On the environmental hazards posed by the industrial-scale production of scrambled eggs

Kickin' back in a hotel bar, perusing Peter Mansfield's A History of the Middle East, sipping a worthy though far from outstanding brew. Decent sorta place. But a very, very loud tourist type chick, fortiesh/fiftiesh, is drinking with a boisterous bunch at the bar, beltin' out every laugh like it's a proclamation to be heeded unto the four corners of the world. She is deafening. I have now learned entirely more than I could possibly have wanted to know about her various spats with her in-laws, her dogs, her preference for catalogue shopping...

What can ya do. My lovely wife and the little one are sleeping; would be rude to read and/or tap away in the room, where such behaviour might wake either.

Hotels. Resisted the temptation to write a predictable 'all airports are the same' thang a week or two back. So I'm due for a hotel observations thing.

'Cept I've nothing profound to point out, really. Except that the hotel breakfast buffet is now so standardized I have begun to suspect that actually, there's just one enormous kitchen somewhere, serving every hotel in the world. They make the scrambled eggs in gigantic vats--several thousand metric tonnes of the stuff, which is then shipped in container trucks to regional hubs, where they break it up into wooden crates full of the steel, lidded containers you see in the hotel eatery. So many shells must be cracked and disposed of to generate this massive volume of protein and cholesterol that their diposal has created a unique environmental hazard around this mythical kitchen--the calcium leaching into the local soil from the shells has reached such concentrations in the area that even the plants have teeth...

Ah, the loud one just stumbled past me, enroute to her room. The hotel lobby ambient sound returns to the standard low key burble. It is becoming the 'late night in the hotel' scene. A few folk, here and there, still sittin at the bar, negotiating sex over drinks.

No, I've no comment on the Mansfield as yet. Just getting started.

Been trying to learn Arabic, in fits and starts. Which, of course, is precisely the worst possible way to learn a language. Really have to stop that.

Francophone party strolls past, a sound of home--speaking of languages I never quite learned as well as I probably should have.

I suppose it would be wise to sleep sometime this eve.

Scrumptious

Travelling over the weekend, didn't catch much of the debate yestereve. There's a big part of me wonders if it was the Bushies who pushed for these things to happen Fridays. It wouldn't, methinks, be a great night for getting audience share, would it?

Saw a bit, nonetheless--just enough to remind me that watching the smirking mug of the dazed one (one of my many fond nicknames for the current occupier of the oval office) and watching him pouring on the oily smarm for the benefit of his audience is bad for the digestion. This one, when he puts on that 'gee, I'm just one of the boys' mug reminds me of a lying layabout of a husband, back again, trying once again to convince his poor, long suffering wife that really, he's been good to her, and all those industry lobbyists and psycho evangelicals and warmongering neocons he's been seen about town with didn't mean a thing, really...

Anyway. Had dinner this eve with my lovely wife and our charming little one at a nice little trattoria--durn tasty, I gotta say.

DVDs on Linux

In a word, wow.

So one of the older Thinkpads I've got kicking around here--on which I've installed a Debian distro for bit bashery while on the road--has a DVD player. But I've never bothered before with DVDs on Linux, 'cause let's face it, I don't watch a lotta DVDs anyway, and somehow, I found myself thinking, it sounded like it might be painful.

But curiosity got the best of me. Got to thinking--can it be coerced? Seems to me if the player's there, the box can probably do it. Just a matter of getting bits from A to B fast enough.

And sure enough, can you ever do this! Took a little fiddling--the key seems to have been getting the right driver for the actually quite capable S3 Savage hidden somewhere under the hood so the XVideo stuff could pump the frames to the screen fast enough--but given that, I've got beautiful, jerk-free video right from the player. The Lord of the Rings--The Fellowship of the Ring--Extended Edition looks beautifully crisp on the LCD. Lovely.

I hereby heartily recommend Ogle for your DVD viewing pleasure. And hereby give a hearty thankya to Tim Roberts, the gent who wrote that beeyootiful Savage driver.

No election yet

Well, it would appear the government is still standing.

Craziness.

Just. Wow.

Really shoulda been paying more attention to the crazy neighbours.

Crazy. Truly crazy. For those not from 'round here, the parliament has only been in session since Monday. This is their first vote.

Not sure if, should the government fall, this would constitute a record.

Not sure, in retrospect, if it surprises me much, either. But I gotta take a closer look at the issue up for vote.

Missing the point...

... and kissing ass.

The Post's editorial misses the point of the growing mass of evidence for duplicity utterly, of course. Quoting:

The larger question is how, or even whether, decisions about preemptive war can be made in the absence of unambiguous intelligence. This is not hypothetical: Whoever wins November's election may face a similar dilemma. Extremist anti-American governments or terrorists may acquire weapons of mass destruction, and neither al Qaeda nor the rulers of Iran and North Korea are inclined to transparency. The case of Iraq has shown that it is possible that the intelligence on which a war decision may be based may later prove to be mostly wrong. Does that mean the president cannot act in such cases? That's a question Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry would do well to discuss.

BS, on an impressive scale. The problem with the intelligence wasn't mere 'ambiguity'. The problem was wilful, knowing distortion.

Yes, there's always ambiguity in intelligence. But there are levels of certainty, and there's also a point at which reasonable doubt no longer applies. Where sensible people discuss such things, the certainty is qualified and quantified as well as possible, and usually, you can be certain enough. So that last question is a red herring. Of course you can act where some ambiguity exists, if you honestly assess enough of the evidence is compelling enough that a mistake here and there doesn't really change the overall risk.

And that's the most you're ever risking, when you're honest. And that's the problem. They weren't honest.

'Mistakes' like the one the US administration is now claiming to have made just do not happen. Yes, you sometimes get details wrong. But several weapons programs that simply weren't there? That's a bit more than a detail. These are things that intelligence can reliably detect, if they're really there, even if there are issues surrounding scale and progress at any given instant.

So you can actually conclude, quite safely, that it wasn't a 'mistake'. That's the point.

It's not that the intelligence was 'mostly wrong'. It's that the administration chose to ignore the intelligence it didn't want to hear, and listened to plenty that it should have known it should have ignored, just because it confirmed the story it wanted to tell its citizenry and the world.

The administration knew the bioweapons source was an unreliable drunk, and they knew the tubes weren't for nukes. But that didn't matter. They weren't looking for evidence. They were looking for a pretext. So they tortured the evidence until they could convince themselves they heard it saying what they wanted to hear, and then they got their war--even if almost no one outside their country believed them for an instant.

This is just obvious now. It pretty much always was. And the Post's view goes well past merely giving these goons too much credit, all the way to actually spinning it for them.

Sad, really. Guys, you're just not a newspaper any more. Hand in your badges.

Summing it up...

... it seems to me it's time to add all this up, since there's been so much coming out of late. We now have:

• the administration knew the tubes weren't for nukes, and told the UN otherwise...
• Iraq had no WMDs at the time of invasion...
• Iraq had no apparent ties to international terror, and the administration was relying heavily on evidence concerning one case only; and that evidence, apparently, no longer points that way...
• and the principal source the administration relied upon for intel to the effect that Iraq had bioweapons labs was an unreliable drunk, and the intelligence arm knew this perfectly well.

And here's the funny thing. It's news that official sources like the FBI and the CIA are copping to it. But apart from this, it ain't really news. In the larger sense, we pretty much knew all this.

Okay, except for this conclusion that Iraq actually had no WMDs whatsoever. And that's only a sorta. As in: I admit that surprises me a bit. I always thought they might have a little something socked away somewhere, even if nothing much. The fact that the CIA and company now don't even seem to be considering that as particularly likely or relevant, well, wow.

Anyway. Summing it up now in just one sentence:

The case the administration built for their war was, indeed, as you probably already knew, nothing but a pack of lies.

Time to bite the Mehlman

Yi...

"Ken Mehlman, told the Guardian that Mr. Cheney was saying that 'in a world where 19 people with boxcutters can kill 3,000 Americans in the course of 20 minutes, allowing to remain in power a brutal dictator who defied the world, who had a weapons of mass destruction capability ... [this] wasn't acceptable and wasn't safe".'

-- from the Guardian.

Oh that's clear, dude. Except that:

a) they had no weapons, and

b) they had no substantive links to the terrorists.

... and, for that matter, your segue to Iraq's nonexistent WMDs from Al Qaeda's boxcutters is such a stretch, it's amazing you didn't sprain something.

I'm sorry, but this has just gone too far. This ain't the news. This is the twilight zone.

Why is this fruitcake even getting air time? And how come, when he says shit like this, the reporter interviewing him doesn't just have the crew turn the camera away from him, look into it himself, and say "We're sorry folks... we don't know how this twit got in here, but we'll try to find someone credible to interview on this issue for later... our apologies... moving now to sports..."

Seriously. Enough already. These guys see a camera lense, they see a microphone, their noses start growing. It serves no purpose to report their opinion, when it has absolutely no merit.

The Amber Spyglass

Vis a vis my earlier post on Pullman's classic, The Amber Spyglass strikes me as a bit stronger than the rest of the series, and ups my estimation of the overall thing a bit.

Well, that and the fact that various apologists for a certain dominant superstition are bitching so much about Pullman's giving them a smack or two in the course of the narrative. No more than they deserve, I assure you.

I was particularly amused by an online scribe annoyed by the fact that Pullman had a few choice words on the subject in a live Q&A a while ago. Seems there were kids about to be confirmed present; said scribe didn't, for some reason, want them hearing that particular opinion of the faith.

My opinion of the matter is: the fact that religion has served as a spear carrier for ignorance and brutality on a fairly regular basis isn't a smear. It's history. History I'd like to think people should have a chance to consider before they make any committment to such an institution. I mean, joining this crowd without knowing the worst their beliefs have inspired is like joining the military because someone tells you it's really just a buncha free plane tickets to see the world...

Oh. Wait. They do that too, don't they?

Hmmm....

Next on Rants'R'Us*--religious prosyletizers and army recruiters--the shocking parallels...

Anyway, in my opinion, in the book, Pullman was positively gentle. The torture the church actually visited on people (oh, wait, pardon me, they had the 'secular arm' do that... they didn't actually torture anyone; just had it commissioned, really) was frequently enough far worse than the worst Pullman's works got vivid about (which is probably for the best, as it is, after all, a kid's book). And Pullman's villains don't even get around to burning anyone alive once. Some inquisitors.

And that's just lax, if you ask me. I mean, what the hell's an inquisition without an auto da fe or two? If someone's not screaming in earshattering agony as the flames lick the flesh from their bones, it's just not a party...

Still not really my kinda book, though, I guess. Imaginative, yes. And ya still gotta be impressed with a plot that revolves around the missing dark matter turning out to be conscious (no, hardly a spoiler; it's given away pretty early in). But I think something about the actually very imaginative nature of the work actually took something away from it, for me. Perhaps because the conflict was a bit too otherworldly, I found it hard to get that involved.

Still recommended, anyway, on balance, for great characterization, and because if you're seen in public with it, it will annoy the local priest.

(*No, I don't know if the Rants'R'Us domain name is taken. Knock yerself out.)

More amusing still

... if also rather sick.

So Cheney's taking issue with Edwards' bringing up the issue of the number of US dead--the numbers Cheney feels they should use include, well...

... the Iraqis.

Now, let's get this in context.

The point that Edwards was making was Bushco™ (thanks, I should add, to the fact that most of the rest of the world appreciates they're basically a buncha lying psychotics talking up a particularly bizarrely transparent pretext) failed to garner global support for their actions, or to build up any sort of coalition, and thus the US is bearing the brunt of the casualties and war costs.

So Cheney counters with:

'Not so... We got the Iraqis in on it too'.

Well, Dick (and I use the term advisedly), that was a lovely delivery, and a very nice try, but sorry, no cigar. The Iraqis aren't in on it. They just happen to live there. They didn't join your coalition. They didn't join anything. You brought the war to them. They're the ones living (and dying) in the war you brought them, and you think their deaths should go to credit you and your fellow incompetents for your talent in building the coalition of the coerced?

Man, I shoulda known. After all, your lips were moving, weren't they?

'His judgement is flawed'

Cheney's talking point this eve, apparently.

Let's see, chump. Apparently, you let an imaginative alcoholic convince you a buncha trucks he saw in a waking dream were a good enough reason to get your military sucked into a quagmire, and you feel comfortable questioning anyone else's judgement?

You amuse me, ugly man.

Rumsfeld slips

... and, apparently inadvertently, tells the truth.

Not to worry, I'm sure it won't happen again. Or at least, not any time soon.

It's like one of those cop shows. The guy bein' questioned is talking a great game; he's got his story down.

Then the officer asks an innocuous question, he lets something slip...

And the cuffs go on.

See Rummy, that's how the truth is. Some of the guys like your crew, who've been lying so long you barely know what's real any more, you can get so far from it, you almost forget it's there.

But fool yourself as far and as long and as much as you like, a part of you still knows it's there anyway. And sooner or later, it's gonna slip out.

See, I've said this before, I'll say it again: that's the kicker right there.

They never had any evidence.

It ain't the Hussein didn't necessarily have weapons--and here's the one thing I actually agree with Rumsfeld about: I also suspect they'll find something or other, eventually. It seems a bit too unlike Hussein that there wasn't something up his sleeves somewhere.

But that, at this point, just isn't the point.

The point is people: yet again, we know this:

They lied.

Because they didn't say 'we think he might have them'. They didn't say 'he might have something somewhere.'

They said, and I quote:

"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

That would be Dick Cheney speaking, back there.

That would make him a liar.

Now you might be thinking oh, maybe he was deceived. Maybe he had bad sources.

I have two words for that theory:

Bull. Shit.

Cheney, Bush and company have consistently demonstrated their willingness to stretch the truth until it screams for mercy. And every time they stretched it, they stretched it in the same direction. We now know how they massaged the aluminum tubes evidence, we know perfectly well how they treated intelligence sources who refused to say what they wanted the public to hear--up to and including exposing an undercover field agent, potentially endangering her life.

Cheney and the rest of the Pathologicals (their gang name, I hear) were not deceived, unless, perhaps, as some of the best cons often do, they also managed to deceive themselves in the course of lying to you.

Sure, Mr. Code name 'Curveball' told them some whoppers. This gives them exactly no bloody excuse. They knew he was unreliable.

What he gave them wasn't evidence. What he gave them was an excuse.

A ridiculously thin excuse, too. I mean, a drunk guy shows up with a wild story about mobile biological weapons labs... you write it all down...

And then you take it to the UN?

Riiiiiight.

Cheney has begun debating this eve. I'm gonna give a little tip, help you out here, in separating fact from fiction: you can always tell when Cheney's lying.

It's when his lips are moving.

Do you have what it takes to be president?

Yeah yeah, I could probably spend my time more wisely than this.

Anyway, this is the 'can you be president' quiz. Please answer the skill testing questions, so we may assess your suitability for the highest office in the land (it's hard work, ya know)...

1. The legal blood alcohol limit in Maine is:

a) 0.10
b) 0.12
c) Irrelevant if you go on long enough about how much ya love Jaysus.

2. The correct pronunciation of 'nuclear' is:

a) noo' kyoo-lur
b) nu' klee-ur
c) Now watch this drive.

3. What does the term 'nuclear' mean?

a) Something to do with families. So good.
b) Something to do with Iraq (honest). So bad.
c) Okay, something to do with North Korea. But nothing to worry about.
d) Something to do with stem cells. Bad. I think.

4.

The objects in the photo above are:

a) thingies with which to make uranium centrifuges.
b) thingies with which to make artillery pieces.
c) a useable pretext for war, as long as none of you idiots ever mentions to the Times that we know very well they probably have nothing to do with nukes.
d) big aluminum straws, probably bitchin' for suckin' up blow.

5. Which of the following people is reputed to be a key figure in the financing of and high level strategic decision-making for the Al Qaeda terrorist network:

a)
b)
c)

6. Which of the following is the current defense secretary to the president of the USA?

a)
b)
c)

7. Which of the following symptoms match those of the victims of the gas attack on Halabja?

a) victims dropped dead.
b) victims coughed up green vomit, then dropped dead.
c) victims' skin burned and blistered agonizingly, their eyes burned, they went blind, and then they dropped dead.
d) victims convulsed, shivered violently, acted as if deranged, stumbling about laughing hysterically, and then dropped dead.
e) victims suffered long-term crippling effects, including permanent blindness, disfigurement, respiratory, digestive, and neurological disorders, leukemia, lymphoma, and colon, breast, lung, skin, and other cancers, increased miscarriages and infertility, severe congenital malformations and other birth defects.
f) all of the above.

8. Which of the following, in response to the US senate's 1988 "Prevention of Genocide Act", meant to impose sanctions on Iraq, in the wake of Halabja, vetoed the bill?

a) Some Frenchified flip-flopping Al Qaeda sympathizer.
b) Some Neville Chamberlain-style appeaser.
c) Daddy's boss at the time--a senile old B-movie actor called Reagan.

9. When intelligence began to arrive that Iraq was making indiscriminate use of chemical weapons against the Kurds and the Iranians, Reagan, Daddy and their administrations--members of which are still prominent in the current administration--reacted by

a) sending Iraq more aid.
b) attempting to suppress and discredit reports concerning these events.
c) sending the Baath regime technical assistance and strategic advice for the prosecution of their war with Iran.
d) frustrating attempts at the UN to censure the regime.
e) all of the above.

10. Complete this sentence. 'He gassed his own people ___'

a) With our help.

11. Which of the following did your 'favourite philosopher' Jesus Christ say?

a) Let them hate, so long as they fear.
b) In the big lie, there is always a certain force of credibility.
c) Trick question. Wrong favourite philosopher.
d) The poor will always be with us--or at least, that's our domestic policy.

12. The US, __, the UK, and the Solomon Islands. Which one did we forget?

a) Poland
b) Slovakia
c) Micronesia
d) did we already mention the Solomon Islands?

13. You're the governor of Texas. You've just found out through your diligent review of the file of a man about to be executed that he had dreadfully incompetent legal representation, and may have been railroaded. You would like to call the death chamber guard to commute his sentence to imprisonment, thereby allowing an opportunity for appeal, and the only available phone is a pay phone. You have only your IQ in change. Do you have enough to make the call?

a) Yes.
b) Whuh?
c) It's irrelevant. It's not as if I'm gonna know that phone number anyway.
d) Do I have enough to play the VLT?

14. A small group of East European terrorists kills several dozen people with a homemade bomb detonated in a NYC subway, in an attempt to coerce your government to cut off assistance to their government, which they say frustrates their efforts toward self-determination. Reputable humans rights organizations do feel the ethnic group they represent is severely persecuted in the country in question--this persecution involves torture, extrajudicial executions, forced relocation, and uncompensated appropriation of property. Which of the following is a sensible foreign policy response:

a) Demand from any and all foreign governments that any and all suspected conspirators against which you can find reasonable grounds for charges be extradicted to stand trial, and make a public statement to the effect that such measures are not the way to negotiate with yours or any government.
b) Do the above, speak to the grief of the victims, but speak publicly and sympathetically also to the question of the human rights violations committed by the foreign government in question, and suggest that, while it is now inappropriate for your government to get involved in such talks, you do hope a deal can be worked out between legitimate, non-violent representatives of the persecuted minority and their government.
c) Direct intelligence services to more aggressively infiltrate and/or investigate organizations believed to have been involved in the attack. Use available intelligence to notify border guards of potentially dangerous travelers.
d) Attack Iraq.

15. A small group of members of an apocalyptic Japanese cult detonates a device which spreads nerve gas through the NYC subway, killing several hundred people. Which of the following is the sensible response:

a) Demand from any and all foreign governments that any and all suspected conspirators against which you can find reasonable grounds for charges be extradicted to stand trial, and demand full cooperation from the Japanese government in aggressively investigating the involvement of the cult itself in this atrocity.
b) Do the above, and use intelligence sources to more aggressively investigate the cult. Put potentially dangerous travelers on a watch list, and notify border guards.
c) Arrest family members of Japanese persons vaguely associated with cult members, and hold them in an offshore compound for a year or so without charging them.
d) Attack Iraq.

Good luck. But no, we're not gonna actually read the answers. We're probably just gonna vote for the guy who says 'vote for me or the terrorists will get ya'. But thanks for coming out, anyway.

On to something here

Re this post, I see I'm now not the only one.

I'm on to something here.

Bush and reality

Have to say this piece pretty much hits it on the head.

"Mr. Bush is a man who will frequently tell you--and may even believe--that up is down, or square is round, when logic and all the available evidence say otherwise"

As I said a few posts back: the sensible question to ask is: which is he? Delusional, pathological liar, or clinically interesting combination of both?

Gee. This is a surprise...

Re Doubts raised on Saddam theory in 2001... umm, this is news?

No, don't get me wrong. I'm glad it's getting coverage. They lied big and that got people killed, and justice should at the very least involve this story staring at them from every newspaper box, every TV screen they pass.

Still, the story needs work. The lead's good, clarity-wise: "The Bush administration knew as early as mid-2001 that a central plank of its argument about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction was regarded by its own nuclear experts as probably untrue"... that's good, to the point.

But the headline doesn't really match the lead. People, let's cut to the chase here. I see something that cuts to the marrow of the content, lays it out, nice and clear. I'm seeing something like:

"Administration lied fat asses off over tubes"

Oh well. Mebbe in the Mirror.

Of global tests and global pariahs

So I note the brain trust (I use the term loosely) that is the Bush campaign team think they can make some political hay with Kerry's support for the notion of a 'global test' for foreign policy moves.

Let's see. The radical notion espoused here is that the US should actually worry when it can't convince trusted and long term allies to support it in its actions, and these boys think making this a campaign issue is actually gonna help their cause?

Heh.

Yeah, you guys really wanna bring this up. Sure ya do. The buncha geniuses who turned the world's sympathy following the horror of September 11 into worldwide derision when they cynically took an event on which hangs the grief of many thousands of their own countrymen as pretext to wage an entirely unrelated war really want to get into the subject of just what the international view is of their actions.

Beautiful. Poetic, even. So, what you're saying is: look, when longtime allies who've always come to our side in the past say 'erm... busy that week', it's nothing to worry about. When we go in the space of years to virtual pariah status in the international community, it's all no worries.

What you're saying is "hey, everybody, look over here! Yep, we're really so flagrantly sociopathic that we think it's perfectly normal that the rest of the planet now take us a bunch of triggerhappy nutbars (which yes, this administration is), and generally avoid us at parties. That we actually go off the deep end in indignation if someone actually suggests we pick up the phone and give the neighbours a call before blowing shit up right next to them."

It will, of course, resonate with certain more xenophobic members of their base. But, umm, guys, I expect you've already got their vote... Can't imagine this is gonna help you much beyond them.

And, of course, it's marvellously, perfectly revealing of the whole attitude of the thuggish louts that have hijacked the oval office, that they think they can get mileage out of this... revealing enough to alienate the many probably quite sensible folk among their population who might just now be thinking, gee, allies were kinda a nice thing to have in the day, weren't they...

Good luck with that, boys.

Throw the bum out

I find myself nodding in a agreement with the sentiment behind Harooon Siddiqui's piece in the Star today. Honestly, yeah, the fact that a reasonable majority of people have begun again to recognize Bush for the petulant, spoiled, insecure little frat boy he's always been is a good thing, but in the context of the train wreck his administration represents for his nation and much of the civilized world, it still seems a ridiculously feeble response.

Y'ask me, in a sane world, the twisted little demagogue would have been chased from the stage by at once angry and derisive laughter maybe halfway through the proceedings, and a slightly more sympathetic coterie of former supporters woulda checked his addledness into the nearest mental institution, better to address the central question sensible people should be asking themselves given the situation: to wit, is the man a pathological liar, or merely delusional--or perhaps, for that matter, some mildly interesting (from a clinical perspective) combination of both? Honestly, the little twit embarrasses himself and everyone present on live TV with such idiocy as claims that his administration's bloody Iraq debacle is justified because 'they attacked us', and roughly half the country's voters (okay, a little less now, it's true) are still voting for the yutz?

So I find myself nodding in agreement. But then, I'm no strategist. I suppose in a culture in which the delusions and outright deceits of the men in power have trickled so far into the popular consciousness that they aren't quite so obvious as they should be, maybe it's harder than it seems to get that job done.

But honestly. I still can't help but find myself asking, in mystification: What the hell are the citizens of the USA thinking?

He lies to them, plays them for chumps, trades on their fears, plays blatantly manipulative politics with the (quite justified) grief and outrage they were left with in the wake of the carnage of September 11, and they're still even giving this little shit the time of day?

What the hell is that? Have they no goddamned self-respect?

Y'ask me, if they've any sense whatsoever, they'll kick the little twit out, already, and kick him so hard his sorry ass never forgets it.

As I said before, he gets four votes nationwide, it's still four votes too many.