THE HEAVENS—Straining to react to the surprising engagement announcement with a measure of enthusiasm, God, Our Heavenly Father and the Creator of the Universe, reportedly struggled to feign happiness Monday after Jesus Christ informed Him that He would be marrying an exotic dancer from a place off I-95. “I should have paid more attention when He kept making earthly appearances at some place off the Jersey turnpike called Centerfolds, but I never expected He’d suddenly be telling me He proposed to some stripper He barely knows,” said Our Lord, stressing that while He held nothing against the 22-year-old beauty school graduate and had always encouraged His son to reach out to those at the margins of society, there was “no way in hell” that He would be allowing Christ to get married to someone named Cinnamon. “All I could do was keep smiling and nodding while He went on about how artistic she was and how He already felt like a father to her two kids. I can tell you this much, though: There is no goddamn way I’m letting the son I sent to die for humanity’s sin throw away His life like this.” At press time, He Who Commanded the Light to Shine Forth From The Darkness went on to note that He would be changing His will in the next few days just in case His son disobeyed His wishes.
Has this past week seemed particularly chaotic to anyone else? From international news (rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran) to celebrity gossip (Megxit), the headlines are so OTT that all I can think of is that infamous @Horse_ebooks tweet: “Everything happens so much.”There’s a reason for this, says astrologer Lisa Stardust. Mercury, Saturn, and Pluto are all in Capricorn, and on Sunday, January 12th, they’ll align in what’s called a conjunction — meaning they’re all lined up in the same sign. During this day, we can expect big things to happen all over the world.
“On January 12th, we have a series of events that will shake up our lives due to the stellium (a cluster of planets in the same sign) of planets linking up in Capricorn,” Stardust explains. “First, we start off the day with Mercury aligning with Saturn and then Pluto.”Related StoriesHere’s When Mercury Will Be In Retrograde In 2020Your X-Rated Horoscope For 2020 Is HereYour January Horoscope, RevealedThe fact that it’s these three particular planets lined up matters. “Whenever Mercury and Saturn come together, there’s a big story with authority and power. This sentiment is exemplified by Pluto’s connection to Mercury,” Stardust says. “These planets, especially in the cardinal sign of Capricorn, will force us to take action against those who aim to control us or hold us back. Finally, later in the day, Saturn and Pluto come together.”This Saturn-Pluto conjunction is particularly important. “This is the fight. The rage against the machine. This is where we will unchain ourselves from the constraints or status quo of society and speak our minds,” Stardust says. “With the political climate being super heated, we can expect protests against the government and the patriarchy. This energy will set off the birth chart of the U.S.A., and force voices throughout the country to be heard.”Pay attention to the headlines this weekend. “All of these planets want to expose the abuses of power in order to transform the world,” Stardust says.ADVERTISEMENT
Translators: Mike Zonta, Melissa Goodnight, Richard Branam, Hanz Bolen
SENSE TESTIMONY: Powerful people abuse power and disrupt and corrupt democracy.
5th Step Conclusions:
1) The whole population rules the whole population through the indomitable utilization of omnipotent Truth, orderliness, honesty and honor.
2) The One Perfect Infinite, is the only True Source of all performative authority and capacity, and is always sharing and distributing, absolutely equally, the measureless fullness of Itself; therefore, every individuation is a pristine exemplar, Being expressed as Such.
3) I We Thou, All One Mind being the essence, expression and identity, ability, usefulness and value of all there is: is abundant, harmonious, sound and well in the True Presence of Trust Evidenced in All, which is Only Rightly Used. Only Right Use-Ness exists.
4) Truth is the Essence of Moral Power, Being Eloquence in Reasoning, the Effects are Omnipotence of Energetic Force, this Fashionable, Facilitating proficiency is Universally Principled assembly, Being Fashionably Democratic utility, this Powerful Force is the Abrupt Eruption of Enlightenment.
All Translators are welcome to join this group. See Weekly Groups page/tab.
Norman Mailer gave a superb speech at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on February 20th, 2003. I caught the last third of it replayed on the radio last night, and found a written version today.
With many a perfectly turned phrase, Mailer summarizes well the psyche and politics that brought us to the brink of war.
He argues that democracy is a special thing: “Real democracy comes out of many subtle individual human battles that are fought over decades and finally over centuries, battles that succeed in building traditions. The only defenses of democracy, finally, are the traditions of democracy. When you start ignoring those values, you are playing with a noble and delicate structure. There’s nothing more beautiful than democracy. But you can’t play with it. You can’t assume we’re going to go over to show them what a great system we have. This is monstrous arrogance.”
“Because democracy is noble, it is always endangered. Nobility, indeed, is always in danger. Democracy is perishable. I think the natural government for most people, given the uglier depths of human nature, is fascism. Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.”
He concludes that it may be time to decide to defend democracy, as well: “Democracy, I would repeat, is the noblest form of government we have yet evolved, and we may as well begin to ask ourselves whether we are ready to suffer, even perish for it, rather than readying ourselves to live in the lower existence of a monumental banana republic with a government always eager to cater to mega-corporations as they do their best to appropriate our thwarted dreams with their elephantiastical conceits.”
Carl Gillespie wrote::H.G.Wells, novelist and historian of note in his “History of the World” looks at Bagdad in 1081, nearly a thousand years ago and the same factions are at work. Today’s problems there are not a repeat of history but a continuation of the local history. What makes us think that a thousand years hence the same forces won’t be at work there? Democracy in that part of the world is a blip on the historical screen.Monday, May 29, 2006 at 07:04 #
by Brian Bromberger – Monday Dec 30, 2019 (ebar.com)
Author Walt Odets, Ph.D. Photo: Dianne Woods
Walt Odets, Ph.D., a gay man and clinical psychologist in private practice in Berkeley, has worked with, and written about, the psychological, developmental, and social lives of gay men for more than three decades. His new book, “Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30) is an exploration of how gay men construct their identities, fight to be themselves, and struggle to live authentically.
His seminal book, “In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS,” published in 1995, was a groundbreaking look at the lives of HIV-negative gay men who survived the epidemic yet had to deal with issues of guilt, grief, loss, anxiety, and isolation.
Odets’ latest book uses personal stories, case histories and testimonies of patients, and social commentary to focus on the psychological aftermath of the HIV epidemic. He also looks at long-established childhood and adolescent stigmatization and trauma experienced by gay men, and the conventional idea of “the homosexual” and its negative influences on gay identities, self-realization, and relationships between men.
Odets, 72, spoke with the Bay Area Reporter in an email interview.
Having worked with only a handful of lesbian clients over the years, Odets said that he doesn’t feel he has enough professional experience with women to make similar confident statements, though his intuition suggests that developmentally, through childhood and adolescence, their lives are somewhat easier because there is less social stigmatization of “masculine” women than there is of “feminine” men, especially public displays of affection, he wrote in the email.
He added that he was inspired to write his new book as a follow-up to his earlier work. The current book is about gay life 40 years later. Even as the epidemic is not over, its role in many people’s lives has shifted.
“The new book is a very different kind of exploration of gay lives, from childhood forward,” Odets wrote in the email. “I’ve now worked with gay men for over 30 years, and gained a sense of the issues that affect us. We are mostly people who have experienced at least some stigmatization from immediate family, the larger society, and adolescent peers.
“My therapy clients are not usually people with ’emotional problems,’ they are people who have been marginalized and are trying to find ways to live as themselves, both internally and within communities,” he added. “And they are seeking relationships that work. So after listening to, and talking with, other gay men for about 24,000 hours, I felt that a discussion of the various issues that come up in gay lives would be useful.”
For Odets, the elephant in the room remains the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic, despite the fact many have relegated it to history, even as it still ravages the LGBT community, especially the most marginalized: low-income people, people of color, and transgender people.
According to www.hiv.gov, an estimated 38,700 Americans became infected with HIV in 2016.
“Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men bear the greatest burden by risk group, representing an estimated 26,000 of new HIV infections per year,” the website noted.
African Americans remain the highest racial/ethnic group among the newly diagnosed, followed by Hispanic/Latinos. Researchers have said that AIDS, despite breakthroughs in treatment and prevention, still stigmatizes those affected by it, both directly and indirectly.
Three generations Odets divides gay men into three generations based on their relationship to the AIDS epidemic: older-group men, born before 1971, including those who were out and active in gay communities before the introduction of highly active anti-retroviral therapy, or HAART, in 1996; middle-group men, born between 1972 and 1988, those who were out and active in gay communities after 1996, but had no direct, personal contact with the early epidemic; and younger-group men, born after 1988, who have never known HIV as almost inevitably fatal and did not experience the trauma and loss that the other two groups have, yet live with the consequences of the disease.
Odets noted that these groups don’t always get along, are suspicious of each other’s motives, and make faulty assumptions, whether it be shame about surviving while others died, shame about not adhering to the “Condom Code” (the universal use of condoms in sex to reduce HIV transmission, every time for a lifetime regardless of the HIV status of the two partners) or shame about using PrEP, with some young men calling others who use PrEP, “whores” and “sluts.”
With young gay men coming out earlier and more readily today, Odets writes in his book: “Simply coming out is a poor predictor of the quality of the internal life that follows. People who have come out often still experience shame and self-doubt, and usually experience some ongoing measure of stigmatization, real or imagined.”
Odets contends it is still not easy to be gay in the U.S., “unless one comes from the relatively rare insightful family, or one of a handful of educated, socially progressive (urban) enclaves.” Most still struggle with a legacy of early-life stigma, especially bullying, and a deficiency of self-acceptance, which can fuel doubt, regret, and even self-hatred.
Odets believes that the effect of all the political and legal successes for LGBTQ people has been greatly exaggerated.
“Shame still often lurks unconsciously behind the most successful of gay lives,” he wrote in the email.
“I do not know that there is a way to ‘uproot’ shame, but very broadly speaking, changes occur when one acknowledges the shame, understands its origins, recognizes when it is at play, and attempts not to play it out,” he added. “There is not a single gay man alive in America who has not sometimes felt self-conscious or fearful about touching a lover in public.”
Odets has received some criticism that most of his patients and case histories are white affluent men and have limited applicability to other diverse LGBTQ populations.
“I can only write from what I have experienced and know,” he wrote in the email. “I would add that most of the men I talk about began life in limiting families, and if they later became ‘affluent’ this was something they accomplished on their own. I don’t believe that ‘most’ of the people I discuss are white, but I know that in the U.S., non-white people are underrepresented in psychotherapy because of the cultural norms with which they grew up, and sometimes because of the costs.
“But the histories and psychological lives of the men I do discuss are applicable to most LGBTQ people,” he added. “Race and finances are often a handicap, but they do not significantly alter the psychological issues of being gay, even as they often exacerbate them.”
Homosexual versus gay Odets, in his first chapter, draws a distinction between homosexual and gay. Homosexuals are men who have sex with other men. Gay means attracted to other men, but rather than a single, objective behavior, the gay man encompasses an entire life of feeling.
“The majority of gay-identified men do have at least a marginally conscious sense that being gay is about more than sexual attraction or sex, but many gay men have been swayed by the heterosexual definition and have accepted the narrow, behaviorally defined identity. In today’s gay assimilationist politics, gay men often explain themselves to heterosexuals with the idea that they are ‘attracted to men, but otherwise just like you,'” he wrote.
For Odets, gay men are accepting the heterosexual perspective on who they are, which is not the whole truth.
“For us as individuals, and for the larger society, the idea that one is defined by the label homosexual implies that our sexual lives are a complete description of who we are. This is nonsense, for we are obviously much more complex and inclusive,” he wrote. “If I were to ask someone to describe Donald Trump, he or she would never respond with the assertion that ‘He is a heterosexual.’ If I asked the same question about Mayor Pete [Buttigieg], many would answer that he is a homosexual. All human beings are born with the need for emotional and physical attachment to others, and sex is only one important expression of that attachment. But by itself, sex is not a complete life.”
Odets postulates that for gay men, there is a gay sensibility, “which describes both the man’s internal experience of himself, and his characteristic external expression of self to others.”
“The idea of a gay sensibility rejects the narrow internal emotional life that is dictated by traditional ideas of male and female sensibility,” he wrote. “Many gay men experience an internal sensibility that blends those traditional ideas. It is true that many gay men are frightened by some measure of both internal and expressive female sensibility — and some are hyper masculine — but I believe they are repressing otherwise natural feelings and expressions that, if allowed, might broaden their internal and interpersonal experience.
“Being gay offers important opportunities that can only be realized if gay people can free themselves of societal and internalized stigma, much of which stems from the conventional idea of the homosexual,” he added.
This is why Odets argues that for gay men, this search for authenticity won’t be found in accommodating heterosexual institutions, such as marriage.
“If acceptance is predicated on ‘normalizing’ gay relationships by molding them — at least in appearance — into conventional heterosexual forms, the change will become a significant additional source of hopelessness for gay men. Mimicking and misrepresentation are inauthentic, and inauthentic lives feel hopeless,” he wrote.
Odets believes that gay men have always had to invent their own relationships with no help from the larger culture.
“I am not, per se, critical of gay men who marry, value monogamy, or try to assimilate,” he wrote in the email. “I am certain that, for many men, these desires are an authenticate expression of how they think and want to live. But if, as two examples, men are marrying primarily for societal approval or the lifelong ‘ownership’ of a partner, then I ask that they think through their motivations.”
For Odets, this lack of authenticity makes it difficult for gay men to form lasting relationships: a connection of friendship, companionship, romantic feelings, and sex.
“I am inclined to think of successful relationships as a balance between two conflicting requirements: mutual support for each man’s individual needs and personal growth; and the fundamental relationship requirement of being emotionally bonded and together. The former relies significantly on complementarity, the latter on symmetry, and a relatively happy relationship allows some measure of both,” he wrote.
The diminished sexuality among long-term gay couples is often due to “sport sex,” sex for fun and pleasure that is “focused on novelty, orgasm, and demonstrations of prowess and performance,” Odets writes in his book. Such sex largely excludes — often even forbids — the expression of emotional intimacy, which is precisely what is needed to sustain sex in longer-term relationships.
“A beautiful, potent body engaged in hot sex with the beautiful body of an idealized stranger is what all men, but particularly gay men, have been acculturated to believe is the definition of ‘good sex,'” he wrote. “Long-term partners usually know way too much about each other — and each other’s imperfect bodies — to buy the ‘I’m hot, you’re hot, let’s fuck’ approach that characterizes most gay-adolescent, and much adult-singles sex. When the male sensibility cannot make any transition from pure sport sex to relationship sex, both gay and straight couples experience a ‘loss of sexual interest.’ Thus, sport sex is a behavior but relationship sex is a communication of feeling.”
Odets does see some positive evolution in both personal lives and the gay subculture, especially the trend of gay men not to see themselves as victims, but as resilient innovators.
“Yes, I do see improvement, but the degree depends on the individual and the early developmental experience, particularly with the immediate family,” he wrote in the email. “I don’t think that, as a community, we are any longer united by single purpose such as gay liberation or the epidemic, but this diversity is a sign of progress. As I said somewhere in the book — I don’t remember where — simply being gay is not much to have in common with another man. Different people will make different choices. The idea that many — probably not most — gay lives are still an uphill struggle is hardly a gloomy prediction. Without acknowledging our histories and lives as they are, we cannot change anything.
“I do think that, very slowly, the societal and familial influence on gay people have, and will continue to, improve,” he added. “It’s still a long road. Think of the Emancipation Proclamation, which was issued by Lincoln about a century and a half ago. Today, are the lives of African Americans without uphill struggles?”
Odets hopes readers will take away his main message: “to find ways to be, and live, as yourself, to find our own ways to invent honest and loving lives. In my experience, gay men have done admirably with lives that have usually been forced to navigate an obstacle course of destructive social influences. That so many have persevered in simply living as gay men is remarkable and moving.
“Being gay in an adverse society is a sometimes-daunting, sometimes-lifelong task,” he added. “But millions have found ways to have lives that authentically express who they are: the realization of gay lives is all around us. I hope for such self-realization to take root and flourish for as many men as possible.”
Aldous Huxley’s inspiration for writing his last novel, ‘Island’, was to promote an ideal world, a utopia, in which the best of Western and Eastern culture would collaborate and learn from each other. The island of Pala was founded by a Scottish secular humanist medical doctor and an Old Raja, who came together to negotiate a place where a balance was made between their differing worldviews; thus, the island of Pala adopts English law, language and literature, and Western science and medicine, but they practice the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and religion, and Eastern living, art and customs.
On the island, the attainment of self-realisation is made compatible with the interest of the greater good, and there is a careful and open consideration of religion, science, medicine, technology, government, sex, and health; a balance which avoids the dangers of runaway science, superstition, mass-mechanisation, and tyranny. It seems then Pala is a middle way between East and West, whereby the virtues of one cancels out, or at least disarms, the vices of the other.
Huxley remarks on Island that: “It’s a kind of fantasy, a kind of reverse Brave New World, about a society in which real efforts are made to realize human potentialities. I want to show how humanity can make the best of both Eastern and Western worlds. So the setting is an imaginary island between Ceylon and Sumatra, at a meeting place of Indian and Chinese influence.”
– Writers at Work: The “Paris Review” Interviews (second series; New York, 1963), page 198.
On the first page of ‘Island’, the call of “Attention!” by a talking mynah bird is the first sound Will Farnaby hears as he regains consciousness after deliberately wrecking his boat on the island paradise of Pala. Why the birds have been taught to say this curious word is one of the first things which Farnaby asks of the Palanese girl who found him helpless on the rocky cliff:
“Is that your bird?” Will asked.
She shook her head.
Mynahs are like the electric light”, she said. “They don’t belong to anybody.”
Why does he say those things?
“Because somebody taught him”, she answered patiently…
But why did they teach him those things? Why ‘Attention’? Why ‘Here and now?’
“Well …” She searched for the right words in which to explain the self-evident to this strange imbecile. “That’s what you always forget, isn’t it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what’s happening. And that’s the same as not being here and now.”
“And the mynahs fly about reminding you — is that it?”
She nodded. That, of course, was it. There was a silence.
(Aldous Huxley, Island, page 15)
Later in the novel, Farnaby is invited to dinner by Shanta, and before the family begins to eat she explains to Farnaby that the Palanese people do not say grace with words, rather they chew with grace; the taste of food is “something given, something you haven’t in vented”, and it is to be experienced and attended to with the proper patience and presence of mind that it deserves:
“Grace is the first mouthful of each course — -chewed and chewed until there’s nothing left of it. And all the time you’re chewing you pay attention to the flavor of the food, to its consistency and temperature, to the pressures on your teeth and the feel of the muscles in your jaw.”
“And meanwhile, I suppose, you give thanks to the Enlightened One, or Shiva, or whoever it may be?”
Shanta shook her head emphatically, “That would distract your attention, and attention is the whole point. Attention to the experience of something given, something you haven’t invented. Not the memory of a form of words addressed to somebody in your imagination.”
(Aldous Huxley, Island, Page 243)
This mindful exercise keeps one’s attention to the here and now, and leads to the awareness of the fact that, like breathing, we have no control over our taste, it happens naturally — that is the point of the practice: to become more and more aware of what our unconscious — the you that is not-you, the you that cannot be grasped — is doing.
The theme of paying attention is a constant throughout the novel; we are made aware of it when Farnaby learns to observe his feelings at the beginning, when Lakshmi accepts that she is dying, and when Farnaby connects with nature and Susila in the final chapter.
This emphasis on the present moment is just one of customs which Huxley uses to distinguish Pala from the neighbouring country of Rendang, and also from our own world, the Western world; in this way, the island of Pala is a commentary and a critique on the state of mind in the modern West, which has, as Huxley argues in his essay ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’, condemned us to live in a rationalised, mechanical abstraction which has little relation to or harmony with nature, and in which we spend our days calculating and predicting the future — indeed, this is the principle virtue of our time: the ability to estimate the future.
In this modern age we are impatient for the future; the future is the supreme virtue. So nowadays we hurry everything we do, so that we might reach the future faster and enjoy our happiness in some distant land. But increasingly we find ourselves caught in a terrible circle: for the quicker we move the more that is expected of us, and the more that is expected of us, the faster our pace — in short, it is the circle of stress. We fly from point to the other, chasing happiness at greater and greater speeds, and all the while, ruining our work and wellbeing, and eventually our society, by violence, confusion, and haste, for the purposes of deadlines, money, the boss, hopes for the future.
As result, everything we do is not worth doing; our hurried actions become punishments — modern food, architecture, journalism, art, fashion are all punishments, because they have corrupted our sense of taste, and made us addicted to the artificial, the counterfeit, and ignorant of the real thing, the homegrown, of nature, truth.
We are all bound by heavy chains: economics, fractions, progress, allowances, spreadsheets — but the heaviest is that of time. So little time that we take our food so fast that it has none of the quality of food, and take our holidays wishing we were somewhere else and oftentimes wishing we were back at work. And yet everyone is agreed that it is absurd to be a man who hurries about his food and leisure. But how can it be helped? How can one in this age not indulge in the haste and stress when the primary aim of the society is productivity and progress?
This is, as Huxley sees it, the principle vice of the West: that we are only happy when we have the assurance of a happy future; even when we have given up on our own future then we are anxious about the future of someone else. We demand an assured future. However no such assurance is possible, only vague calculations and probabilities. So we are forever on edge, never quite settled with what we have in this moment. The antidote to this vice, Huxley argues, is in the philosophical traditions and customs of China and India; just as Western scepticism and science is the antidote to the Eastern vice of superstition.
On the last page, when the invading army from neighbouring country of Rendang, a military dictatorship whose sole interest in Pala is oil and natural resources, is for the time being out of sight, the frogs and the insects and the mynah birds are once again audible, and the same reminder is heard — first, “Karuna, Karuna,” which means compassion, and then, “a semitone lower, ‘Attention’.”
“The roaring of the engines diminished, the squeaking rhetoric lapsed into an inarticulate murmur, and as the intruding noises died away, out came the frogs again, out came the uninterruptable insects, out came the mynah birds.”
(Aldous Huxley, Island, page 354)
In the end, Huxley is not offering us a romantic, far-off island to which we could go and escape and be happy, but rather a country which is suffering with very real challenges and has difficult practical choices to make; a country which is not unlike our own world. His purpose is not to invent some fool’s paradise; escapism is always an indication of a deeper insecurity. But rather he challenges the reader to pay attention, to be here and now in sickness and health, to choose the good in whatever terms the present moment offers, and to stop looking to the future for happiness, for a place in which all is finished, where there is nothing to struggle against.
There is no such thing as an assured future, and any desire for security is a contradiction in a world which is constantly changing. We as readers are asked to take reality as it is, to slow down and give our whole attention to whatever our present circumstances are now, in this moment, even under the threat of bombs and the machine guns.
“We don’t despair,” he said, “because we know that things don’t necessarily have to be as bad as in fact they’ve always been.” “We know that they can be a great deal better,” Susila added. “Know it because they already are a great deal better, here and now, on this absurd little island.”
Sojourner Truth (1797 – November 26, 1883) was an African-American abolitionist and women’s rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. Wikipedia
The idea that the Big Bang didn’t happen — at least not the way most scientists assume — is gaining traction in academic circles.
Eric Lerner, founder of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, has been arguing against the notion of the Big Bang for decades, having written a book on the subject in 1992. Now, Inverse reports, Lerner’s latest research finds that there’s a discrepancy between the theory and actual data scientists have observed.
Alternative Ideas
Lerner’s study, which he presented Wednesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, specifically challenges assumptions about how light elements like helium and lithium formed in the earliest days of the universe, according to Inverse.
The Big Bang theory posits that the universe’s oldest stars and galaxies churned out a massive quantity of those elements, which later fueled nuclear fusion reactions in newer stars. But Lerner found that ancient stars had half the helium and one-tenth the lithium they were expected to.
Growing Traction
There are myriad alternative hypotheses to the Big Bang theory, but so far none have risen to prominence, Inverse reports. But even if scientists disagree on what exactly happened, more seem to be challenging the field’s dogma regarding origin of the universe.
For instance, Nobel winner James Peebles railed against the Big Bang theory in November: he accused scientists of accepting the theory because it’s a convenient assumption, not because they have enough evidence to support it.
