Now let's talk drugs for a minute -- along with the jackassery in both the States and Washington DC.

Everyone is outraged about the number of opioid deaths -- and the peddling of synthetics, such as fentanyl.  In fact I can make a pretty clean argument for closing the Mexican border and nuking Beijing on that alone.  But..... how about something more-mundane?

30% -- or about 1 in 3 American adults -- don't drink at all.  20% more have less than one drink a month.  The next decile (10%) consume about one drink every two weeks.

The next 10% consume about one drink every three days; odds are they have them both in a given week on one day, probably Friday.  The next 10% (we've now accounted for 80% of adults) have slightly less than one drink a day.

Now it gets interesting.  The second-to-top 10% consume about 15 drinks weekly, or about two a day.  This is the limit, according to physicians and such, for alcohol consumption that is generally not (all that) harmful.  I have news for you -- as I've reported here before, I can, from the physiological data off my Garmin, tell you on which days I've had one drink, two drinks, or more.  So if you say it doesn't do any harm with the first one, well, yes it does.  And so does the second.

But the top decile -- the top 10% , which incidentally means more than 20 million Americans -- consume an unbelievable 73 drinks a week or more than 10 a day, on average, every day.

To put this in perspective if you add up all the drinks the other consume you get about a third of those that these people consume.  That's right -- 3/4 of all alcohol consumed goes down the gullet of 1/10th of the American adult population.

73 drinks is over 7,000 calories a week as a result of alcohol consumption or more than 1,000 a day.  That's enough to put on more than two pounds a week, all other things being equal.  Put another way the average sedentary person who is drinking that much is consuming roughly 60% of their caloric requirement in alcohol alone; if that booze is being consumed in the form of beer or mixed drinks that contain sugar in their mixers it's even worse, likely 2-3x as bad!

ALL of these people are raging alcoholics.  ALL of these people are either outrageously obese or nutritionally deficit at a level sufficient to do very serious metabolic damage or kill them, not counting the damage from the alcohol itself.

BUT MORE TO THE POINT EVERY SINGLE PRODUCER AND SELLER OF ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES IS BOTH UTTERLY RELIANT ON SUCH PEOPLE TO SURVIVE IN BUSINESS AND THUS THEY ARE ALL AIMING THEIR ADVERTISING AND MARKETING EXPENSE AT THEM -- THEY HAVE TO IN ORDER TO STAY IN BUSINESS.

I personally do not care if you are (1) an adult and (2) wish to drug yourself to death.

But -- I refuse to sit quietly for the hypocrisy both from politicians who bitch and whine about far less dangerous drugs than alcohol (e.g. marijuana and especially CBD, which has no known intoxicating effect) while at the same time there is a store on every single corner that intentionally stocks, markets to and sells dangerous drugs that they know damn well are, 75% of the time by volume, going into the gullet of people who are committing slow suicide.

Further, while you certainly have the right to commit suicide, whether slowly or not, you don't have the right to demand that I pay for it.

What shocks me in these statistics, however, is that it's 10% of the population.  I knew two people who have drank themselves to death, am absolutely certain that's both what killed them and have no trouble believing they were consuming 70 drinks a week.  But what these statistics say is that this is an amazingly common thing.  1 in 10 American adults?!  Seriously?  1 in 10 adults in America are clinically alcoholic and well on their way to killing themselves by being so?

Well now that does put some perspective on things, does it not?

It also puts perspective on state and federal government activities related to various drugs -- including a whole host of them that are illegal, yet clearly are less-harmful than booze is.

So we have Louisiana poised to sign an anti-abortion Bill, Alabama has just passed one, and there are others.

On the other hand as I noted New York and Virginia started this latest round of insanity, with both states basically attempting to declare that a child in the process of being born could be aborted.  Then the US House refused to pass a bill that would require a fetus that survived an abortion attempt to be given medical care as a child.

I don't know how much more-clear you can get than that as to intent; the House clearly stated that a born infant, who was attempted to be aborted but survived, has no right to life even though it is now independently alive outside of the mother.

Essentially, the left -- all of it, including all elected Democrats in Congress, have declared that there is no such thing as a baby until and unless the mother declares that it is.  At any point prior to that declaration she can declare it nothing more than an unwanted growth irrespective of that "unwanted growth's" ability to survive independently, independently of her negligence, or independently of the random odds of survival, which said child beats, while she's actively trying to kill it.

Let's cut the crap; the left's position on this is transparent and obvious: A woman who doesn't want the financial and personal costs of raising a child must have the ability to evade that at any moment up to the baby's first breath, no matter what happens from that instant in time forward.  She may defer that decision through personal avarice, negligence or even intentional misconduct up to that moment in time and none of that bears on the merits of the decision.

At the same time a man has no rights whatsoever, even if his sperm is stolen from a used condom.

The far right's position is equally-clear: Your legs were open if a women or your pants off (or at least unzipped) if a man.  Tough crap; you undertook an adult act, now behave like an adult.  If you got raped that's unfortunate and a criminal act but even under that circumstance it's not the baby's fault so you don't get to kill the child.  Go after the rapist.

These are polar opposite positions.

The USSC in Roe, however, played Solomon and "split the baby" so to speak.

And when these laws get to the USSC, and they shall as they're intended to do exactly that it is my belief that the Court will do the logical and appropriate thing.

Specifically, I don't think Roe falls.  In fact I don't even believe that despite the statements from some of these state legislatures they expect Roe to fall.  They may wish it but I doubt very much they expect it to.

But I do believe the USSC will send back these laws with a remand consistent with Roe.

Let me remind you what Roe actually holds:

• In the first trimester a woman has the presumption of supremacy for two reasons -- personal medical privacy and the fact that no 1st trimester fetus can survive outside the womb.  That is, the fetus is inextricably tied to the woman in question and if she acts as an adult, having undertaken an adult act or as a victim of a crime implicating an adult action forced upon her, she, in concert with a physician that elects to do so under his rules of conscience has the right to stop the progression that would otherwise lead to a birth.
  
  
• In the second trimester there is a balance of harms and benefits to the woman which is left to the states to decide and regulate, with the exception found below (that is, a state cannot require a woman to sacrifice her life.)  That is, the people of the 50 states have the right to tilt the scale of supremacy in either direction provided they can justify it on the basis of maternal health. There are likely to be 50 different answers depending on the specifics of the circumstances found in said states -- and that's constitutional.  This balance of harms and benefits test is logical because any woman who desires to know she is pregnant before the expiration of the first trimester may discover same and by that point she has had a reasonable amount of time to contemplate the risks and benefits of both paths available to her in the context of both state law and the regulation of medical practices within a given state.
  
  
• Beyond fetal viability (which is almost-exactly concordant with the start of the third trimester) the states have the right to put into law a presumption that the fetus has a right to live.  At this point the woman has decided either through negligence or intentional action to continue the pregnancy for two thirds of the requisite time.  In addition with each passing day it is increasingly likely that should there be a birth the child can survive independently of that specific woman; in other words it in the event of delivery said child is no more or less dependent than any other baby in that anyone can feed, clothe, diaper and protect it; there is no longer a biological requirement that a given specific woman do so.  Exactly where that line is changes over time but that it certainly occurs somewhere early in the third trimester is a fact.  However, even here the duty is not absolute: A woman is not required to sacrifice her life for said soon-to-be--infant, any more than you are required to stop and render aid to a motorist in a crash.  In fact there is no circumstance, not even under admiralty law on the sea, where you're required to sacrifice your own life to save another.  You may choose to, but you're not required to.  Therefore absent such a clear requirement in trade -- life-for-life or clear and convincing evidence that the mother will have her health severely and even permanently harmed -- states are fully within their rights to bar as a matter of law all third-trimester abortions.

That's what Roe found folks.  It did not confer an absolute right to an abortion at any time.  The Supreme Court has never issued such a ruling.

Ever.

The screaming liars on the left have claimed that Roe in fact goes all the way to birth -- and even during birth.  This is flat-out nonsense.  Here is what was actually held in Roe, from the actual text of the decision:

3. State criminal abortion laws, like those involved here, that except from criminality only a life-saving procedure on the mother's behalf without regard to the stage of her pregnancy and other interests involved violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action the right to privacy, including a woman's qualified right to terminate her pregnancy. Though the State cannot override that right, it has legitimate interests in protecting both the pregnant woman's health and the potentiality of human life, each of which interests grows and reaches a "compelling" point at various stages of the woman's approach to term. Pp. 147-164.

(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician. Pp. 163, 164.

(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health. Pp. 163, 164.

(c) For the stage subsequent to viability the State, in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life, may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother. Pp. 163-164; 164-165.

4. The State may define the term "physician" to mean only a physician currently licensed by the State, and may proscribe any abortion by a person who is not a physician as so defined. P. 165.

There is no unrestricted right to abortion, as found by Roe, beyond the first trimester.

Period.

A State may therefore find that abortion beyond the end of the first trimester implicates maternal health, including mental health, damaging same, and so regulate it -- including a prohibition except where the manifest trade-off mitigates otherwise.

A state may not, in other words, enact a law that requires a pregnant woman to sacrifice herself for the fetus she is carrying.  However, beyond the first trimester a state may find as its legislature determines on the balance of harms.

Further, since the states are explicitly in Roe reconfirmed in their power to license physicians and thereby set standards for the conduct of medical practice the State can determine what appropriate medical judgement is -- in other words a State is fully within its rights to declare, for example, that "health" in this context means severe and permanent physical disability (for example) and not something such as "well she doesn't have any money therefore that implicates her health."

The State is also empowered to prohibit any and all abortions not performed by a physician defined by the licensing and practice scheme within in the State.

Note that fetal viability is medically defined as the point where there is a 50% rate of survival.  This is approximately 24-25 weeks or during the sixth month of pregnancy.  By the 27th week the rate of survival is roughly 90% and survival beyond that is >95%.

Therefore an appropriate remand on such a law at the USSC would be:

• Prohibitions on abortion at a state level prior to the passage of three months from last menstruation are inconsistent with Roe and void.
  
  
• Prohibitions at a state level beyond three months may be enacted provided they comport with state-licensed medical practice rules that protect maternal health, provided that they cannot require a woman to continue to carry a pregnancy that, in the reasonable opinion of licensed physicians, will kill her.
  
  
• States may, beyond fetal viability, which is approximately congruent with the third trimester, ban the procedure entirely except where the mother's life or, congruent with the above objective medical licensing standards, serious maternal health issues are implicated.  Note that this does not create a "carve out" for economic or speculative impact (e.g. "psychology") such as, for example where a fetus is known to have a material but survivable defect or deformity.  A state may choose to permit abortion in such a circumstance but is not required to permit it.

That's what I expect the USSC to hold as it is entirely consistent with Roe and yet at the same time upholds most of what these states seek to do.  As such "heartbeat" laws are likely unconstitutional -- but just barely, by a couple of weeks, and as such instructions on a remand would move that barrier to 14 weeks after the initiation of last menstruation.

That decision would in fact not eviscerate Roe -- such a judgment would reconfirm Roe, and leave the States in the position of setting enforceable and definitive medical standards and licensing requirements defining the balance of harms tests for maternal health and the protection (or lack thereof) for fetal life which they are explicitly empowered under Roe to do.

It would "reset" and underline what has been a rampant and outrageous pack of lies by the left as to what Roe actually held -- a good thing that has been needed for the last three decades -- while at the same time moving the barrier on the "heartbeat" people to a legally-defensible place in conformity with Roe itself.  While that change would be significant all-in the states that enacted "heartbeat" legislation would likely find it to be a win as they'd get 90% of what they enacted and which is almost-exactly what Roe first put into place.

Alabama would be the sole exception: they would be forced to accept Roe "as written."

In addition such a decision does not implicate the 1st Amendment (e.g. establishment) where a decision to toss Roe would have severe trouble in that regard.  The Establishment Clause issue can probably be worked around but there's utterly no reason for the Court to twist themselves into knots to go there, and as a result I don't expect them to.

We'll see.

The very title of this article is a lie.

One morning last December, Autumn Barksdale, a receptionist at a dog grooming salon, asked a dozen colleagues to gather near the fur-trimming tables so she could explain how she would change in the weeks ahead.

Barksdale’s coworkers listened as she explained that the person they knew as a man named Adam would shift to become a woman named Autumn. She had started taking estrogen pills, which would give her breasts and a rounder face. She wanted to begin wearing women's clothing, makeup, and nail polish to work. Barksdale arranged this "trans 101” session, as she called it, because she feared that people would react negatively when her identity began to change visibly. That turned out to be a fair assumption.

The bolded sentence is a lie.

Adam would appear to become a woman yet it is a physical impossibility for Adam to become a woman because he is immutably a man.

This is not my opinion it is a physical fact that cannot be changed any more than you can change the pull of gravity on the face of the planet earth from 32 ft/sec^2.

The very name "transgendered" is a factual lie for the same reason: You cannot change your gender; it is an immutable quality set at the time sperm and egg join.

You can change your appearance to varying degrees, whether done with simple modifications of your dress or far more-drastic events such as attempting to override your natural hormonal balance with drugs or surgical modification of your body, with the latter two having an increasingly-permanent effect.

But it is not possible to change your factual gender and any claim to the contrary marks you as a liar and fraud -- period.

The real problem that I see with claims of "discrimination" is that they too are inherently false.  The issue from my point of view, as a former employer, is that someone who will lie to themselves will lie to both myself and other associates in the firm as well, and that has the potential to be extremely serious.

I never gave a damn about an associate's sexual preference at my firm; it's utterly immaterial to their job performance.  However, were I to become aware of someone's infidelity, irrespective of their sexual preference, I might have a different view for the precise same reason that I'd have had an issue with someone trying to claim the impossible: It bears on their willingness to lie for personal gain with those who at least in theory they should have had a greater duty to than they do to the company.

“When someone calls me [Adam] or calls me 'he,' it takes away everything, it makes me feel so invalidated," she says. “These people are literally refusing to see me as a person, except for this construction that they have in their mind.”

No, when someone calls this person "Adam" or "he" they are stating a physical fact.

The only thing "invalidated" by such a declaration is your belief in being able to change immutable physical facts to suit your fantasy world view -- something that we consider to be normal in children and their development but which used to be, and still should be, recognized as a mental disorder when exhibited by grown adults.

Take away the astroturf games like the so-called grassroots organization(s) that sprung up (by magic!) out of Newtown and you wind up with a truly ugly truth when it comes to gun violence in this country: Most of it is gang-related, most of the gangs are in our inner cities, and our President, along with the rest of the so-called "mainstream media", simply refuses to address any of it.

Take a recent shooting in Chicago.  The media pictures of both shooter and victim are radically inaccurate measured against their own social media postings.

The truth about that particular shooting?  The gun, originally claimed to be stolen, wasn't.  It instead passed through a number of hands, at least one of them on probation and a second person who allegedly took the weapon to the shooter knowing it was going to be used to commit violence, a 30ish old aunt who allegedly went for the show (seriously!) someone who unjammed the gun after it malfunctioned and gave it back to the girl who had just tried to murder the victim but the weapon failed to fire.

Nor is that all.  We have another case where a "cute little charter-school graduate" (as presented by the family and the media) appears to have a bunch of social-media postings of her bearing weapons of all sorts, including a rather-large revolver that looks right out of a Clint Eastwood movie and a pump-action shotgun.  Oh, and this angel apparently capped at least two people before being killed herself.  She was 17.

Are we ever going to address this instead of playing Astroturf games with kids who are drugged up on various psychotropic meds and then go insane -- a rare but obviously far-too-common event? 

Probably not.

Why not?

Because our Black President won't talk about it.  Our liberal media won't talk about it.  And we won't talk about it either, nor will we bring to the forefront the fact that we have essentially invented this problem out of whole cloth by generating a welfare and police state that empowers gangs by giving them the fuel (money) on which they rely.

And how did we do that?  We declared various self-destructive behaviors among and between consenting adults unlawful, generating an entire second economic system under the carpet that was then used to justify a "war" that we ourselves created and then declared. 

The result has not only been a monstrously-high prison population it has also been an explosion of violence, without which we would be far down the list when it comes to the abuse of guns and property crimes.

Instead of admitting our stupidity in this regard just as is the case with the medical industry and its monopolist scams in the general case we have instead grown an entire industry around arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning huge numbers of people, most of them minorities. 

What's worse is that we are also watching them murder each other with wild abandon, while we sit in our chairs and refuse to talk about the statistical facts.

Indeed, if you take out black-on-black homicide in the major cities from our so-called "blood-red streets" that Bloomberg and others claim as our emblem of "endemic gun violence" you find that a number shockingly approaching three quarters (that is, well more than half) of all gun murders disappear.  

There is a basic principle when it comes to solving problems in the general sense, and it applies here as with most issues: 80% of any particular problem is easy to solve, and reasonably cheap.  The last 20% is both expensive and hard.

But we won't talk about the 80% or how it gets generated.  We don't want to talk about the fact that we create these gangs by giving them an underground economy fueled by what appears to be an innate desire of man to addle his own mind, and which we can actually track back to the animal kingdom generally!  

In the early part of the 20th Century we allowed power-brokers who were trying to protect their own industries to play on now-documented racism and false claims when it came to various drugs, with the now-iconic Reefer Madness being one of the poster children for that era.  We banned alcohol sales and created, almost overnight, an entire criminal class that shot up our cities and reaped huge amounts of profit from the desire of people to simply have a drink. The Depression effectively forced the end of Prohibition, but only for booze.

Today we have the worst of both worlds.  On the corner about two miles from my home is a store that has more forms of a popular drug in it than would be necessary to kill platoons of men, yet I can buy and consume as much of it as I desire.  In the gas station and grocery store I can buy still other forms of the same drug, again, limited only by my wallet.

At the same time in the nearest big city (and probably in my "nice" small town) there is a thriving underground economy.  Police officers with whom I'm acquainted tell me of the crack houses they bust with crude labs that threaten to blow up entire buildings -- not through terrorist action but rather because the "chemists" inside don't know what they're doing or don't care because they're too stoned to be concerned with reasonable safety precautions.  The mind-altering substances they produce are addled with God-knows-what, the ingredient list likely driven by whatever is cheapest to get as a diluting agent so as to "stretch" what they're producing for sale.  Some percentage of those drugs, along with mass-produced quantities in Mexico and elsewhere, stream into our major cities where the trade in them generates huge profits and massive amounts of violence, all aimed at "protecting" the highly-profitable trade in same.

Have we ever asked if the people who get hooked on meth and similar monstrously-destructive drugs would use them absent this pipeline of illegal supply and coercive sales capacity?  If those people could walk into any pharmacy and simply buy whatever you wanted, having only to prove they're of adult age, being supplied not only their drug of choice but also a pamphlet describing exactly what was in the package were buying and its expected long and short-term effects, would they? Would they rob and mug people if the price of maintaining their addiction was one tenth of what it costs today via illegal routes of supply?

Or would they choose to try something else -- perhaps a bottle of liquor or a pack of 20 Class A joints?

I don't know and neither does anyone else, but what we do know is that plenty of people were addicted to opiates and other drugs before the "War on Drugs" was launched, and a very significant percentage of them were able to hold down jobs and lead reasonably-productive lives.  Oh sure, they eventually got sick and some died, but what we didn't have was 17 year old kids shooting each other over insults, real or imagined, trumped up by what amounts to a trade war within our own borders.

I understand why Obama, Rahm and Bloomberg don't want to entertain this debate.  If they were to do so with someone like me they'd be in a very tough spot, because I'd put facts and figures in front of them and the audience might conclude that we've created not only a prison industry and siphons off tens of billions of dollars, not only have we destroyed the earnings power of millions, most of them minorities with these same policies, but in addition we have a more than 50-year history that says we cannot win this war nor do we give a good damn about those who die as a consequence of our puerile and outrageous policy pronouncements in this area, most-especially the young people of color who are overwhelmingly both victim and perpetrator.

Indeed, some people might conclude that our President and the rest of the drug-warriors are in fact racists of the highest order in that they're complicit in the murder of far more black people in a single year than the KKK ever hung from trees through its entire sordid history.

This much I'm absolutely certain of -- our black community organizer-cum-President surely doesn't want to face his rank hypocrisy on this issue.

Nor, for that matter, do the rest of the so-called Progressives.

The first paragraph reads:

In a big day for gay-rights advocates, the Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down a federal provision denying benefits to legally married gay couples and issued a separate ruling that paves the way for same-sex marriages to resume in California.

Well, yes, but don't get to the partying just yet.

See, The Federal Government has no right to enter your bedroom and dictate to you what constitutes a marriage in the first place.  Neither do State governments.  Both arrogated to themselves powers they did not have and which, at least in the Federal case, violate the 1st Amendment.

Marriage is a religious institution.  It always has been.  It predates our modern governments.  In the early days of what was to become the United States, and through the lands before, you posted your Banns of Marriage on the church door.  The only "involvement" the government had historically was in organized bigotry -- that is, making damn sure you didn't marry a Lord if you were a commoner.

That translated directly to the United States; the original marriage "laws" were for the explicit purpose of making sure you didn't marry a white person if you were black, or an American Indian if you weren't one yourself.  

Think I'm kidding?  I'm not -- go look it up.

So what you, dear readers who support this, gay or straight, have bought into is turning what is supposed to be about two individuals who love one another into a tri-party deal with the State -- the damned government -- in the middle of your relationship.  

You cheered this today.

You fools.

You were baited by the siren song of that which you could easily have without any such crap.  Powers of Attorney work just fine for medical and financial decisions and cost nothing to draw up.  They're superior to the default "rules" too, because you can craft exactly what you -- and your partner -- want.

Wills, trusts, estate planning, all fairly simple and all doable unless you're terribly rich, in which case the passage of an estate from one "married" partner to another is in fact easier.  But most of you reading this don't have a pot to piss in when it comes to your estate anyway or are well under the limits where it matters.  Never mind that, once again, most of the time the default isn't exactly what you want, so again you've saved exactly nothing.

Access to "health insurance"?  Really?  ObamaCare has already destroyed what you thought you were going to get.  Welcome to reality.  Never mind that creating a monster and then using it as justification for a second stupid thing qualifies as Darwin Award material.  In this case given what ObamaCare is bringing to you that's not a rhetorical observation either.

The truth is that it's none of anyone's damn business who I choose to take up with, so long as we're both consenting adults.  The same applies to you.

If you have heart-felt beliefs about what marriage means to you in a religious context you need to have a very long session with your conscience, because it is a virtual certainty that you lied before God when you took that oath.  You presented a paper to a Minister, Priest, or Rabbi from a government that is a legally-binding document giving the government the right to define what your marriage was at the time, change it without your consent in the future, and define the terms under which you may modify or end it.  You did this contemporary with taking your oath "Before God" and then after you took that oath you pissed all over it as your officiant signed that piece of government paper post oath and sent it in to be registered.

Now we have gay people dancing in the streets over the right to lie to their creator, or whoever they choose to officiate their ceremony.  Unless, of course, it's a Judge -- then it's all ok.  We have taken all context from the word marriage that resides beyond letting the government literally into your bedroom to share your most-intimate moments, defining what is and is not legitimate, how you will love and just as importantly how you will end your time together if and when that love ends.

The worst part of it is that you can't even hold the government to the rules they have at the time you get married.  They change literally on a daily basis like Calvinball and once you submit to this jackbooted crap you have no ability to argue for application of the law at the time you entered into the agreement; you are bound instead by whatever government decides to do later on, even decades later on, irrespective of how either of you feel about it.

Your life no longer belongs to you and your paramour; you both cede all control over your most-intimate moments and, if necessary, their resolution.

The solution to the problem faced by gay people was never to be found in government interference; rather, it was to remove government from the bedrooms of our nation in their entirety.  To return marriage, such as it is, to a private contractual matter between two persons and, if they choose, a religious officiant that matches their desire.  To be able to form actual contracts that must be mutually renegotiated -- or terminated -- in accordance with what the people who entered into them agreed to at the time, not retroactively determined by some robed jackass who is free to change whatever you agree to 10, 20, 30 or more years ago to suit his beliefs, expectations and whatever government decides at any point -- without and even explicitly against your mutual consent.

Gay people didn't win anything today.  They, like so many who argue for both "contemporary" and "traditional" marriage, instead lost yet another battle in the fight for soul of both our nation and her people.  

I hope you enjoy having the government under the sheets with you.  

It's what all of you dancing in the streets are celebrating this evening, whether you realize it or not.