The Remains of an Administration

Each day that the Obama administration fades into the past, its wrongdoings manage to wander back into the present.

After years of suppression, all sorts of strange events keep popping up to remind us of what little is left of the Obama years — the Susan Rice memo, Christopher Steele deleting his computer records, FBI-doctored and lost 302s, text messages wiped clean, the bizarre Obama January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting, the ambush interview of Michael Flynn, the unmasking and leaking of redacted names swept up in reverse-targeting surveillance operations, the administration fraud perpetrated on the FISA courts. The list is so overwhelming and bizarre that it ensures that anything at any time can now appear. And the result keeps reminding Americans of how corrupt were the years between 2009 and 2017 and how untruthful was the coverage of such institutionalized wrongdoing....

Emeritus Barack Obama now and then ventures out to go through the motions of an enfeebled defense for what is becoming an increasingly discredited administration. But his heart is not in it. His mind is elsewhere. His cause is no longer social activism and community organizing, if it ever was, but lucre and the perceived well-earned good life. The arc of his moralizing universe is long, but for the anointed like him, it apparently bends toward the just deserts of riches and material bounty.

OBAMA TO BLAME FOR DEPLETING FEDERAL MEDICAL STOCKPILE

The Strategic National Stockpile, America’s giant medical storage closet for a terrorist or biological crisis, once boasted more than 100 million respirator masks to protect doctors, nurses and other frontline health care workers in case of a contagion.

But when the COVID-19 pandemic started a few months ago, the supply had dwindled down to just 12 million fitted masks, known as N95 respirators, and 30 million surgical masks, a supply deemed to be less than 2 percent of what the nation would need for full-blown pandemic.

The tale of how such a critical supply lapsed, leading the Trump administration to scramble for 500 million new masks in the midst of pandemic, is one of government neglect and competing priorities that began in 2009.

That’s when the Obama administration drew down nearly 97 million of the masks to deal with the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, effectively protecting frontline medical workers from a virus that infected more than 60 million Americans.

But when it was over, the administration decided not to fully restock the respirators, choosing to spend its $600 million annual budget for the stockpile on other priorities such as key drugs and vaccines to deal with smallpox, anthrax and the like, experts said

Team Obama could not walk and chew gum at the same time.  This was also the time the CDC focused on Obesity and Race as the biggest medical threat to the country.

Obama’s Social Experiments Are Wreaking Havoc on America Today

Barack Obama's biggest harm to America was not his economic policies but his social policies.

Here are five key ways Obama's policies impacted American culture, beginning with #MeToo, sexual assault, and Brett Kavanaugh.
1. The sexual assault maelstrom.
2. Transgender ideology.
3. "The Handmaid's Tale."
4. Same-sex marriage.
5. Race.

Read the whole thing.

The Ukraine Was a Test Case of American Foreign Policy Moralism Vs. American Foreign Policy Realism, and Realism Won in a Rout

It's not moral or ethical to encourage people to go to war, that you have their back, and then sit by while they get killed.  Long, but worth reading the whole thing.

America has a limited appetite for war. Americans will go to war, but they do reach a point of exhaustion with war after some number of years.

It is silly to pretend this fact away in order to count oneself as "idealistic." People who ignore reality are not "idealistic;" they're just cowards afraid to face reality.

The fact is that Americans are tired of war and it is dangerous to write checks on America's war-fighting account that it might not be willing to cover.

The fact is that one of America's two main political parties is always willing to be part of a war at the Fun Part of the war -- the declaration of war part, the first-easy-victories part -- but which abandons every war it votes for when it sees any small political advantage in doing so.

Joe Biden, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and many other Democrat Senators voted for the War in Iraq. Within three years, they were screaming that Bush "lied us into war" and that we must withdraw immediately.

It is insane to pretend this away. If you know Democrats will give you initial support for a war they'll happily vote you into, when doing so grants them political advantage, and then savagely turn on that war the moment they get political advantage from that, it is lunacy to even count them as allies in war.

By the way: The NeverTrumpers who sometimes claim "At least Hillary Clinton would have been better on foreign policy?" Yes, of course. The same Hillary Clinton who voted for the War in Iraq to show how tough she would be as a president, and then agitated to abandon troops in the field when she realized that opposing the war would boost her chances of becoming president.

Yeah, we need that kind of patriot as President, rather than the unamerican, immoral Trump.

And this ...

In 2008, Obama campaigned on the idea that he would somehow both withdraw from Iraq and yet also "win" Iraq by withdrawing.

I was incensed by this; it was so obviously, transparently a lie and a dodge. He wasn't planning to "win" anything; he just wanted to bug out. I was angry at the media for never challenging his "Win by Withdrawing" claims and pissed off at Americans for believing this bullshit.

But they voted him into office anyway, and by decent margins. I realized that Americans weren't really tricked by Obama; rather, Obama told them a lie that they knew was a lie but they wanted some "out" to pretend they were honoring the sacrifice of the already-dead while also bugging out of Iraq.

So Obama pretended he would "win" the war in Iraq, and the American public pretended to believe him.

The end of the old order

In Epitaph, Richard Fernandez recalls how Obama was so wedded to managing the decline that he could not act to stop or reverse it.

The roots of today's new tensions have roots deep in Obama's and even George W. Bush's term. Yet so great was the establishment's commitment the post Cold War order it seemed irresponsible or unlucky to admit things were breaking down even when they manifestly were. Time and again when challenged by China's naval island building, Russia's expansion into the Ukraine, Beijing's theft of the classified OPM database, the shootdown of MH17 and the disintegration of Syria, Obama with remarkable sang froid maintained the air of business as usual.

Ben Rhodes in his account of how Obama drew a Red Line in Syria then erased it, described how avoiding the perception of crisis was so important to his boss. "We in the Obama administration stepped up to the brink of military action against Assad. And then, suddenly, we stepped back." Rhodes wrote:

I wanted to do something about the catastrophe in Syria, just as I had advocated intervention in Libya. ... It was as if Obama was finally forcing me to let go of a part of who I was—the person who looked at Syria and felt that we had to do something, who had spent two years searching for hope amid the chaos engulfing the Arab world and the political dysfunction at home. ...

I saw what he had been doing—testing Congress, testing public opinion, to see what the real maneuvering room was for his office when it came to intervention in Syria. ... On the flight home, Obama mentioned that he’d had a private conversation with Putin on the margins of the summit. ... This time, Obama again suggested working together to remove and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons.

He reposed his trust in Putin because ... what else could he do? Obama's observation that “maybe we never would have done Rwanda” caught the essential sense of helplessness of the 44th president. While he may have sensed that the post WW2 order was grinding to an end and the fruits of Ronald Reagan's victory over the Soviet Union were sliding from his grasp, though the era was dying Obama could not bring himself to bury it.

THE OBAMA DISASTER, AND THE TWEET OF THE DAY

CLAUDIA ROSSETT ON OBAMA’S RUSSIA “COLLUSION”

In an excellent interview with Ginni Thomas for the the Daily Caller, Rossett explains why Russia does, indeed, pose a serious threat to the U.S. and to world order. She also reminds us of the enthusiasm and flexibility Obama displayed toward Russia until near the end of his two terms, when Russia needed to be viewed differently to serve his Party’s interest.

Rossett cites Obama the hot mic promise of flexibility towards Putin; the shelving of missile defense for Europe in the name of that phony “reset;” the inadequate pursuit of Edward Snowden who is still hiding in Russia; Obama’s fecklessness regarding the “red line” that opened the door to Russia’s dominance in Syria; the Iran deal that advantaged Russia and its allies; and the weak response of the U.S. when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine.

Compared to this, says Rossett, Trump’s occasional unfortunate comments about Russia and Putin pale. She is right. A few conciliatory comments can’t match nearly eight years of appeasement — a policy Democrats, including those in the media, would still be defending had they not gotten the “cable” sent when top Democrats decided to blame Russia for Hillary’s electoral woes.

Backbearings

Who's the Russian mole?  Could it be the head of one of Obama's intelligence agencies?

Still it may be profitable in real-life Washington to go back a few years, as Dana Priest in the New Yorker does, to unravel a problem similar to that which baffled Sherlock: why did the dog not bark in the night? Or as Priest puts it,why couldn't the Obama era intelligence community detect Russian meddling.

There are too many coincidences for it to be just bad luck. Some journalists are belatedly realizing they are living through the aftermath of the Big Bang. A huge strike happened without them even being aware of it and the scale of it is boggling. The Obama administration failed to detect the rise of the Islamic state, was surprised by the Russian invasion of Crimea and Putin's intervention in Syria, did not see the rapid development of Kim's nuclear arsenal and, publicly at least, ascribed the assault on the Benghazi consulate to a video -- and as the New Yorker points out, were even blindsided by Russian election interference openly happening on Facebook.

And then, of course we have the famous Romney - Obama debate in which Obama chides Romney “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because you know, the Cold War has been over for 20 years."

Read the whole thing.

A Special Message from Teleprompter XD-235.

Horrid headlines on the health-care bill are about an alternate reality

From the NY Post.

Democrats and much of the media are screaming over the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that 24 million Americans will “lose” their health insurance thanks to the GOP-proposed American Health Care Act. In fact, the CBO numbers are guesses based on an alternate reality.

Back when they wrote the ObamaCare law, Democrats gamed the system to get happy predictions out of CBO — numbers that never showed in this reality. Naturally enough, the push to replace ObamaCare now yields some scary estimates.

Proposed bill would let bosses fine you for refusing a genetic test

CBO said the Affordable Care Act would trim the deficit; reality’s been the reverse. It said 24 million people would be enrolled in the exchanges by now. Reality: below 11 million.

And the agency is still projecting the exchanges to cover 19 million by 2020 if nothing changes. In fact, enrollment leveled off this last year; at best, it’s on course to stay around 11 million. More likely, the program has begun its “death spiral,” with soaring prices prompting plummeting enrollment.

Then, too, CBO says the repeal of the “individual mandate” — the fine for going without insurance — would drive 18 million people to drop their coverage by next year. But that includes 6 million of the 11 million on the exchanges — suggesting that more than half of those people only buy insurance to avoid the fine.

Much as we hate ObamaCare, we don’t believe that — the fines aren’t high enough. And even if CBO’s right, then those people don’t really want their policies, so they wouldn’t be “losing coverage,” but fleeing it.

CBO also says 5 million would quit Medicaid — even though premiums are tiny. Anyway, everyone who qualifies can re-join Medicaid the instant they need it, so those folks wouldn’t truly lose coverage.

Plenty of other CBO assumptions are just as dubious. For example, the agency guesses that the bill would push up exchange premiums — when Health Secretary Tom Price has already started the process of pushing them down, by junking Obama-era regulations that forced every policy to cover a long liberal wishlist, from “free” contraceptives to chiropractors and other alternative medicines.

The GOP bill isn’t perfect, but it’s a realistic first step toward moving beyond a system that’s on track to implode. The scary headlines only describe a fantasy world where ObamaCare is a smashing success.

When an organization has such a bad track record on prediction, why would you believe them , unless your desperately want to.

Saul Alinsky Leaves the White House

The very day after Obama was elected in 2008, I predicted in this space that his team would steal the Senate by hook and crook (see: Al Franken); nuke the filibuster at least for judicial nominees; liberalize voting laws (or enforcement thereof) to make fraud easier while charging opponents with “vote suppression”; drum up spurious allegations of civil rights violations; punish anti-abortion protesters; enact “copious new regulations, especially environmental, to be used selectively to ensnare other conservative malcontents”; invasively use the IRS to harass conservative organizations; and tacitly encourage civil unrest in furtherance of Obamite goals.

All those predictions of course came true.

Obama and company also waged bureaucratic war against independent inspectors general; tried their hardest (even illegally) to hobble fossil fuels industries; evaded Congress’s intent by sending cash and uranium to a near-nuclear-ready Iran; fumbled and stumbled while veterans suffered virtually criminal neglect; wasted hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on projects that were not “shovel-ready” and did not create many jobs; oversaw an economy in which the workforce participation rate dropped to historically low levels while real median household income also fell and personal debt rose, and in which food stamp rolls grew to a number larger than the population of Spain; horrendously politicized the Justice Department; and saw race relations worsen for the first time in decades....

If Barack Obama knew how to slink, he would slink out of the Oval Office and completely offstage, bowed and beaten by his record of scandal and failure, as much or even more of a pariah among an American majority than Jimmy Carter was in the early 1980s.

It Wasn’t Me: Obama Blames ISIS On Bush, Climate Change and the 2nd Amendment

In his final address to the troops as commander-in-chief, President Obama took the opportunity to cap off his eight-year presidency by blaming President George W. Bush, climate change and the Second Amendment as reasons why ISIS nutballs seem to keep popping out of the ground like daisies. Because, of course, the rise of a radical Islamic terrorist group can’t possibly be the fault of Obama’s failed policies.

Obama took aim at Bush pretty early on in his speech, setting the former president up to take the fall for ISIS even before the group ever existed in its current form.

“And in shaping our response, we refused to repeat some of the mistakes of the 2003 invasion that have helped to give rise to the organization that became ISIL in the first place,” Obama said of his counterattacks against the group, which appear to have worked about as well as pouring napalm on a forest fire.

But lest the never-ending crutch that is the Bush administration fail to serve as an adequate excuse for why crazy Muslims are chopping people’s heads off right and left, Obama also pointed to a changing environment to explain radical terrorism.

“Sectarian conflicts rage. A changing climate is increasing competition for food and water,” Obama declared, basically likening violent zealots to a couple of lions fighting over a watering hole. Really, it’s not their fault.

Aside from a president who hasn’t been in office for nearly a decade and a whole mess of CO2 in the atmosphere, the right of the American people to keep and bear arms also holds some responsibility for why we can’t simply eliminate ISIS.

According to Obama, “We will not achieve the kind of clearly defined victory comparable to those that we won in previous wars against nations. We won’t have a scene of the Emperor of Japan and Douglas MacArthur in a surrender. And the reason we won’t have that is because technology makes it impossible to completely shield impressionable minds from violent ideologies. And somebody who is trying to kill and willing to be killed is dangerous, particularly when we live in a country where it’s very easy for that person to buy a very powerful weapon.”

Yes. Yes, gun rights -- this must be the problem! Because terrorists never think to, you know, attack a bunch of people with a knife.

In fact, just about everything under the sun can and should be blamed for the rise of ISIS other than Obama himself and, of course, the untouchable religion of Islam. Because terrorist groups that commit atrocities in the name of Mohammed and Allah are after all, nothing more than “false prophets [who] are peddling a vision of Islam that is irreconcilable with tolerance and modernity and basic science.”

At least, thus sayeth Obama.

But of course, if none of these excuses satisfy in justifying the past, one can always just point to future failures and make excuses for those, too.

“Now, to say that we’ve made progress is not to say that the job is done,” Obama said in his speech. “We know that a deadly threat persists. We know that in some form this violent extremism will be with us for years to come.”

Basically, it’s not Obama's fault that ISIS exists and that they haven’t been put down like rabid dogs. And don’t expect it to change anytime soon, because...coal plants. Or something.

Obama led the world downward into chaos

We're just not sure if it was incompetence or a plan.

Meanwhile, in Syria, the eye of the refugee storm, America is losing its last trace of dignity. On Monday the Syrian army announced an end to that cease-fire declared just a week ago by Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov.

The Kerry-Lavrov pact was doomed from the start, but the death blow came late last week when US planes bombed forces loyal to Syria’s butcher-in-chief, Bashar al-Assad. The Obama administration rushed to apologize, swearing it was a mistake.

Remember when Team Obama said Assad must go? That policy, we learned over the weekend, secretly became a dead letter two years ago: It was back then, Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin disclosed, that the United States “committed,” in an agreement with Damascus, that our airstrikes in Syria “would not affect” Assad’s army.

We became, in effect, an accomplice of Assad, the world’s most prolific killer.

One chief reason: our desire to secure an agreement with his main regional backer, Iran.

And let's not forget Libya, the millions of refugees escaping from Obama's foreign policy and the deliberate destruction of America's health care system.

North Korea conducts fifth nuclear test, claims it has made warheads with ‘high strike power’

Obama can't leave office soon enough.  What would he have done differently if he hated America?

Richard Fernandez on the Age of Obama

The Era of Hope and Change has been one prolonged act of suicide. If anyone had said that Obama would manage to alienate Israel and the Philippines, lose Turkey, pay Iran a hundred billion dollars, preside over the loss of a won war in Afghanistan, lose billions of dollars in military equipment to ISIS, watch a consulate burn, restart the Cold War with Russia, cause Japan to re-arm and go the knife's edge with China would you have believed it? If someone had told you in 2008 millions of refugees would be heading for Europe and that the UK would leave the EU after Obama went there to campaign for them to remain would you not have laughed?

He promised "smart diplomacy" and the restoration of American prestige in the world. How did it come to this?

The Dream of Muslim Outreach Has Become a Nightmare

Victor Davis Hanson

When President Obama entered office, he dreamed that his hope-and-change messaging and his references to his familial Islamic roots would win over the Muslim world. The soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize laureate would make the U.S. liked in the Middle East. Then, terrorism would decrease.

But, as with his approach to racial relations, Obama's remedies proved worse than the original illness.

...

In apology tours and mythological speeches, Obama exaggerated Islamic history as often as he critiqued America. He backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He pushed America away from Israel, appeased Iran, and tried to piggyback on the Arab Spring by bombing Libya. He even lectured Christians on their past pathologies dating back to the Crusades.

Yet Obama's outreach was still interpreted by Islamists as guilt and weakness to be exploited rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated. Terrorist attacks increased. Obama blamed them on a lack of gun control or generic "violent extremism."

Careerist toadies in government parroted the party-line message and even tried to outdo their politically correct boss.

Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano focused on returning veterans as terrorist risks. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry said that global warming, not the Islamic State, was the real threat. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the president asked him to make Muslim outreach a top priority for the agency. CIA Director John Brennan said that jihad "is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam." Director of National Intelligence James Clapper opined that the Muslim Brotherhood was largely secular...

The real problem is that Islamic terrorism feeds off the self-induced failures of the Middle East. Jihadists try to convince the Arab street that returning to religious fundamentalism and exporting jihad will empower Muslims to recapture lost primacy over a decadent and guilty West, just as in the mythical glory days of the caliphate.

In truth, religious intolerance, gender apartheid, illiteracy, autocracy, statism, tribalism and religious fundamentalism all guarantee poverty, economic stagnation and scapegoating. While much of Asia and Latin America progressed through reform, the Middle East blame-gamed its miseries on affluent Western nations and on Israel.

More disturbing, millions of Middle Easterners fled to the safety of Europe and the United States -- but on occasion, only to resist assimilation and show ingratitude once they got there.

In short, the dreamy Obama approach to terrorism has proved a nightmare -- and it is not over yet.

Read the whole thing.

Obama Blames Libya and Syria on British PM David Cameron

Nothing is ever his fault.

Barack Obama has sharply criticised David Cameron for the UK’s role in allowing Libya to become a “shit show” after the fall of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi, in an unprecedented attack on a British leader by a serving US President.

Mr Obama said that following a successful military intervention to aid rebels during the 2011 Arab Spring revolt, Libya was left to spiral out of control – due largely to the inaction of America’s European allies.

In a candid US magazine interview, Mr Obama said: “When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong… there’s room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up.”

His part of the plan went great. Qaddafi was killed. That's when the plan came apart because Barack's problem is that he trusted the Europeans too much.  Don't be surprised if he ends up blaming Benghazi on Cameron.

And then there's his Syrian Red Line. Poor Barack could not make good on his treat because of the British:

Mr Obama also said Mr Cameron’s failures had affected his decision not to enforce a “red line” over President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons during the Syrian civil war. The President had planned a strike against Assad’s forces in August 2013, following a deadly sarin gas attack by the regime on civilians in a Damascus suburb. The strike was called off at the 11th hour. One “major factor” in the decision, the President said, “was the failure of Cameron to obtain the consent of his Parliament” for military action.

The only surprise in this list of blame-shifting is that he didn't blame George Bush.

The Washington Post Endorses Obama

Here is what the Washington Post wrote when they endorsed Obama:

But Mr. Obama, as anyone who reads his books can tell, also has a sophisticated understanding of the world and America’s place in it. He, too, is committed to maintaining U.S. leadership and sticking up for democratic values, as his recent defense of tiny Georgia makes clear. We hope he would navigate between the amoral realism of some in his party and the counterproductive cocksureness of the current administration, especially in its first term. On most policies, such as the need to go after al-Qaeda, check Iran’s nuclear ambitions and fight HIV/AIDS abroad, he differs little from Mr. Bush or Mr. McCain. But he promises defter diplomacy and greater commitment to allies. His team overstates the likelihood that either of those can produce dramatically better results, but both are certainly worth trying.

I do not see a single thing here that has been proven correct.

Why was this written now? Why am I posting it now? I don't know, but it's like watching the innumerable accounts of Nazi defeat on the Hitler channels; we know how it ends but it's just too sweet to stop. Even as we watch it happening again.

Posted by Rodger the Real King of France

From Legal Insurrection, commenting on the total failure of Obama's policies in the Middle East leading ever closer to a war between Iran and Saudi Arabia:

This failure wouldn’t have been possible without a complicit media, creating a myth instead of a candidate. Will the editors of The Washington Post take a critical look at their 2008 endorsement and learn from their mistake before 2016? I wouldn’t count on it.

OBAMA’S CRAZY VISA POLICY MAKES TRUMP LOOK LIKE A PROPHET

Today on Good Morning America, John Cohen, a former acting under-secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and now a national security consultant for ABC News, dropped a bombshell: over the objections of security-minded DHS personnel, the Obama administration secretly barred DHS from looking at postings on social media by visa applicants like Tashfeen Malik.

Choose Your Fascism

If the only explanation for Trump's 'Islamophobia' is bigotry or mental deficiency a better one is needed to account for the data. A much simpler explanation for the fear which drives the Trump crowds is a loss of confidence in government assurances that they will keep the public safe.

As the blogger Ace of Spades put it, "think about this for a moment though. How many people who are deeply, deeply offended about keeping non-citizen Muslims out of the US think it's perfectly fine to force Christian bakers to provide a cake for same sex ceremonies? "

Then there's this.  Referring to Obama's Surveillance Regime ...

It is a false kind of hospitality that rolls out the red carpet to strangers only to direct them straight to the bugged room. It is a strange kind of anti-fascism that uses police state methods to enforce tolerance. We live in a world of "friends and neighbors" only rhetorically. In practice we are well on our way to creating a penitentiary.

Fear is natural in the world of ghosts the Western elites have created through their deceptions. They tell us not to worry but clutch at amulets and nostrums as if they were jumpy themselves. Rukmini Callimachi, writing in the New York Times, seriously argued that president Obama is basing his anti-ISIS strategy on an attempt to avoid fulfilling an Islamic prophecy which holds that "boots on the ground" would signal the last battle in which the infidel will be destroyed.

It is partly that theory that President Obama referred to in his speech on Sunday, when he said the United States should pursue a “sustainable victory” that involves airstrikes and supports local forces battling the Islamic State rather than sending a new generation of American soldiers into a ground offensive.

“I have said it repeatedly: Because of these prophecies, going in on the ground would be the worst trap to fall into. They want troops on the ground. Because they have already envisioned it,” said Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East Studies at Sciences Po in Paris, and the author of “Apocalypse in Islam,” one of the main scholarly texts exploring the scripture that the militants base their ideology on. ...

“To break the dynamic, you have to debunk the prophecy,” Mr. Filiu said. “You need to do so via a military defeat, like taking over Raqqa. But it needs to be by local forces — by Sunni Arabs.”

That so far has been the approach of the Obama administration, which has armed as well as provided air support to a number of militias in northern Iraq and Syria, hoping to give a local veneer to the tip of the sword. The result has been mixed, with gains only in areas that are outside the main Sunni Arab strongholds that the Islamic State controls.

Obama was brought up in Muslim countries and could very well be aware, and influenced by Muslim prophesy. Ridiculous? How many times have Christians been accused of supporting Israel because they believe in biblical prophesy about Armageddon and the second coming of Christ? The answer is, Lots. So it's an interesting hypothesis.