What transpired in Turkey can easily happen in US. There are many dissatisfied people on either side of the political spectrum. Now more than ever, with higher unemployment and extensive communication channels, the risks are even higher.
But there are ways to keep the population at check:
1 - Utilize the fear of external entities (Iraq, terrorism, etc.) to channel away anxiety from domestic issues.
2 - pre-occupy the public, reality shows, sports, etc.
3 - Focus the problem on individuals to provide the election as a escape valve (Bush, Obama, etc.)
4 - Quickly stop or discredit any movement before it catches on like wild fire.
5 - Identify potential instigators and defuse them early if needed (shutdown bank account, credit card, ATM) terminate their phones and Internet-which is why you need this list.
, etc-which is why you need this list.
Watching common Americans being abused by their government and corporations for a decade now, with very little that came out of it, except a few protests / shows / petitions - I highly doubt a serious uprising is possible.
Americans seemed to have lost their free spirit. Back in the 60s - that was a real movement. Real actions. Real spirit. Right now, most people, especially young (what's saddening), are conformists and as long as they feel relatively safe and well fed, they won't go far than writing a comment on HN... like this one :)
>>>There are many dissatisfied people on either side of the political spectrum.
Which is the entire point of the American Constitution. It was created by political malcontents for political malcontents.
Having suffered under the brutality of the King, the Colonists drafted a document that would prevent such abuses in the future by enshrining it in law. That millions and millions of people who would "get along" under any regime (see North Korea today) benefited is strictly a collateral effect.
That no one seems to understand the original point of it all is why we're going down this greased slide to hell today. And hell it will be.
(6) engage the public in BS non-issues or peripheral issues, the two parties are putting a show of disagreeing about, from the debt ceiling to gay marriage to corporate taxes, etc, while they work hand in hand in all important aspects of fucking over the middle class.
I was at the coffee shop yesterday. One thing I like doing in between work sessions is to look around and observe people around me, and try to guess what their lives must be like. In this particular case though, I was looking at them within the context of the latest NSA scandal.
There was a mother nursing her baby while trying to get some work done on her laptop. Did she care if the NSA is watching her? Probably not. She just had too much shit to think about. She was worried that her baby seemed to be getting sick. She was worried about being able to finish the report that was due the next day at work. She was worried about what she was going to cook for dinner that night, and whether her husband was able to catch his connecting flight in Chicago earlier.
There was the overworked barrista, who was really busy trying to process the orders from a long line of customers. Did she care if the NSA was watching her? Probably not. She had been working non-stop for the past six hours, and half an hour before the end of her shift she suddenly had to deal with a large group of new customers, each of whom was cranky because they needed their fix of caffeine. She was thinking about whether the guy she gave her number to at the bar the previous night was going to text/call her soon, because he was really cute. She was thinking about whether she would be able to make it home in time to catch the latest episode of her favorite TV show.
There were two guys sharing the table next to mine. One of them was wearing a full suit, and the other was in business casual. Judging by the bits of conversation I overheard, it was an informal job interview. Did the interviewee care if the NSA was watching him? Probably not. He was worried about a ton of other things, like being under-dressed for the interview and his growing need to use the restroom really badly. He was worried about whether the interviewer would hire him, because his bills were at serious risk of running overdue. His wife had also been texting him for the past half hour complaining about the dishwasher that stopped working.
Now, these were just my guesses about these people, and they were most likely wrong. But in the grand scheme of things, I think my point stands: people are so fucking obsessed with their own little lives that they cannot raise their heads and look at - much less critically think about and analyze - what is going on around them. They don't have the type of mental bandwidth to even try to process the big picture. Their own piece of the puzzle and the immediate surrounding pieces are what demand their attention.
I was talking to my roommate this past weekend as the NSA scandal was unfolding, and I asked her if she had heard. She said no. I was appalled. I wanted to scream at her "ARE YOU LIVING UNDER A ROCK?!?" But I couldn't. She works 12+ hour days, plus a 2 hour commute, and the rest of her time is taken up by volunteer projects she's leading in our neighborhood. How can I blame her for not having heard of some invisible party listening in on all her emails and phone calls and social media conversations? How can I blame her for not being worried about the insane implications of this surveillance and what it means for her country?
Seems legit. I'm totally sure that high level whistleblowers from across the government would have chosen a slightly-mentally-unstable freelance literary magazine contributor to reveal the truth about the most secret government program of all time.
- that the U.S. government has been developing Main Core and martial law plans since at least the 1980s, and
- that they might use a major terrorist attack, involving the death of thousands of people, as an excuse to implement those plans.
Of course we already did have such a terrorist attack, and martial law was not declared, and 8 million Americans were not rounded up into FEMA detention camps.
The government does something bad, you see the evidence and speak out. Those who support the government have no defence so they trash you. One way to to that is to use another one of those weasel words "conspiracy".
One of the usual arguments against "conspiracy" theories is that apparently it over estimates how clever and organised a government can be.
"Oh, don't be so silly, a government could never keep all that quiet, you silly little conspiracy theorist." Then as an aside, often talking tot the interviewer or audience, in a getting you on side tone, " Such poor weak people need to know that governments control everything. There is comfort in that for them".
Heard that kind of patronising put down before, used against people trying to be heard? Note how with the statements from both US and UK governments, they also avoid the direct answers? Same as google, FB, etc? "Trust us, we are only after the bad guys, and if you have nothing to fear..."
Hmmm, well, until a whistle blower spoke out, all that surveillance was conspiracy theory. Any one who spoke out or claimed it was happening was put down, patronised or accused of being a foil hatted nutter.
Except, it turned out to be true.
Or think back to how the illegal extraordinary rendition story broke. Rumours of secret night flights carrying kidnapped people and delivering them to off limits secret torture prisons in places out of jurisdiction. A very evil setup, denied left right and centre by the US government. Accusers were openly mocked. All until some UK plane spotters started taking down plane numbers and looking them up, connecting the dots.
So, yes, if you criticise the government or the power that be you are almost programmed to feel like a "wing nut", etc, etc. Just like you are made to feel "unpatriotic" or worse still, "traitorous".
Trust us, the are nukes in Iraq, we must invade......
Only if you apply the loose criteria conspiracy theory wingnuts apply. Like with anything else, you should ask yourself 'what's the evidence? how reliable/well-sourced is this story?'. In this particular case, the answer to the latter is 'very poorly'.
A reasonable common-sense question is also - what use is a database with 8 million records in a situation dire enough to necessitate invoking continuity-of-government procedures/martial law/etc. Who exactly is going to go out and check up on 8 million 'potential threats' in case of, say, a nuclear attack?
What does the raft of evidence, that was once conspiracy theory, coming true tell you/us? No wonder the internet being throttled is top of the agenda - information spreads exponentially until critical mass occurs and those that suppress freedom are removed from power - unfortunately, the powers that be use force and not so good things happen to some. Fear as a control mechanism works well for most people.
History and psychology prove power in the hands of the few corrupts. The only difference this time is the technology being used - the goal is the same as it was in every other case, control of dissenters of the imposed status quo.
It makes sense to wonder. After all, when you find out someone lied to you once, you tend to doubt everything else they've ever said. That seems natural. And while the scandal is in the air and our elected officials are doing their initial "what scandal?" dance, our conspiracy theorists are in rare form, re-iterating their practiced denouncements.
I would take care to stay focused on the actual issue and not get distracted by conspiracy theory bullshit. PRISM is bad enough. When our wingnuts start babbling about how this is just like <insert conspiracy theorist bullshit here> and trying to "demand answers" there, they weaken our position. The feeling you have now thanks to PRISM is, apparently, addictive. But the last thing you want to do is align your position with a bunch of easily dismissed nonsense. Attack the problem you know about first. Discover more problems later.
"Figuring things out for yourself is the only freedom anyone really has. Use that freedom. Make up your own mind." -- Captain Ratchak, Starship Troopers.
>Main Core contains personal and financial data of millions of U.S. citizens believed to be threats to national security
Millions of US citizens believed to be threats to national security? Paranoid much, US government? I don't see much of a reason tot trust that government; it seems they don't trust you, anyway.
Just to put this level of paranoia in some perspective, Stalin's purges hit a massive 1% of the population. 8 million is 2.5%.
This is so paranoid that it is hard to comprehend. If you think that 2.5% of the population is out to get you, then you should probably be very carefully considering the possibility that the problem is actually you.
It's not just the US government - many national governments have been known to keep lists like that over the year.
In Norway it turned into a major scandal in the 90's when it was revealed the security services had lists of people to be considered detained in the case of war (implicitly the assumption was a war with the Soviet Union, since the list only had left wing activists though it indiscriminately included left wing activists who where aggressively anti-Soviet, which tells you something of the mindset), and plans for using sports arenas or other suitably large enclosed spaces to lock in such high risk people as Berge Furre, a lecturer in theology, historian and MP for the Socialist Left party ("left wing" reformists/social democrats rather than revolutionaries) - not exactly a hardened revolutionary.
When the government started investigating this along with widespread illegal surveillance, he was a member of the commission in charge of the investigation (the Lund commission), and it was soon uncovered that the security services again started illegally investigating him while he was investigating them. Shows just how little respect you can expect organisations like this to have for law and democracy.
I sometimes fret that a nation formed by a revolution, who's founding document even seems to imply that revolutions are periodically necessary, would so thoroughly protect itself from revolution. This database is a revolution-buzz-kill.
Then I get bummed that after the Newtown shooting all the politicians who wanted to enact tighter gun restrictions kept saying that you don't need an assault rifle to hunt. I don't see anything about hunting in the 2nd amendment. I always thought the second amendment was about preventing tyranny, in which case a fully automatic weapon would be very useful.
But, the second amendment is probably more about state organized militias in a time when the feds didn't maintain a standing army. I guess I'm going to have to give up this idle revolution fantasy. It would probably suck anyhow -- there's no way more people will be fed than are now, wealth would be distributed more equally, or due process would be better respected, after an armed revolution.
Assault rifles have basically never been allowed. You are thinking of assault-style weapons, a recently made up term that basically refers to a costume a semi automatic rifle is wearing, along with high-capacity magazines.
Let me tell you how useful an automatic weapon is against a swarm of drones: not useful at all. Those drones are very similar to the laptops and tablets we use everyday and can be mass produced in millions on the Pentagon/Occupation/etc. 1+ trillion budgets. PRISM and company will just supply the targets - leaders, current and potential, of an opposition.
So, we have people claiming that FEMA(?) have all these dormant prison camps all over the US waiting to lock millions of Americans up in the even of..... well, who knows?
Well, if Main Core is correct, these people have to go somewhere. If the prison camps are only in the imagination of loon conspiracy theorists, where would these 8 million go?
Strikes me the US, probably my lot in the UK too, needs a truth and reconciliation commission.
Or hn needs to get over its sudden decision to become a mashup of /r/politics and /r/conspiracy.
Really, this is first rate nutty stuff. Did you know the U.S. government has a database containing records on hundreds of millions of its citizens (and even some non-citizens!)? It contains records of where you live, which causes you support and how much money you make. Some people in this database are flagged for "special attention" by government agents who conduct an even more thorough trawl through personal lives.
Of course, that's the IRS. Maybe some of us would prefer a taxation scheme that didn't require all this infrastructure, but there's nothing deeply nefarious about it.
It's one thing to be unhappy or disturbed by the alleged degree of NSA data collection on U.S. citizens, but when you start speculating about FEMA prison camps you've gone over the edge.
Not everyone has to "go" somewhere. Prison release programs have people wear ankle bracelets. For some, house arrest will suffice with a GPS shackle. It will likely depend on your Threat Score. For instance, do you have a cache of weapons or is your "threat" mainly about ideas? People who can actively engage in force will likely have a higher score than someone whose "threat" is persuasion. (Although to a regime like China, the Dalai Lama is perhaps a higher threat than someone with a cache of guns. So your "threat mileage" might vary.)
Yes, Obama is rounding up our guns to put them into FEMA camps so that the Illumanati can give them polio vaccines to cause our firearms to have the autism.
The bit that seems to me more poorly sourced is the purpose of the list - the idea that it is there for the investigation, detention or as someone has made the leap to Stalin level purges.
If you're planning for Continuity of Government you aren't looking to handle detaining whole swathes of your surviving population. However you may want a database to be able to check people coming forwards to be involved in civil society after such an event.
Surely there are enough people on here who have watched Jericho and Revolution to understand that civil society is really vulnerable in the aftermath of a catastrophic event.
Keep in mind that detained may be for a long time, indefinitely in solitary confinement and without charges, in one of the many prisons the US government has been building in recent years: http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-unit...
The Wikipedia article is correct and covers most of it. Technically it is correct the current list is from 1982. But really the list surfaced in 1950.
Another Wikipedia article to check out is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarran_Internal_Security_Act#... . The provisions of that act are more-or-less the same thing - a reversal of the idea of habeas corpus. It grants the executive branch power to indefinitely detain masses of political dissenters without trial. The provision that allows this was proposed by the champion of US liberalism at the time, Hubert Humphrey.
That 1950 list is the 1982 list and is also the current list. Of course the names change as times go by, but the purpose is the same. For the government it is a good idea - it worked pretty well for Germany and Italy - you get rid of troublesome nationalities and political dissenters. It works well and makes a lot of sense for them. Of course I myself don't condone it.
[+] [-] salimmadjd|12 years ago|reply
1 - Utilize the fear of external entities (Iraq, terrorism, etc.) to channel away anxiety from domestic issues.
2 - pre-occupy the public, reality shows, sports, etc.
3 - Focus the problem on individuals to provide the election as a escape valve (Bush, Obama, etc.)
4 - Quickly stop or discredit any movement before it catches on like wild fire.
5 - Identify potential instigators and defuse them early if needed (shutdown bank account, credit card, ATM) terminate their phones and Internet-which is why you need this list. , etc-which is why you need this list.
Edit:fixed formatting
[+] [-] junto|12 years ago|reply
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-live/2013/jun/13...
[+] [-] znowi|12 years ago|reply
Americans seemed to have lost their free spirit. Back in the 60s - that was a real movement. Real actions. Real spirit. Right now, most people, especially young (what's saddening), are conformists and as long as they feel relatively safe and well fed, they won't go far than writing a comment on HN... like this one :)
[+] [-] mikecane|12 years ago|reply
Which is the entire point of the American Constitution. It was created by political malcontents for political malcontents.
Having suffered under the brutality of the King, the Colonists drafted a document that would prevent such abuses in the future by enshrining it in law. That millions and millions of people who would "get along" under any regime (see North Korea today) benefited is strictly a collateral effect.
That no one seems to understand the original point of it all is why we're going down this greased slide to hell today. And hell it will be.
[+] [-] coldtea|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pekk|12 years ago|reply
What outcome do you expect from this?
[+] [-] enraged_camel|12 years ago|reply
There was a mother nursing her baby while trying to get some work done on her laptop. Did she care if the NSA is watching her? Probably not. She just had too much shit to think about. She was worried that her baby seemed to be getting sick. She was worried about being able to finish the report that was due the next day at work. She was worried about what she was going to cook for dinner that night, and whether her husband was able to catch his connecting flight in Chicago earlier.
There was the overworked barrista, who was really busy trying to process the orders from a long line of customers. Did she care if the NSA was watching her? Probably not. She had been working non-stop for the past six hours, and half an hour before the end of her shift she suddenly had to deal with a large group of new customers, each of whom was cranky because they needed their fix of caffeine. She was thinking about whether the guy she gave her number to at the bar the previous night was going to text/call her soon, because he was really cute. She was thinking about whether she would be able to make it home in time to catch the latest episode of her favorite TV show.
There were two guys sharing the table next to mine. One of them was wearing a full suit, and the other was in business casual. Judging by the bits of conversation I overheard, it was an informal job interview. Did the interviewee care if the NSA was watching him? Probably not. He was worried about a ton of other things, like being under-dressed for the interview and his growing need to use the restroom really badly. He was worried about whether the interviewer would hire him, because his bills were at serious risk of running overdue. His wife had also been texting him for the past half hour complaining about the dishwasher that stopped working.
Now, these were just my guesses about these people, and they were most likely wrong. But in the grand scheme of things, I think my point stands: people are so fucking obsessed with their own little lives that they cannot raise their heads and look at - much less critically think about and analyze - what is going on around them. They don't have the type of mental bandwidth to even try to process the big picture. Their own piece of the puzzle and the immediate surrounding pieces are what demand their attention.
I was talking to my roommate this past weekend as the NSA scandal was unfolding, and I asked her if she had heard. She said no. I was appalled. I wanted to scream at her "ARE YOU LIVING UNDER A ROCK?!?" But I couldn't. She works 12+ hour days, plus a 2 hour commute, and the rest of her time is taken up by volunteer projects she's leading in our neighborhood. How can I blame her for not having heard of some invisible party listening in on all her emails and phone calls and social media conversations? How can I blame her for not being worried about the insane implications of this surveillance and what it means for her country?
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] samstave|12 years ago|reply
What do you think 2008 was about?
[+] [-] dfc|12 years ago|reply
http://web.archive.org/web/20080831101327/http://www.radaron...
[+] [-] Alex3917|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|12 years ago|reply
Main Core theory is the source for such speculation that they are after people and keep a list of who to stop from spreading truth.
[+] [-] snowwrestler|12 years ago|reply
- that the U.S. government has been developing Main Core and martial law plans since at least the 1980s, and
- that they might use a major terrorist attack, involving the death of thousands of people, as an excuse to implement those plans.
Of course we already did have such a terrorist attack, and martial law was not declared, and 8 million Americans were not rounded up into FEMA detention camps.
[+] [-] w_t_payne|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alan_cx|12 years ago|reply
One of the usual arguments against "conspiracy" theories is that apparently it over estimates how clever and organised a government can be.
"Oh, don't be so silly, a government could never keep all that quiet, you silly little conspiracy theorist." Then as an aside, often talking tot the interviewer or audience, in a getting you on side tone, " Such poor weak people need to know that governments control everything. There is comfort in that for them".
Heard that kind of patronising put down before, used against people trying to be heard? Note how with the statements from both US and UK governments, they also avoid the direct answers? Same as google, FB, etc? "Trust us, we are only after the bad guys, and if you have nothing to fear..."
Hmmm, well, until a whistle blower spoke out, all that surveillance was conspiracy theory. Any one who spoke out or claimed it was happening was put down, patronised or accused of being a foil hatted nutter.
Except, it turned out to be true.
Or think back to how the illegal extraordinary rendition story broke. Rumours of secret night flights carrying kidnapped people and delivering them to off limits secret torture prisons in places out of jurisdiction. A very evil setup, denied left right and centre by the US government. Accusers were openly mocked. All until some UK plane spotters started taking down plane numbers and looking them up, connecting the dots.
So, yes, if you criticise the government or the power that be you are almost programmed to feel like a "wing nut", etc, etc. Just like you are made to feel "unpatriotic" or worse still, "traitorous".
Trust us, the are nukes in Iraq, we must invade......
[+] [-] glurgh|12 years ago|reply
A reasonable common-sense question is also - what use is a database with 8 million records in a situation dire enough to necessitate invoking continuity-of-government procedures/martial law/etc. Who exactly is going to go out and check up on 8 million 'potential threats' in case of, say, a nuclear attack?
[+] [-] ironic_ali|12 years ago|reply
History and psychology prove power in the hands of the few corrupts. The only difference this time is the technology being used - the goal is the same as it was in every other case, control of dissenters of the imposed status quo.
[+] [-] fusiongyro|12 years ago|reply
I would take care to stay focused on the actual issue and not get distracted by conspiracy theory bullshit. PRISM is bad enough. When our wingnuts start babbling about how this is just like <insert conspiracy theorist bullshit here> and trying to "demand answers" there, they weaken our position. The feeling you have now thanks to PRISM is, apparently, addictive. But the last thing you want to do is align your position with a bunch of easily dismissed nonsense. Attack the problem you know about first. Discover more problems later.
[+] [-] smky80|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikecane|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|12 years ago|reply
Trust me - you'll like it.
[+] [-] cyphax|12 years ago|reply
Millions of US citizens believed to be threats to national security? Paranoid much, US government? I don't see much of a reason tot trust that government; it seems they don't trust you, anyway.
[+] [-] jlgreco|12 years ago|reply
This is so paranoid that it is hard to comprehend. If you think that 2.5% of the population is out to get you, then you should probably be very carefully considering the possibility that the problem is actually you.
[+] [-] vidarh|12 years ago|reply
In Norway it turned into a major scandal in the 90's when it was revealed the security services had lists of people to be considered detained in the case of war (implicitly the assumption was a war with the Soviet Union, since the list only had left wing activists though it indiscriminately included left wing activists who where aggressively anti-Soviet, which tells you something of the mindset), and plans for using sports arenas or other suitably large enclosed spaces to lock in such high risk people as Berge Furre, a lecturer in theology, historian and MP for the Socialist Left party ("left wing" reformists/social democrats rather than revolutionaries) - not exactly a hardened revolutionary.
When the government started investigating this along with widespread illegal surveillance, he was a member of the commission in charge of the investigation (the Lund commission), and it was soon uncovered that the security services again started illegally investigating him while he was investigating them. Shows just how little respect you can expect organisations like this to have for law and democracy.
[+] [-] dfc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] euroclydon|12 years ago|reply
Then I get bummed that after the Newtown shooting all the politicians who wanted to enact tighter gun restrictions kept saying that you don't need an assault rifle to hunt. I don't see anything about hunting in the 2nd amendment. I always thought the second amendment was about preventing tyranny, in which case a fully automatic weapon would be very useful.
But, the second amendment is probably more about state organized militias in a time when the feds didn't maintain a standing army. I guess I'm going to have to give up this idle revolution fantasy. It would probably suck anyhow -- there's no way more people will be fed than are now, wealth would be distributed more equally, or due process would be better respected, after an armed revolution.
[+] [-] cma|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trust-me|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gordaco|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikecane|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codex|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Natsu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dfc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanp2k2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alan_cx|12 years ago|reply
Well, if Main Core is correct, these people have to go somewhere. If the prison camps are only in the imagination of loon conspiracy theorists, where would these 8 million go?
Strikes me the US, probably my lot in the UK too, needs a truth and reconciliation commission.
[+] [-] twoodfin|12 years ago|reply
Really, this is first rate nutty stuff. Did you know the U.S. government has a database containing records on hundreds of millions of its citizens (and even some non-citizens!)? It contains records of where you live, which causes you support and how much money you make. Some people in this database are flagged for "special attention" by government agents who conduct an even more thorough trawl through personal lives.
Of course, that's the IRS. Maybe some of us would prefer a taxation scheme that didn't require all this infrastructure, but there's nothing deeply nefarious about it.
It's one thing to be unhappy or disturbed by the alleged degree of NSA data collection on U.S. citizens, but when you start speculating about FEMA prison camps you've gone over the edge.
[+] [-] mikecane|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angersock|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blots|12 years ago|reply
Well, as a possible consequence.
[+] [-] cmdkeen|12 years ago|reply
If you're planning for Continuity of Government you aren't looking to handle detaining whole swathes of your surviving population. However you may want a database to be able to check people coming forwards to be involved in civil society after such an event.
Surely there are enough people on here who have watched Jericho and Revolution to understand that civil society is really vulnerable in the aftermath of a catastrophic event.
[+] [-] milesf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wavefunction|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|12 years ago|reply
That being said, that doesn't mean it's good. How "dirty" is that data set, for starters?
[+] [-] bravoyankee|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CleanedStar|12 years ago|reply
Another Wikipedia article to check out is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarran_Internal_Security_Act#... . The provisions of that act are more-or-less the same thing - a reversal of the idea of habeas corpus. It grants the executive branch power to indefinitely detain masses of political dissenters without trial. The provision that allows this was proposed by the champion of US liberalism at the time, Hubert Humphrey.
That 1950 list is the 1982 list and is also the current list. Of course the names change as times go by, but the purpose is the same. For the government it is a good idea - it worked pretty well for Germany and Italy - you get rid of troublesome nationalities and political dissenters. It works well and makes a lot of sense for them. Of course I myself don't condone it.