South African parliament votes to violate post-apartheid agreements and confiscate white-owned farms without compensation

The story is here.

South African GDP has contracted by a whopping 29% as black radical Marxists have gained the upper hand there since 2011.

The country is following the pattern of neighboring Rhodesia, which willingly embraced Marxist Robert Mugabe in 1980.

Keep letting into America 1 million non-whites a year and the same will happen here.

It's just a matter of time. In South Africa, it took just 24 years.

BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) is a violent Marxist group with teachers as members, active in Michigan and tied to antifa, the NEA and NAMBLA!

And our property tax dollars pay their salaries!

From the story here:

One of BAMN’s most prominent organizers is Yvette Felarca, a Berkeley middle school teacher and pro-violence militant. Felarca currently faces charges of inciting a riot for her role in the Sacramento violence. ...

BAMN is active within both the National Education Association — the nation’s largest teacher’s union — as well as with local and regional teacher’s unions in Michigan and California. Last year, 17 different BAMN members ran for elected positions on the Detroit Federation of Teachers, according to a newsletter sent out by the DFT. BAMN also ran five candidates for different national leadership positions with the NEA in 2017.

Jonah Goldberg knows a thing or two about self-hatred

In "Behind the monument wars is a plague of self-hatred", Goldberg calls self-hatred a "Western disease". Gee, where'd we catch that?

The mobs of students — and their enabling professors and administrators — renaming buildings and bowdlerizing the language are still products of Western civilization. Even the poseurs who think Googling a few phrases from Karl Marx and wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt make them anti-colonialists are disciples of Western thinkers. Where does Mark-Viverito think her mother’s feminism came from? The Arawaks? For centuries, to the extent that educated Muslims talked about the Crusades at all, it was to boast about how they emerged victorious from them.

But Osama bin Laden and his ilk read too much Noam Chomsky and caught the Western disease of victimization and resentment. That’s the plague sweeping the land now. And tearing down some statues and renaming some streets isn’t a cure, it’s a symptom.

The country's become more liberal as "moderates" decline 21% since 1992

Gallup reported in January here that the country's moderates have declined from 43% in 1992 to 34% in 2016, a decline of nearly 21%.

At the same time the country's liberals have risen in number from 17% in 1992 to 25% in 2016, an increase of 47%.

Meanwhile conservatives are still stuck at 36%.

This means the country has become more polarized along the conservative-liberal axis as a huge part of the squishy middle has converted to the left.

My hunch is that the real story is that as the older generations have died off, what has been exposed is the more liberal elements of the Baby Boom generation and especially of their children and grandchildren, who were all indoctrinated in liberalism by the public schools, which were gradually taken over by the left after the 1960s.

I experienced this first hand in my high school in the early 1970s. I remember how two new young teachers freshly minted from college stuck out like sore thumbs compared with the old guard of my teachers. They wasted no time and immediately introduced us to the work of such luminaries as the Marxist Bertolt Brecht and the gay counterculture revolutionist Charles A. Reich, a teacher of both Bill and Hillary Clinton at Yale. Meanwhile I learned useful things from my lunkhead economics teacher, like how to do my taxes, but the textbook for the other parts of the class was the socialist Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers. Fortunately for me, my American History teacher loved America and the US Constitution. His name was Walt Anderson. I think now he saved me.

I survived to become a conservative, but obviously, most of you didn't.    

Mandela's legacy: Black South African government covers up racist tortures and murders of white farmers

Reported here:

In total, between 1998 and the end of 2016, 1848 people have been murdered in farm attacks — 1187 farmers, 490 family members, 147 farm employees, and 24 people who happened to be visiting the farm at the time. ... 

But any form of justice is incredibly rare, and white farmers are increasingly questioning their future. The number of white farmers in South Africa has halved in a little over two decades to just 30,000. Thousands more farms are up for sale. ... 

Since 2007, at the direction of the government, South African police have stopped releasing statistics about the race of the victims. Monitoring group Genocide Watch says the cover-up has been exacerbated by American and European governments, which have “remained silent about the problem, reinforcing the campaign of denial”. The rise in farm attacks has been blamed on increasingly anti-white hate speech, particularly from the ruling African National Congress.

In 2010, high-profile ANC member Julius Malema sang “Shoot the Farmer, Kill the Boer”, which Genocide Watch describes as “once a revolutionary song, but now an incitement to commit genocide”.

Malema was convicted for hate speech and the singing of the song was banned, but just seven months later president Jacob Zuma sang the song himself at an ANC event, in direct contempt of the judge’s ruling.

Malema was later kicked out the ANC, forming his own Marxist party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, which is now the third-largest party in parliament. Recently, Malema has been travelling the country urging black South Africans to take back land from “Dutch thugs”.

“People of South Africa, where you see a beautiful land, take it, it belongs to you,” Malema was quoted in The Telegraph as telling parliament.

Perhaps in response to populist pressure from Malema, Zuma earlier this month called for the confiscation of white-owned land without compensation. Zuma urged the “black parties” in the parliament to unite to form the two-thirds majority that would be needed to make the necessary change to the country’s constitution.

Last week, during a debate in parliament about the farm attacks, an ANC MP shouted “Bury them alive!” while MP Pieter Groenewald was speaking about the plight of white farmers.

“This is proof that the utterances of political leaders could lead to violence and murders and that the issue of farm murders is of little importance to the ANC,” AfriForum’s head of community safety, Ian Cameron, said in a statement afterwards. “Certain members of the ANC were chatting during the debate and not listening nor partaking at all.”

I knew there was something I didn't like about R. R. Reno

Once a radical, always a radical.

He admits to nostalgia for his former radicalism, here:

Jacobin, founded in 2010, is a Marxist quarterly that has gotten notice as the voice of youngish radicals. I took a subscription last year, wanting to know the thinking of the anti-establishment left. As a college student in the early 1980s, I was for a brief period the campus organizer of CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. I’ll leave it to the historians to determine whether CISPES was a front organization under Soviet control, but I can report that my participation in meetings put me in touch with hard-core communists. So I enjoy a certain nostalgic pleasure when I read the occasional essay that speaks of “objective conditions” and “a working-class vanguard.”

Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson asks "What is Aleppo"?

Well, not a long lost Marx brother.

Story here.

We're old right, not alt-right, in case you were wondering, because we have faith in God and fear him and they don't

And they will end badly, if they can even manage to end at all.

Alt-righter John Derbyshire, formerly welcome at National Review where he was a better and even somewhat beloved writer, explains the difference here: 

"As has often been noted, state ideologies, like the Cultural Marxism that currently holds sway in the West, key to the same social and psychological receptors as religions. Recall the late Larry Auster’s observation that blacks are sacred objects, criticism of which is received just as blasphemy used to be in the Age of Faith, and still is in places like Pakistan.

"Alt-Right types — all of them, though in many different ways — are reacting against this state ideology.

"What characterizes the Alt-Right is the rejection of Cultural Marxism; but while it characterizes us, it doesn’t unify us. That’s because we haven’t fled from the CultMarx pseudo-religion to some other, unifying faith. We don’t do faith." 

Substituting the truth with a lie doesn't make the truth a lie.

Chicom People's Liberation Army: Just waitin' for the order to Kill, Kill, Kill

Seen here:

China in recent years has turned to animated short films, rock bands and rap music to promote the Communist Party, government policies and the military. An armed forces recruiting video released earlier this month features a rap-rock soundtrack with lyrics such as "just waiting for the order to kill, kill, kill" over a frantic music-video style montage of aircraft, tanks and guns.

The video is here, at the end of which the message couldn't be clearer. An effort is also underway to make Karl Marx cool to the millennial generation of China, which has lost interest (story here).

Commenter explains Donald Trump to oblivious Marxist at CBS News MoneyWatch who appeals to Richard Hofstadter's passé paranoid style

Here:

IHATEUSERNAMESLIKETHIS April 21, 2016 6:6AM

It's not class resentment.

First you destroyed the way we funded our homes and communities -- the Savings and Loans.

Then you destroyed the ways we collectively bargained -- the unions.

Then you stole the [principal] of the Social Security Trust fund, some 2.7 trillion dollars so it couldn't earn interest and started to act like it was a handout you were giving us.

Then you shipped all the manufacturing jobs to China.

Then you shipped the service jobs to India.

Then you "commoditized" the mortgages on our homes in violation of the long standing "statute of frauds" and put them on the big roulette wheel you call Wall Street.

Then when that scheme failed you bailed out the banks that came up with the fraud and stuck us with the bill to bail them out.

Then you ran the money printing press so fast, so the big roulette wheel could prosper while the rest of us found our money buying less and less.

That is not called class resentment. That is called waking up.

Yanis Varoufakis calls far left party Popular Unity's plan for Grexit and a return to the drachma "isolationist"

In Greece the left calls the left isolationist.

In America the right calls the right isolationist.

Maybe the isolationism is where the real meaning is, the other monikers "left" and "right" being obfuscatory and Orwellian, and useless.

The two candidates for president in America with any energy in their campaigns are against free-trade because it is one-sided trade which slowly impoverishes the American middle class. A more insidious form of Fabianism is hard to imagine. One of the candidates is a patriotic socialist throwback to the FDR 1930s, the other a businessman whose hero was another Democrat in recovery, Ronald Reagan.

In our time it has been only some people from the left who have seemed capable of understanding that our capitalism-in-name-only actually requires the destruction of the economic ladder along which historically Americans have more or less freely traveled both up and down. This is because only people of the left are acquainted with the truth of the observation by Marx how free-trade was to be welcomed because it hastened the revolution. We get absolutely no insight from the American right about this and they run headlong unaware toward their fate. Accordingly we get no sympathy from them either for the plight of formerly prosperous millions of Americans who have crashed onto the rocks of the libertarian free for all. Their few children will become the next proletariat, the wealth of their parents and grandparents only a faint memory. 

The irony of the world situation is that it is creatures of the left who want to stop this, both here in America and in Greece. 

Yanis Varoufakis on the other hand is not one of them. Chalk it up to being an "erratic" Marxist, as he likes to say. What he is is a pan-Europeanist, a world citizen and globalist who is more at home in European capitals than he is on Aegina. He is not for what Greeks need most, which is the ability to feed themselves and export at a profit, for which they must have control over, and responsibility for, their own affairs. 

Seen here:

'The 54-year-old Varoufakis has already dismissed speculation that he would join the far-left Popular Unity party that broke away from Syriza last week, telling ABC that he had "great sympathy" but fundamental differences with them and considered their stance "isolationist".'

Greeks pass third draconian austerity/bailout package 222 to 64 with 11 abstentions

Looks like Alexis Tsipras' Syriza MPs defected in a big way: 32 No votes this time with 11 abstentions and 1 absent. This could prove fatal to Tsipras' continuance as Prime Minister. The Syriza coalition of the Left with 149 members partners with Independents with 12 in the 300 seat parliament. Tsipras' core support in parliament appears to have fallen to 39%.

The "erratic Marxist" Yanis Varoufakis voted No, after voting Yes and No previously, and reportedly offered to resign his seat so that Tsipras may appoint a reliable vote to replace him. 

The Guardian has full coverage here.

Einstein's successor Freeman Dyson: Climatologists don't understand the climate, burning coal is good for crop yields

Quoted here in 2013:

"I think any good scientist ought to be a skeptic."

"I just think they don’t understand the climate," he said of climatologists. "Their computer models are full of fudge factors."

"The models are extremely oversimplified," he said. "They don't represent the clouds in detail at all. They simply use a fudge factor to represent the clouds."

"It’s certainly true that carbon dioxide is good for vegetation," Dyson said. "About 15 percent of agricultural yields are due to CO-2 we put in the atmosphere. From that point of view, it’s a real plus to burn coal and oil."

"They’re absolutely lousy," he said of American journalists. "That’s true also in Europe. I don’t know why they’ve been brainwashed."

"It was similar in the Soviet Union," he said. "Who could doubt Marxist economics was the future? Everything else was in the dustbin."

George Will falls in love with Bill Clinton's free-trade utopianism

George Will here:

'You who are reading this column probably have a chronic, indeed incurable trade deficit with your barber or hair dresser. You regularly buy what he or she sells, yet he or she never buys anything from you. But things somehow work out. As they do between nations, because as the late Robert Bartley, editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, once wrote, “International transactions are always in balance, by definition.”

'“Protectionism,” said Clinton during the NAFTA debate, “is just a fancy word for giving up; we want to compete and win.”'

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Do we really need to point out that if transactions are always in balance then there is no such thing as winning? Trade is an endless struggle between competing interests just as is politics. It is pure utopianism to dream otherwise. There is no finality in politics or trade, simply a pause before the next confrontation or negotiation, which usually ensues after a party to the transaction realizes it got shortchanged in some way, or will be.

Karl Marx was all for free-trade because it hastens the transition from capitalism to socialism by shifting political power to a growing, impoverished proletariat and the elites who run them. 

Its odd bedfellows today are Barack Obama and George Will, and too many members of the two political parties.

Michael Lind is right: American progressives should thank libertarians for hijacking American conservatism

From a perceptive (because he agrees with me) obituary for economic conservatism in Salon, here, by ex-neocon Michael Lind:

In today’s debate about the economy, populist liberals, centrist neoliberals and libertarians are represented. One group is missing from the American economic debate: economic conservatives.

The economists and economic pundits who are usually described as “conservatives” in the U.S. are really libertarians, or, if they are more moderate, right-neoliberals. While genuine conservatives are anti-utopian in temperament, most right-wing economists in the U.S. [today] share the utopian belief that many if not most public services and publicly regulated utilities can be replaced with competitive private markets. ...

The once-influential conservative historian Russell Kirk dismissed libertarians as “chirping sectaries” and declared that any genuine conservative would sooner be a socialist than a libertarian. From Kirk’s Burkean conservative perspective, libertarians or classical liberals were crazed, hyper-rationalist, utopian radicals, like Marxists.

What do liberals and libertarians have most in common this week?

What do liberals and libertarians have most in common this week?

The almost giddy pleasure they take in ridicule of religious founders and their followers.

That this ridicule of religion has animated liberalism for a long time in America is a given. Just ask any devout Christian, if you can still find one, how Serrano's Piss Christ made him feel.

But conservatives, on the other hand, have always believed above all in self-restraint, without which there cannot be any such thing called limited government. As Oswald Spengler reminded us in the 1930s but everyone seems to have long since forgotten, Christianity is renunciation and nothing else. The exploding ignorance of this knowledge had already gone hand in hand with the development of totalitarian forms of government in Spengler's own time, and has only gotten worse since. The world is now dominated as a consequence by two forms of fascism which ended up winning against communism, one of the left and one of the right: the one is in China and the other in the United States. The reason? Fascism is more successful at production and consumption than communism, which is all there is to materialist philosophers. To them self-restraint is as much of an enemy as it was an opiate to Marx. 

The most uncomfortable example of self-restraint for our own time has been self-censorship, which is nothing more than the recognition of the existence of the evil inclination inside of every human being, a recognition only made possible by an openness to a moral vision of the universe. That moral vision says that that evil inclination must be restrained by the free choice of the self if civilized society is to survive. But our supposed political allies today in conservatism and libertarianism want nothing to do with that. They have together more in common with liberalism than with the transcendent world of which I am writing. 

Self-censorship in fact used to be seen as a virtue in America, when it was a more religiously informed country. "Let what you say be simply 'Yes' or 'No'; anything more than this comes from evil", said the founder of our religion. The idea was to live and let live because the evil and the good had to grow up together until the harvest. Otherwise the wheat would be lost with the tares. Accordingly, to be wise meant often to hold your tongue and keep your peace, even when you knew you were right, and to forgo arguments especially over religion because you were free to go to your church or to no church at all, and I was free to go to mine. "Strive for peace with all men", said another of our authorities. If Christians have been given their own form of jihad, that has been it, but they have failed miserably at it.

It must be stated plainly, nothing distinguishes what is different about Islam from us more than its opposition to peaceful coexistence, however poorly we have lived up to our own ideals. Islam means submission to its law, its prophet and its God. A Muslim is "one who submits". Peace only exists between the two of us when we submit to them. Which is why it follows that inviting Muslims into Christian countries is a recipe for conflict.

All around us this week so-called conservatives are urging us to join them in unloading a barrage of invective against Islam's founder, Muhammad. They do not want to live in peace. They want a war, which threatens to destroy us all.

Here's Roger Kimball at Pajamas Media:

"Were I (per impossible) editor of The New York Times, I would run those cartoons of Mohammed on the front page of the paper every day for a month." 

Here's Ralph Peters at Fox News:

"Even if those terrorists are tracked down and killed - and I hope they are killed and die miserably - the end result of this is going to be we're going to continue to self-censor."

"The correct response to this attack, by all of us in journalism ... if we had guts, those cartoons would be reprinted on the front page of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times tomorrow. They won't be."

And here's a local libertarian in Michigan, one Steve Gruber:

It was blood thirsty little pieces of crap-spawned from the repugnant womb of modern Islam that murdered a dozen innocents inside an office for a French satirical magazine. Screaming glory be to Allah while executing 10 staff members and two police officers the vile nature of modern Islam was on display for all to see once again. Why did they attack the magazine? Because the magazine routinely skewered just about anyone and everyone and had the courage to publish cartoons making fun of Mohammed. Well too damn bad. ... In the spirit of America let me say to hell with Mohammed and any of his followers if they think it proper to murder cartoonists or anyone else in the name of Allah.

What these individuals, were they conservatives, should be calling for is separation, keeping Muslims at a distance from Christian civilization, because the two are fundamentally not reconcilable until Muslims undergo a reformation of their own which renounces the inspiration of Koranic surahs legitimating violence against infidels. I predict it will be a cold day in hell before that happens because the so-called conservatives cannot see that the so-called innocents were anything but. They were as much the enemies of what made the West the West as the Muslims are.

Instead all that these ideologues of ours offer is ridicule of Islam, but from the safe distance of an increasingly less intact West. They call this courage, but shrink from what real courage requires: The courage that doesn't need to justify itself in the face of mortal danger, but which freely and quickly acts to excise the cancer and banish it, as well as abolish the tenuous economic cords made of petroleum from which it profits. Libertarian devotion to first principles of freedom of movement, trade and the like all work together to sabotage this doctor from performing the necessary surgery. All they can do is insult, and retreat to the safety of the drone war against an implacable enemy, ala John Galt.

Having grown up in a Christian denomination which held very dim views of everyone else's religion but was convinced everyone else was worth converting to our way of thinking because Christ died for them too, I find the overt lack of charity toward a whole religion and its founder a sign of profound decadence in our own civilization, criminal acts by religious fanatics notwithstanding.

We have to live together in the same world, but it were better if we grew in separate gardens to the extent that that is possible. The only constructive policy with Islam going forward is utter disengagement with its worst elements, and repression of those when called for, such as now in Yemen. Unfortunately for the West, this means withdrawing from Muslim lands, especially Arabia, and actively choosing to promote independence in energy to the extent that whether Islam reforms or does not reform, we can live without them and prevent them from harming others.

We cannot continue to serve God and mammon. Otherwise we are no different than them.

If Obama had wanted to "rescue" the economy in 2009, he should have ramped-up the wars as he's doing now

If Obama had really wanted to rescue the economy in 2009, he would have ramped up dramatically the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of putting them on the path to euthanasia. In this sense he was a very bad Keynesian who made FDR spin in his grave.

Of course, that assumes he is smart enough to understand Keynesianism, being raised as a doctrinaire Marxist who was content to bask lazily in the glow of his presidential victory while a bunch of Clinton re-treads did their mediocre best for him . . . recreating HillaryCare. A more sinister interpretation believes that the inattention to the economy was all on purpose, since suppressing the middle class is the main objective of revolutionary leftism faced with successful capitalism almost everywhere. Still others simply chalk it up to Obama's incompetence, just another example of the Affirmative Action Presidency at work.

But I digress.

The simple reason for the need to have ramped up the wars back in 2009 is that the radical stimulus spending called for by the likes of Paul Krugman (3x what Obama ended up spending), who ridiculed the smallness of Obama's stimulus spending plan in The New York Times here, cannot be accomplished quickly through any other department of the federal government except through what we used to call more accurately The War Department. 'There are only a limited number of “shovel-ready” public investment projects — that is, projects that can be started quickly enough to help the economy in the near term,' Krugman wrote at the time.

That's for sure.

Proof of this can now be seen in the GDP numbers in just the last year when ISIS all of a sudden became a threat on the administration's radar screen even though ISIS had been building in the open for years and the administration actually had been warned about it and knew about it.

Federal government consumption had been a net negative subtraction from GDP for each of the last three years, 2011-2013, totaling -0.28 points of GDP for each year on average, and 75% of that came on average from cutting spending on National Defense.

All of that changed on a dime in 3Q2014 when ISIS surged into Iraq. Consumption on national defense suddenly vaulted to +0.69 points of GDP from +0.12 points in 1Q and -0.07 points in 2Q, to the point where defense spending now represents fully 97% of the federal contribution to GDP in the third quarter of 2014, and over 13% of GDP overall. All the current big contributors to GDP come in lower than this except for exports, with which defense spending is tied. 

Only the military can spend large sums of government money quickly in this slow-moving, inertia-plagued bureaucratic state. Future presidents, take note: War is still the father of everything.

2Q2014 GDP, third estimate, comes in at 4.6%, 1Q still -2.1%

The third estimate of 2Q2014 GDP comes in at 4.6%, up from 4.2% a month earlier, mostly on revisions to exports and nonresidential fixed investment. Subtract 1.4 points for inventories and you've basically got 3.2%. Not too shabby but not gangbusters like it ought to be at this stage of the game.

Recall, however, that the export picture in 2Q reflects a dollar index trading in the range of 79, whereas the index has been on a tear since mid-July, marching upward beyond 85 today thus making exports very pricey in 3Q compared to then, portending rough news ahead on that front. Exports of goods are running at about $1.6 trillion nominal annualized in 2Q vs. $1.5 trillion a year ago. Imports of goods, however, which subtract from GDP, still swamp our exports by $800 billion net annually and are also up $100 billion year over year at $2.4 trillion nominal annualized in 2Q. To put that $800 billion in context, consider that total nominal GDP year over year is up only $700 billion. Think what we could be if we were an export powerhouse once again.

MSNBC dingbat tries to tell the world Animal Farm wasn't aimed at the Soviet Union

Her name? Krystal Ball.

(With a name like that shouldn't she be doing the weather somewhere, or maybe the traffic? No, I know! Market futures!)

Here she is in all her dimness, trying to frame George Orwell's fairy story as a screed against capitalism:

Animal Farm, hmm. Isn't that Orwell's political parable of farm animals where a bunch of pigs hog up all the economic resources, tell the animals they need the food because they're the makers and then scare up a prospect of a phony boogie man every time their greed is challenged?

Sorry, no. The original capitalist pigs were the communists, which is why the communists like "Krystal Ball" work so hard to make you think the opposite:

One publisher during the war, who had initially accepted Animal Farm, subsequently turned it down after an official at the British Ministry of Information warned him off. The publisher then wrote to Orwell, saying: "If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators [Lenin and Stalin], that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships. "Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are."

In Orwell's London Letter for Partisan Review dated 17 April 1944 he stated how it was "next door to impossible to get anything overtly anti-Russian printed" because of the US, UK, Soviet alliance.

What's next from old Krystal? The OSS (formed in 1941) murdered Trotsky?

If Hillary Doesn't Run, Her Marxism Dictates That Chelsea Must . . . For Something: How About Ambassador To Libya To Get Her Started?

Libya accepts pregnant ambassadors, right?

Mickey Kaus, here:

The Clinton mode of production, then, is running for office or serving in office. That is the material basis for the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton lifestyle and the whole Clinton institutional structure. In order to keep this mode of production from breaking down, the Clintons–one of them, at any rate–must be at least potentially in the running for a powerful office at all times. If Hillary doesn’t really want to run, she can’t admit it in public. She must maintain the facade of candidacy until the last minute–or else the Foundation will have to cut back and Ira Magaziner might need to find a job. If it looks like Hillary might not run–perhaps because of health reasons–the model would predict that another Clinton, presumably daughter Chelsea, would start making noises about launching a political career. Voila! Data point confirmed. The theory is off to a good start. …

h/t Chris