The nice thing about governments when it comes to history buffs is that everyone is covering their ass all the time. They cover their ass by documenting what they were told to do when and by whom... otherwise they might someday be accountable for their own actions, or be accused of doing things on their own.
I do not have high confidence in the desire of government to be open, because government is made up of people and people do not like to be subject to scrutiny. That said, there is so much cover-your-ass (CYA) going on in government that there will always be a paper trail.
It's ironic that you wouldn't know details of his assassination unless agents like Wikileaks existed. All you'd read is "Rape suspect dies in tragic staircase accident".
First of all, let's remember that we are talking about a purely hypothetical situation.
Second, lets remember that no intelligence services leaks have occurred (yet?) - I highly doubt that diplomatic cables would contain details of a clandestine CIA operation.
Third, why the heck would they assassinate him?
And finally, eventually any government documentation will get released. Yeah, you'll have to wait until some bureaucrat decides it's time, but eventually it will all be public record.
Inflation does include energy... but it also includes everything else, too! It is a hard problem, but oil holds up well compared to other commodities. I won't touch gold because I think it's a bubble, but historically they ARE highly correlated.
If people have not changed their driving habits given where the prices are now I do not see any more increases changing those habits.
Gas is hovering around $3/gallon... that's pretty cheap - or at least not high by historical standards. But anyway, people DID change their habits. Back in 2007-08, gas was near $4/gallon and SUV sales went through the floor.
Funny that; all the USG PHB's talk about increasing security; none of them mentioned why the cables were in cleartext.
IIRC, the state department's database was hooked into the Pentagon's classified system as a way to share information after 9/11, and the leak occurred on the Pentagon's side. They have since severed this link. I suspect things will come back in a more restricted manner:)
In terms of the long game, I throw my preference against the nation state in its entirety. It is time to start working on an update.
I think I agree, just because it would neatly tie together my humanist tendencies. However, I can't imagine what scenario could occur in which the nation-state is replaced. The whole concept of a state is pretty young, though, so perhaps I just lack imagination.
Why so snarky? I can be snarky, too: Hint #3: I wasn't talking about Julian Assange, but the person who gave the data to Wikileaks.
So treason has occurred (presumably by the army private that leaked the other documents) and Wikileaks (and by extension Julian Assange) is the enemy of my country.
LOL, we're talking past one another. In terms of a military victory, yes it succeeded. Did it dramatically change "our" lives? No, probably not. But then the colonists were on balance pretty happy or ambivalent about English rule, so dramatic change wasn't really the goal. Hell, we even kept British common law...
They are fought for the benefit of men like George Washington or Dick Cheney: The already wealthy who have a big stake in the outcome.
Yup.
Overall, I would say, even that wasn't worth fighting.
I wasn't making any kind of a value judgment... just pointing out that asymmetric warfare worked even way back when, and actually looked more or less the same. Which shouldn't be a surprise, since people are more or less the same.
its really that technology has changed to favor small, decentralized insurgencies over large armies.
I disagree. Afghanistan would not still be going on if not for outside support - same thing that happened to the Russians 25 years ago. The same was true in Iraq. The American revolution was an insurgent war, but it only succeeded because of French support. I don't really think anything has changed.
but because information technology has changed the game.
This is a wash in an insurgency. The insurgents can communicate better, but their communication can betray them. Also, the occupying force also has better communication.
but because it showed us that when you actually display war before people, in all its gory detail, it does exactly what we need it to do, turn people against war.
It certainly was the first multimedia war, but it was hardly a sea change. Afghanistan is the longer war from the perspective of the US, and this despite even more images being available.
Because... people actually dislike war when they have to see what it really means.
There is some truth in this, but people generally don't like war - even without the gruesome images. And I don't see a reduction in the duration of conflicts that you would expect if your thesis were correct.
No, enemy of my country. We aren't in a brutal dictatorship - we are responsible for our leaders in the US, depressing as that may be. I'm not going to shirk my responsibility for them.
Just because something happened a certain way in the past, doesn't mean that we are destined to see it again in the future, or that the sequence of events past shows any sort of causation.
Yes, it does. Because when you see the same thing happen over and over and over you need to come to realize that what you are seeing is human nature. We study history to learn lessons from it, and "Oh, I'm sure it will be different now that time has passed," is not a lesson. It's a gamble, and one that has never paid off.
We have been letting the tin foil hats set policy since the beginning of the cold war.
Goodness, what about the Soviet Union seemed like an imagined threat to you? They expanded their sphere of influence everywhere they could, and Stalin was a downright bloodthirsty, paranoid nut. The reason it was a cold war and not a shooting war was primarily MAD, but also both sides had formidable conventional armies. Even then, there was plenty of shooting during the cold war, just through proxies - often at or near the borders of the US and it's allies.
Now maybe SS is more scam than risk, but its a scam being run by the same people that you seem to think should be defending us.
Ahh, but there is a difference. In defense, our interests align a lot more than in social policy. Most of us have some interest in defense, but many of us will never see any SS money... nor do I plan on needing it - but one never knows.
See, I just don't see why just anything you can imagine is suddenly a credible risk.
Human history is full of examples. We really shouldn't be having this discussion. Twice in just the last century, the US went into isolationism only to end up participating in a world war.
It just seems like a stupid thing to worry about to me. Certainly a stupid thing to let bankrupt the country spending 1/3 of the yearly budget (not accounting for the active wars) on.
See, I think differently. Defense is one of the few uncontested roles of a federal government. We really NEED a government for defense. It's up there with the civil and criminal judicial systems. Everything else (regulations, social welfare programs, etc) is a matter of preference of the electorate.
You want to talk about risks, I think having the "National Retirement Fund" (thats social security) be a "Trust Fund" that consists of a few IOUs from the people who are supposed to be keeping it... now thats risk.
In the third millennium one can hope the war is a matter serious enough to be actually considered and discussed before going into
Hold on while I get off the floor. I've seen no indication that people are more reluctant to go to war, just because Christ died 2000 years ago. People are exactly the same as they were back then. The US alone is fighting one war and wrapping up another. In Iraq, we went to war because of faulty intelligence. We had to rely on intelligence because they weren't putting their cards on the table - very similar to the problem I was describing.
Can you please elaborate?
Yes. You can't close Guantanamo until the prisoners are all gone. Some countries don't want their foreign nationals back. Diplomacy was being used to try to find homes for these prisoners, and now that the negotiations have been laid bare it will be harder to strike deals with countries to take these prisoners.
And no, they can't live in the US. That would be political suicide for Obama, and I'm not sure what it would accomplish other than narrowly honoring a campaign promise.
Possibly... just possibly... this is how an invasion of another country was averted?
In Bush's new book, he implies that a military attack was averted because the best intelligence of the time said that Iran had halted their nuclear weapons program.
The leak was treason, Mr. Assange's actions just make him an enemy of the state.
Either way, they get a nice trial if they ever slip up and get into police custody somewhere that has an extradition treaty with the US for such things.
One key problem with Marx (and democracy, and republics, and communism, and socialism, and just about every other -ology, -ism, and -cracy) is that the implementations are very poor.
One gets implemented perfectly every time - call it Warlordism or Fuedalism or whatever you like. This is the default human condition - allegiance to a powerful master in exchange for security. It's what we are wired for, and you see it wherever there is a failed state.
We must constantly fight this natural tendency, and we do this by adopting these ideologies. And I'm all for that. However, it is delusional not to recognize that we are always pulled towards our default condition. And those who are drawn in don't obey rules, because it really is almost total anarchy. If you are trying to play a game fairly against an opponent who is not following any rules, you will lose. You can't, say, negotiate a trade pact or arms treaty if you put all your cards on the table and the other side hides an ace. You may have to be, frankly, dishonest to try and ascertain what the other side holds. It's not noble, but that's the way of the big bad world.
It doesn't make my ideas religion, or unworthy of speech or consideration. It just makes them goals to aspire to, and all the more important to put, and keep, on the table.
I happen to agree with your goals, and agree that you have to use your ideals as a target. I guess I'm just more willing to abandon them when hit in the face with reality. An example that doesn't involve Wikileaks is that if I were the police chief in New York and an earthquake hit, I might just suspend many civil liberties to maintain order and to let the emergency services have an easier time getting around. I can't think of what ideology that would mesh into - for that moment, the police chief would be the local "warlord".
Why are you being so obtuse? Who broke their oath? What specific judge or politician? And what specific incident led you to say this? The 4th amendment doesn't say anything about privacy - it talks about search and seizure. This has been mostly settled law since the 60s when the Supreme Court defined "search". You can look it up, but basically an airport pat-down is not a search because it is both expected and (so far) deemed reasonable by society at large.
But more than that, even if you think that there are traitorous politicians and judges, shouldn't we be going after them AND the traitor who is passing along state secrets?
I think it is pretty clear that their jobs will be harder if they cannot speak frankly with foreign diplomats and leaders. If China won't confide in us that they would like to see Korea united, then we have to guess. If the Arab leaders won't be frank about Iran, then we have to guess.
Guessing leads to mistakes. Diplomatic mistakes can lead to war.
It sure is going to be hard to close Guantanamo now, that much is probably certain.
Because he's exposing its criminal activities, like bartering away the lives of people detained in Guantanamo, torturing people, and so on.
Not one of those things was revealed by Wikileaks. Torture has been debated for years - we can't even agree on the definition of torture, and we know things like waterboarding have occured. We knew Obama was trying to close Guantanamo, and we knew he was pressuring other countries to take some of the detainees. The leaked cables have turned up nothing particularly untoward at all (so far). The juiciest bits read like mild Hollywood gossip, and the real surprise so far is how candid the Arab leaders are (well, were) with our diplomats.
The USG he is "attacking" is not the one that was described to you in grade school.
You have a pretty romanticized notion of what the USG once was like. Slavery was written into our constitution. Nothing that the US government does today is even remotely as evil, especially when considering the scale, as slavery. And then there's the whole era of the political boss... the Alien and Sedition Acts... the entire Jim Crow period... Internment of the Japanese during WW2...
Modern America isn't perfect, and it may even be getting worse - but there are darker periods in our history, and we've come out of them. The system certainly isn't so broken that I'd root for a egomaniac rather than my own government. Like all self-professed "great" men, his ego seems to have gotten ahead of him and he will soon be serving time for rape.
Extracting ourselves from our obligations in Japan, Korea, and Europe might be harder than you think. We signed up to treaties, so some serious diplomatic wrangling would be needed to extricate ourselves.
And you can't really have free trade without a strong military. We can't have merchant ships just getting hijacked - we have to be able to project power to protect our commerce. Then you need diplomats to negotiate ports for your ships and such... Free trade agreements need to be actively negotiated, and you might be negotiating with people who are disingenuous. Then there are things like fishing quotas, where things that happen in foreign or international waters can affect your ability to fish. Pollution controls... the list of needs for diplomacy goes on an on, even in the total absence of military power. It's just not possible to completely shrink from the world.
No, why would I? It isn't "my" town/county, it's simply a town/county I happen to live in currently.
Many, many people feel that their town is a part of them. Hell, ever meet anyone from Texas? They feel that way about their high school football team. Southerners once took up arms just to defend "the South". I dare say you are an outlier.
Right at the beginning, where you began making enemies for short-term gain.
And yet your impulse would be to do so, even if you knew intellectually that it wouldn't necessarily work out.
But do you see how one might question the underlaying assumption of this thought experience?
It's something that I struggle with, so I'm not particularly fond of this thought experiment. On the one side, I feel like I'm a humanist and everyone should have the same rights. On the other hand, I won't defend people's rights in other countries for no reason other than they are in another country. People live in conditions that we simply would not tolerate in, say, Sudan, and yet we just watch. Asking "why" leads to no consistent or comfortable ideology - it runs into pragmatism and our ability to toss ideology aside. It becomes a game of "where do you draw the line"?
Think about it - if a Warlord was operating in New Mexico, we would have no qualms whatsoever sending in armed forces to restore democracy. Yet this happens right across an imaginary line we call a "border"... a border which we moved with probably illegitimate force in the 19th century. Why is this border so significant? How does that work into any consistent ideology? Are the people 500 yards away less human? I can't be a humanist, can I? Is the concept of property so powerful that it overrides our natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
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The nice thing about governments when it comes to history buffs is that everyone is covering their ass all the time. They cover their ass by documenting what they were told to do when and by whom... otherwise they might someday be accountable for their own actions, or be accused of doing things on their own.
I do not have high confidence in the desire of government to be open, because government is made up of people and people do not like to be subject to scrutiny. That said, there is so much cover-your-ass (CYA) going on in government that there will always be a paper trail.
It's ironic that you wouldn't know details of his assassination unless agents like Wikileaks existed. All you'd read is "Rape suspect dies in tragic staircase accident".
First of all, let's remember that we are talking about a purely hypothetical situation.
Second, lets remember that no intelligence services leaks have occurred (yet?) - I highly doubt that diplomatic cables would contain details of a clandestine CIA operation.
Third, why the heck would they assassinate him?
And finally, eventually any government documentation will get released. Yeah, you'll have to wait until some bureaucrat decides it's time, but eventually it will all be public record.
Inflation does include energy... but it also includes everything else, too! It is a hard problem, but oil holds up well compared to other commodities. I won't touch gold because I think it's a bubble, but historically they ARE highly correlated.
Show me an economically viable electric car, and I think I'll buy it.
After all, you can't extract money from a company that doesn't exist...
For a sad example of exactly this, see United Airlines. Once employee owned, a bankruptcy took care of that.
If people have not changed their driving habits given where the prices are now I do not see any more increases changing those habits.
Gas is hovering around $3/gallon... that's pretty cheap - or at least not high by historical standards. But anyway, people DID change their habits. Back in 2007-08, gas was near $4/gallon and SUV sales went through the floor.
Funny that; all the USG PHB's talk about increasing security; none of them mentioned why the cables were in cleartext.
IIRC, the state department's database was hooked into the Pentagon's classified system as a way to share information after 9/11, and the leak occurred on the Pentagon's side. They have since severed this link. I suspect things will come back in a more restricted manner :)
In terms of the long game, I throw my preference against the nation state in its entirety. It is time to start working on an update.
I think I agree, just because it would neatly tie together my humanist tendencies. However, I can't imagine what scenario could occur in which the nation-state is replaced. The whole concept of a state is pretty young, though, so perhaps I just lack imagination.
Why so snarky? I can be snarky, too:
Hint #3: I wasn't talking about Julian Assange, but the person who gave the data to Wikileaks.
So treason has occurred (presumably by the army private that leaked the other documents) and Wikileaks (and by extension Julian Assange) is the enemy of my country.
The American Revolution succeeded?
LOL, we're talking past one another. In terms of a military victory, yes it succeeded. Did it dramatically change "our" lives? No, probably not. But then the colonists were on balance pretty happy or ambivalent about English rule, so dramatic change wasn't really the goal. Hell, we even kept British common law...
They are fought for the benefit of men like George Washington or Dick Cheney: The already wealthy who have a big stake in the outcome.
Yup.
Overall, I would say, even that wasn't worth fighting.
I wasn't making any kind of a value judgment... just pointing out that asymmetric warfare worked even way back when, and actually looked more or less the same. Which shouldn't be a surprise, since people are more or less the same.
its really that technology has changed to favor small, decentralized insurgencies over large armies.
I disagree. Afghanistan would not still be going on if not for outside support - same thing that happened to the Russians 25 years ago. The same was true in Iraq. The American revolution was an insurgent war, but it only succeeded because of French support. I don't really think anything has changed.
but because information technology has changed the game.
This is a wash in an insurgency. The insurgents can communicate better, but their communication can betray them. Also, the occupying force also has better communication.
but because it showed us that when you actually display war before people, in all its gory detail, it does exactly what we need it to do, turn people against war.
It certainly was the first multimedia war, but it was hardly a sea change. Afghanistan is the longer war from the perspective of the US, and this despite even more images being available.
Because... people actually dislike war when they have to see what it really means.
There is some truth in this, but people generally don't like war - even without the gruesome images. And I don't see a reduction in the duration of conflicts that you would expect if your thesis were correct.
No, enemy of my country. We aren't in a brutal dictatorship - we are responsible for our leaders in the US, depressing as that may be. I'm not going to shirk my responsibility for them.
Just because something happened a certain way in the past, doesn't mean that we are destined to see it again in the future, or that the sequence of events past shows any sort of causation.
Yes, it does. Because when you see the same thing happen over and over and over you need to come to realize that what you are seeing is human nature. We study history to learn lessons from it, and "Oh, I'm sure it will be different now that time has passed," is not a lesson. It's a gamble, and one that has never paid off.
We have been letting the tin foil hats set policy since the beginning of the cold war.
Goodness, what about the Soviet Union seemed like an imagined threat to you? They expanded their sphere of influence everywhere they could, and Stalin was a downright bloodthirsty, paranoid nut. The reason it was a cold war and not a shooting war was primarily MAD, but also both sides had formidable conventional armies. Even then, there was plenty of shooting during the cold war, just through proxies - often at or near the borders of the US and it's allies.
Now maybe SS is more scam than risk, but its a scam being run by the same people that you seem to think should be defending us.
Ahh, but there is a difference. In defense, our interests align a lot more than in social policy. Most of us have some interest in defense, but many of us will never see any SS money... nor do I plan on needing it - but one never knows.
See, I just don't see why just anything you can imagine is suddenly a credible risk.
Human history is full of examples. We really shouldn't be having this discussion. Twice in just the last century, the US went into isolationism only to end up participating in a world war.
It just seems like a stupid thing to worry about to me. Certainly a stupid thing to let bankrupt the country spending 1/3 of the yearly budget (not accounting for the active wars) on.
See, I think differently. Defense is one of the few uncontested roles of a federal government. We really NEED a government for defense. It's up there with the civil and criminal judicial systems. Everything else (regulations, social welfare programs, etc) is a matter of preference of the electorate.
You want to talk about risks, I think having the "National Retirement Fund" (thats social security) be a "Trust Fund" that consists of a few IOUs from the people who are supposed to be keeping it... now thats risk.
It's not a risk - it's a scam :)
upholding the american spirit
What the hell is that? Define that and then we'll talk.
If you mean "rugged individualism", then you are right - I can't even grow a beard.
Apparently women ask him to stop in the middle of intercourse - not a problem I've ever had, but we can go back there if you want.
In the third millennium one can hope the war is a matter serious enough to be actually considered and discussed before going into
Hold on while I get off the floor. I've seen no indication that people are more reluctant to go to war, just because Christ died 2000 years ago. People are exactly the same as they were back then. The US alone is fighting one war and wrapping up another. In Iraq, we went to war because of faulty intelligence. We had to rely on intelligence because they weren't putting their cards on the table - very similar to the problem I was describing.
Can you please elaborate?
Yes. You can't close Guantanamo until the prisoners are all gone. Some countries don't want their foreign nationals back. Diplomacy was being used to try to find homes for these prisoners, and now that the negotiations have been laid bare it will be harder to strike deals with countries to take these prisoners.
And no, they can't live in the US. That would be political suicide for Obama, and I'm not sure what it would accomplish other than narrowly honoring a campaign promise.
Possibly... just possibly... this is how an invasion of another country was averted?
In Bush's new book, he implies that a military attack was averted because the best intelligence of the time said that Iran had halted their nuclear weapons program.
The leak was treason, Mr. Assange's actions just make him an enemy of the state.
Either way, they get a nice trial if they ever slip up and get into police custody somewhere that has an extradition treaty with the US for such things.
I'm in the US.
I'm enthralled by the leaks - they are fascinating, and I await the next batch each day.
That said, treason has occurred and Wikileaks is an enemy of my country.
One key problem with Marx (and democracy, and republics, and communism, and socialism, and just about every other -ology, -ism, and -cracy) is that the implementations are very poor.
One gets implemented perfectly every time - call it Warlordism or Fuedalism or whatever you like. This is the default human condition - allegiance to a powerful master in exchange for security. It's what we are wired for, and you see it wherever there is a failed state.
We must constantly fight this natural tendency, and we do this by adopting these ideologies. And I'm all for that. However, it is delusional not to recognize that we are always pulled towards our default condition. And those who are drawn in don't obey rules, because it really is almost total anarchy. If you are trying to play a game fairly against an opponent who is not following any rules, you will lose. You can't, say, negotiate a trade pact or arms treaty if you put all your cards on the table and the other side hides an ace. You may have to be, frankly, dishonest to try and ascertain what the other side holds. It's not noble, but that's the way of the big bad world.
It doesn't make my ideas religion, or unworthy of speech or consideration. It just makes them goals to aspire to, and all the more important to put, and keep, on the table.
I happen to agree with your goals, and agree that you have to use your ideals as a target. I guess I'm just more willing to abandon them when hit in the face with reality. An example that doesn't involve Wikileaks is that if I were the police chief in New York and an earthquake hit, I might just suspend many civil liberties to maintain order and to let the emergency services have an easier time getting around. I can't think of what ideology that would mesh into - for that moment, the police chief would be the local "warlord".
Why are you being so obtuse? Who broke their oath? What specific judge or politician? And what specific incident led you to say this? The 4th amendment doesn't say anything about privacy - it talks about search and seizure. This has been mostly settled law since the 60s when the Supreme Court defined "search". You can look it up, but basically an airport pat-down is not a search because it is both expected and (so far) deemed reasonable by society at large.
But more than that, even if you think that there are traitorous politicians and judges, shouldn't we be going after them AND the traitor who is passing along state secrets?
And because of this, what wrong will happen?
I think it is pretty clear that their jobs will be harder if they cannot speak frankly with foreign diplomats and leaders. If China won't confide in us that they would like to see Korea united, then we have to guess. If the Arab leaders won't be frank about Iran, then we have to guess.
Guessing leads to mistakes. Diplomatic mistakes can lead to war.
It sure is going to be hard to close Guantanamo now, that much is probably certain.
Because he's exposing its criminal activities, like bartering away the lives of people detained in Guantanamo, torturing people, and so on.
Not one of those things was revealed by Wikileaks. Torture has been debated for years - we can't even agree on the definition of torture, and we know things like waterboarding have occured. We knew Obama was trying to close Guantanamo, and we knew he was pressuring other countries to take some of the detainees. The leaked cables have turned up nothing particularly untoward at all (so far). The juiciest bits read like mild Hollywood gossip, and the real surprise so far is how candid the Arab leaders are (well, were) with our diplomats.
The USG he is "attacking" is not the one that was described to you in grade school.
You have a pretty romanticized notion of what the USG once was like. Slavery was written into our constitution. Nothing that the US government does today is even remotely as evil, especially when considering the scale, as slavery. And then there's the whole era of the political boss... the Alien and Sedition Acts... the entire Jim Crow period... Internment of the Japanese during WW2...
Modern America isn't perfect, and it may even be getting worse - but there are darker periods in our history, and we've come out of them. The system certainly isn't so broken that I'd root for a egomaniac rather than my own government. Like all self-professed "great" men, his ego seems to have gotten ahead of him and he will soon be serving time for rape.
Extracting ourselves from our obligations in Japan, Korea, and Europe might be harder than you think. We signed up to treaties, so some serious diplomatic wrangling would be needed to extricate ourselves.
And you can't really have free trade without a strong military. We can't have merchant ships just getting hijacked - we have to be able to project power to protect our commerce. Then you need diplomats to negotiate ports for your ships and such... Free trade agreements need to be actively negotiated, and you might be negotiating with people who are disingenuous. Then there are things like fishing quotas, where things that happen in foreign or international waters can affect your ability to fish. Pollution controls... the list of needs for diplomacy goes on an on, even in the total absence of military power. It's just not possible to completely shrink from the world.
No, why would I? It isn't "my" town/county, it's simply a town/county I happen to live in currently.
Many, many people feel that their town is a part of them. Hell, ever meet anyone from Texas? They feel that way about their high school football team. Southerners once took up arms just to defend "the South". I dare say you are an outlier.
Right at the beginning, where you began making enemies for short-term gain.
And yet your impulse would be to do so, even if you knew intellectually that it wouldn't necessarily work out.
But do you see how one might question the underlaying assumption of this thought experience?
It's something that I struggle with, so I'm not particularly fond of this thought experiment. On the one side, I feel like I'm a humanist and everyone should have the same rights. On the other hand, I won't defend people's rights in other countries for no reason other than they are in another country. People live in conditions that we simply would not tolerate in, say, Sudan, and yet we just watch. Asking "why" leads to no consistent or comfortable ideology - it runs into pragmatism and our ability to toss ideology aside. It becomes a game of "where do you draw the line"?
Think about it - if a Warlord was operating in New Mexico, we would have no qualms whatsoever sending in armed forces to restore democracy. Yet this happens right across an imaginary line we call a "border"... a border which we moved with probably illegitimate force in the 19th century. Why is this border so significant? How does that work into any consistent ideology? Are the people 500 yards away less human? I can't be a humanist, can I? Is the concept of property so powerful that it overrides our natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?