created in our rotting society. 

There are no Godfathers or Casablancas being produced. There are no novelists writing masterpieces on par with Steinbeck or Hemingway. But we do have Cardi B belting out her best-selling song WAP (acronym for Wet-Ass Pussy) and Sports Illustrated with transgender and obese swimsuit models. Based on TV commercials, 90% of Americans are either black, in an interracial relationship, gay, or transgender. We are an un-serious society. Anyone observing America and most of the western world in an impartial manner would have to conclude we are already living in a new Dark Age of ignorance, superstition, and degradation, even before the final collapse of empire. 

IN THE ARENA

 

clic on pic to enlarge

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” — Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States

JOKE

 

  "You show me someone who embodies cool in today’s world, and I’ll show you a candidate for sainthood because the “cool” virtues involve placing the needs of others above one’s own."

How did it come to pass that the lives of others are more important than one's own? To be virtuous I must consider my needs as worth less than yours. You, in turn, to be virtuous, must consider your needs as worth less than mine. And there is no end to this competition for selflessness among members of the public. So, as a practical matter, according to the author, the pursuit of virtue is the pursuit of self-annihilation. Only if I am strong can I take care of the needs of the ones I love. Only after their needs are satisfied can I take on the burden of caring for the needs of strangers.

The assault on virtue

What were once vices are now habits

by Martin Hackworth Jan 09/24

I’ve been venting my spleen over the Claudine Gay/Harvard/antisemitism/plagiarism fiasco for the past few columns. Her ludicrous rise and inevitable fall at Harvard made my head almost literally explode. Gay is currently exhibit "A" in what I perceive to be an ongoing attack on merit by the extreme left. This bothers me to no end.

From where I sit, virtue, as a whole, is under assault these days. I do not, mind you, consider this attack on virtue to be the sole provenance of the left. There is, as far as I’m concerned, plenty of blame to go around. The way things are these days, a lot of people evidently don’t even know what virtue is. Or if they do, they don’t give a hoot about it.

Virtue is, of course, any trait that reflects high moral values: honesty, courage, prudence, reliability, perseverance, industriousness and self-control, to name a few. These used to be considered good and necessary traits. These days, not so much.

Howlin’ readers will recognize this as another in a series of laments and rants (review here, here, and here) over what I see as a race to the bottom when it comes to how we cooperate with each other and conduct ourselves as a society. I predict that no good will come of it either. You simply cannot write enough laws to govern every human interaction, and if you could, they’d be impossible to enforce, especially given the fact that we can’t enforce many of the smaller number of laws currently written.

At some point, people who aspire to live peacefully together in communities have to learn to conduct themselves responsibly. Self-regulation is an essential element in any stable, well-functioning democracy.

When self-regulation begins to falter on a large scale, watch out; the fascists on both the left and the right will be happy to fix everything simply by taking away your rights. That’s the precipice over which we are looking right now.

Let’s examine a list of virtues, starting with honesty. The lack of honesty drives me nuts. Honesty should be a simple, universally lauded value that builds the trust that is needed for any organisation to function. Yet, in today's moral climate, you are considered naive if you aspire to be scrupulously honest. Not that long ago, a handshake deal was considered good in most circumstances. Your word was supposed to mean something. And if it did not you would lose your reputation. People would not trust you.

These days, honesty is merely what your lawyer advises when all other tactics would fail.

Courage is another virtue that is universally praised but seldom demonstrated. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the modern academy. Universities are populated by people whose job is precisely to stand up for excellence in scholarship, research, and service Despite the fact that most of these folks enjoy the benefit of some form of tenure to help them, they repeatedly fail to counter assaults on free speech, the free exchange of ideas, excellence, and merit.

Colleague under duress for not kowtowing to DEI madness? Throw them under the bus. Observe obvious research fraud? Look the other way. Exams too difficult, too stressful, too laborious to administer, inequitable, and not empathetic? Don’t stand up for pedagogy; just bin them.

Don’t even get me going on integrity, which is so rare these days that I’m flat-out amazed when I encounter it. The road to integrity is perhaps one of the loneliest, simply because it is so seldom trod. That, my friends, is a gen-you-wine wrinkle in the human condition.

Compassion, generosity, fairness, and kindness generally come in a package known as “cool.” You show me someone who embodies cool in today’s world, and I’ll show you a candidate for sainthood because the “cool” virtues involve placing the needs of others above one’s own. That turns out to be a rare trait across the political and social spectrum.

If you lived in a one-person universe, there’d be no such thing as cool. We live in a world of billions of people where opportunities abound, yet despite this, cool is an exceptionally rare commodity. The cool people are all keepers.

Tell me who, in today’s political, media, or pop culture enclaves, embodies prudence, modesty, or self-control. I’ll wait, but I won’t hold my breath. The examples, vis-à-vis these values, set by most media, sports, and cultural figures are enough to make me want to drive a railroad spike through my kneecap. My kids might not get to watch TV until they are 20.

Reliability? A lot of that went down like a lead balloon on Jupiter during the pandemic. The contractor says they’ll be there by 11 a.m. You’d better hope they don’t mean next year. Need call-center help? You might as well jump out of a window to solve your problem. Need the police or other authorities to address crime in many places? Good luck with that.

Perseverance and industriousness are dirty words to the DEI set because they are elements of a work ethic—something that embodies “whiteness” and confounds “equity.” The end result of this idiocy, to bring things around full circle, is the saga of Claudine Gay.

So why is virtue under assault? For the same reasons that cultural and professional standards have declined across the board: Lack of instant gratification, lack of work ethic, difficulty staying the course, and an increasing inability to deal with disappointment. The participation trophy, trigger warning, and safe-space crowds are generally not up to any of this, and that has become a problem. Rather than aspire to reach for the sky, we’ve come to pull the sky down to our level because it’s a lot quicker and much easier.

So virtue is taking some hits; what to do about it? I think that this is the one situation in which I believe that cultural cancellation is appropriate. If you lie, cheat, steal, or rip people off, like a prominent former POTUS (or two, or three), you should be eschewed, not lauded, for that.

Courage is tough, and not everyone is cut out to be pugnacious when it’s needed. That’s fine. I have no issue with the meek. But no guts, no glory. Respect comes after you develop some cojones. That’s my rule, anyway. I think it’s a good one.

If you are a rare person of integrity who happens upon this column, please know this. I respect you immensely, even if I don’t know you. You make the world a better place just by walking down the street. My greatest fortune in life is knowing an outsized number of people who embody integrity. They have provided me with a lifetime of examples to look up to.

Be cool, or go away. You simply should not put up with people who aren’t cool. I’m not talking about the people who think that they are cool because of their station in life either; I’m talking about the ones who embody compassion, generosity, fairness, and kindness. Getting these mixed up is a mistake.

Reliability is tough simply because reliable people are well-subscribed. It’s still worth seeking them out. Better yet, it’s worth becoming one yourself. You may begin immediately.

And finally, work ethic. This is another virtue that is remarkably rare yet within the reach of everyone. Just put your head down and get to freaking work. It’s a hard road, and you will occasionally be let down. You are going to work very hard at some things that won’t work out. Get over it. Perseverance is the key. Develop a good enough work ethic, and you should always feel good about betting on yourself.

That, my friends, is freedom. And freedom is really good.