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Palindromedary, Do you ever slow down the rhetoric? You see a conspiracy behind every corner! Who the hell said they want too take away your guns. This is a story about a sick man, in a terrible situation, where innocent people were slaughtered....He used a perfectly legal weapon too carry out this insane crime. Maybe if we were not pushed into these situations by a society that has almost broken down due to our corrupt politicians on both the left and the right, this type of event would not be so common in our nation. So stop crying about being disarmed, you sound like a regular NRA member....I become nervous when I think people like you are running around thinking the goverment is out to take away all your civil rights, damn, lighten up!
My Yes vote is more a hope than a belief. I keep wondering what will finally be the last straw?
"Our nation is obsessed with the rights of gun owners, unfortunately, we’re forgetting about the rights of non-gun owners – like the right to not live in a nation plagued by mass shootings where the mentally ill can get military-grade weapons."
Yes, and our nation is obsessed with murdering people in other countries...and they use the world's most powerful high tech killing machines...against unarmed civilians. Where is my right to not live in a world where a superpower goes around murdering innocent civilians...all in our name? Sure, they argue that the civilians are just "collateral damage".."they didn't mean to kill all those kids"....something they are willing to laugh off...like a bad joke...and then claim they have some worthy and patriotic reason for why they had to do it. Very bad taste of those chicken-sh1t Al Qaida to hide behind women's skirts instead of standing right out in the open...armed with their sling shots and BB guns...and take a direct hit from one of our Hellfire missles launched by some snot-nosed, pimply-faced gamer back in the states sitting in a cozy air-conditioned office.
Maybe more people should be more concerned about all of the mass murder our brave boys and girls in uniform are doing in the Middle East. Maybe we need to disarm the military of all their murderous toys...before they decide to turn them on us...the unarmed American citizens who balk at being crapped on by the few wealthy elite.
General Eisenhower, after Germany's defeat, paraded all the town's people into the death camps so that they could see what the Nazis had done. It is not so easily done, here in America, to make the people experience the visceral and traumatic experience of the stench and horror that the German people had to endure. These German people were not much different than Americans today. They wanted so very much to believe in their system and what their Furor was doing for their country. They swallowed the propaganda...and so do we.
Our media won't cover atrocities that our military commits and tries to avoid it...oh, they'll, perhaps mention surface details but no investigative journalism will touch it. They leave that to Wikileaks. And when they do mention it it is done so as not to make people question our military presence over there. So, the pampered Americans get very upset when they experience the highly touted and well covered lone-gunman media events. "Oh, how horrible!" And the reactionary..."Oh, this shows that we have to ban all guns." That's right...make everyone else who wants to own guns...to give them up.
A: " I know Hitler claimed to be a socialist, but he wasn't."
..and I'd say that Obama claims to be a Democrat and strongly inferred, when he campaigned anyway, that he had progressive leanings...that he was at least more for the middle class and lower classes than for the wealthy upper classes. None of us, who voted for him, ever thought he would be more like a conservative than a liberal progressive. And highly disappointing was his pre-election rhetoric condemning the Bush administration for 911 and their illegal war in Iraq and then, after he was elected, he just wanted to forget the past and concentrate on the future. Obama turned out to be not only dismissive of what the Bush administration did but actually carried on with the same policies that the Bush administration started. Obama is nothing about what we were led to believe about him.
Hitler had his death camps where they tortured and murdered innocent people. Obama has his death machines flying in the air that murder innocent civilians from the skies and prison camps where they torture people.
B: Hartmann's blogs has long railed against gun ownership...and I don't think Thom or Louis makes a very clear and persistent distinction between military-grade weapons from any other guns/rifles. A lot of people who read these blogs, I believe, could very easily think that all guns are bad and should be removed from everyone.
But having said that...how do you think it would go if hundreds of thousands of people armed with sling shots and BB-guns who tried to rebel against a right-wing corporate controlled government armed with drones with Hellcat missiles? Ludicrous, right? But, if millions of people are ticked off and well armed, it would make the ruling powers a little more willing to be less rapacious and tyrannous.
"When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." --Thomas Jefferson
And so...as a last resort...when the "Democratic System" has been so corrupted that we are basically cornered into voting for one of two who represent the tyrants..the ruling elite..the plutocrats...instead of the people...then we don't have a real Democratic System...but are ruled by tyrants who...according to TJ need to be overthrown...and you don't do that with BB guns and sling shots...and you will never do it at the ballot box...unless (remote possibility) you manage to vote in a third party candidate like Jill Stein. But, I'm not sure how well even she would stand up to the pressures of the ruling elite.
Obama has already proven that he won't really go to bat for those constituents who voted for him.
But, this country IS getting very close to Nazi Germany...and it will be...or could be... much worse...if there is no decent ability to oppose them....NOW...before it is too late to really do anything about it. Put it another way....if all of you people keep talking the way the ruling elite wants you to...ie: "oh, please, we need more gun control"....the ruling elite knows they have you right where they want you. If on the other hand the majority of people don't buy it and oppose gun control, especially if they are liberals/progressives, then the ruling elite knows they have a problem. Just look at how the Democrats chicken out whenever the right-wingers start mentioning "overthrowing the government"..."armed rebellion"..yeah, like the "government" they want to overthrow is the one that provides benefits and safety nets for the majority of the people and protects them from the rapacious greed of a small group of insidious capitalist gangsters. And, perhaps, the reason why the Democrats chicken out is because they have no teeth (guns).
And lastly, I wouldn't be surprised if these lone-nut shootings were actually done by patsies manipulated by whatever MKULTRA-like operation they have now. It used to be LSD and hypnotism...I'm sure they have a much better way of controlling people to act as "Manchurian Candidates". All they have to do is create a few of these killings and use the mass media to scare people out of their liberties and rights...like gun ownership.
You'll get nothing without a fight...and they know how much you don't want to fight...because you are willing to not only give up your guns but you are willing to make everyone else do so as well.
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Excerpts from Chris Hedges' article "The Battle of Blair Mountain":
"Blair Mountain, amid today’s rising corporate exploitation and state repression, represents a piece of American history that corporate capitalists, and especially the coal companies, would have us forget. It is a reminder that citizens have a right to resist a corporate machine intent on subjugating them. It is a reminder that all the openings of our democracy were achieved with the toil, anguish and sometimes blood of radicals and popular fronts, from labor unions to anarchists, socialists and communists. But this is not approved history. We are instructed by the power elite to worship at approved shrines—plantation estates erected for wealthy slaveholders and land speculators such as George Washington, or the gilded domes of authority in the nation’s capital."
"In late August and early September 1921 in West Virginia’s Logan County as many as 15,000 armed miners, some of them allegedly provided with weapons by the United Mine Workers of America, mounted an insurrection after a series of assassinations of union leaders and their chief supporters, as well as mass evictions, blacklistings and wholesale firings by coal companies determined to break union organizing. Miners in other coal fields across the United States had concluded a strike that lasted two months and ended with a 27 percent pay increase. The miners in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky wanted the same. They wanted to be freed from the debt peonage of the company stores, to be paid fairly for their work, to have better safety in the mines, to fight back against the judges, politicians, journalists and civil authorities who had sold out to Big Coal, and to have a union. They grasped that unchallenged and unregulated corporate power was a form of enslavement. And they grasped that it was only through a union that they had any hope of winning."
"It is an old and cruel tactic in any company town. Reduce wages and benefits to subsistence level. Break unions. Gut social assistance programs. Buy and sell elected officials and judges. Fill the airwaves with mindless diversion and corporate propaganda. Pay off the press. Poison the soil, the air and the water to extract natural resources and leave behind a devastated wasteland. Plunge workers into debt. Leave them owing more on their houses than the structures are worth. Make sure the children will be burdened by tens of thousands of dollars lent to them for an education and will be unable to find decent jobs. Make sure that everything from hospital bills to car payments to credit card fees exact increasing pounds of flesh. And when workers stumble, when they cannot pay soaring interest rates, jack up rates further and deploy predators from debt collection agencies to harass the debtors and seize their assets. Then toss them away. Company towns all look the same. And we live in the biggest one on earth."
"The armed miners, many of them veterans of World War I, fought militias and police, who were equipped with heavy machine guns, for five days. The militias and police held back advancing miners from a trench system that is still visible on a ridge top. The Army was finally ordered into the coal fields in early September 1921 to quell the rebellion. The miners surrendered. By the time the battle ended, at least 30 of those defending the mine owners had been killed along with perhaps as many as 100 rebel miners."
"These miners knew the dynamics of capitalism and the role of government. They knew who their friends and enemies were. They knew that only by organizing and physically defying centers of power would they ever get justice. They did not trust authority. They did not wait for authority figures to dole out justice. They were not seduced by the empty rhetoric of politicians. They knew that if they wanted a better world they would have to be their own leaders. They would have to fight for it. And this is a lesson in the nature of corporate and governmental power that we have forgotten. We must make the powerful afraid of us if we are to get any semblance of an open and free society. They are not and never will be on our side."
"The coal companies have erased this piece of history from school textbooks. It is too inconvenient. It exposes predatory capitalism’s ruthless commodification and exploitation of human beings and the natural world. It exposes the drive by corporations to keep us impoverished, disempowered and unorganized. If corporate forces can sanitize history, if they can ensure historical amnesia, then the doctrine of laissez faire economics—which in short promises that the wealthier that rich people get, the better it is for all of us—can continue to rule our lives."
"All the gains, often paid for with the lives of working men and women, have now been reversed. We are back where we started. We must organize, resist and build movements. We must embrace radical politics and remain perpetually alienated from power or become a subjugated herd. I do not call for an emulation of this violence. But I do call for direct and sustained confrontation with all formal mechanisms of power, including the Democratic Party. The corporate state, for its part, should also remember the lesson from Blair Mountain. There are limits to how far a people can be pushed. And if violence continues to be the preferred mechanism for control, if the state refuses to institute rational economic and political reforms to address the growing misery that corporations inflict on the citizens, it will, as at Blair Mountain, engender a violent response."
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_battle_of_blair_mountain_20120716//
"Police Officers were in fact terrified of the Panthers. Carrying law books and equipped with tape recorders Panthers would follow the police around during their beats. Huey implemented Panther's monitored the police's behavior by pointing out legal violations to them and documenting unjust police action . As the BPP rapidly grew across the nation, the Panthers threatened police from local, state and federal branches of government."
http://www.customessaymeister.com/customessays/Civil%20Rights/15696.htm
"The Party's ideals and activities were so radical, it was at one time assailed by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States." And, despite the demise of the Party, its history and lessons remain so challenging and controversial that established texts and media would erase all reference to the Party from American history."
".........a small group of Black Panther Party members, led by Bobby Seale, designated chairman of the Party, marched into the California legislature, in May 1967, fully armed. Defined as protest against a pending guncontrol bill (which became the Mulford Act) aimed at the Party with the position that blacks had a Constitutional right to bear arms, the Party's message that day became a clarion call to young blacks."
"When, therefore, in October of 1967, Huey Newton was shot, arrested and charged with the murder of a white Oakland cop, after a gun battle of sorts on the streets of West Oakland that resulted in the death of police officer John Frey, it was indeed the spark that lit a prairie fire. Young whites, angry and disillusioned with America over the Vietnam war, raised their voices with young, urban blacks, to cry in unison: "Free Huey!"
"It became a movement of itself, the very embodiment of all the social contradictions, between the haves and have nots, the included and excluded, the alienated and the privileged. The freeing of the black man charged with killing a white cop, the oppressed who resisted oppression, was tantamount to the freedom of everyone."
"One result was not only the flowering of the Party itself but a rapid proliferation of other, like minded organizations. Chicanos, or Mexican Americans, in Southern California formed the Brown Berets. Whites in Chicago and environs formed the White Patriot Party. Chinese in the San Francisco Bay Area formed the Red Guard. Puerto Ricans in New York created the Young Lords. Eventually, a group of so called senior citizens organized the Gray Panthers to address the human and civil rights abuses of the elderly in society. The Party expanded from a small Oakland based organization to a national organization, as black youth in 48 states formed chapters of the Party. In addition, Black Panther coalition and support groups began to spring up internationally, in Japan, China, France, England, Germany, Sweden, in Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uruguay and elsewhere, including, even, in Israel."
http://www.blackpanther.org/legacytwo.htm
A) It's really funny to me when the group most like Nazi's (republicans and conservatives) argue that Democrats and progressives are akin to Nazis. Couldn't be further from the truth. There is no parallel between fascism and democracy or socialism. I know Hitler claimed to be a socialist, but he wasn't....he was a fascist....and a racist.....and really almost like a monarch....much like the modern day conservative movement who wish to purge minorities from the voting booth (and which is home to neo-nazis, the KKK, and other white supremist groups), who argue in favor of unregulated capitalism, who embrace the citizen's united decision and corporate personhood in general, and who voted for GW who claimed "this would all be much easier if this were a dictatorship....and i were the dictator"
B) How did you get from Thom's argument "the right to not live in a nation plagued by mass shootings where the mentally ill can get military-grade weapons" to "Don't buy the idea that we need to give up our guns just because an occasional nut kills a few people."??? Thom and the overall progressive voice is not saying that guns should be illegal. What we're saying is: A) military grade weaponry shouldn't be legal to purchase or at the very least people shouldn't be able to buy mega sized clips, B) proper background checks, including mental health, should be performed for all gun purchases. Some of us would even go a step further to argue that licensing should be required for each type of gun purchase. Guns are dangerous and in the wrong hands they can wreak havoc as we've been seeing more and more over the past 15 years. This is a debate about how to live in a safe society where responsible people own guns and irresponsible and mentally ill people don't. End of story. Stop acting like this is Nazi Germany.
The abbreviation of Romney/Ryan to R/R reminds me of something. Thom should research where the term "railroad" (as a verb) comes from. Is it from the charter shopping that railroad barons did in the late 1800s? If so, it's an appropriate term to use against R/R, reflecting their pro-corporate stances.
Slogans:
Romney/Ryan 2012: Trickle Down on America
I guess I could call you a simpleton useful idiot since you called me a ranting nut but I won't!! The problem with people like you is that you never see an enemy, even when they are very obvious to many others, and would never have the balls to defend yourself against them. You, just like the Germans during the Nazi regime, would rather let those power elite...the ones who always have the guns...frighten you into submissiveness..and cajole you with lies....just..just vote for Obama...that will set things right! Yeah, right!
Or, are you one of the useful idiots that are batting FOR the power elite? The power elite really doesn't want anyone else but those who they control to have guns..and they certainly don't want liberals to have guns.* They will even pretend to be progressive liberals who will ply their anti-gun propaganda in order to disarm the people. They will try to make you believe that it is only right-wing conservative conspiracy nuts who want to own guns. But the fact is that there are a lot of progressive liberals who own their own guns..although many would never admit it. And in the end...if you buy their propaganda...only the real right-wing nuts, the criminals, and the ruling elite will be the only ones who have guns. All the so-called liberals just obediently got on the box cars for their trip to the gas chambers. But, of course, our modern-day "gas-chambers" will be in the form of "no decent health care" and "starvation". It will be a slow death but it will come just the same. So, keep squawking and complaining and voting for the least evil choice...the one who had his chance to make good on who we voted for the first time but turned out to be NOT who we voted for. Obama is part of the illusion that the ruling elite has created to keep people ever hopeful for change...so they will never get off their butts and do anything substantial to change things.
* Funny how those who create our history books tend to emphasize MLK but try to hide HPN (Huey P. Newton) and the Black Panthers. More white cops sh!t their britches when the Black Panthers showed up as a regimented and armed force in the streets of America. And the Black Panthers was just a small part of what could have happened. What if hundreds of thousands of armed citizens decided enough was enough and took back our country from the rich snobs who have stolen it? It sure won't be the namby pamby chicken-sh1t liberals who want to ban all guns that will make any difference. I consider myself a liberal and a progressive but certainly not a misguided fool liberal who would be willing to hop on one of those box cars to the "gas chambers" all without a fight. I am also not a lone meglomaniacal nut willing to hurt anyone unless it is in self defense or in defense of loved ones. We have that right!
Weird parallels are happening. Thom's wife has breast cancer surgery, then Ed Schulz's wife has ovarian cancer surgery. Thom has abdominal surgery, and today Ed was talking about getting back surgery soon. Good luck to everyone. I wish them all speedy recoveries.
Ayn Rand's "Objectivism" is euphamistic for Nihilistic Narcissism. She actually benifitted much from public education in her early life and from the Soviet educational system. After the Lenninist revolution her family fled to the Crimea where she attended public primary and secondary schools. Upon her return, she was able to attend the university in Petrograd because the new, revolutionary Soviet government removed barriers to women and Jews which, previously, would have prevented her education on either count. She later came to the United States to benefit from the New Deal.
She actually was not an "Anarcho-Capitalist" or even a Libertarian. She considered anarchism a naive philosophy based on subjectivism that could only result in collectivism. She was, instead, in favor of constitutionally limited government.
Did anyone else catch on his Facebook page how the only current figure listed under "Inspirational People" was Glenn Beck? While certainly not a cause, Beck's propagation of distrust and paranoia should at least be considered as a contributing factor.
Ranting nut. Go take your meds. The government isn't the threat, it's people like you that look for an excuse to see an enemy to shoot. This is not NaZi Germany - except for the fact that you are trying to make the US over as if it were
Romney and ryran, both stand for
Vulture, vouchers and vampires......"V" does not stand for victory any more.
Mitt did the Democrates a big favor selecting this one. LOL
Paul ryan is Sara palin in pants......only he has a worse record of insanity.
Old people and children will be trampled by those struggling to survive. The 9 hour documentary called "Showa", which I watched at the theater when it first came out, had the testimony of concentration camp survivors who had to clear out the dead bodies from the Nazi gas chambers after the victims were gassed. They said that, in every case, they noticed one thing that was quite striking...that the children and old people were always on the bottom of the piles of people struggling to get the last bit of good air at the top of the chamber. People will try to be civilized and dignified up until the very last moment that it is quite clear that they are going to die. There was no wild, or uncivilized or undignified, lashing out in a struggle to survive, no rebellion, just follow orders...until right before it was just too late do do anything meaningful about it. How do you think this could be relevent today? Any similarities? In trying to be dignified and civilized, people will continue to vote for tweedle dee (Democrats) or tweedle dumber (Republicans) and believe they really have no other choice. Instead of using their advantage of a massive display of revolt against tyranny they will continue to play the rigged voting game. Maybe the ruling elite will set up chamber music ensembles at the entrances of every poll station and put up signs that says "Voting will make you free!". "See there, Hannah, what did I tell you....the music...the sign 'Arbeit mact frei'...we are just being resettled to work camps until the war is over...so let's not risk being shot...we'll survive!"
Don't buy the idea that we need to give up our guns just because an occasional nut kills a few people. The Nazis sure didn't want the people (especially the Jews) to have guns. The Jews (some of them anyway) eventually did fight back. But the "civilized" ones went to the gas chambers. And when you look at the things, like NDAA, that Obama signed into law...you had better hang on to your guns.
Stress will definitely make you sick, both mentally and physically. And what our government has been doing, in lock step with the ruling elite puppeteers, for many years in setting the example of murdering innocent civilians...in Vietnam and in the Middle East, and fostering a jingoist propaganda to aggrandize such actions will obviously filter down to trigger the kinds of things that happened in Colorado and elsewhere.
That's right...the consequences for those few at the top who have accumulated all the wealth and refuse the masses a relatively decent existence is that the masses will eventually riot and chop off heads of the wealthy. It happened in France..it happened in Russia..it happened all over Europe...and now it is happening in parts of the rest of the world. I suspect that, eventually, it will happen here in the US.
Once the masses realize that their 2 party political system is owned by the ruling elite and that it is rigged to pander false hope, and the propaganda that we have to vote for the least evil of the two choices is not the solution, then the people will see how futile it is to keep playing their (the ruling elite) games.
Unfortunately, the ruling elite still has a lot of people fooled by this and these people still thinks that voting for Obama is the answer. Obama is part of the problem. He is just as owned by the ruling elite as is Romney/Ryan.
Obama is being sued by Chris Hedges and 6 other plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg over Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
"This section of the NDAA, signed into law by Obama on Dec. 31, 2011, obliterates some of our most important constitutional protections. It authorizes the executive branch to order the military to seize U.S. citizens deemed to be terrorists or associated with terrorists."
"Any activist or dissident, whose rights were once protected under the First Amendment, can be threatened under this law with indefinite incarceration in military prisons, including our offshore penal colonies."
"The Justice Department’s definition of a potential terrorism suspect under the Patriot Act is already extremely broad. It includes anyone with missing fingers, someone who has weatherproof ammunition and guns, and anyone who has hoarded more than seven days of food."
"....the Obama White House ..... permits the government to detain and assassinate U.S. citizens they deem to be terrorists."
“The essential thrust of the NDAA is to create a system of justice that violates the separation of powers,” Mayer told the court. “[The Obama administration has] taken detention out of the judicial branch and put it under the executive branch.”
"Barack Obama’s administration has appealed Judge Forrest’s temporary injunction and would certainly appeal a permanent injunction. It is a stunning admission by this president that he will do nothing to protect our constitutional rights. The administration’s added failure to restore habeas corpus, its use of the Espionage Act six times to silence government whistle-blowers, its support of the FISA Amendment Act—which permits warrantless wiretapping, monitoring and eavesdropping on U.S. citizens—and its ordering of the assassination of U.S. citizens under the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force, or AUMF, is a signal that for all his rhetoric, Obama, like his Republican rivals, is determined to remove every impediment to the unchecked power of the security and surveillance state. I and the six other plaintiffs, who include reporters, professors and activists, will most likely have to continue this fight in an appellate court and perhaps the Supreme Court."
"The corporate state has convinced the masses, in essence, to clamor for their own enslavement. There is, in reality, no daylight between Mitt Romney and Obama about the inner workings of the corporate state. They each support this section within the NDAA and the widespread extinguishing of civil liberties. They each will continue to funnel hundreds of billions of wasted dollars to defense contractors, intelligence agencies and the military. They each intend to let Wall Street loot the U.S. Treasury with impunity."
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/criminalizing_dissent_20120813/
I think people tend to confuse fascism and nazism. As mentioned before, fascism is corporate governance, and more and more we have that already. Ryan is in total agreement for the wealthy and corporations to be in power. He is not a Nazi that I am aware of. Nazis are members of the German political power in the 30's and 40's that were very oppressive and violent in their drive for power.
I see signs of nasism developing as we see the militarization of our civilian law enforcement. Nazism may be innate in fascist governments because corporations have no soul and their ethic is profit at all costs with no compunction against torture, murder, and theft in the cause of power and profit.
It seems to me our government in general has become more and more fascist since Regan, no matter what party was in the White House. While I am sorry to see the Obama administration continuing that trend, the Romney/Ryan administration would be even worse. It is up to us to push more citizen sane participation in government, and that won't be easy.
I agree with your decision on the choices for the next presidency.
http://www.reinventingaging.org/diet/sensa/sensa/ are typically produced by pharmaceutical companies and are often patented to give the developer exclusive rights to produce them, but they can also be derived from naturally occurring substance in plants called herbal medicine. Thanks.
I also agree....Jill Stein!
Hidden Motives: Millions of Murders from the Orient Express
"One of the motives for the First World War less publicized in the USA was the planned construction of a Baghdad to Berlin Railway in the dying Ottoman Empire in the late 19th and early 20th century."
The Big Boys Play Dirty
"While on the surface Great Britain shrewdly supported the project, watching Germans foot the bill for laying the rails and pouring money into the project,apprehension simmered beneath because this railway might one day compete with British trade in Mesopotamia, plus it bypassed British tariffs."
"In 1914, the German government was forced to concede that those areas would remain exclusively under British financial control. The Germans, who had spent a fortune by now, perhaps in vain, were also required to have two British members sit on the Baghdad Railway Company board and had to agree not to extend the railroad past Basra or establish a port or railway terminus anywhere along the Gulf without British approval. Meanwhile, Britain was bankrupt by January 1914, and when Bank of England notes consequently became emergency legal tender, all gold was removed from circulation and England’s gold reserves went to the Rothschild's Bank of England to use for profit-producing warfare."
http://www.forumeerstewereldoorlog.nl/viewtopic.php?p=213116&sid=e7cf95a...