www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/ck…
— Matthew B (@matthewbroome.bsky.social) December 4, 2024 at 2:30 PM
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.
The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.
The choice is between normal and crazy.
“I was told there would be no fact checking.”
The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.
Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.
“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”
There is no right way to do the wrong thing.
They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.
Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.
We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.
Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.
If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.
Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.
They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.
Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.
Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.
Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.
No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.
The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.
Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.
Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.
When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.
It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.
Baud
Typical French stuff.
Trollhattan
Blessed are the cheesemakers.
Weird situation, that.
John S.
Barnier was a garbage pick from the very start. I’m surprised he made it this long.
Meanwhile, Poodle Macron is too busy giving Trump a tongue bath to worry about his own backyard.
Rose Judson
Just government after government going into dramatic meltdown following a budget fight.
At least this one doesn’t involve the military, unlike yesterday’s.
Chief Oshkosh
Macron is not everyone’s cuppa, but he’s been a great leader during difficult times.
Seems similar to our recent election, and those in other western democracies. I agree with Adam on what’s going on: You (western democracies) may not be interested in WWIII, but WWIII is very interested in you.
ETA: Or is it that Macron’s job isn’t on the line here? I’m obviously not a French gov’t expert…
John S.
@Chief Oshkosh:
Macron called a snap election that was an unforced error. Then he named Barnier PM despite clear opposition in yet another unforced error.
Whatever good he may have done in the past is being quickly undone.
Chris
Everything about this year has been a shit show.
First, Macron called for a snap election after the European elections in the hope that that could somehow help him. The result was a big showing for the left in the first round of elections. Not so much for Macron’s party.
Then, he refused to coordinate a strategic voting campaign with the left wingers to ensure the fascists couldn’t pass – the campaign still happened, and was successful, but only because Macron was essentially overridden by his own underlings.
Then, he refused to nominate a Prime Minister from the left-wing party, despite them having won the biggest share of seats in the legislature, and picked a random right winger instead, which is his right, but pretty much ensured a completely dysfunctional result.
Now, his selection’s effectively blown up in his face, and we’re back to the usual shit show.
When I say that all over the West, the political center seems to have decided to just drive the car into the ditch, Macron is possibly the most perfect example of what I mean. “No, I don’t want fascists taking power, although it’s increasingly unclear why I think that would be bad other than it means someone who’s not me would have power. But if stopping that means working with the left, or God forbid, abandoning some of my own policies that aren’t terribly popular, then I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna. The world can burn. It’ll be its own damn fault for not recognizing what a wonderful and irreplaceable person I am.”
WaterGirl
@LanceThruster:
In your case, possibly.
You have been permanently banned by Cole.
Any new nyms from you will also be banned.
Elizabelle
We live in interesting times. Sacre bleu!
Gin & Tonic
@Elizabelle: I’m so old I can remember when liberal democracy prevailed and “history” was dead.
Yutsano
@Chris: Macron ramming through the increase in the retirement age did not do him any favours either.
Elizabelle
@Gin & Tonic: We live in such disjointed times.
Probably time to start keeping a journal.
glc
Macron ignored the results of the last election and that was not particularly expected to last. Then Barnier forced a vote of confidence that he was expected to lose.
Not particularly remarkable, and all according to existing provisions of the constitution, which are more sensible than our electoral college certainly, though I’m giving myself a low bar, obviously. In the background to all of this are ideas of de Gaulle, possibly a bit less outmoded than ideas of our founding fathers.
(Somewhere considerably farther in the background would be ideas of Napoleon, but filtered through de Gaulle. They manifest more in the legal system than in the political system.)
Being shocked by any of this is like begin shocked that it is possible to win the popular vote and lose the election. Which of course is shocking, but one gets used to it eventually
Urza
Anyone else tired of the world trying to start wars and going crazy? I know I am. Not that I expect the French to start a war but its part of the same itch or whatever going on.
Lobo
@Chris:
Pick Me Democrats in a nutshell.
Chris
@Yutsano:
Oh, that. Pisses me right off, it does.
The left spends its entire life being told that the government can’t do this or that because it’s just not popular. “Oh no, we can’t do anything for illegals! That would make people upset! Do you want the fascists to win?” “Oh no we can’t do anything for trans people! That would make people upset! Do you want the fascists to win?” “Oh no, we can’t do anything about police violence! That would upset people! Do you want the fascists to win?”
But somehow it’s fine for the center to ram through whatever Thatcherite wet dream Macron has been jerking off to since he was in grad school studying public affairs. And when the entire country tells him that his wet dream is not wanted and that they’d like to take it out and burn it like the English burned Joan of Arc, it’s fine for him to ram it through without a vote in the legislature. And when the expected political fallout happens, it’s fine for him to go away in a corner and sulk! What about the fascists, you say? Well, it’s the left’s job to be worried about that. Not his! Don’t you know who he is?
Chris
@glc:
To be fair to France, I should point out that its political system does adhere to the groundbreaking idea that when a candidate for chief executive gets more votes than any other candidate for chief executive, that candidate should, well, win the election.
A bit less outmoded than the founding fathers, indeed.
John S.
@Chris:
Spot on. It’s bad enough to have the fascists on the march everywhere without having the center-left give them a big fucking assist.
Layer8Problem
@WaterGirl: Thank you.
Fair Economist
@John S.: Macron ain’t center-left. He’s center-right with some Thatcher-curious thrown in.
glc
@Chris: Certainly, though one is a matter of constitutional law and the other a matter of established practice. But actually I was thinking of article 49.3 which is something we are not at all accustomed to.
New Deal democrat
I read a report a few weeks back that Macron and Starmer had some discussions about sending French and British troops to Ukraine.
if that happens, particularly after January 20, it will be particularly “interesting.”
Geminid
@John S.: Macron is not Center-Left. He is Center and even calls himself a “Radical Centrist” which evidently is a real political philosophy.
It sounds to me like you were attempting to smear Democrats you don’t like by means of guilt-by-association tactics. If you don’t like being in a Center-Left coalition– which is what the Democratic Party is– you can always make the case for something better.
But the political dynamics of France’s Fifth Republic are so very different than ours that you really need to find better way than slagging Macron.
TaMara
@WaterGirl: Some folks just cannot take a hint. 🤣🙄
Chris
@John S.:
I think “center left” is excessively generous to Macron. He’s just center. (I’d argue center-right, but reasonable people can disagree). If he were an American, he’d be Mike Bloomberg.
Chris
@New Deal democrat:
If they were willing to do this, or otherwise seriously bump up assistance to Ukraine, my opinion of them both will certainly be raised significantly.
p.a
@WaterGirl: I’m pretty regular here and that nym doesn’t ring a bell.
Lucky me!
WaterGirl
@p.a: Lance Thruster has been banned for quite some time, but he keeps trying with slightly different nyms and email addresses.
I thought maybe he didn’t know he was banned and was just trying to get his comments through, so I thought it best to spell it out.
Geminid
@p.a: He dropped in after the Biden-Trump debate and made various bad-faith arguments about how stupid Democrats would be if they didn’t ditch Buden. Eventually he revealed that he was a Jill Stein fan who might consider voting for Harris. Then he started talking about “Zionist” bio weapons labs on one of Sdam Silverman’s posts and got the hook.
Sister Golden Bear
Closer to home…. The consensus from LGBTQ journalists covering today’s SCOTUS hearing about whether banning trans healthcare for kids is legal: we’re fucked.
The attitude from the reactionary justices was essentially, “Stopping gender affirming care leads to suicide? Excellent.” Muttered slowly in a low, sinister Mr. Burns voice while steepling their fingertips.
Don’t worry, I’m in no danger of self-harm (I’m too fucking stubborn), but this one of those days where it’s really hard to find a reason to keep going in a world that wants us dead.
It was only four years ago that we were deemed of actually deserving a few rights… Republicans are working overtime to ensure we’re all dead.
Martin
So, my dad’s French friends (retired teachers and communists) feel that Macron believes that the fasicsts are less of a risk to his neoliberal policies than the left is. And that’s probably true. He doesn’t much care about the risk the fascists present to all other policies. So he’d rather liberals be an independent foil to the right under the rule of the right, where some time in the future they can campaign their way back to power, than be a minority bloc under the left where it would be much harder to campaign back to power.
I don’t know a lot about French politics, but I was there for the election, so I got the context of that particular moment from the people around me, and my dad’s friends view seems pretty widely shared.
Baud
@Sister Golden Bear:
Related.
I’m sorry about the argument, although I can’t say it’s a surprise.
Trollhattan
@Urza:
Rise of a far right party in Austria is a strong vote for a completely new set of writers. Simply too on the nose.
Le Pen has made fascism quelle attractive to 21st century France. Daddy was too much a boor and she sanded off the edges, plus changed the name. Who says rebranding doesn’t work?
Chris
@Martin:
“Fascism is bad, but left-wing politics are worse” is the kind of view that’s become alarmingly common among Western elites, and far too many “middle of the road” voters.
Sister Golden Bear
@Baud: Not a surprise at all.
From what we’ve seen of the Red State pre-filings for next year, the next wave of anti-trans bills will be even more horrific than last year — when there were more than 500 anti-trans bills, too many of which passed.
Belafon
@Sister Golden Bear: I was reading some of the reporting and some replies on bsky, and if the conservatives were to apply their arguments to other things, we’d also be banning plastic surgery, knee replacement and any other procedure that modifies the body. And we know they wouldn’t do that.
Belafon
@Chris: Because left wing solutions involve holding the rich to their part of the social contract, which they don’t want to do.
Urza
@Chris: Pretty sure at least the American Intelligence agencies have been on that page for a very long time.
Martin
@Chris: Yeah, I have trouble trying to express that idea in a way that prevents people losing their shit and screaming at me.
ColoradoGuy
@Baud: Young trans people would be prudent to leave the former slave-Klan-oligarch states. They are reverting to type, which makes it physically dangerous for anyone non-conforming.
White people shouldn’t get too complacent in those states. I’m old enough to remember overhearing people talk about “race traitor”, which is a real thing to Klansters. The MSM studiously avoids it, but the modern GOP is the Ku Klux Klan, supported by oligarchs (just like the old days).
Baud
@Martin:
It’s because you falsely ascribe those views to the institutional Dem party.
Donatellonerd
as a dual citizen and a Paris resident for the past 40 years: Macron has no principles except to do what’s best for himself and his rich friends. Sound familiar?
Other than that, he cares a lot about preventing American woke-ism from coming to France (tbf, many French people feel that way, unless they happen to work with the marginalized those people want to keep marginalized. And if he did have principles they’d be between the center and the far right. That is, RW but not a RWNJ. Just an arrogant asshole who thinks he’s god’s gift to France and Europe, and who as far as I can tell, most French people detest. He has done a few good things and prevented a few bad things, but dissolving Parliament was an asshole move; claiming that the left is extreme and Le Pen is stupid, and refusing to acknowledge that the left came in first in the elections was an asshole move. if not a coup (many French people feel it was). certainly doesn’t believe in norms.
you should know i only dislike him intensely, and that, together with being able to acknowledge he’s done a few good things (none of which come to mind at this moment), made me feel good for a while that I could dislike the politician i voted for (twice, and the second time very unhappily) without hating him with the white hot hate I hold towards … the person I voted against in the US in November.
will read the thread when i wake up in the morning, it’s my bedtime.
Melancholy Jaques
@Martin:
So, the French version of Manchin & Sinema.
Belafon
@ColoradoGuy: The hard part is that mainly requires parents to leave those states, which isn’t easy.
Citizen Alan
@ColoradoGuy: I’m convinced that’s why they call us communists, groomers, and other disgusting slurs. They know they can’t get away with calling us race traitors (or worse, [N-word] lovers) in public, so they just resort to the most vile words they can use in public.
Layer8Problem
@Donatellonerd: Thank you (and Rose Judson) for voting from far, far away.
Belafon
@Chris: And what’s truly annoying is when you ask these same people which policies they prefer, it’s the ones on the left.
karen marie
@Chris: “Middle of the road” voters have been well trained by the media they consume. (Media that’s owned by the “Western elite.”)
Lapassionara
@Sister Golden Bear: that sucks.
I would like to be a better ally of trans people. Can you suggest some articles or books that I could read to help when the propaganda starts being printed? I apologize if you’ve provided these before, and thank you for fighting the good fight.
Dave
@Belafon: And convince themselves that fascists and the fascist adjacent are actually in favor of those policies.
See union bosses who supported Trump now bitter and shocked that he under bussed them more or less immediately.
TBone
Crypto grifto crime family off to the races!
…
The devil is in the details:
https://digbysblog.net/2024/12/04/but-his-crypto/
Fascism includes the marriage of corporate (business) power with state power, no?
Geminid
News aggregators Clash Report and Visegrad24 report that Syrian rebel forces have surrounded the city of Hama on three sides, cutting off 4 of the 6 highways serving the city. There is fighting in several of the city’s neighborhoods already. The Assad regime has issued AK-47s to the traffic cops but they don’t look very enthusiastic about their new role.
With a population of nearly one million, Hama is Syria’s fourth largest city behind Damascus, Aleppo and nearby Homs. The term “Hama Rules” was coined after Hafez Assad’s savage repression of a revolt there in 1982. Now his son Bashar is watching the city fall from Damascus, 130 miles south of Hama.
Ed. Yesterday I looked up Syria’s area and population to get a better handle on this conflict. It turns out Syria is a little bit larger than Florida in area and its population is close to Florida’s 22.5 million.
Gretchen
@Belafon: I read that knee replacement have a far higher regret rate than gender affirming surgery. And do they realize that breast implants for teen girls is gender affirming surgery? I’m so sick of people with no medical knowledge deciding to tell doctors how to practice medicine.
Chris
@Belafon:
Back after Trump’s first election, when the whole system had been rushing to normalize him for a while, one of my thoughts was that there’s a pretty terrifying possibility that the postwar consensus – that people should at least publicly pretend to agree that fascism is bad and beyond the pale – was the aberration, and what we were seeing was a reversion to the norm. As Paxton (and a lot of other people) point out, fascism lives or dies on the center-right’s approval: it’s only ever taken power when traditional conservatives threw the doors open to them, and if they don’t, it stays on the outside. The problem is, “traditional conservatives” are exactly the kind of shallow little fucks who will look at six million dead Jews on one side, mild tax hikes and minimum wage increases on the other, and decide “well, nobody wants dead people, of course, but we can’t simply pay taxes like some kind of mortals!”
And sure enough, all over the West, we’ve been seeing the phenomenon of center-right parties melting away to join the far right, and center-right politicians altering their policies to suck up to it.
@Urza:
The Cold War is the era when the principle of “far right bad, but far left worse” really entrenched itself, with the security state’s politics being probably the most famous example of it.
On the one hand, that idea was on much more solid ground back then: when “far left” literally meant communism, Stalin and Mao had created things that were pretty much as monstrous as anything Hitler ever did, and the West’s most powerful enemies in the world were all communist not fascist, you could make a pretty solid case for the argument. On the other hand, it was clear even then that the security state and far too many Westerners who agreed with it were much too eager to use a definition of “far left” that was way broader than justifiable, and use “anticommunism” as a hammer with which to hit civil rights movements, antiwar movements, labor unions, liberals, and democratic left-wing leaders throughout the third world. J. Edgar Hoover’s bête noire wasn’t the KGB. It was Martin Luther King.
Post-1991, even the old justifications don’t hold anymore. But the political system overall has spent thirty years just doubling down on them again and again and again.
Chris
@Donatellonerd:
I miss Jacques Chirac.
Votez escroc, pas facho.
Elizabelle
@Chris: LOL. “Vote crook, not fascist.”
Had to look up escroc.
bjacques
@Chris: same in NL. The leading party in the last few elections before this one was the center-right VVD, led by Mark Rutte, who I hope will be a better NATO Secretary-General than he was a political leader. He and his party courted far right voters for years on immigration and benefits, and now we have a government with the far right Geert Wilders (PVV) leading a coalition and dragging along Rutte’s successor in the VVD.
Nettoyeur
@Donatellonerd:
I lived and worked in France in the 1990s, and maintain the connection. My French friends, always hypercritical no matter what their politics, have ended up detesting all the presidents and prime ministers, left, right , whatever. The latter in particular are seen as “fusibles” ie, fuses, to be replaced anytime the public is unhappy. The country of the Revolution, Napoleon,Talleyrand, and Vichy has a deep and lasting cynical attitude to the practice of politics. They have a point.
Nettoyeur
@Yutsano: That’s a no win issue. Not raising the retirement age impacts the budget and eventually taxes. Raising it makes many people go feral.
Citizen Alan
@Belafon: This! I am consistently stunned at how many people hate the Dems for being “Socialists” while simultaneously calling for socialist policies. Like, short of enacting price controls or nationalizing the egg production industry, what the hell was Biden supposed to do about the price of eggs?!? About the only thing he could affect price-wise was dropping gas prices by opening up the Strategic Oil Reserve (i.e. that reserve of GOVERNMENT OWNED AND CONTROLLED OIL!) as a way of undercutting price-gouging by the oil producers, but that’s it.
Trollhattan
Shit-shit-shit-shit-shit. Again.
America, y’all.
Plus, Adventists aren’t even fundy sociopaths.
mrmoshpotato
@Citizen Alan:
SOMETHING! /s
Yeah. These dumb schmucks who blame the government for food prices… Exactly when did the US
become a Communist countrynationalize food production?And of course the price gouging and bird flu outbreak was totally Biden’s fault too. /S
lowtechcyclist
I don’t know what the French are doing, but they’re on our side – I believe.
WereBear
@Belafon: A man has a right to accept treatment that will affect his fertility.
RevRick
@TBone: The marriage of the corporate world to fascist regimes is one of convenience.
Fascism itself is based in a claim of racial/ethnic superiority and is obsessed with the purity of blood. It’s not accidental that one of the first things the Nazis did when they came to power was send a delegation to Arkansas to study Jim Crow. Along with this claim of superiority is an emphasis on action, purging the nation of its enemies and asserting itself in the world. This means fascists are contemptuous of critical reflection and expression of doubts, which becomes, for them, akin to treason. So, fascism inevitably leads to a hypermasculine hero cult, death cult. Women, of course, are thrust into subordinate positions.
Spain and Portugal chose to follow a milder version of a ethno-Catholic model.
Martin
@Baud: Nobody has made a particularly compelling case that it’s false. This whole campaign people thought it was more important for Harris go on right-leaning shows than left-leaning shows of comparable size.
Why did Harris’ message shift away from anti-corporate populism to Trump as a threat – as more Democratic consultants joined the campaign? Her own superPAC had polling showing the anti-corporate message was working. Why did the campaign undermine that?
I missed a bunch of the campaign dealing with a family emergency and when I left she was campaigning with Shawn Fain and when I returned he was campaigning with Liz Cheney.
How do I keep missing this institutional appeal to the left?
Elizabelle
A new thread would be minty. It is after midnight in France, this very minute.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: What left leaning shows did she refuse to go on? What right leaning shows did she go in instead?
pieceofpeace
@Sister Golden Bear:
Some things take more than we think we have.
Keep going.
Baud
@Martin:
I’m not revisiting the campaign or the left. I was just answering your question about why people contested your beliefs.
ETA: I didn’t really blame the left for the loss until the left started taking credit for it. Weird choice, but oh well.
Doug R
@Nettoyeur:
Everyone’s so afraid to raise taxes in the slightest and Europe seems to be even worse on immigration than us.
I really don’t understand it, I would have happily paid 2x as much for my CPP (Canadian social security) if it meant I got 2x more later.
Chris
@bjacques:
The response to far-right immigrant-bashing in far too many places, not even by the center-right but often by the left, is to basically accept their entire framing, and then run on the premise that the far-right is correct about everything but somehow you’ll do a better job of being them than they will. Like anybody’s going to believe that.
I have no idea if it would’ve worked, but just for the sake of variety, just once, I’d have liked to see a sustained pushback by the rest of the political scene.
The FN’s breakthrough in 2002 France was met with a massive popular mobilization from across the entire spectrum, even behind an incumbent president nobody liked, to force them back into their cave. One might reasonably suspect that there was some appetite for antifascism there if the political class cared to try and harness it at all. Instead, five years later we got Sarkozy running on the platform of “we need to win back votes from the FN,” and then when that proved difficult moving further and further in their direction. The next fifteen years were moderate presidents throwing out one gimmick after another to try and prove that they were Tough On Immigration too. So now, not surprisingly, the FN’s gone from getting under a fifth of the vote to being close to half.
We can blame the public, but where the hell is the public supposed to have gotten the idea that the FN was wrong? Sure as hell not from most politicians.
Martin
Kroger execs admitted they had raised prices ahead of inflation, so gouging laws might have applied there. And we have had price controls on milk for decades, adding them to critical staples like eggs isn’t some radical step.
I know some egg producers were exporting more eggs at the peak of the market in order to artificially constrain domestic supply and keep prices high.
But the polling I find suggests that voters blamed corporations more than Biden for the prices, and they liked Harris’ gouging regulation. And a lot of people here would say ‘so why didn’t they vote for Harris?’, when I think the answer is ‘why didn’t they do these things? They were in charge, they didn’t need to wait until after the election’. Egg prices first spiked 23 months ago. Why didn’t they put measures in place after that. Why weren’t there hearings if wrongdoing was happening. Why weren’t people being held accountable?
We know they are capable of doing this. Though people could be forgiven for thinking that fine may not serve as a deterrent, and be annoyed that the case took 13 years to conclude. If I was being gouged, I wouldn’t be happy if my settlement arrived in 2037.
My thesis has been that voters like Dem policies but everything feels so goddamn ineffective. And isn’t eggs kind of its own little microcosm of that? There’s a market that operates in ways the public doesn’t understand, that sometimes it seems like the government doesn’t understand, that the government is effectively powerless to respond to? That’s not a great environment to run in if your message is ‘we’re going to preserve the current system and tweak around the edges’.
I don’t think the cost of eggs is necessarily the hill that voters are dying on here. But the inability to influence the cost of eggs by this huge federal government might be.
Martin
@Baud: I agree that’s a weird choice.
Nettoyeur
@Chris: As a sort of French person (lived there, speak the language, professor, kids in French school) I was invited by the French Embassy in Canberra, Australia for a day after election breakfast when Chirac beat Le Pen in the 2nd round. I heard about the Chirac Voting Kit, which included rubber gloves and a clothespin (to hold the nose shut)…….
RevRick
@Chris: It’s important to remember that the mental illness called white supremacy is a European invention. As long as Europe was essentially the domain of white people, social democratic policies could gain traction, even among militantly conservative regimes like Bismarck’s Germany. But with refugees pouring in from the war torn Middle East and poverty stricken Africa, whites feel threatened and respond by shifting right in their political views. That perceived threat exists at the primitive, lizard brain level, irrational and dangerous. Fascism thrives when racial/ethnic purity fear of and disgust for others is activated.
Another Scott
@Sister Golden Bear: I heard a bit of Alito pontificating and questioning Prelogar on C-Span radio on the way home. Here (YouTube link, 4:37). She’s a great attorney and Solicitor General of the US.
Prelogar starts around 1:38.
It’s clear that Alito has made up his mind, but we can assume that his mind was made up before they even took the case.
Grrr…
Hang in there.
Best wishes,
Scott.
YY_Sima Qian
@Chris: Macron’s latest cabinet post-election also as some hilariously ill qualified & out of touch members.
YY_Sima Qian
@Trollhattan: A coup in South Korea is also a little too on the nose by the script writers of this simulation.
YY_Sima Qian
@TBone: Justin Sun is now a citizen of Granada. He could be acting to advance his self-interest, as an asset of the PRC MSS, as an asset of some other government, or some combination thereof.
Donatellonerd
@Chris: yeah we did that too. seems like a long long time ago. I guess I do miss him.