Year: 2013

One of my Twitter followers asked a rhetorical question on Twitter and the OpEdge blogsite in response to my recent blog on drones being used to kill American citizens.

The question: Terrorism = war? If so, drone kill is ok.

My response is that even if terrorism is war, that definition in itself doesn’t make it legal or moral to use drones in civilian populations or to hunt down U.S. citizens.

Terrorism is a type of warfare that takes advantage of one of the loopholes in conventional warfare in the 21st century: Don’t attack civilians if you can avoid it and don’t invade countries that are not parties to the dispute. By operating while concealed in civilian populations, often in peaceful countries, terrorists take advantage of these humane rules. It makes it harder to seek out a battle terrorists. On the other hand, a terrorist army is so small that the long-term damage it can do is much less than an army with an air force and bombs. If you don’t believe me, then ask the Iraqi people.

My point, which I may have not made as clearly as I could have the other day, is that drones are okay on the legitimate battle field but not to hunt people in civilian settings.  And drones are never okay against a U.S. citizen. Now if that citizen is in an airplane attacking a U.S. ally and we shoot him or her down, that’s fine. But by virtue of singling out the U.S. citizen in a non-battlefield environment, we have changed the context from hot warfare to peacetime (or wartime) crime. And when we’re talking about crime, we’re talking about due process.

My opinion may or may not have a firm basis in international law. That doesn’t matter to me. I know what’s right and fair, and hunting down U.S. citizens instead of capturing them and bringing them to trial is neither right nor fair. I‘m not willing to pervert our way of life to take out a terrorist.  It lowers us to their level—makes us no better than they are. Besides, it’s not needed: we were winning the war against Al Qaida before we started using drones.

 

 

The very fact that Bruce Willis has a say in the public controversy about gun control demonstrates once again that the United States suffers from the advanced stages of celebriosis, defined as excessive brain damage from focusing too much on the lives and thoughts of celebrities.

What pro-gun die-hard Willis said earlier this week is a classic in one special rhetorical device used by both sides to defend not changing a bad situation: the slippery slope.

Without using the expression, “slippery slope,” Willis caught the essence of its silliness with his statement: “I think that you can’t start to pick apart anything out of the Bill of Rights without thinking that it’s all going to become undone…If you take one out or change one law, then why wouldn’t they take all your rights away from you?”

And why will that happen of necessity? Just because we want to run people through background checks before they buy guns, how does that lead to taking away the right to assemble or the right not to have to house soldiers (3rd amendment)? With the “slippery slope” metaphor, the first act is like taking a step off a very icy hill. The exhilaration of the moment makes you lose balance and slide all the way down the hill, into tyranny, communism, lawlessness or whatever the bête noir du jour.

The slippery slope is a fanciful absurdity that’s different from taking something to its extreme because the argument for the slippery slope states that we will slide of necessity by taking that first step. Obviously it’s just not so.

The classic slippery slope was actually a line of dominos, representing countries in Asia, all set to fall to the communists if the first one, South Viet Nam, did.  The sheer philosophical necessity of all the dominos falling once Viet Nam did haunted a generation of U.S. government officials, leading to a war of unparallel brutality and suffering. But when we lost Viet Nam, most of the other dominos stayed standing—and in fact in recent decades Viet Nam has moved into capitalist circles. There was no domino effect and there is no slippery slope.

In the interest of balance, one article quoting Willis’ inanities included the opposing views of someone equally as qualified to speak publicly on the issue of gun control—since he too has used plenty of fake guns in Hollywood shoot-em-ups. It was good old slurry-voiced Rocky, AKA Sylvester Stallone, who supports a ban on assault weapons, saying “I know people get (upset) and go, ‘They’re going to take away the assault weapon.’ Who needs an assault weapon? Like really, unless you’re carrying out an assault. You can’t hunt with it. Who’s going to attack your house, a (expletive) army?”

Maybe that’s the problem? Maybe Bruce is confusing his filmic chimeras in which an eff-ing army could attack his house with the real world? Maybe Bruce has taken a few too many punches in his movie roles? It’s good to see that Rocky hasn’t.

For about 10 years, I have been embarrassed for my country because our leaders condoned and committed torture, and even dreamed up fanciful legal justifications. Perhaps the most odious of the legal arguments made by the Bush II administration for sticking someone’s head under water until near drowning and hanging them cold and naked by their arms for hours was that if the President ordered it, it could not by definition be illegal.

Now we see this justification used again, and this time by the administration of Barack Obama.  I am not only embarrassed for my country, but personally ashamed since I voted for the guy—twice.

But mostly I’m angry.

Obama’s legal team is essentially saying that it’s okay to murder a U.S. citizen if the president says it’s okay. What about due process? That’s a nicety that gets lost because the assumption is that we’re talking about terrorists in other countries whom we intend to take out with a clean drone hit.

Of course, that’s today. Tomorrow it could be in our own country. Or it could be with a bullet or strangulation. Or maybe an auto accident that kills a few innocent bystanders.  Of course, that’s all slippery slope speculation, except for those familiar with the secret history of the CIA and U.S. military. I advise readers to review the deaths of Allende or Diem. It’s not a matter of one thing leading to another, it’s a matter of publicly acknowledging something the U.S. government has done for decades, only now saying that it’s legal.

The drone makes it impossible to deny American involvement in state ordered assassination. At least until other nations get a hold of drone technology, which they will.

I have nothing against the U.S. use of drones, but only against legitimate enemies enrolled in real armies during real battles. Drones on real battlefields make a lot of sense. The problem is that all you can do with a drone is kill. If they figure out the robotics to capture and transport the accused to a military base, drones would become a wonderful tool for terrorists.

But U.S. citizens and non-combatants of all nationalities all deserve the due process that is denied someone by a drone killing. They deserve due process, but more importantly, so do the American people.

Whether by drone or bullet, killing a U.S. citizen without first giving that person a trial is illegal and un-American.  The President should take some time off from pandering to gun enthusiasts with target practice photo ops and look deep into his heart and ask himself if he really wants to be remembered with Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon and Bush II as perpetrators of illegal state violence.

The Pollyannas and Panglosses among us like to look back at past instances of the automation of production or service-delivery as proof that the economy adjusts and people find newer, better-paying and more fulfilling jobs. A recent example is Catherine Rampell’s article in yesterday’s New York Times “Sunday Review” section titled “Raging (Again) Against the Robots.”

In her rambling, Rampell trots out the usual fictional suspects: The Golem, Capek’s R.U.R., Kurt Vonnegut’s Piano Player. To these literary manifestations of the fear of robots, she adds cursory mentions of the agricultural and software revolutions. A flippant approach to this mostly fictional material trivializes the problems caused by automation.

While it is true that people eventually did get better jobs after farming was mechanized, the argument is absurd that warnings against automation in the past proved false and therefore the current warnings will not pan out either. History does not repeat the past in the same way all the time. Just because something worked out in the past doesn’t mean it will work out again.

There are many differences between automating farming and manufacturing in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the current automating of engineering, medical, retail and teaching jobs in the early part of the 21st century:

• The jobs replaced in the industrial revolution were tedious and back-breaking physical labor. The current wave of machines replaces primarily “brain” jobs filled by middle class professionals and paraprofessionals.
• There were few limits in the world markets in the 19th century, so jobs were created by expanding markets. Now there are many limits to market expansion, including increased competition from other countries and the limits to growth imposed by the dual impact of climate disruption and resource scarcity.
• The historical means to absorb excess labor no longer exists. The citizens of western democracy and many totalitarian regimes such as China and Iran will no longer tolerate a high number of war casualties. There are few habitable wildernesses like the American West to which excess populations can move.

There is also the question: does this new technology increase the quality of life or does it merely make the process cheaper? Exhibit #1 against the mindless implementation of technology is the rush to on-line university classes.  In how many ways is a live class better? The ability to interact spontaneously off on fruitful tangents. The greater need to pay attention. The greater difficulty in cheating.  It also keeps more teachers working.

We’ve discovered that we can take technology too far in many realms, even farming, which, with the return to small, local farms and the increase in organic farming, has seen some reverse substitution of human labor and thought power for technology in recent decades.

We also have to ask ourselves what we can do to help the workers affected by the current wave of automation. Their jobs are never coming back, and to a large extent the jobs being created in our slowly gathering economic recovery are low-paying.

Either more people are going to fall out of the middle class and into poverty or we are going to have to take a look at how we split the profits resulting from the increased productivity of knowledge-based processes such as teaching, engineering and health care.  It starts with raising the minimum wage, which leads to higher wages at all levels. Instead of trying to destroy teachers unions with charter schools and pension givebacks, our public policies should foster increased unionization of other knowledge workers, since unions raise the incomes of workers. We should also start thinking seriously about lowering the hours considered full-time for a job to 30 a week without a decrease in gross pay.

The other alternative is to face a U.S. economy in which virtually everyone is poor except for a handful of rich people and a sprinkling of middle class and upper middle class professionals.

A constant thread of anti-intellectualism runs through the mass media.  Mass media writers seem to embrace anti-intellectual assumptions: They pretend that simple math is hard.  They call good students “over-achievers” and “nerds” (a derogatory term now embraced by many who are academically inclined, just as many GLBT have embraced “queer”).    “Smart” characters such as the four fictional “Big Bang” scientists are depicted as inept with women, uncool and uncoordinated.  Science writers demean their own profession.

A recent New York Times Book Review provides a stunning example of anti-intellectualism embedded into the premise of an article. It’s in a book review of a biography of the 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge.  Muybridge, whose eccentricities bordered on madness, is known for setting up a row of cameras to take a series of photographs that showed how a horse runs. His work helped to develop the conceptual framework for motion pictures, which are created by taking photographs so fast that when played back one after another at the speed they were taken will produce the illusion of movement.

Here is how the book reviewer, Candace Millard, opens her piece:

Genius, it seems, is almost always accompanied by eccentricity, if not madness. Those rare instances of genuine brilliance that we find scattered throughout history — in the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, the mathematical equations of John Nash — often appear to have come at great cost to the minds that produced them. The work of Eadweard Muybridge is no exception.

Setting aside the question of whether Muybridge is a case of genuine brilliance or just a good and innovative photographer, let’s examine this paragraph: Millard uses the common propaganda trick of selecting only the details that help her case. She lists a composer, painter and mathematician. But what about Bach, Picasso and Isaac Newton? These men were all quite happy and completely normal. Or Mozart, Titian and Bertrand Russell (who, BTW, was quite the ladies’ man)? Or Charles Ives, Turner and Gauss?  Interestingly enough, in the case of the painters and mathematicians, the names I have thrown out are usually considered to be much more important—greater geniuses—than the ones who Millard uses to try to make her case.

Yes some geniuses have lived unhappy lives or suffered from mental illness. Others like Albert Einstein have had their small eccentricities, but so do we all.

It is just not true, however, that “genius is almost always accompanied by eccentricity, if not madness,” as Millard states. In insisting on this point and then graduating Muybridge to the top rank of intellects to provide additional proof of it, Millard continues the long-time American myth of the mad or cursed genius.

As a piece of fiction, the mad genius works well in a classic Aristotelian way, because like the fictional Nash in the 2001 movie, “A Beautiful Mind,” the genius is undone by himself, a case of twisted hubris.  But it’s no more than a myth, as false and odious as the myth that Jews or Chinese are smart or that African-Americans are not.

The myth of the mad genius is part of the ideology of anti-intellectualism that the mass media promulgate on an almost daily basis.  I’m going to speculate that the mass media keep the myth of the mad genius and other manifestations of anti-intellectualism alive  because denigration of intellectual activity is a form of social control. The media and its owners want people to focus on buying stuff. They want people’s minds to remain undeveloped, so that they become good-little sheep-like consumers. They want the intellectual to be an outsider, someone off in his own little world that has nothing to do with the bigger more important world of mindless consumerism.

The media owners may also want to reserve the top jobs for their own kind, which is hard to do in a meritocracy unless you can discourage poor kids from seeking true knowledge in school (as opposed to credentials). They want a world in which money and not knowledge rules.

 

 

“We give up our rights one piece at a time,” a West Virginia banker named Charlie Houck stated to West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin recently during a meeting the Senator was holding in Beckley, WV on gun control.

Yes, we do, Mr. Houck.

Let’s go over some of the many rights we have already given up, one piece at a time:

We’ve given up the right to force ourselves sexually on other people.

We’ve given up the right to murder someone else.

We’ve given up the right to abuse children.

We’ve given up the right to take anything we want from anyone too weak to defend her or himself.

We’ve given up the right to drive an automobile without insurance or a license. We’ve given up the right to just keep driving—speed limits, red lights and stop signs deter us.

We’ve given up the right not to hire someone just because she or he is a racial or ethnic minority, a woman, disabled or gay.

We’ve given up the right to sell food that’s spoiled or adulterated or to sell products that don’t meet safety standards. Or to sell products that don’t do what the sellers say they will do.

We’ve given up the right to burn down our neighbor’s home.

We’vegiven up the right to steal words and images that other people created and say that we did it.

I could go on and on for pages about the rights we no longer have, some of which we gave up millennia ago, some of which we gave up before recorded history.

And I for one am delighted that all these rights have gone, because without these restrictions on rights and hundreds of others, we—the people—could not have a civil society. Civilization is all about restricting rights.  When we are part of society, we agree to restrict our rights for the greater good and to protect ourselves from the harm that others would inflict on us if they exercised those “rights.” It’s called the social compact.

Rights change over time. In the past, many societies, including much of the United States, had the right to own slaves.  No more, thank goodness.   Through much of the history of the United States, employers had the right to hire children, work them long hours and pay them pennies. No more, thank goodness.

Many of these restrictions evolved as society changed. For example, when automobiles first came out, there were no rules of the road, no stop signs, no red or yellow lights, no speed limits. But soon there were so many cars around, we had to develop rules and we had to require that those operated cars have insurance.

Often we give up one set of rights to gain another one, or some people gain rights at the expense of others. For example, when minorities and women gradually gained workplace rights, racist and misogynist employers lost the right to discriminate. And it’s a damn good thing they did!

At this point in time, only extremists (like me) want to outlaw private ownership of guns. What mainstream organizations and elected officials are asking for is to restrict the absolute right to own and carry a gun—for the safety of society. What’s so problematic about requiring that there is a background check before all gun sales? Why should anyone have a problem with restricting the right to carry a loaded weapon in public places such as college campuses, hospitals, malls and schools? Why should gun owners object to paying insurance to cover the damage done to people in gun violence?

And why can’t pro-gun extremists see the necessity of outlawing a type of weapon responsible for most of the mass murders in the United States, a weapon that, as Senator Manchin has noted in the past, is not used by hunters or target shooters?

As society evolves, we—the people—uncover more rights we have to give up and more rights to give to ourselves. That’s called progress. We already have given up the 18th century views of women’s rights, slavery and intellectual property. It’s about time that we progressed from our 18th century mindset when it comes to guns.

 

 

What do KPMG, Exxon-Mobil, Rolex, Barclay’s Bank and Calloway Golf have in common?  All of these corporations are paying tons of money to Phil Mickelson to say nice things about them. 

Mickelson is a professional golfer who has won more money playing golf than all but one other person in the history of the game. But his big pay-off comes from lending his name to products and companies. Mickelson earned a total of $53 million in endorsements in 2011 in addition to the $9 million he made playing golf that year. Mickelson routinely has made more than $40 million per annum for years.

And yet he’s complaining that his federal and California state taxes have gone up. After a golf tournament this past weekend, Mickelson made a veiled threat to change his public life because his taxes are too high. His exact words: “There are going to be some drastic changes for me because I happen to be in that zone that has been targeted both federally and by the state and, you know, it doesn’t work for me right now.”

Some pundits think he’s threatening to retire from golf, while others think he’s threatening to relocate to a state that has lower taxes than California.

What’s he really threatening to do is become the poster child for tantrum-throwing selfishness.

Mickelson complains that his tax rate is 62% or 63% of his income.  That percentage is completely bogus, of course, because it doesn’t include the many deductions he probably takes and it applies the highest tax rate for both California and federal income tax to all his income, not just the amount above the floor for the highest marginal (or incremental) rate.

But even if we assume that Mickelson is actually paying 63% of all his income in taxes, that means that he and his family would have to get by on a mere $14.8 million a year, assuming he continues to make his low end of $40 million income before taxes.  Does that mean more hamburger helper and Top Ramen for the Mickelson household?  Of course, he could always supplement the budget by dipping into his estimated $150 million net worth.

Mickelson’s problem could be that he lives in a hermetically sealed environment of golf courses, resorts, country clubs and gated communities in which he only interacts with other golfers and a lot of rich folk who love golf.  He may never see the maid who cleans his hotel room, the guy who mows the green, the crews that repair the roads on which he drives or the TV engineer who makes sure his swing is transmitted to the millions of fans watching the tournament on TV. He may have never thought about how much—or how little—money his children’s teachers make, or how much or little the cashier makes who works the cash register where the hired help buy his family’s groceries.

Mickelson may have not done the math, so let’s do it for him: The $14.8 million that he would pocket a year if he only earned $40 million gross and he was taxed 63% on it computes to about 285 times what the average employed Californian earns before taxes.  

In his sequestered and rich little world, Mickelson may not be aware of the fact that our roads and bridges need work, that our public schools have been starved of funds, that we need to develop new technologies to address the threat of global warming, that the cost of public colleges is skyrocketing primarily because of a cutback in state support or that millions of people are unemployed or underemployed.

Mickelson may not know that he would have paid more in taxes in 1980, before Ronald Reagan began the conservative retrenchment that has led to the growing inequality of wealth in America. Mickelson may not know that he would have paid more before the Bush II tax cuts for the wealthy. He may not know that he would pay more taxes in virtually any other industrialized country.

I’ve had my fill of selfish a__holes like Phil Mickelson.  As far as I’m concerned he can follow the tax avoidance strategy of that overrated French actor Gérard Depardieu, who, rather than pay French income tax, has given up French citizenship and now makes his home in Luxemburg.  Maybe like Depardieu, Mickelson will be granted Russian citizenship by Vladimir Putin. 

I say, let Mickelson play 18 holes somewhere in Siberia.

Walmart is making a big deal about two moves it announced this week, for which it is demanding applause and gratitude.  You could call it the Walmart private sector economic stimulus plan. The trouble is, it’s nothing but smoke and mirrors.

Walmart’s first contribution to the American economy is a pledge to buy an additional $50 billion in goods and services from American companies over the next 10 years. It seems like a lot until you run the numbers, which I am not the first to do. It works out to $5 billion a year, a drop in the bucket of more than $250 billion in goods and services that this modern leviathan buys each year. Walmart is making a big deal about what for them is a minor adjustment that will make but a minor ripple in the U.S. economy.

More odiously self-serving is Walmart’s announcement that it will hire 100,000 veterans, or every veteran who left the service with an honorable discharge this past year. Sounds like a great combination of patriotism and economic growth until you start to think about it. Walmart literally has more than 2.2 million employees. Between growth and turnover, in any given year it is going to be hiring 100,000 people as greeters, cashiers, stockers and other in-store positions. Walmart has not created a single job, it has just said that it would give special consideration to one demographic group—recent veterans.

I’m also not the first to point out that the type of job that virtually all these vets will get at Walmart is low pay and with minimal or no benefits and little chance for advancement. Is this the best that we can do for those who have risked their lives on the frontlines of the wars prosecuted in our names?

The most interesting aspect of the Walmart hiring veterans announcement is what it will do to the demographics of its workforce: In the overall economy, more than 50% of all jobs today are held by women, and yet women are only 20% of the armed forces and therefore about 20% of the veterans in any given year. The disparate impact of hiring veterans is that the Walmart workforce will begin to skewer towards the male. Given the many past and ongoing lawsuits accusing Walmart of discrimination against women, the focus on veterans could make one begin to wonder if Walmart’s motives were less than patriotic.

Like the executives of many large companies, Walmart’s leaders could easily get lost in the internal rhetoric of the company, which lauds itself with the inexorable regularity with which parents laud four year olds for finishing their plates and zipping up their flies after potty.  These guys might actually get themselves to believe that it’s a big deal to bump up domestic purchases by a small amount or to focus hiring on one demographic group. And they probably thought the U.S. news media and public would believe it, too.

But it doesn’t matter how thickly Walmart’s public relations flaks paint the happy face on Walmart’s announcements. The news media and the public are more cynical after decades of seeing Walmart destroy small towns, bankrupt small business owners, squeeze suppliers and pay low wages.

Coke’s two-minute commercial telling us what it’s doing to fight the epidemic of obesity sweeping across America must contain two hundred people—all happy, many engaged with a Coke product, and none of them obese, or even overweight. Okay, okay, maybe two of the hundreds of people in the ad could stand to lose a few pounds, but even these still-happy few were in pretty good shape and shown being active.

Imagine. If instead of getting attractive models to shill their messages about a wider variety of smaller portions and lower calorie drinks, Coke had shown a cross section of the population—or better yet, a cross section of their drinkers—we would have seen a mesmerizing montage of saggy and billowing mid sections, big tushes, thunder thighs and quadruple chins. In short (and in large) one third or more of the happy Coke drinkers (shown or implied) in the commercial would have been obese and another third would have had more pot-gutted waddle than spring in their step.  That’s what all the statistics say: about a third of us are obese and another third are overweight.

Unfortunately for Coke, in the ideal world depicted in its commercial, a world of all healthy and happy people, there is no room for Coke or its products, other than the unscented water. The 100% juices that Coke mongers substitute a less healthy way to consume fruit—drinking it—for the healthier and lower calorie option of eating a real piece of fruit.  The sugared sodas are empty calories and the low-calorie ones have chemical substitutes that make people crave more food, so both lead directly to weight gain.

The ad and Coke’s overall campaign repeat the Big Lie that gets told whenever food companies get involved in an anti-obesity campaign. The big lie is to overstress the importance of exercise in losing weight. Don’t get me wrong: everyone should exercise a lot because it’s good for the brain, the heart and the psyche, and it does work off calories.

But exercise can only go so far. It takes about a half an hour on a tread mill to work off one chocolate chip cookie. So for the two thirds of Americans who already have a problem, exercise is no substitute for eating less…a lot less. If you want to lose weight, you have to eat less. And what better place to start reducing what you eat than to stop consuming the empty calories of Coke products?

The absurdly ironic impact of politics on the justice system shines brightly on the front page of today’s New York Times. First we learn that, of the 80,000 Americans who the Justice Department (DOJ) knows committed the federal crime of lying or providing inaccurate information on gun purchase background checks in 2010, only 44 were charged with a crime. And surprise, surprise, those who lie on background checks are more likely to commit violent crimes than the average person.

The 80,000, of course, are only the ones who got caught lying.  Some unmeasured number succeeded and thereby own guns that should legally not be in their possession.

Certainly many of the 80,000 were telling little stretchers and don’t deserve prosecution, but I’m betting that a goodly number were involved in identity theft, had a record or a restraining order or were under the care of a therapist. Prosecuting a large number of people who lie on their gun background applications would certainly send a message. It would lead to fewer people prone to lie on background checks filling them out. If we required background checks for all sales, it would lead to fewer guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.

Now that’s a message that the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the rest of the moneyed anti-gun control lobby doesn’t like.  Few lawmakers have the guts to support gun control and insist that we go after these lawbreakers. And as with the environment and global warming, Obama talks a good game but has actually done nothing about gun control except commiserate with victims and do a little tough-talking.

While I’m hopeful that the Biden Task Force will lead to some action (finally!) on controlling the proliferation of guns with inadequate regulation, I’m also wondering how in the world the DOJ is going to be able to summon up the resources to investigate those who lie on gun purchase background checks, given shrinking federal budgets.

To our good fortune, the Times provides the answer right there on the very same front page in a story about federal prosecution of a California businessman who has all his state licenses, follows all state laws and regulations to a tee, keeps pristine records, pays all taxes, files his forms on time  and yet faces years in jail because his business is growing and selling medical marijuana. The prosecution of Matthew R. Davies for being a sharp but law-abiding entrepreneur is only the latest in DOJ efforts to squelch the use of medical marijuana in states in which it’s legal. Barack Obama and his attorney general Eric Holder seem to hold a special animus for those who facilitate the legal use of marijuana, as if they have a kind of juvenile envy of people allowed to puff the magic dragon. No study links pot smoking with violent crime or even any increase in crimes (except the crime of buying/selling/using it where it s not legal or under illegal conditions). The DOJ thus does nothing to help make our lives safer and more secure by going after California or Colorado pot entrepreneurs.

Let’s review: Instead of prosecuting people who are willing to lie to get their hands on a loaded gun, the DOJ goes after a business person who has broken no state law and is supplying a medical service.

Perhaps the folks at DOJ have been smoking a bit too much of the stuff they’re confiscating.