Modern Society Archives - Page 21 of 21

Taft for President

The book: The Bully Pulpit, by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

When this I book came out, I had zero interest in reading it.

Zero interest.

Teddy Roosevelt just doesn’t thrill me all that much.

H.L Mencken’s essay, “Roosevelt: An Autopsy” concludes:

Enormously sensitive and resilient, almost pathological in his appetite for activity, he made it plain to every one that the most stimulating sort of sport imaginable was to be obtained in fighting, not for mere money, but for ideas. There was no aristocratic reserve about him. He was not, in fact, an aristocrat at all, but a quite typical member of the upper bourgeoisie; his people were not patroons in New Amsterdam, but simple traders; he was himself a social pusher, and eternally tickled by the thought that he had had a Bonaparte in his cabinet. The marks of the thoroughbred were simply not there. The man was blatant, crude, overly confidential, devious, tyrannical, vainglorious, sometimes quite childish. One often observed in him a certain pathetic wistfulness, a reaching out for a grand manner that was utterly beyond him. But the sweet went with the bitter. He had all the virtues of the fat and complacent burgher. His disdain of affectation and prudery was magnificent. He hated all pretension save his own pretension. He had a sound respect for hard effort, for loyalty, for thrift, for honest achievement.

His worst defects, it seems to me, were the defects of his race and time. Aspiring to be the leader of a nation of third-rate men, he had to stoop to the common level. When he struck out for realms above that level he always came to grief: this was the “unsafe” Roosevelt, the Roosevelt who was laughed at, the Roosevelt retired suddenly to cold storage. This was the Roosevelt who, in happier times and a better place, might have been. Well, one does what one can.

There didn’t seem much else to say.

But then my wife bought me the book for Christmas, and my wife has an unerring ability to buy me books I will enjoy. So, lifting this doorstop of a book, I started in.

Less than a week later, I was done. Amazingly good book. Highly recommended.

The big surprise: it’s not actually a biography of Teddy Roosevelt—well, it is that, but not only that.

I suppose the subtitle should have tipped me off (“Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism”), but it didn’t.

I just assumed from the title (the part above the sub-part) that it was really about TR.

Even after reading Goodwin’s Preface, I assumed it was a book just about TR. Goodwin noted in her Preface: “Perhaps most surprising to me in my own process of research was the discovery that Roosevelt’s chosen successor in the White House, William Howard Taft, was a far more sympathetic, if flawed, figure than I had realized.”

Totally right—a huge surprise to me too. This book is much more than a biography of Roosevelt; it is also the biography of Taft and a half-dozen assorted journalists.

I am not sure I can even begin to convey my total shock at discovering Taft. I took a whole bunch of college level courses on 20^th Century history, and in particular 20^th century American history. I spent endless hours learning about all the 20^th century Presidents—all of them.

Well, it turns out, all of them except Taft. Taft was always that guy between Roosevelt and Wilson, that guy whose most famous act was getting stuck in his bathtub, that guy who didn’t do a thing. Nothing. Zero. I couldn’t tell you a single thing about Taft other than
1) that bathtub story,
2) that he lost to Wilson in an election in which Roosevelt also ran against him, and
3) that he later ended up on the Supreme Court.

A total zero in every single 20^th century history class I had had and every single book about the 20^thcentury I have read. Apparently Goodwin shared my same belief that Taft was a nonentity.

Yet, it turns out, he was anything but a nonentity. He should be much better known.

You know how every now and then (well, all the time) someone argues that it would be good if we could move away from all these sound-bite, hyperactive politicians and get a President who is the solid, dependable, hard-working, thoughtful, accomplished, non-self-serving, decent, humane, good person we all know would be vastly better than the politician type we get?

Well, that is Taft.

Biographically, he didn’t lack a thing you would want in a president. His personal demeanor is exactly what you would want. Everyone, everyone, knew he would be a good President.

But, you don’t have to take my word for it—or Goodwin’s. Henry Adams: “the best equipped man for the Presidency who had been suggested by either party during his lifetime.” Or, on his legislative success as President, the New York Times: “When people come to write history fifty years from now, they might give credit to the worth of a plain-minded gentleman whose head wasn’t thoroughly filled from the beginning with himself, but who really and honestly tried to enact into legislation the things he himself had written into his party’s platform.”

A good, decent and (surprisingly) effective President. Yet, he was destroyed in his reelection bid by both Wilson and TR.

Why? Taft wasn’t a politician. At all. Roosevelt was if nothing else a political animal. And Roosevelt propelled Taft into the Presidency (they were longtime friends) and then when Roosevelt could not stand having the national spotlight on someone other than himself, he destroyed Taft in an attempt to regain the spotlight.

There is a second act—Taft eventually made it onto the Supreme Court, which is where he spent his whole life wanting to be.

Taft is, in other words, a fascinating person. Utterly fascinating.

Taft and Roosevelt had careers which were inextricably intertwined. They were both fatally flawed, but their flaws were quite different.

Taft is the more sympathetic figure; he wanted to do right but ended up in over his head because everyone one around him kept calling on him to enter deeper waters.

Roosevelt’s failing were all his own.

Roosevelt would do well in the modern primary system. Taft would never have a chance of making it to the Iowa caucuses. Yet, when people ruminate about what they really want, they describe Taft.

Some people say politics today is totally different than in the old days—it turns it is exactly the same.

Pity Poor Malcolm Gladwell

Imagine you were a rather good journalist, who could write stories about people and events which were worth reading.

Interesting stories in which a fine ear for a telling anecdote helps illustrate a larger point.

Imagine you are making a decent career doing that.

Imagine you have worked your way up to writing for The New Yorker. (The New Yorker! That is a magazine Easterners of High Class all read. Californians? Well, I never understood why a magazine pretending New York was the Center of the Universe made sense. But, even still, if you are writing for The New Yorker you have arrived. If you can make it there…)

Then suddenly, you have an idea: some of the sorts of stories you are telling can be linked together to tell an even larger story.

So, you write a book—a real book, not just a magazine article—which is roughly a collection of magazine-article-like things but united by this common theme, see, and thus it is a book—a real book—and so you get royalties and fame and go on talk shows, like, you know, an expert.

It is the journalist high.

So you do that. Twice.

You publish The Tipping Point and Blink and you are famous and getting those Royalty Checks and you are on TV and people like you, they really, really like you.

You are famous! And everyone loves your books.

So you do it again. You write Outliers. And some people love it—you are famous, see, you get $45,000 for giving a speech, see, so you must write good books, right?

But, other people start noting something.

The book doesn’t really hang together as a book. The seams are showing.

It reads more like a set of stories in which you are pretending there is a common theme.

The critics even make it into your Wikipedia entry: “The New Republic called the final chapter of Outliers, ‘impervious to all forms of critical thinking’ and said that Gladwell believes ‘a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule.’” That hurts.

So you go back to the drawing board and you publish a book which really is just a collection of your articles. You don’t pretend otherwise. Nobody even knows that book exists.

So you go back to the well one more time, and you publish David and Goliath.

Sigh. I read that book. And I sighed. (See—the Sigh is right there three sentences ago.)

The subtitle of David and Goliath is Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.

The essay on David is cute—while we think of David as an underdog, truth be told, if you were in ancient times and you were betting on a mano a mano between Behemoth and Slingshot Artist, you would want to put your money on the guy who can kill the other one from a distance.

It’s a lot like a battle between a guy with a gun and a guy with a large sword. Yeah, you saw that movie too. It was funny, laugh out loud funny, because at first you think Indy is doomed, but then he pulls out a gun and you realize that the joke is that of course he would win. David and Indiana Jones are the same guy.

Like I said, cute story—though Gladwell really should have made that Indiana Jones comparison.

So, a book about underdogs! Americans love underdogs! Americans love Gladwell—see those royalty checks! So Americans will buy this book! And they did! And…it’s not very good.

Don’t get me wrong, the individual chapters are all good—if they were in a magazine I was reading, I’d like them. (Then again, since I don’t read The New Yorker, I would be unlikely to see them.) Gladwell does write well and he does have that ear for a good anecdote.

But, put all these articles together and pretend that the combination makes some larger point? Uh…hardly.

If you tried to draw a large cohesive lesson from this book, you end up in a mess really fast.

I tried. Briefly. I gave up as soon as I tried to connect two chapters and realized that no matter which two chapters I picked, the larger story was inherently contradictory. There is no larger story here. There are some good individual chapters.

Gladwell is an article writer, not a book writer. But all the money is in books. So, he will undoubtedly keep trying.

And the book market being what it is, it will be interesting to see how long before everyone notices that this here Emperor has No Clothes. If you want to pay $45,000 to hear Gladwell give a talk, be my guest. He probably even gives a really good talk.

But the strange part—the reason he gets these large checks is that everyone assumes he is writing books on a common theme, but he is really publishing collections of magazine articles. And people who publish collections of magazine articles aren’t nearly as famous.

So, this is why you should pity Malcolm Gladwell. Well, pity him as he is on the way to the bank cashing his checks…but that is beside the point. Pity him. Sooner or later, the game may end.

In the meantime, you should enjoy his books—just don’t be fooled into thinking that there is a larger point than is contained in the individual chapters.

Wait a Minute, Mr Postman

Will the US Postal Service survive for another 20 years? Should it?

Mail fascinates me. I have no idea why.

(Then again, I have no idea why I am fascinated by 90% of the things which fascinate me.)

It’s not that I like sending physical letters; I don’t. I have converted every bill I can to electronic payment. And it’s not that I get a lot of mail I like to receive. My Wall Street Journal is delivered by the USPS, but that is just an oddity. I get a few magazines once a month. An occasional letter; very occasional. Yet, every day when I get home, I wander down to the mailbox to get the mail and somehow this doesn’t seem like a tedious chore.

These ruminations are prompted by Bradbury’s “The Great Wide World Over There” all about an illiterate woman living in the middle of nowhere who is insanely excited and fascinated by getting mail. (Pretend there is a story surrounding that description—there isn’t, but it will make you feel better if you imagine there is a story.)

The idea of getting mail is exciting; but actually getting mail is rarely exciting. Why the disconnect?

Now e-mail, I like. Quick, efficient, easy. I understand why I like e-mail.

All of which prompts me to wonder: how much of the National Tolerance with US Postal Service is pure nostalgia? Growing up in California, I was mesmerized by the idea that “Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail” would ever stop The Mailman. I believed that. Then reality came crashing down on me after I moved to New England and mail delivery was cancelled due to a blizzard. Apparently Eastern mailmen are not as reliable as California mailmen. Either that or the saying…just wasn’t true.

But, as a business concern, the postal service is a mammoth joke. What kind of business promises to deliver letters to every single address six days a week for under 50 cents per letter? How does this make sense? Think about all the mail delivered on any given day. Now ask: if all of that mail had been delivered one day later, how much damage would be done? I can only remember once receiving a piece of mail which would have caused harm if I had not received it until the next day—we received our Visas for India the day before departing for India. Surely, there is time-sensitive business mail—but would anyone, anyone at all, send a time sensitive piece of mail via regular delivery by the US Postal Service? Next Day Mail. Cheap, guaranteed delivery the next day. Who wouldn’t use that for something which needed immediate delivery (besides the Indian Embassy, of course)?

Now if the Postal Service were to drop guaranteed delivery to every address from every day to every other day, that would be a rather dramatic cutting of costs—you would need only half the mailmen. (Does anyone call them mailmen anymore? I thought not.) A pretty obvious cost cutting measure, yet I have never seen it mentioned. Instead, they periodically talk about cutting Saturday delivery—and one would think not receiving mail on Saturday is a sign of the Apocalypse from the political outcry. The same goes for stamps—where did we get the idea that the price of mailing a letter should be below the cost of mailing a letter?

We treat the US Postal Service like a natural monopoly, and honestly, it probably is a natural monopoly. I think it is easy to make the case that the US Postal Service is also a Public Good. So, unlike the libertarian types, I am not fired up about abolishing the whole enterprise. Yet, even if I am right about the Public Good nature of the whole enterprise, I cannot see any reason for the size of the operation. Having the ability to send relatively cheap letters to anyone in the country is a good thing, but is there any reason that daily, instead of, say, weekly, delivery of mail is a public good? This is the sort of discussion we should be having, but strangely, we are not.

None of which explains why I like the idea of mail so much. I know my feelings are not universal. My wfe hates the mail—she viscerally loathes going to the Post Office and she would never remember to go collect the mail every day. And my kids? I am not sure they even know how the mail system works. I suspect there are quite a few people under the age of 25 who literally have no idea how to send a letter through the US Postal Service.

So, 20 years from now will daily physical mail delivery still exist? I am beginning to doubt it.

On Technological Stagnation

“No city, no town, no community of more than one thousand people or two hundred buildings to the square mile shall be built or permitted to exist anywhere in the United States of America.”

Constitution of the United States, Thirtieth Amendment.

Thus begins Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow, included in the Library of America’s American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels: 1953-1956.

The first thing to note about this novel is that it does cause one to wonder (once again) about the definition of Science Fiction. When does a book deserve to be included in the genre? The only futuristic aspect of this novel is that the world has been decimated by nuclear war. Otherwise, no technological advance. Indeed, there is very little of what would traditionally be considered science; most of the book takes place in a world which could be considered pre-scientific.

The closest we come to science is a discussion on the merits of nuclear power—and therein lies the interesting place of departure for reflection.

Post-nuclear war, the remaining citizens of the United States blamed cities for the war, and vowed henceforth to live in the Amish manner. No electricity, steam engines or anything of the sort. Horses and buggies and small communities everywhere.

Our hero tires of this life, wanders off to find the rebellious, perhaps mythic, city in which they still use advanced technology. Upon finding it, well, they still live in a ridiculously primitive manner, but hey, they have a functioning nuclear power plant.

The discovery terrifies our hero (Nuclear Weapons = Bad; Nuclear Power = Nuclear Weapons = Bad). At which point we spend a small amount of time realizing maybe nuclear power isn’t so bad after all. At which point, the realization dawns: the Reader no longer cares at all about this novel.

Here we have a curious “Science Fiction” novel; when we are reading about people who have reverted to Olden Times in the aftermath of a nuclear war, there is something at least minimally interesting. When we find the town using nuclear power, the novel just dies.

One virtue of the novel: it shows how little the opponents of nuclear power have evolved in the last 60 years. They sound just like the opponents of nuclear power in this novel.

All of this got me wondering (shocking, to be sure), not about nuclear power (which, Truth be Told, I like—clean, safe, plentiful power), but about economic progress.

It is one of those facts which often surprises students when I mention it, but the age we live in when people expect rapid technological advances not just in their lifetime, but in the next decade, is a historical anomaly. For most of human history, technological advance was very slow.

Yes, things were more advanced in 1500 than in 500. But compare the shock of taking someone from the year 500 and putting them in a town in 1500 to the shock of taking someone from the year 1920 and putting them in a town in the year 2019. It’s not even close. Our current world would be overwhelming to someone from 1920. Literally overwhelming. And mostly unrecognizable.

Why do we prefer the Modern world to the Older world. Why is it obvious to us that people would be happier in the modern world than they would in a world in which the most advanced technology is something which predates the steam engine?

Yes, I have a hard time imagining going back to an earlier technological age—and it isn’t terribly hard to figure out why. (Think: no internet.)

But, now go the other way. Imagine the current state of technology would be frozen for the rest of your life. Nothing which exists now would go away. Would you be content with that state of affairs? I wouldn’t. I’d be sad about the cessation of technological advance, despite the fact that I have absolutely no idea what technological advance will make me happier in 20 years.

Two decades ago, I never imagined I would ever have anything like the iPhone XR. Now that it exists, why do I think that if it was still the summit of technology in 20 years, we would be really missing out on something?

Again, the curious thing to me is not that I think this way. It is that for most of human history, nobody thought this way. Does the rapid pace of technological innovation breed a hunger for itself?

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The New Class Conflict

Every now and then a book comes along which while not really saying anything you didn’t know already, rearranges all those bits of knowledge into a new, and fairly interesting, pattern.

Joel Kotkin, The New Class Conflict is such a book.

Here are the bits of information:

1. There is a growing divide in American society (See Charles Murray’s Coming Apart for the best description of this divide.) The divide is not solely income based. The divide is also a cultural divide.

2. There is a Dominant View among the opinion-makers of society (Academia/media) (see any college campus for a good example)

3. There is a lot of new wealth in the Silicon Valley, Seattle and other Tech hubs.

4. There is a coming generational storm in which the baby Boomers in their retirement are going to divert a lot of resources away from the young to the retired (see Social Security)

5. There are imploding cities and sprawling suburbs. (See Detroit and All sorts of second-tier cities in the US)

Now, rearrange all that stuff.

Kotkin argues that the New Divide in America is:

1. On one side there is the Clerisy (the academy and media and government) and the Tech Oligarchy (the nouveau riche of the Silicon Age). These two have partnered together to impose a new order on society. The new oligarchs are using their money to fund the visions of the Clerisy. In return, the Clerisy vehemently argue against “the Rich” but somehow the tech Oligarchs always get a pass when talking about the Rich. Generic Wall Street Banker is bad; but Bill Gates is good. But, then in a subtle shift, the Clerisy also props up the New York Bankers.

2. On the other side is The Yeomanry. This is everyone else. Al those people who, you know, work for a living. They want a steady job and enough income to buy a house in the suburbs.

The battle is most vivid in the Environmental debate. On the one side are the Clerisy and their financial backers in the Tech Oligarchy who want to impose a particular vision on society—no commuting, small houses. The Clerisy and tech Oligarchs don’t like the yeomanry. The yeomanry does not fit their vision of the new society. They want to pack people into those small living spaces in Big cities and keep them quiet. Think Bread and Circuses.

The Yeomanry are constantly rebelling, but it is hard because the new ruling classes are constantly putting barriers in the way of that steady job in the suburbs. So, the Keystone Pipeline or fracking become examples of the divide. On the one side are the Clerisy and tech Oligarchs who oppose such things. On the other side are the Yeomanry who support such things because it will give them lots of jobs and low energy prices and allow them to lead the lives they want to lead.

Meanwhile, the youth are growing up and if those youth do not end up in the clerisy or the tech oligarchy, where exactly will they go? Not much hope there. The Middle class is drying up.

Like I said, not much new here, but I had never really put things together in this way—I had, for example, never really thought about the Silicon Valley-Clerisy connections before, but Kotkin may be right—they are aligned.

So, where is the way out? On this, Kotkin is right—the solution here is economic growth. Without economic growth, there is no way out. The Clerisy does not like Economic growth.

But, how to get economic growth? Kotkin has some fantasies of a return to a small-scale existence. Think Russell Kirk or Wendell Berry, but with a growing, dynamic economy. People spread out across the country, all self-employed, running their own little businesses, being empowered to lead fulfilling lives, setting their kids up to be richer than their parents. It is a pretty picture in its way. It is also nearly impossible to imagine it happening.

Has Kotkin tried to start a small business in modern day America? Sure, it sounds nice and all. But, it is a giant headache. I know. My wife has her own small business. She grows plants and sells them. She does garden consulting. The amount of paperwork and regulations to do something like that are stunning. In the years she has done this, I have never ceased to be amazed at all the little petty tyrannies thrown up by the government which make it just that much harder to run a small-scale business.

Take the income tax alone. I have a PhD in economics, but figuring out the income tax code is too complicated to be worth my time. Long ago, I gave up trying to do our taxes by hand, so I bought TurboTax every year. That was ridiculous. But, then add a new business, and now we hire an accountant every year just to pay our own income taxes. That’s crazy. Just plain crazy. And this is, let me remind you a small business.

If my wife wanted do hire someone to help her out, the paperwork goes up to a whole new level. If she wanted to hire some 17 year old kid at $15/hour to help out on Saturdays from April through July, the amount of extra paperwork involved would mean hiring a bookkeeper.

Moreover, she can sell tomato plants. But, if she were to also sell, you know, tomatoes—yep, whole new levels of paperwork. She sells perennials (those are the ones that live for more than a year (yeah, you probably knew that)), but if she sells “woody” perennials, then, yep, whole new levels of paperwork.

We have a farm stand on our property—self-serve, stop by, get the plants, put the money in the box. But, because we have a farm stand and a greenhouse, we had to add a farm policy to our homeowner’s insurance—and you guessed it, whole new type of insurance company—and even better, there is exactly one farm insurance company licensed to operate in the state of Massachusetts, so we get to pay monopoly rates.

And, we added a shed to store some pots. It had to be on a temporary foundation or else, you guessed it, we would have had to go through whole new levels of paperwork to get a building permit in order to add a shed to store pots.

And…well, you get the point. I could go on like this for hours. And this is a small business.

Kotkin thinks lots of people can set up small businesses—he clearly hasn’t done the paperwork for one. The Clerisy has already stamped out that route to self-sufficiency.

So, Kotkin may be onto something in the diagnosis here—the tech oligarchs and clerisy are operating in tandem to restructure American Society in their own image. But, I am afraid his solution isn’t much of a solution.

Corporations, Marxists, and the Academy

Why Teach? An interesting question, that.

Mark Edmundson asks that: Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education.

In a curious way, this was a rather thought-provoking book. It’s a collection of essays which, truth be told, meander all over the place, united only by the fact that they have something to do with education.

The book is best described as a cri de coeur. Edmundson looks out and sees a sterile corporatized (a favorite adjective of the Academic Left) educational system which has moved well past taking root and is starting to flower, bear seeds, and replicate itself. That college is anathema to Edmundson. He is a prophet standing on the hill lamenting and denouncing and calling his people to repentance. Edmundson is Jeremiah.

What does Edmundson want? An education that matters, that rips right into the souls of the students and shakes them out of complacency into deep reflections about things that truly matter. He wants faculty who don’t want to play the game of the modern college, who eschew the trendy pedagogical imperatives of the day. He wants faculty who are most certainly not cool, who do not try to meet students where they are but force students to move to a better higher place. He wants students to pause in their race to graduation and decide to learn something deep and meaningful. Get rid of all that technological floor show, no multimedia spectacles, no simplifying the curriculum, no making everything easy. Hard, meaningful work. Studying important timeless things in timeless ways. Professor, student, Great Book. That is all you need.

Obviously, I agree with Edmundson. He is the type of professor who often walks up to me after a faculty meeting and says things like “Wow. Even though I totally disagree with your politics, I really agree with you about education.” I don’t know why liberal faculty are always surprised that a conservative academic preaches the value of Tradition in Education. I suspect it is because they think that the enemy of Education, properly conceived, is that “Corporatization” thing, and “Conservatives like Corporate America,” so Conservatives must hate Great Books. It is strange how narrow minded modern liberal professors can be.

By the way, this is not just some gratuitous swipe at Edmundson. He fits the type I have met all too often. For example: “My overall point is this: It’s not that a left-wing professorial coup has taken over the university. It’s that at American universities, left-liberal politics have collided with the ethos of consumerism. The consumer ethos is winning.” So typical.

In this book Edmundson spends many, many pages showing that the whole neo-Marxist-feminist-multiculturalist-genderindentityist crowd have destroyed the reading, real reading, of Great Books. That new crowd has turned every book into a mirror, simply reflecting back the author’s prejudices. From the argument in Edmundson’s book it is obvious that the left-wing professoriate has joined forces with the consumer culture to destroy the type of education Edmundson values.

Yet, Edmundson must periodically assert his left-wing credentials by giving the very people he is criticizing a pass. It is really quite sad. When people like me note how the reading of Great Books has been destroyed, we are just called Neanderthals. Edmundson should just embrace his inner Neanderthal.

The problem with the modem college is not some sort of corporate takeover by evil outside administrators. The problem is that the faculty have given up the battle to educate. Providing an education is hard work.

One of the overlooked things about the modern academy is: many (most?) faculty are really not interested in working hard at educating. They get offended when you say this, by the way. But, if you walk onto campus in the first week of January or sometime in the middle of the summer, I would suspect that far less than 20% of my colleagues are in the office.

Similarly, when I hear my colleagues wax poetic about all those new innovative pedagogical tools, the thing that is left unsaid is this: if you use these new tools, then you won’t have to do so much work. Show videos in class? Don’t have to prepare a lecture. Encourage students to get together in groups to work on problems together in class? No lecture. Flip the classroom so students watch lectures on-line and then come to the class to work on problems? What do you know? Less lecturing.

Then there are all the pedagogical innovations that simply make less work for the students—and less work for the students means—you guessed it—less work for the professor. Fewer readings for students? Less reading for the professor.

Saying such things does not exactly make you popular with the crowd. Edmundson almost says such things. After reading the book, I doubt he disagrees with those things at all, but he never quite gets around to saying them. He may be Jeremiah, but he is a kinder, gentler Jeremiah.