Gorsuch is his man.

I see that Mr trump selected his nominee to join the supremes tonight. (Let me guess, white and male, right?) Someone should tell Mr trump that he is taking this Apprentice reality show thing a bit too far. But I get it, he had to change the headlines because he has been getting killed over the past few news cycles. Move up that pick and give people something else to talk about.

Well played Mr Bannon; well played.

Anyway, folks in some quarters are raving about what a bright and great conservative mind Neil Gorsuch  has. But you know who else had a brilliant mind? Josef Mengele, so I am not sure what that  means if you don't use your "great" mind to do good and not evil.

I need you liberals to understand, that in many respects this man is to the right of Scalia if you can imagine that. He is only 49, so the court is going to be leaning right for a long time to come. But what might be even more problematic, is that trump has over 100 federal court appointments still to come, and he has vowed to fundamentally change these courts as we know them . These are lifetime appointments, so Herr trump will be putting his stamp on the American judiciary and there is nothing any of you well meaning liberals can do about it.

The joke in liberal circles is that trump shouldn't be allowed to pick a Supreme Court Justice in the last year of his presidency, but the truth is, trump isn't going anywhere for at least four more years. And even if democratic senators try to block this pick, there is a little nugget called the nuclear option which will make it damn near impossible to do that. The republicans in the senate only need 51 votes to push this nomination through.

It's sad, but that's where we are.

"The outrageous obstruction of Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court — the 10-month-long stonewall by Senate Republicans that not only stymied the high court’s ability to do its job but effectively stole the nomination of a new justice from President Obama — is now delivering its rewards to the cynical politicians who carried it out.

Having denied Garland even a committee hearing from the time of his nomination in March until Obama was safely out of office, the GOP-controlled Senate is now smugly offering that opening to President Trump to fill. The new president, who has repeatedly promised to select a new justice in the mold of the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, has said he will announce his nominee Tuesday evening.

It’s hard to express how head-shakingly unfair this is. Trump will now have an opportunity to affect the balance of the increasingly polarized court for the next 30 or 40 years — influencing rulings on abortion, the rights of gay and transgender people, free speech, corporate and union spending on elections, labor issues, the separation of church and state, the ubiquity of guns, criminal justice reform and endless other hot button subjects.

But Trump never should have been handed this opportunity. The seat was Obama’s to fill subject to Senate “advice and consent,” and he fulfilled his constitutional responsibility in good faith, only to be kneecapped by a body that would neither advise nor consent but merely gummed up the machinery in a transparent effort to preserve the court’s conservative majority. The GOP’s feeble justification for its behavior — that an appointment made by a duly elected president was somehow illegitimate because he had only 10 months remaining in office — was believed by no one." [Source]

The people who support Mr trump believe it, and for now, that's all they need.

*Pic from twitter.com






 

Hatred in the White House.

Because of the shooting today in Canada, where some Canadian Dylann Roof wannabe acted out his wicked and sick hatred towards members of another religion, the following article by Ben Norton should be required reading for all those who are interested in knowing what is going on in the trump White House.

"Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s right-hand man, made what was essentially a call for a Christian holy war in a speech in a international conference only a few years ago.

Bannon, chief strategist and senior counselor to Trump, is notorious for his extreme right-wing views. He previously served as the CEO for the far-right president’s campaign, and now sits on the National Security Council.

In remarks to a 2014 conference at the Vatican, Bannon warned his Christian audience, “We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict.”

“We are in an outright war against jihadists, Islam, Islamic fascism,” Bannon continued. He likewise condemned “the immense secularization of the West” and the increasing secularism among millennials.

Bannon stressed that “the people in this room, and the people in the Church” must “bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the Church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting that will literally eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000 and 2,500 years.”

In his speech, Bannon articulated a view of the world as a constant conflict between the capitalist “Judeo-Christian West,” which is a benevolent force of “enlightenment,” and the malevolent forces of socialism, atheism, and Islam.

Trump’s chief strategist, who will now play a crucial role in crafting U.S. foreign policy and sit in on meetings of the National Security Council Principals Committee, has been described even by hard-line conservatives as an extremist.

Ultra-right-wing pundit Glenn Beck compared Bannon to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, a close ally of Adolf Hitler, and said the Trump campaign was “grooming Brownshirts,” in reference to Nazi paramilitaries. According to Beck, Bannon is “quite possibly the most dangerous guy in all of American politics.”

Republican strategist John Weaver, who worked on Republican John Kasich’s 2016 presidential campaign, likewise warned that, with Bannon as Trump’s chief strategist, “The racist, fascist extreme right is represented footsteps from the Oval Office.” (The Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party praised Trump for appointing Bannon to his top positions.)

Bannon made these holy war remarks in a speech — which has previously been reported on by BuzzFeed — at the 2014 International Conference on Human Dignity, the third annual meeting organized by the Rome-based Christian organization Dignitatis Humanae Institute.

The Dignitatis Humanae Institute is a religious group that advocates for “the active participation of the Christian faith in the public square.” It promotes what it calls “authentic human dignity” by, in its words, “supporting Christians in public life, assisting them in presenting effective and coherent responses to increasing efforts to silence the Christian voice in the public square.”

A glowing endorsement from Bannon is conspicuously featured at the top of the website, in which President Trump’s right-hand man calls the group’s founder Benjamin Harnwell “the smartest guy in Rome” and “a very tough guy.
”
The religious organization uploaded footage of Bannon’s speech at its 2014 conference to YouTube. The video had only a few thousand views at the time of the publication of this article.

advertisement

When he made his remarks, Bannon served as chairman of the far-right media company Breitbart, which is infamous for publishing racist and sexist material. Bannon has identified Breitbart as “the platform for the alt-right,” a popular euphemism for the growing white supremacist, neo-fascist movement in the U.S. and Europe.

In a guide Breitbart published on the alt-right, it noted that the movement was founded by neo-fascist leader Richard Spencer, who declared “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” at a white supremacist conference in November, referencing the Nazi slogan “Sieg heil.”
Bannon kicked off his 2014 speech warning that “the world, and particularly the Judeo-Christian West, is in a crisis.”

“It is really the organizing principle of how we built Breitbart News to really be a platform to bring news and information to people throughout the world — principally in the West, but we’re expanding internationally — to let people understand the depths of this crisis,” he explained.

Bannon noted that, exactly 100 years before his speech, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, in a shot heard round the world that prefaced World War I. This war heralded in the bloodiest century of human history.

The 20th century, Bannon argued, constituted a kind of second Dark Age. He described its conflict as “the Judeo-Christian West versus atheism............Bannon spoke of the increasing secularism among young people in the West as a dangerous problem. “The overwhelming drive of popular culture is to absolutely secularize this rising generation,” he lamented.

The Breitbart head also alarmed his Christian audience about the wave of extremist Islamism. “We’re now I believe at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism,” he said. “And this war is I think metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.” [Source]

This man is the president's right hand man when it comes to our security.

Let that all sink in for a minute, and when it does, go to whatever church you choose to belong to and pray.

*Pic from nbcnews.com

A disguised Muslim ban goes wrong.

Herbie Hancock was recalling a story about the great Miles Davis when he just started playing in his band. Not wanting to play the wrong note, he asked Davis what he should play. According to Hancock the response was classic. Davis looked at him and said, "The piano motherfucker".

I suspect that if trump--- or someone in his administration---- were to ask someone how to be president, the simple answer would be, to stay with my metaphor,  just play the damn piano.

All these Executive Orders just to show his loyal followers that he is not Obama (even though he has followed some of Obama's word for word) is not working out so well.

Trump, in the first few days of his presidency, has been trying to  play every damn instrument in the band, and, instead of mastering just one, he has been making a mess of every instrument that he has touched.

The latest disaster for team trump, is his racist and possibly illegal ban on travelers from certain countries with populations that he considers a threat. It's actually a Muslim ban but he can't say it because that would be unconstitutional.

Needless to say that it has been an unmitigated disaster. 

I am not sure what made him think that this would be a good idea, although I think that moving the white supremacist in his inner circle to  his National Security Council might have had something to do with it.

Mr Bannon, I am sure, has his own ideas about who should be let into this country, and trust me, it has nothing to do with our safety. 

I have been watching trump's minions appear on television all day while they try to defend him, and needless to say that it has not been going well. This might be because it's hard to defend something that is morally indefensible.

The trump administration is doing what you would suspect is the next step in what could be a short march to totalitarianism. They are upset with the free press, and they want journalists fired if they disagree with him.  The above mentioned Bannon actually said that the press should keeps its mouth shut.

Through all this, Herr trump, (to stay with my analogy) should be working on his piano skills, but instead he was watching Finding Dory  and tweeting about World War III today, and that is not a very presidential thing to do when the country is going through a crisis.

"Senators should focus their energies on ISIS, illegal immigration and border security instead of always looking to start World War III."

No Führer, the person "looking to start World War III" might be you.

*Pic from huffingtonpost.com














 

CAPTION SATURDAY.

*

I need a caption for this pic.

Example: Hair Club For Men commercial , Take 2


*Pic from twitter.com

OPEN THREAD FRIDAY.

It's open thread Friday. Let me know what's on your mind.

I am thinking that this has been a very tempestuous week for Herr trump and his men, and I honestly don't know how much more of this clown the country can take.

Should the press just "shut up" and not report on the lies? Stephen Bannon thinks so.

"Negative motivation" is a tool used by preachers, politicians, and even us lawyers at times.

It's motivating by fear. "If you don't repent you will burn in hell". Or, "If you don't vote for me the other guy is going to make your life miserable".

Donald trump uses this tactic brilliantly to keep his minions and followers in line: "America is going to hell in a hand basket. It's in terrible shape, and if you don't let me do what I want, things are only going to get worse." 

He was at it again today while visiting us here in Philly.

" President Trump said Thursday that Philadelphia's murder rate has been "steady, I mean, just terribly increasing.

 By almost any interpretation, he's wrong.

First, let's look at his full quote:

'"Right now, too many families don’t feel secure. Just look at the 30 largest cities. In the last year alone, the murder rate has increased by an estimated 14 percent. Here in Philadelphia, the murder rate has been steady, I mean, just terribly increasing.”'

The most accurate interpretation of his remarks about Philadelphia would be to say the murder rate last year was steady. That is correct: In 2015, the murder rate was about 17.86 per 100,000 residents, according to a calculation using police statistics and census data. In 2016, it was about 17.41 per 100,000 residents.

But after saying "steady" Trump added, "I mean, just terribly increasing," which is incorrect. It's true that 2015 and 2016 had higher murder rates than 2013 and 2014. But the earlier two years had the lowest murder rates the city had seen in decades: " [Source]

The Philadelphia Inquirer is being kind. He knows that he is "wrong"; he flat out lied.

But that's how trump rolls, he just lies for lying sake. He can't help himself. It's one lie after another. Lying has become the new normal for an American president. Facts be dammed, we have "alternative facts" to give you.

Today trump was in Philly, and there were thousands and thousands of protesters in the streets. He can't lie to me about that, I saw it with my own eyes. But we all now how obsessed he is with crowds. (Ordering a government agency to find proof to back up a  lie is beyond the pale.) Soon he will go on some national cable show and try to convince us that there were no protests in Philly today. And the scary thing is that some people will believe him.

Is it any wonder, then, that his number two guy does not want the press to report anything and just "keep its mouth shut".  

Hopefully no one in the Fifth Estate is listening, and everyone will just keep writing and talking.

Lies and weather reports.

I tweeted about this earlier. Do you remember the days when we called George W. Bush a Nazi and we were speaking metaphorically? It was just hyperbole to drive home a point: That the man was surrounded by Neocons who had no problems acting out and playing deadly war games.

Of course, looking back, we didn't think that W was really a Nazi, or, for that matter, that he had the heart of one.

How times have changed. This guy....*shakes head*

Anyway, I bet a lot of you progressives would take W these days over what we currently have in the White House.

I know that  W and his band of Neocons had a lot of issues, but I don't remember them being blatant liars like the crew that we have in charge now.

For instance, Baghdad Sean recently came to the defense of Kellyanne Goebbels  by declaring that "alternative facts" are kind of like conflicting weather reports.  (Let that sink in for a minute.)

" Sean Spicer has shed some light on the concept of "alternative facts," a widely panned concept introduced by his colleague Kellyanne Conway to defend his seemingly inaccurate inauguration attendance numbers.

According to the White House press secretary, his use of "alternative facts" is much ado about nothing. He says it's similar to a meteorologist who incorrectly predicts the weather.

"The press was trying to make it seem like we were ignoring the facts," Spicer told Fox News' Sean Hannity during an interview that aired Tuesday night. "The facts are, sometimes when you look at a situation, in the same way that you can look at a weather report. One weather report comes out and says it's going to be cloudy, and another says it's going to be light rain. No one lied to you. It just means you interpreted the data in a way that you felt got you to a conclusion." 

Ahhhm, no it doesn't, Sean To stay with the weatherman analogy, "alternative facts" is like the weatherman telling you that it's Sunday when you know it's Monday. It's just a lie.

But this is kind of how this president gets down: he lies a lot.

Check out this little anecdote: 

"On Monday, President Trump gathered House and Senate leaders in the State Dining Room for a get-to-know-you reception, served them tiny meatballs and pigs-in-a-blanket, and quickly launched into a story meant to illustrate what he believes to be rampant, unchecked voter fraud.

Mr. Trump kicked off the meeting, participants said, by retelling his debunked claim that he would have won the popular vote if not for the three million to five million ballots cast by “illegals.” He followed it up with a Twitter post early Wednesday calling for a major investigation into voter fraud.

When one of the Democrats protested, Mr. Trump said he was told a story by “the very famous golfer, Bernhard Langer,” whom he described as a friend, according to three staff members who were in the room for the meeting.

In the emerging Trump era, the story was a memorable example, for the legislators and the country, of how an off-the-cuff yarn — unverifiable and of confusing origin — became a prime policy mover for a president whose fact-gathering owes more to the oral tradition than the written word.

The three witnesses recall the story this way: Mr. Langer, a 59-year-old native of Bavaria, Germany — a winner of the Masters twice and of more than 100 events on major professional golf tours around the world — was standing in line at a polling place near his home in Florida on Election Day, the president explained, when an official informed Mr. Langer he would not be able to vote.

Ahead of and behind Mr. Langer were voters who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote, Mr. Trump said, according to the staff members — but they were nonetheless permitted to cast provisional ballots. The president threw out the names of Latin American countries that the voters might have come from.

Mr. Langer, whom he described as a supporter, left feeling frustrated, according to a version of events later contradicted by a White House official.

The anecdote, the aides said, was greeted with silence, and Mr. Trump was prodded to change the subject by Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, and Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.

Just one problem: Mr. Langer, who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., is a German citizen with permanent residence status in the United States who is, by law, barred from voting, according to Mr. Langer’s daughter Christina.

“He is a citizen of Germany,” she said, when reached on her father’s cellphone. “He is not a friend of President Trump’s, and I don’t know why he would talk about him.”

She said her father was “very busy” and would not be able to answer any questions.

But a senior White House staff member, who was not at the Monday reception but has heard Mr. Trump tell the story, said Mr. Langer saw Mr. Trump in Florida during the Thanksgiving break and told him the story of a friend of Mr. Langer’s who had been blocked from voting." [Source]

In other words, he lied again.  

*Pic from thedailybeast.com

Lie merchants.

I think that we can all agree by now that the current American president is clinically insane.

To tell falsehoods one after another without even giving it a second thought cannot be normal.

The man has told one lie after another since becoming president, much to the shock and surprise of the American news media. And many of them are having a hard time believing how incredibly thin his skin is.   That. my friends, is not a good trait for an American president to have, because if he thinks things are bad now, just wait until he is faced with a real crisis.

Anyway, I say serve them (the press) right. When this man was lying about president Obama for the last seven years, where were they? When he told lie after lie on the campaign trail they acted as if it was normal, and that it was just Donald being Donald. Now that he is president they expect this seventy year old man to all of a sudden change who he is? Not. Going. To. Happen.

Donald's latest whopper (because he just can't help himself) is the one he told a bunch of lawmakers who were visiting him in his newly gold minted digs in the white house. (The man's office decor is gold; he wears neckties that are way too long; and he treats his wife like she is there to serve him. Proof positive that he represents the very worst of us males.) He just can't let this whole popular vote thing go, so he had to let them know, in no uncertain terms, that millions of American voters committed voter fraud, and this is why he lost the popular vote by over three million people. He keeps blatantly lying about this, in spite of the fact that it has been proven over and over again to be false.

The scary thing about trump and his "alternative facts" crew, is that many of their supporters still choose to believe the bull s**t that they peddle on a daily basis.  They have all bought in, and to jump off the trump train now would be too much for them to handle.

The white house has now "doubled down" on this voter fraud nonsense, and now that they have the power to feed into the lies created by their alternative universe, they actually have the power to investigate this non-issue. And they have actually declared that they might in fact have an investigation regarding this issue.

 “He’s stated his concerns about voter fraud and people voting illegally during the campaign, and he continues to maintain that belief based on studies and evidence that people have presented to him,” Spicer said.

No credible study supports Trump’s claim, and the only study Spicer cited does not support the president on the issue. " 

What no one is talking about is the possible nefarious method to the president's madness: Push this false narrative long and hard enough, and justify more voter suppression of the folks who have traditionally been disenfranchised.

Maybe the man is not as insane as I first thought. Maybe he is just an evil person. Or, sadly, maybe he is a little bit of both.

*Pic from thedailybeast.com

Day three.

I'm off tonight, field hands.

No folks, Mr. Thin Skin did not have me arrested. Yet. 


I suspect, though,  that if he does start rounding up bloggers, writers, and activists; "Baghdad Sean Spicer" will be out in front of the American people to tell us yet another lie.

"Nasty women" versus the " liar- in- chief. "

I suppose that if I happened to be standing in Comrade trump's shoes I would be upset as well. I mean the day after his coronation  he had to watch over 4 million people (mostly women) all over the world take to the streets to denounce his presidency and what it stood for.

Of course it didn't not take long for Mr. Thin Skin to bite. In what was an unprecedented move, he sent out his press secretary to denounce a tweet from a New York Times reporter which was retweeted by some news outlets. His problem with it wasn't that it undermined national security, or that it might trouble our economic standing in the world, his problem with it was that it dd not put him in a better light. To him, it diminished the size of the crowds of his inauguration and thus put a little shade on what should have been his shining moment.  By showing actual pictures to prove that there were less people at his inauguration than Obama's in 2009,  the reporter drew the ire of Herr trump, who spent the rest of the day pouting and using the bully pulpit to put down the apparent diss.

There he was at the CIA headquarters, standing in front of a wall that serves as a memorial to all the people who died while serving their country in covert operations all over the world, and all he could do was speak about himself in the third person, and brag, once again, about how popular he was and how evil the press was being to him. That was a sickening display of self-aggrandizement. Throw in the fact that he told not one, but two blatant lies in doing so, and you can see why all those people took to the streets yesterday to protest his presidency.  

If you were living in Germany in 1933,  this has to all seem so familiar to you. Hitler promised not to threaten the Reichstag,  the German President, the Churches and the States, and, as a result, he was granted emergency powers via the enabling act. We all see now how that turned out.

He did it all by de-legitimizing the press, and mobilizing the German people into a nationalistic fervor, And he did it with slick propaganda  (I see you Kellyanne Goebbels) , and well meaning Germans who sat on the sidelines until it was too late.  

“I can only say that I am with you 1,000 percent. And the reason you’re my first stop—” Trump said before dramatically changing direction, “— is that as you know I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth. Right? And they sort of made it sound like I have this feud with the intelligence community.” 

That's a lie! 

"Trump drew laughs from the crowd when he described reporters as "the most dishonest human beings" and claimed he'd drawn as many as 1.5 million people to his inauguration despite official estimates closer to 200,000 and repeated images of empty standing spaces. A few miles away, at the White House, Trump aides were soon setting up pictures of the crowd inside the press briefing room."

Another lie!

If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” ~Hitler~

At least he has the "frequency" part down pat.

Who says that trump doesn't read? I bet he has a copy of Mein Kampf on that big gold desk of his.


*Pic from theatlanctic.com


 

CAPTION SATURDAY.

I need a caption for this pic.

For example: "Where is everybody?" 

*Pic from usatoday.com

OPEN THREAD THURSDAY.

This is open thread Thursday y'all, tell me what's on your mind.

Oh, and don't forget to set your clock back 50 years tonight.

Holla.

Explaining Toni Morrison as she explains Donald trump.

The Field Negro education series continues.

The following article was written by Brianna Cox for Atlanta Black Star :

"Pulitzer prize-winning and prolific author Toni Morrison has penned an important essay in response to Donald Trump being elected president — as well as to the vile beliefs and violent actions of his supporters — in an effort to explain exactly why he won in the first place.

In her essay, “Mourning for Whiteness,” which was published in The New Yorker, Morrison’s central thesis is simple: Trump won because privileged white people, white men especially, feel threatened by a “rapidly” diversifying United States of America.

“Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color,” she begins.

She continues: “Under slave laws, the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in America today, post-civil rights legislation, white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are ‘people of color’ everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening.”

Morrison goes on to explain that white people, whether consciously or subconsciously, fear Black people and otherwise non-white people fighting for and obtaining equality, as this ultimately means losing their superiority. Equality for all is a loss for white people.

Because of this fear, white Americans, “[i]n order to limit the possibility of this untenable change and restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white Americans are sacrificing themselves. They have begun to do things they clearly don’t really want to be doing,” Morrison writes. “[T]hey are (1) abandoning their sense of human dignity and (2) risking the appearance of cowardice.”

The cowardice that Morrison writes of is specifically the racism that white Americans allow — and commit — every day: “Much as they may hate their behavior, and know full well how craven it is, they are willing to kill small children attending Sunday school and slaughter churchgoers who invite a white boy to pray. Embarrassing as the obvious display of cowardice must be, they are willing to set fire to churches and to start firing in them while the members are at prayer. And, shameful as such demonstrations of weakness are, they are willing to shoot black children in the street.”

In this particular paragraph Toni Morrison alternates between racially motivated happenings both old and new, from the church bombing in 1963 that killed four young Black girls to Dylann Roof‘s slaughter of nine Black church goers in 2015. Morrison articulates easily just how eerie it is that things have not changed in that time frame.

Morrison continues, saying, “These sacrifices, made by supposedly tough white men who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.”

And it is for these reasons — the imminent “collapse of white privilege,” as Morrison calls it — “that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.”

Morrison skillfully illustrates that all white Americans did this, not just rich, not just poor, not just men and not just women — ALL of them:

“On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters, both the poorly educated and the well educated, embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.”

She concludes her essay by recalling an old novel by William Faulkner titled “Absalom, Absalom!” and how even in 1936, there were people who understood how serious whiteness was to white Americans: “William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In “Absalom, Absalom,” incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its “whiteness” [once again], the family chooses murder.”' [Source]

As of this post, there are over 50 lawmakers (mostly people of color) who have decided to boycott the trump inauguration.