Monday, September 29, 2008

Unqualified is the Qualified in Postmodernism

A little backstory: I'm from Arkansas. Live in Seattle. Will vote for Obama. Do not like George Bush as President. I am liberal by most right winger perspectives. What I say in this blog posting is analysis, not my preferences. And the analysis is aided by my extensive experience in the backwaters of the Southeast, combined with undergrad and graduate studies in postmodernism in uberleftist schools in the Northwest.

The Left and (good) established media are getting it wrong on Sarah Palin. She is qualified because she is a hockey mom. Her answers in interviews that have sent pundits into a tailspin of derision are the articulations of your standard hockey mom, or a mom that owns a successful diner in Memphis Tennessee, or a mom that is in a bureaucratic position at the local police station. I'm met 100's of those types of women, kin to a few, and can tell you for sure that all they need to know is the leader of Iran hates Israel and the next thing out of their mouth is "then we need to kill that man".

America will vote for a woman like that.

Postmodernism has taught the legitimacy of the less than aristocratic, the less than educated, the less than expert. Republicans operate on that; are strengthened by that. While the nuanced and smart that proliferate the campuses and more urbane metro areas of the USA tout academic capital P Postmodernism, they don't know game as it is being played on the streets. Postmodernism is certainly a threat to old orders of doing things, but it is not a tool that only fits into the hands of former slaves, the downtrodden, and indigenous. Actually it is a tool that only works for those who know how to manipulate it. I contend that to manipulate it, one is better served by acting unqualified and ignorant rather than articulating a thesis such as historical slavery.

George Bush II was the only person in his family we could call "stupid", and his family has been amazed at his success eclipsing his more brilliant brother. GWB should thank god for postmodernism, because he got through 2 Presidential elections riding on the mandatory qualification of "ignorant" as part of the Cult of Personality in a postmodern state. Adding to this, in the smaller towns away from metropolitan suburbs across the South is a type of man who is successful by local standards but an ignorant oaf by New York City or Stanford standards. I've met a lot of those kinds of middle aged men -they talk and act just like George Bush II.

America voted for that kind of man.

With every New York Times Op-Ed piece that correctly points to Palin's lack of expertise, they have added to the power of her in Cult of Personality in the postmodern state.

Supporting resources Dump Palin?

Thursday, September 25, 2008

"Eastern US Useless Moneychangers Culture" - you so die now, die die die die

Below is, too me, a scary description of what may happen in the US if the tax payer bailout goes forward. It is all a quote from MSNBC MCCAIN VS. OBAMA: BAILOUT POLITICS:

The New York Times’ David Brooks sees an ideological shift for the country coming, and it starts with the enactment of this plan: "The Paulson rescue plan is one chapter. But there will be others. Over the next few years, the U.S. will have to climb out from under mountainous piles of debt. Many predict a long, gray recession. The country will not turn to free-market supply-siders. Nor will it turn to left-wing populists. It will turn to the safe heads from the investment banks. For Republicans, people like Paulson. For Democrats, the guiding lights will be those establishment figures who advised Barack Obama last week — including Volcker, Robert Rubin and Warren Buffett."

Brooks continues, "If you wanted to devise a name for this approach, you might pick the phrase economist Arnold Kling has used: Progressive Corporatism. We’re not entering a phase in which government stands back and lets the chips fall. We’re not entering an era when the government pounds the powerful on behalf of the people. We’re entering an era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable — and often oligarchic — framework for capitalist endeavor.”

-MCCAIN VS. OBAMA: BAILOUT POLITICS with Brooks comments at bottom

David Brooks is brilliant, hip and honest. The only brilliant, hip and honest voice from the conservative side of American politics, in my opinion. So my vehemence is not aimed at him, but at those who would carry out the assessment Brooks has prophesized.

With more sadness than vehemence I read on the Barack Obama official campaign website that Obama is supporting the bailout, with conditionals that are a little more disciplined than the initial White House offering. I may not be voting for Obama now.

I think the red-blue state cultural divide may take a back seat to another cultural divide that is as yet unnamed. I cite this article to give some of its tectonic shape: CNN: Fed's bailout plan met with skepticism out West. I will call the Pro-Bailout side the Eastern US Useless Moneychangers Culture. I brushed up against this class when I lived in Arkansas. There was a class of wealth who looked down on anyone 1) with a skill 2) that had to show up at a job. Even CEO's, bank presidents, and the state governor were of the lower class to these people. All these people knew how to do was invest, to hedge massive amounts of abstract wealth in ways that insured their continued aristocratic lifestyle. Doubly emphasize one aspect: this hedge investing class viewed any skill or technical knowledge class of humans as expendable slaves. Now that you have this Eastern US Useless Moneychangers Culture in mind, look at another cultural tectonic landmass that is forming in the form of I.T. intelligentsia: Door Number Three -Bob X. Cringely. I quote from the Cringley op-ed below to give a quick glance of this emerging cultural force, but emphasize my own schema first: the old redneck suburbanite or southerner versus urbane social justice redstate/bluestate may be slipping in relevance. The Giant Data Warehouses with Web Access Culture is on the West Coast ( Amazon and Google). This culture has a new kind of person in their workers and their more adept users/customers. I think this new kind of person has the potential to subvert and take over, and the first and most appropriate target for destruction should be the Eastern US Useless Moneychangers Culture

We're in an important transition period not just for IT, but also for business in general. Everything seems to be in flux. And that means the old ways of doing things are changing and ought to. And in this way IT is leading -- or ought to lead -- the way. Later this week I'll be making a dramatic shift and proposing the Cringely Energy/Economic Policy, but first I need to drive home the point that, however different it is from the rest of the company, IT is generally the vanguard for a new corporate culture and whole new ways of doing business for the world.

We're in a mess. The world is screwed up and some of that can be traced to the improper use of IT as a financial weapon. But the people of IT actually present many of the answers we need, because they are living much deeper in technology than other parts of the company or of our society.

Think about it. There has nearly always been a class of eggheads showing us a path toward new business models, whether it was Edison and Firestone, Hewlett and Packard, Noyce and Moore, Gates and Allen, or Brin and Page. It takes in each case a generation to happen, but ultimately we all (and I mean ALL -- everyone in the total organization) come to look like the geeks of the generation before. So let's lean into that, get on with the transition, and get past this place we're in right now where nobody wants to be. Let's consciously embrace the next model that's generally running fitfully right now inside every company, down in the more functional parts of the IT department.

What I mean by this is that times have changed and the world can no longer afford even John Reed's world view with its needs analysis, design, debug, test, rollout strategy -- whether we're talking about a new app or a new marketing campaign. By the time the app (or the campaign) is rolled out, the world changed from HTML to Javascript/SOAP/Ajax (or from financial regulation is bad to financial regulation will save us).

At the heart of this is a concept completely foreign to traditional business -- Open Source. What the open source community has demonstrated is the superiority of a strategy that emphasizes early proof of concept, early release, and frequent releases with features added as needed -- probably totaling 20 percent of the features identified in a needs assessment.

This is the new IT strategy we live with every day -- 80 percent solutions because they are fast, increasingly reliable, and keep the end users in the loop from almost the beginning. All made possible because of an open Internet (at least until Comcast succeeds and enslaves us), easily grasped standards and impressive demonstrations by companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and a ton of start-ups. Wall Street back offices figured this out long ago, they just never got their boss's bosses to understand.

Last week's column was a utopian vision that simply requires all the old managers to be reprogrammed or accept a bullet in the head. But it is not at all utopian if applied solely (or initially) to IT, where this stuff actually works pretty well.

IT people are most of the time building fortresses or feeling unappreciated -- often both at the same time. Yet to our discredit, we've done a very poor job of explaining or demonstrating or outright selling our utility to the broader organization. Where are our Geek Appreciation Days? Take a Geek to Lunch? Bring Your Geek to School? Taciturn, we disparage our co-workers for not appreciating us while giving them little obvious reason why they should appreciate us.

That has to change.

Door Number Three isn't just an escape hatch for nerds, it is the way business and culture and civic life will be for most of us a generation further into this information age. We're just leading the way. And if we're leading the way let's embrace that role and become leaders.

If, like me, you are likely to be fired, anyway, there's no real downside to this strategy. Let's give it a try.

Door Number Three -Bob X. Cringely

Giant Data Warehouses with Web Access Culture.....march forward and don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes!

I should add that those strongly invested in the redneck Protestant suburbanite or urbane Catholic social justice cultures are like the peasants and indigenous peoples during WW2 -spectators, soldiers or victims in a battle they do not guide. This won't be about valuing all humans equally and giving them equal access to food and housing, and it won't be about giving white rednecks a default safe haven. Both those agendas will only live on in the minds of the old or irrelevant.

Eastern US Useless Moneychangers Culture in the news with their views:

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Email to Barack Obama

Senator Obama

I am one of the millions who find your candidacy for President exhilarating. Across the board on issues and nuanced perceptions of America's needs, I feel you have potential no other politician has offered us in my 46 years of life. I support you way beyond the context of this one Presidential election. I hope to be seeing the effects of your vision long into the future.

Unfortunately, I have some precise business to write you about. The issue of taxpayer bailouts of private investment banking firms. I am absolutely against these bailouts. In the November 2008 election I will not vote for any one running for a national office who voted for the bailouts. With your historic run for the Presidency, I have had an ill feeling about standing absolutely on one issue and voting, or not voting, for you based solely on your Senate voting record with the bailout. In final summation I cannot cheapen our relationship -I must vote or not vote for you based on our agreement on issues.

I heartily encourage you to coordinate with Congressional ( especially GOP ) leaders who are standing up against White House pressure, and articulate a resounding no to this amazing attempt to swindle tax dollars to reward failed market risks in the private sector.

Good Luck
-Lance Miller

The New Characteristics of the Tao

I read the Tao Te Ting alot in my year on the ice in Antarctica. The clincher for me is the last poem. It basically acknowledges the big problem trends cannot be avoided unless we 1) avoid symbolic analysis 2) avoid travel/mobility.

So in 1996, at the end of my 13 months in Antarctica, I committed TO mobility and symbolic analysis, which has further mushroomed into my full embrace of digital technology as the cure for social ills. The essence is I saw the Tao as stating an untenable path. Plus I was in the first years of extreme mobility after a lifetime spent bound by localism fetish in Arkansas. I associated localism with a lack of intellect and ability, only those lacking talent tended to stay in Arkansas.

Mobility and symbolic intellectualism are my Tao.

Project Gutenberg Tao

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Republican scum promoting MORE socialism

"Drill Here, Drill Now"

I'm an odd liberal progressive that has no problem with lifting moratoriums on domestic drilling. But the vagaries of meaning the Republicans are embedding the phrase with is such a sham. First, the oil that would come from any drilling in the US would be sold on the "spot market", which simply means to the highest bidder -e.g. If China outbids on the barrel of oil, China gets the oil. The spin we get from Republicans is as if the oil resources are nationalized, like in communist countries, and oil pulled from US soil automatically goes to American consumers. Ask a Republican if they want the US government to seize all oil produced on US soil, if they say "no", then tell them its the Drill Here Drill Now may mean no oil for the US consumer if the US consumers are too poor to pay for it.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Republican scum kill the free market

Reference article for this blog post: McCain’s Radical Agenda
  1. Good: Republicans are for a free market ( this does NOT have to mean pro-corporations, it DOES have to mean the market will kill off bad ideas, bad people, and bad products, and it DOES have to mean if a product is successfully being sold or method of trade is occurring, including barter or living solely on goats milk -is legit by its simply existing. )

  2. Bad: The REPUBLICAN government is bailing out failed financial services giants.

  1. Good: Republicans are for personal responsibility, innovation and initiative as the means of bettering one's living standard, and not the role of HIGH TAXES paying for bums, idiots, and worse to have things they don't deserve. Key here is the GOP almost always run on a LESS TAXES mantra.

  2. Bad: The McCain-Palin Health Plan is to do an entirely new tax in the form of TAXING HEALTH BENEFITS AS IF IT IS INCOME, with the intention of poisoning the current employer-based health insurance scheme with negative social engineering.

The negative social engineering, combined with higher taxes, would make the McCain-Palin Health Plan a double crime from a purist free market perspective.

Its worth noting that Obama is the only voice of free market principles since these bailouts started happening. He is saying, too nicely for my taste, that these bailouts are the wrong signal to the economic system. He puts it in moralistic language sympathetic for the middle-class, which I think obscures the absolutely right stance he is taking. In a free market, one can make billions, or one can lose all of one's billions -the socialistic crime is government preventing either one.

The Republicans circa 2000-present are the worst failures in American history. Security from terrorism -failed; War- failed; Economy -failed. We'd do better electing a crack whore with a history of recurring head lice. At least we could run the country while she was passed out.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Post-Apocalyptic Technology: Multimachine

"The MultiMachine is all-purpose open source machine tool that can be built inexpensively by a semi-skilled mechanic with common hand tools, from discarded car and truck parts, using only commonly available hand tools and no electricity. Its size can range from being small enough to fit in a closet to one a hundred times that size. The MultiMachine can accurately perform all the functions of an entire machine shop by itself." -wikipedia

The best documentation of the machine I have seen is at openfarmtech.org. My desire would be Multimachine aiding in the construction or maintenance of this kind of ride:


Engine blocks with correct bore:
  1. AMC/Jeep 242 cubic inch "242 or 4.0 L or 4.0" straight-6. 1987-2006. Discontinued in USA, still produced in People's Republic of China for Chinese Jeep models.
  2. Ford 240 (3.9 L) 300 (4.9 L) straight-6 1964-1996. Used in F-150 model, UPS trucks, and as power for ski lifts, power generators, wood chippers and tractors.
  3. Cummins 6BT 5.9 L B5.9 4.01". Optional engine in Dodge Ram.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Palin Feminism is the Better Model

Good points in this article: Was Feminism Necessary?

See my initial take on Palin in this earlier post: Here.

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Is Life as meaningful as a bag of stones?

http://seattle.craigslist.org/forums/?ID=101192408

Does life have a meaning? < - > 09/08 13:35:51

is life any more valuable than its equivalent in a bag of stones? Metaphysically what is the real difference?

life is < linux_lance > 09/08 13:52:29

animate, recursive, extropic. A bag of stones is not.

This line of inquiry, pretending to flatten the valuation of higher and lower things, is a pathology that began in the 20th century. Hopefully in the 21st century academia labels this as an attempt to overvalue the lower, and undermine the higher.

Post-Apocalyptic Technology: £270 Trike handmade in 48 hours

[jump to trike pics]

Previously I've posted a handmade, dumpster parts diesel motorcycle that's won many awards here. Now I have found another handmade rat bike, and have to admit it is my all time favorite example of post apocalyptic technology.

Here are quotes from Brit Chopper that form the basis of my admiration:

The entire bike was built in my front garden on a sloping driveway. I made a point of using basic hand tools ( apart from the welder ) just to show it can be done. I didn't plan any of it, just made it up as I went along. The 2CV engine cost less than £100, and the rest cost less than £70.

Time taken to get from a pile of bits to MOT( no MSVA ) ready trike: 46 and a half hours.

The frame was built from scratch by me, in thick ERW tubing. The exhaust guards are made from 10mm mild steel bar, which I bent into shape around a tree.

It's a bit of a wheelie-monster in first, being so short and light, but handles really well with no wobbles or shaking in the steering and despite only having 35 odd BHP it flies along.
[See whole magazine article here]

I should stress this trike builder is famous for extremely polished and beautiful handmade machines that have won many awards. The trike I'm featuring here is a personal project the guy did for himself, and not representative of his custom orders such as this.

Why do I like this trike so much? Here are the reasons:

  1. A trike can drive in the snow. To me transportation that cannot go in snow, ice and rain is not really transportation.
  2. The quickness of the project being completed. If people are building needed items, they do not have the luxury of a year long project. Remember, my criteria is post-apocalyptic adaptation.
  3. The parts are ubiquitous, cheap and the work was done without expensive manufacturing machinery.
  4. Previously my favorite tough snow capable motorcycle has been the Ural Patrol. But they are over $10,000 and the engines are still not as bullet proof and easy running as European and Japanese motors. If I had a choice between a new Ural, or a handmade rat trike like this Exmoor, I'd certainly choose the Exmoor.
[back to top]

Friday, September 12, 2008

Post-Apocalyptic Technology: No Welding Needed

Sections of exhaust pipe joined, not by welding, but by the use of exhaust jointing paste, beer cans and jubilee clips. The result may look unconventional, but it doesn't leak or fall apart, and did not involve the spending of money or the use of heavy equipment.

This is important for austere times such as an apocalyptic anarchic phase in which one would want to keep the machines going.

( learned this researching rat bike culture on wikipedia )

Monday, September 8, 2008

Rightfully Dead Rescued by Lying Scum

The US government has just made the largest economic intervention in decades -acquiring control and fiscal ownership of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The governments stated motives were the prevention of greater chaos in global financial markets, and lower mortgage burdens for US home loan debtors.

So the Bush Regime and Republicans, and for that matter Evangelicals, stand for the free market? Free Market 101, Tenet #1, is that the systems decides what survives, dies, weakens, or gets stronger. To help a dying system node is to undermine the system's own means of hygiene.

Everyone on board for this government economic intervention are not for free markets. Period.

These are looter scum that just raided my pocketbook. I am taking every word of anti-socialism and anti-big government that has spewed forth from the Reagan Echo Chamber and hurling it straight at every business person and Republican administration official who was for this or benefited from it. You are scum.

My family is currently DOING WELL in this economy. We 1) do not own a house 2) do not own a car, walk to work and to the store 3) have over $25,000 in the bank 4) We work in a small firm that makes computers for broadcast news, and as the world goes to hell and people want to watch on the TV, our company gains in that very scenario.

I am living out a dream as master of disaster economics, enjoying watching the stupid plummet into a cesspool of economic and social ruin, all while I live a beautiful, safe, and austere life.

Now the Republicans have taken some of my tax money and rescued people more foolish than me. I'm sorry, weren't Repubs supposed to be the party that believes in a meritocracy? That failures, the stupid, and the underperforming get their just deserts of poverty? And now you dare prop up that very type?

I am speaking of the inner-self and personal value of all on board this hypocritical government action -you are scum inside, and I will here on out practice politics and economics designed to f*ck you in half.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Woe,The End of Days...for the foolish

Today I'm writing with a religious motif and maybe even religious hyperbole. I am playing a fool's game of "divining" meaning from ancient pasts and prophesying the future. Here I go...

I can't really "know" what happened in extremely remote history, but I do know the narratives that survived to my time, and can preach on their relative value -which old stories are worth less by virtue of whoever draws semantic sustenance and guidance from them will become manipulated lower-humans we (those drawing from better information) work to death. Or, more likely, they just die off by living in the spatial-temporal poorest choice, killed by the fitness question imposed from an evolutionary god who has no malevolence.

The first narrative structure of the Bible is the story of the Garden of Eden. My favorite deconstruction of this tale is to look at its regional origin, the Fertile Crescent and Mesopotamia. In that birthplace of military conscription and urbanity, the Garden story stands as primordial antecedent. The Garden has a corporeal relevance in those old river valley civilizations, the Garden is simply a over-the-top idealization of oasis autonomous culture. An oasis culture would have had fruit dropping off the trees, water, intimate family, no government, and naked people mating with no need for a sense of taboo. To further cinch my tying the Garden to oasis cultures, think of the one Big Threat that would chase everyone from an oasis paradise. A large snake.

Imagine what a tale of simple living the Garden was to both the urban Mesopotamian/Egyptian and ever-warring, ever-wondering pastoralist.

The warcraft and scalable, specialized economy of Sumeria spread to almost all of the Eurasian continent long before the European conquests of the New World. To me, the heritage that goes back to Sumerian warcraft and economy is the basis of difference between the colonialists and the natives who were easily overwhelmed. Mesopotamia's story of primordial simplicity of the Garden was still alive across the New World.

It is fine when a nude Adam and Eve, with no taboos and no need to work, live on pages of a book. But when they occupy real land, and they are discovered by Eurasia, with its heritage of warcraft and scaled economy, its time to kill off Adam and Eve or put them to work.

An oasis dweller has no rights, because a platonic utopia has no legitimacy for space on Earth.

So we are through with the easy genocide of Adam and Eve, and note how the story, if lived and literal, is an undesirable lot.

Moving on to today, and something analogous.

Movies of the 20th century have this structure: peaceful setting of family/village/company offices/farm/automobile plant; an obligatory scene or scenes in which all are in a normalized routine that is mundane, some petty bickering that is more for fun than being mean, flirting, children running, someone singing while walking or working. Then something that is a surprise and ominous (such as Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter) comes into the screenplay, or something hugely evil such as a Death Star, Decepticon, Cujo, Illyria, asteroid, or the Event Horizon.

The first thing wrong with this narrative form is the feeling of entitlement to peace we assume for the first scene people. Nothing wrong with Hollywood scriptwriters using this emotion if the audience has it to be exploited, Hollywood's just trying to make every buck they can. What is wrong is us having this emotion of entitled peace.

The second thing wrong is also the second thing on the storyboard. The impetus for change and adaptation is a bad guy, or a whole bad Empire with a guy named Darth as Project Leader. Its, like, always some Nazi, messin up our bong hit, man.

Entitlement, to peace with no contingencies attached ( or shown in the story ). And adaptation. It is rarely the antidote after evil upsets the peace, but rather a Thor-Messiah reaches out and touches someone bad with the hammer. The villagers get to go back to their entitled carefree existence, such as the last scene of boy-on-boy-ass-slapping in the bed in the Lord of the Rings movie.

All entitlement and no adaptation makes Jack a dead body.

Ok, enough beating us all up over our dominant pleasure narrative of the last century. What is the answer to making this better?

Hollywood has willingly blown up this convenience store nutrition-narrative a few times. Clint Eastwood did it a little. Some zombie movies did. But this was just nihilistic shock, not a lot of useful info on what the right system of thought would be.

The right system of thought would be eternal pragmatism, eternal sense of contingency, eternal vigilance. Not a mean spirited leaving behind of emotional attachment, not in love with "change" to the point of infatuation, but a knowing that the world is full of wrong places to live and best places to live. And making a move now if you live in the wrong place. By place I might mean anything from house, job, whole town, region, nation, or religion.

In the 80's or 90's Yuppies were made fun of in the press. Wow, kinda got that wrong. Lets go visit the pathetic dumbasses in the cancer ward of a Louisiana hospital. They stayed in their little petrol-chemical town, a press featuring stories that made them proud of their lack of mobility, and watched the smart nerd move on to less polluted regions. Wrong move, or non-move as the case might be.

Move. Not necessarily to the most wealthy position, its not that simple. Move to where its safe. Down is a watchword for me. The bad things are likely to be thrown down-wind ( pollution), down-stream( pollution and water overuse from upstream), and certainly on low lying land near water is a bad idea. Move to where, if law and social order break down, you don't have windows easily gotten into ( never live on the first floor ), and good guys with guns will be more prevalent than bad guys with guns. Or places with lots of ice or ocean that keep poor bad people far away.

Adapt. Safety will be technological, the "good life" much more so.

Give others a break, and a chance, and some margin for error, but do not corrupt this rational level of compassion with unlimited sense of connection with those who will die in the jaws of civilization disruption.

In the new kind of narrative for survival in the 21st century, we should easily give bad press for some places, dishonor traditions that produce hideously deformed people, and mock those who died holding on to the welcome sign of Shitville. On the positive, we should be screaming from rooftops about the best life practices, about the most enabling skills, about the points on Earth where intelligence finds expression and crime is abnormal. We should want to share information on what works.

In America, the Old Left and the Old Right are doing little to enable the above narratives and dialogues. But then, their constituents are those who won't move or won't adapt. Rich and poor alike in their more passive followers, they are energized by media that reveres their lifestyle as a civil right, when civil rights were intended to protect equal access to adaptation and change more than economic equality of statically defined lifestyles. Those who believe their lifestyle sacred and protected miss the point that their lifestyle is protected from harassment but not from becoming the walking dead adhering to a static, deterministic biography.

The smart walk away.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Google Chrome

I want to see the OS become the system bus device manager, with the only thing sexy it does is CPU intensive audio visual programs, or some crazy math thing, that read write locally ( and that of course is for professionals or hobbyists ). Beyond that, all the processes anyone gives a **** about are hybrids that have half of a life on the web and half on the local bus. If one was to say "I'm not using the internet today", will effectively be saying "I am just going to be checking if my OS sees all the devices connected on the system bus, and I'll check the memory access speed. Thats all I'm doing today with my computer".

Its time the OS became your plumber, not your mayor.