Author: admin

Authored by Paul Adams via The Epoch Times,

In an important new book, political scientist Yuval Levin argues that we have lost faith in our institutions—public, private, civic, and political.

We need institutions, including families, associations, churches, corporations, trade unions, political parties, professions such as law and medicine, as well as the formal institutions of government such as Congress, the presidency, and the courts.

They are, as Levin puts it, “the durable forms of our common life.” They serve purposes or missions, like educating the young, resolving disputes, or defending the country. They give life meaning by assigning roles, teaching self-control, and enforcing standards. In the process, they form the character of those who participate in them.

But we no longer trust them. What went wrong?

From Molds to Platforms

There has been a big shift in the way elites, those who play a leadership role in our institutions, treat them. Instead of seeing their institution as a mold that forms and shapes their character and behavior, they treat them as platforms for promoting their own.

Think of a new member of Congress, who is less interested in learning and conforming to the traditions and expectations of the House than using it as a platform for gaining fame and celebrity. Congress—by its own will, Levin argues—has become increasingly weak and ineffectual. Its members seek publicity and fame through social media and other avenues even before learning or accomplishing anything of substance in Congress itself.

Indeed, Levin notes, political leaders often appeal to their outsider status—claiming not to be part of the Washington bubble or swamp themselves—as a way to enhance their own power. Even as leaders, they criticize their own institutions as if they were not themselves responsible or in charge of them.

The one exception to the breakdown of confidence in institutions is the military. In that case, the formation of character—fitting those serving with the sense of duty, mission, and self-effacement of one’s own interest—is recognized and primary. It’s rare for a soldier in uniform to use the military as a platform to promote himself, not, anyway, until resigning or retiring from duty. We trust the military, beyond other institutions, to do its job of forming those who serve.

Levin shows the need to rebuild institutions and to form elites who can better lead them. He spends much space criticizing anti-elite populism.

But Elites Are the Problem

The problem with all this is that it underplays the extent to which our most important institutions have been undermined systematically by the very elites who are supposed to lead and represent them.

President Donald Trump, a performer rather than a self-effacing institution-builder, tapped into the loss of confidence in our institutions and promised to shift policy in ways that would strengthen them. He talked of draining the swamp of the federal bureaucracy, which had become an “administrative state” pursuing its own interests and policies.

In the case of Trump’s presidency, deep hostility has been evident not only in the violent demonstrations of Antifa, but also in all the leading institutions of society. The administrative state itself has been a center of resistance to the elected president—running its own unelected government even as it asserted its own professionalism and commitment to the Constitution.

We see this from the start in Trump’s White House itself. An opinion column by a senior official in the Trump administration in the New York Times makes the position clear. It’s called “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”

The author, writing under the name, Anonymous, boasts of working diligently to thwart the president’s policies even while working for him. Trump, the author says, is unaware of the extent to which “many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda.”

The point is that Trump was elected and is supported by tens of millions in order to carry out his agenda, not that of establishment Republicans or “Never-Trumpers,” or of Obama holdovers still in his administration.

The Wall Street Journal recently carried an opinion piece from one of those rare figures, a (former) official within the Trump administration who was a director of strategic planning in the National Security Council (NSC), who supported Trump’s policies.

The author, Rich Higgins, confirms but deplores the overwhelming opposition to the president among executive branch staffers. As he portrays the situation on the NSC staff, those who faithfully sought to implement the president’s policies were thwarted by more senior officials on the NSC who were Obama holdovers. Those who attempted to carry out the sitting president’s policies, Higgins among them, were isolated or fired for their loyalty.

Liberal media denounced what it called the firing of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the army officer detailed to serve the NSC, as retaliation for his testifying to the House about Trump’s Ukrainian phone call. Higgins takes a different view. His point is not that Vindman was not in fact fired or investigated, but that he was disloyal.

Vindman’s duty, he argues, “was to serve loyally until he felt he no longer could, then resign. Resistance while in uniform undermines good order and discipline and is especially dishonorable.” It was not Higgins but Vindman, lauded by the liberal media as he was, who undermined the institutions he was sworn to serve.

Elites as Institution-Wreckers

But the problem is wider and deeper than the kind of internal “resistance” described from one side by Anonymous, another by Higgins, and the very existence of which progressives dismiss as a “deep state conspiracy theory.”

Levin begins his analysis with the institutions of our national government and works his way down to the foundational institution that involves us all, the family. But suppose we look at the problem the other way round.

No institution is more fundamental or important than the family in molding us from birth on. A large body of research from scholars across the political spectrum has established the importance of family structure, of growing up in a married two-parent family, as a protective factor for every social indicator—our health and longevity, life expectancy, involvement with the criminal justice system, education, earnings, and marital success.

Recent research indicates that family and faith (attending church or other place of worship and defining oneself as a very religious person) play a larger role in educational achievement than school-based efforts to close the gaps among racial and ethnic groups.

A meta-analysis (study of studies) examined 30 studies of attempts to bridge the achievement gap between white students on one hand and Black and Latino students on the other. It “revealed that, if an African American or Latino student was a person of faith and came from a two-biological-parent family, the achievement gap totally disappeared, even when adjusting for socioeconomic status.” [emphasis added]

Yet progressive elites beyond the administrative state—in academia, law, media, sports, big business, and entertainment—have targeted, unrelentingly, just those institutions that are most important in the lives of ordinary people.

It is the advocates of identity politics who have attacked the institutions of marriage and family, not the populists. These ideologues have used their own institutions as platforms to train others, in psychology, social work, and other fields. The aim is not to support those they serve by helping them strengthen families and marriages, but to liberate individuals from the grip of those institutions.

The sexual revolution has gone far beyond seeking legal recognition for alternative forms and definitions of marriage and family. Its adherents seek to stigmatize and expel from public life those—individuals, parents, businesses, and faith communities—that defend those foundational institutions.

They attack as bigots and haters those whose views were the common sense of almost all communities everywhere just a few decades ago. Such people, according to the new orthodoxy, are unworthy of the right to free speech, free exercise of religion, or the right to pursue in peace their professional vocation or conduct their business enterprise.

Looked at this way, it’s the progressive elites who are destroying our institutions, opposing their purposes and missions, and so the meaning and structure of our lives. It is Trump, a performer unmolded and unintimidated by the ways and customs of political institutions and offices, who is leading the defense of our basic institutions.

His policies aim to defend families and their rights, to uphold school choice, religious freedom and protection of conscience, and the right of children in the womb, the most vulnerable and innocent of all the human family, not to be killed.

Trump and his policies provide at least a moment of respite from, and pushback against, the totalitarian impulses of progressives who seek to politicize and control every aspect of life.

Just after the EU’s foreign policy chief Joseph Borrell urged Europe to “develop an appetite for power” to better chart its own independent course in solving various international crises impacting Europe, the EU has agreed to deploy warships in order to enforce a United Nations arms embargo on the war-torn country. 

The EU has stressed, however, that this is not an extension of its prior controversial mission to rescue migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean: 

Josep Borrell, the EU’s chief diplomat, announced that 27 foreign ministers had agreed to launch a new operation with naval ships, planes and satellites in order to enforce the UN arms embargo on Libya.

To counter objections that the operation could morph into a rescue mission, Borrell promised the ships would be withdrawn if they became “a pull factor” that encouraged people to attempt the risky crossing from Libya to Europe. This commitment helped lift opposition to the mission from Italy and Austria, whose governments had blocked an earlier compromise.

Going all the way back to the 2011 US-NATO intervention to topple Gaddafi, the north African country has existed in a state of anarchy with multiple governments and factions vying for control, and now Benghazi-based strongman Khalif Haftar is attempting to bring the country by force under his control in his bid to seize the capital. 

This has set the stage for a major proxy war involving the UAE as the prime weapons supplier of Haftar, and Turkey as supplying weapons, drones, and even troops to the Tripoli Government of National Accord (GNA). Russia has also reportedly supplied Haftar’s army with mercenaries from the Wagner group. 

The EU marine mission in the Mediterranean to monitor the arms embargo on Libya must, according to Russia, be coordinated with the UN Security Council, said Lavrov on Tuesday.

Russia fears that the EU could increase pressure on Russia’s support for Haftar in the future.

— Ali Özkök (@Ozkok_A) February 18, 2020

The fighting in Libya as well as the external arms supplies fueling both sides of the conflict has become so bad that the United Nations has called an arms embargo recently in place “a joke”. 

“The arms embargo has become a joke, we all really need to step up here,” U.N. Deputy Special Representative to Libya Stephanie Williams said days ago at an international security conference in Munich.

“It’s complicated because there are violations by land, sea and air, but it needs to be monitored and there needs to be accountability,” Williams added, and noted further that Libya has over the past multiple months of fighting been flooded with advanced weapons.

This newest EU operation appear’s the bloc’s attempt at a more muscular response in the wake of frustration over “not doing anything”. 

Austria’s foreign minister, Alexander Schallenberg was quoted in The Guardian Tuesday as saying, “There is a basic consensus that we now want a military operation and not a humanitarian mission.”

The details of the new mission to block all arms going into Libya, dubbed Operation EU Active Surveillance, are as follows: 

Ships under the new mission – to be known as Operation EU Active Surveillance – will patrol about 60 miles (100km) off the coast of Libya, an area of the Mediterranean that is the main route for weapons into the country.

An internal EU memo, released by the London-based civil liberties group Statewatch, underscores that the EU does not expect to be involved in rescuing people. “Naval assets can be deployed in the areas most relevant to the implementation of the arms embargo, in the eastern part of the area of operation or at least 100km off the Libyan coast, where chances to conduct rescue operations are lower,” it says.

It’s widely believed that should ‘mission creep’ occur and the European military ships get pulled into a costly ‘rescue mission’ upon possibly encountering stuck migrant ships in the area, the whole operation will lose political backing and momentum. 

There’s also concern that the mere presence of EU ships will only serve to encourage more migrants to attempt the dangerous Mediterranean crossing. 

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

“Happy 18th Birthday! Meet your new Daddy,” read one website advertisement. “Do you have strong oral skills? We’ve got a job for you!” cooed another.

A message on another billboard directed at the “daddies” was more blunt: “The alternative to escorts. Desperate women will do anything”…

SeekingArrangement was founded by Las Vegas tech tycoon Brandon Wade. Wade is apparently worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million. His motto is, “Love is a concept invented by poor people”…

SA also markets itself as an antidote to student debt. In the U.S. and elsewhere, college students are enduring financial instability and hardship. Because of rising college fees and rent, and the lack of time available for work during studies, many women are extremely vulnerable to exploitation.

“SeekingArrangement.com has helped facilitate hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of arrangements that have helped students graduate debt-free,” Wade boasts on the website. Promotional videos show young, beautiful women enrolled in “Sugar Baby University” — in classrooms, holding wads of cash, driving luxury cars, and discussing the pleasure and ease of being a sugar baby.

When signing up for an account, potential sugar babies are told, “Tip: Using a .edu email address earns you a free upgrade!”

– TruthDig: Sugar-Coated Pimping

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

– Frédéric Bastiat

Watching politics unfold in the post-financial crisis era has been extraordinarily frustrating. While it’s been refreshing to observe the emergence of grassroots populism over the last few years, there’s a problematic lack of depth and clarity embedded in these burgeoning mass movements. Tens if not hundreds of millions of Americans now acknowledge that something’s deeply broken within the current paradigm, but we remain focused on identifying symptoms as opposed to understanding and rectifying the systemic nature of the problem.

As depressing as Bloomberg’s blatant attempt to buy the presidency is, there’s a silver lining.

It’ll force many people to admit what they’ve been trying to avoid. That the country is in fact an imperial oligarchy. Pretending it’s not only makes things worse.

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) February 17, 2020

Of course, there are numerous complexities when it comes to the administration of an imperial oligarchy, and our system didn’t emerge overnight. Perhaps the most fundamental mutation of the post WW2 era came in 1971 when the international convertibility of U.S. dollars into gold was severed. This is when the country began its long transformation from a largely industrial empire to a financial one. I’ve often highlighted how the purely fiat USD reserve currency is the most powerful weapon ever invented, and how the U.S. control of the global financial system is the true backbone of empire, but it’s equally important to understand how the predatory financial system is also used to subjugate Americans in their own country.

In order to understand how this works we need to dig into the most fundamentally important four letter word in any modern economy: Debt.

When most people consider the debilitating societal effects of excessive debt they tend to see it from one basic level. How the bottom half of the population essentially has no choice but to borrow in order to participate in the economy as constructed. This is because the cost of so many things has been inflated way beyond the capacity of most people to purchase them outright. Specifically, wage growth has failed to keep up with the soaring costs of fundamental things such as shelter, healthcare and higher education.

For instance, home prices have been rising faster than wages in 80% of U.S. markets, which means the higher cost tends to offset historically low mortgage rates. Low interest rates don’t really help such people, it just lets them maybe, barely purchase an intentionally inflated asset to live in by taking on a huge chunk of debt. An asset that could quickly become completely unaffordable should the economy turn down as it did a decade ago.

As such, you have multitudes taking on debt defensively just to keep going and avoid falling further down the socioeconomic scale. Debt doesn’t empower such people, rather, it turns them into modern day indentured servants endlessly stuck on a hamster wheel with little to no hope of getting off. This is not an accident, it’s a tried and tested tool which, when combined with incessant mass media propaganda, is an effective way of creating a submissive, confused and desperate underclass.

Many people understand this by now, but what’s far less understood, yet potentially more significant, is how the wealthy use debt.

The oligarchy uses debt offensively (to increase wealth and power), while the masses must use debt defensively (to survive). If more people understood precisely how the game is rigged at the highest level (financial system) we might get somewhere.

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) February 17, 2020

When you own your primary home outright and you’ve got enough savings that healthcare premiums and paying for your kids college in cash doesn’t make a dent, debt becomes something else entirely. Debt’s no longer an albatross around your neck, instead it becomes a tool to increase wealth. Debt becomes leverage.

Much of the explosion in wealth inequality over the past several decades can be traced back to this systemic interclass weaponization of debt. If you’re very wealthy and connected, access to extremely cheap debt is virtually unlimited, and this access is used to make leveraged bets on all sorts of stuff, but primarily real estate and financial assets such as stocks and bonds. Hasn’t this always been the case you ask? Aren’t those with capital always extremely advantaged over those without it? Isn’t that the history of capitalism and America since the beginning? My answer would be yes and no.

The main difference between prior periods of history and, let’s say the 21st century, has been the vast increase in power of the financial services sector thanks to the Federal Reserve’s willingness to encourage and enable the insatiable reckless behavior of the speculator class. It’s no secret the Fed has been intentionally boosting assets across the FIRE sector such as real estate, stocks and bonds since the crisis. Those with the capital to ride the coattails of this irresponsible and undemocratic central planning rushed out to take on debt to buy these assets, thus multiplying the return on investment.

While the white-collar cubicle worker with enough extra income to diligently add to their retirement account over the past decade has done fine, bankers or hedge fund managers who took on massive leverage to amplify such bets made generational fortunes while creating nothing of value. It’s the way debt works for the financial services sector versus how it works for the average person in a world dominated by big finance and the central bankers who provide them unlimited welfare.

The same thing occurs within the corporate suite, as executives across industries have used access to extremely cheap debt to buyback stock and reward themselves handsomely despite creating nothing of societal value while doing so. It’s pure financial engineering. Nobody should become generationally wealthy this way, but it’s exactly what’s been happening. So you see, debt’s not just a means to subjugate a desperate bottom half of the population, it’s concurrently an effective tool to expand wealth and power at the top. 

Then there’s this.

“Investors are paying single A-rated LVMH to borrow money.”

In case you’re not paying attention, ECB policy is subsidizing the wealthiest man in France as he consolidates his industry.

Central bankism is welfare for billionaires. pic.twitter.com/CRDAI98BhI

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) February 18, 2020

When was the last time the bond market paid you to make an acquisition? As Max Keiser so eloquently puts it, this is interest rate apartheid.

But it’s even more pernicious than that. It’s still possible for regular wealthy people to take on too much leverage, make a mistake, and lose their fortunes — unless of course you’re an executive at major financial services firm. In that case you simply can’t lose, which was the primary lesson learned from the response to the financial crisis.

Not only were the titans of this industry not jailed, they walked away with their fortunes intact. The Federal Reserve and the U.S. government made this happen. It wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t to “save the economy;” that’s just nonsense talk for the confused masses. The entire point was to consolidate and further entrench the unaccountable power of those at the very top of the finance feudalism paradigm and signal they’ll also be bailed out for any future catastrophe they create.

Significantly, financial feudalism isn’t just interclass, t’s also intergenerational. The stock market and real estate crash of a decade ago was the market’s attempt to reset those assets more in line with median incomes, but central banks would have none of that. They determined asset prices needed to be re-inflated as much as possible as fast as possible, and these unelected banker stooges went about implementing this major policy decision of central economic planning with zero public debate. Young people entering the workforce had no savings and poor wage growth, so a generation was quickly priced out of homeownership while simultaneously stuck with an enormous pile of student debt. The results of all this are unsurprising.

A message on another billboard directed at the “daddies” was more blunt: “The alternative to escorts. Desperate women will do anything.”

Yet another example of intergenerational abuse. Turning broke college kids into prostitutes.https://t.co/I1zs3R5yGd

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) February 15, 2020

The crisis facing this country is simmering and metastasizing under the surface of misleading aggregate economic data and record stock markets. While it’s tempting to focus on the symptoms, we’ll never confront and tackle any of this properly unless we understand the structure and how the game is really played. The system you’re living in isn’t capitalism or socialism, it’s financial feudalism.

*  *  *

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As nearly the entire country of China remains on lockdown – and the country’s auto industry, which was already mired in recession prior to the coronavirus fiasco, gets thrashed even further – some Chinese cities are doing what governments do best: inefficiently throwing money they don’t have at their problems.

The Chinese city of Foshan is the first in what we guess is going to be a long line of cities to start subsidizing car purchases, according to a Bloomberg report out Monday. 

Consumers who trade in old models are going to be given 3,000 yuan (about $430 USD) of subsidies. Buyers of new vehicles without trade ins will be entitled to 2,000 yuan.

The move comes after President Xi Jinping has urged local officials to help boost auto sales.

Recall, we wrote just days ago that auto sales in China were crushed in January, declining 20.2% on a year over year basis, according to the government-backed China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. The country sold 1.94 million vehicles, according to the CAAM. 

The decline is attributable, obviously, to the coronavirus outbreak in the country, combined with the lunar new year falling in late January, as opposed to early February, this year.

And, unfortunately, there is literally no reason for optimism in February, as it was the end of January and early February when China was placed essentially on a full lockdown due to the outbreak of the virus.

In fact, we just wrote  a couple weeks ago that auto industry executives are admitting that the virus could “wreak havoc” on sales and production for the first quarter, according to the Asia Times. Automakers across the country have been forced to cancel sales targets and offer subsidies to hold over dealers during the outbreak.

 

The coronavirus has now killed over 1,700 people (if you are to believe the CCP’s likely understated numbers) and more than 70,000 people are now confirmed to be infected in China. 780 million people in China are now living under travel restrictions. 

Just days ago, we reported about a major inventory glut looming in the Chinese auto market, as well.

Authored by Pat Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has just given us notice he will be terminating the Visiting Forces Agreement that governs U.S. military personnel in the islands.

His notification starts the clock running on a six-month deadline. If no new agreement is negotiated, the VFA is dissolved.

What triggered the decision?

Duterte was offended that one of his political allies who led his anti-drug campaign in the islands, which involves extrajudicial killings of drug dealers, had been denied a U.S. visa.

Yet, Duterte has never been an enthusiast of the U.S. presence. In 2016, he told his Chinese hosts in Beijing: “I want, maybe in the next two years, my country free of the presence of foreign military troops. I want them out.”

The Pentagon is shaken. If there is no VFA, how do we continue to move forces in and out to guarantee our ability to honor the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty? Defense Secretary Mark Esper called Duterte’s action “a step in the wrong direction.”

President Donald Trump openly disagreed: “If they would like to do that, that’s fine. We’ll save a lot of money.”

The Philippine Islands are among the largest recipients of foreign aid in East Asia, and we’ve provided $1.3 billion in military assistance over the last two decades. But money shouldn’t be the largest consideration here.

Trump has been given a historic opportunity to reshape U.S. and Asia policy along the lines he ran on in 2016.

He should tell Duterte that we accept his decision and that we, too, are giving notice of our decision to let the 1951 treaty lapse. And following expiration of that treaty, the U.S. will be absolved of any legal obligation to come to the defense of the Philippines.

Time for Manila to take charge of its own defense. Indeed, what is the argument for a treaty that virtually dictates U.S. involvement in any future war in 7,600 islands 8,000 miles from the United States?

When we negotiated the 1951 treaty, it was a different world.

We had entered a Cold War with Stalin’s USSR. We were in a hot war in Korea that would cost 37,000 U.S. lives. Gen. Douglas MacArthur had just been relieved of his command of U.S. forces in Korea by Harry Truman. A disarmed Japan had not fully recovered from World War II.

The Communist armies of Chairman Mao had overrun China and driven our Nationalist allies off the mainland. The Viet Minh were five years into a guerrilla war to drive the French out of Indochina.

Today, the Cold War is long over. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is no threat to the Philippines. Nor is China, though Xi Jinping has occupied and fortified islets like Mischief Reef in the South China Sea that are within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines.

There is no U.S. vital interest at risk in these islands to justify an eternal war guarantee or treaty commitment to fight Beijing over rocks and reefs in the South China Sea.

Trump should seize this opportunity to tell Duterte that when the VFA, which guarantees immunity for U.S. forces in the Philippines, is dissolved, the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty is dissolved.

A message would be sent to Asia, and the world, that Trump was serious when he said that he intends to revisit and review all the defense alliances and war guarantees entered into 60 and 70 years ago, to address threats that no longer exist in a world that no longer exists.

The U.S. has a long history with the Philippines, beginning in the War of 1898 with Spain, when Admiral George’s Dewey’s Asian squadron sank a Spanish fleet in Manila harbor, and we invaded, occupied and colonized the islands, thus emulating Europe’s imperial powers and abandoning the anti-colonial legacy of the Founding Fathers.

“Take up the White Man’s burden,” Rudyard Kipling admonished us.

After Filipino patriots fought for nearly four years to liberate their islands from the Americans, as they had from the Spanish, inflicting on U.S. soldiers and Marines thousands of casualties, the New York Herald replied to the Poet of Empire:

“We’ve taken up the white man’s burden/Of ebony and brown/Now, will you tell, Rudyard/How we may put it down.”

After Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Japanese invaded and occupied the islands, until Gen. MacArthur made good in on his famous pledge on leaving Corregidor, “I shall return.”

In 1944, we liberated the islands.

A year after Japan’s surrender, on July 4, 1946, we granted the Philippines full independence. And that nation and people, far more populous and prosperous than in 1946, should take full custody of the defense of their own sovereignty and independence.

At the end of the Cold War, nationalists in Manila ordered the U.S. to vacate the great naval base we had built at Subic Bay. We should have used that expulsion to let the 1951 security treaty lapse.

Trump should not miss this opportunity.

It was just days ago that we reported about Disney’s new dystopian flying robotic acrobats that were taking the place of stunt actors and were capable of performing flips and changing body positioning in mid-flight.

Today, we move a step closer to human superheroes. Pilot Vince Reffe, who is referred to as Jetman Dubai, was recently videotaped flying around the city in a human jetpack that draws comparisons to comic book characters like Iron Man. 

In a video that has been going around on Twitter Monday that originated with The Crown Prince Hamdan Mohammed, Reffe is seen hovering with his jetpack over the water outside the city of Dubai.

He then turns the jetpack toward the city and blasts off at what appears to be well over 100 miles per hour, at one point flying straight up into the sky, mimicking fighter jet moves.

It was estimated that he reached “as much as 1,800 meters” in the air in a matter of seconds, according to TMZ. The pilot then performs some acrobatics, before coming back down to land using a parachute.

And the jetpack doesn’t just look badass, either.

It sounds like a small jet engine aircraft. You’ll want to turn the sound on for this video.