Wolves in the Fold: How Closet Atheists are Suckering the Religious Right Into Abandoning Its Values.

It has long been my belief that many of the conservatives in Congress and on the radio - mostly fiscal conservatives - are closet atheists. I say this because I cannot believe that these men who profess Christ on camera really think they're not going to be in trouble when they stand before God to answer for decades of screwing the poor for financial gain and spreading fear and hate. What are Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Glenn Beck going to say to God when he asks them why they demonized compassion and inflamed people's fears and hatred for others? How are John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Eric Cantor going to explain their policies of cutting aid to low to come families so they can give more money to those who already have more than their grandchildren will ever need.


Mind you, I have no problem at all with atheists. I'd rather have them in charge than the Religious Right. Certainly most atheists are not the money-grubbing, fear-mongering haters that comprise so much of the conservatives in Congress and infesting a.m. radio. But it almost eludes me how the Religious Right can ally themselves with these people. I fear that this unholy alliance (no pun intended) has cause a lot of religious conservatives to abandon many of the the values Jesus taught. Indeed, many religious conservatives - due to their association with these closet atheists - have abandoned their moral obligation to help others and have in fact joined the choir of those condemning compassion. There's no biblical justification for the Rights almost erotic affinity for guns; in fact, one would think that the party that complains that we have no respect for life anymore would be AGAINST the proliferation of guns. I find it hard to believe that these fiscal conservatives really care that much about abortion given how little they seem to care about babies once they're out of the womb. They DO have some common ground when it comes to gay marriage in that the kind of atheist conservatives I'm talking about genuinely do feel uncomfortable with the gay community, but speaking of discrimination, there's no reason Christians should support the oppression of minorities; even the ones who are here illegally.

I don't mean to say, by the way, that atheists are immoral or even amoral.  I don't mean to suggest that they lack compassion.  I certainly do not believe that morality comes from religion - or at least a belief in God - and that without religion there would BE no morality.  One should not need to be told by God, or anyone else, what is right or wrong.  When I say that their alliance with these closet atheists is causing religious conservatives to abandon their moral obligation to help others, I mean that atheists don't hold themselves accountable to God the way Christians are supposed to.  Christians are supposed to believe that when they die, God will judge them and by abandoning their obligation toward others, the Religious Right is acting like there is no God and they will not be judged for shunning the poor.


The point is, anyone who spends as much time and energy spreading fear and hate and demonizing compassion while serving the whims of the wealthy as so many radio and Congressional conservatives do cannot believe that God will pat them on the back for their efforts and there is no reason those who genuinely DO follow Jesus should ally themselves with those people.


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Four Reasons Why the Gate-way Drug Argument Fails

Probably the second most popular argument against legalizing marijuana - after the oh-so-popular and equally fallacious What-about-the-poor-defenseless-children argument - is that marijuana is a gateway drug.  You start out toking joints and pretty soon you're sucking cock in a truck-stop mens room to support your meth habit.  There are a few different reasons I can think of off the top of my head why this argument is patently absurd which I will now innumerate:


1.) Marijuana is the most widely available illegal drug.
The more widely available a drug is, the more likely people are to use it and it's fairly easy to get your hands on some weed.  Even if you live in a small town, you should be able to find a good 10 people who've got it, but even if you live in a big city, you've gotta do some asking around to find anyone who's got coke or heroin.  Yeah, you can find hard drugs (again, IF you're in a big enough town), but it's significantly easier to find weed. 


2.) Most people aren't that interested in trying harder drugs.  
I'm pretty confident I speak for most of the marijuana-smoking community when I say that I'm not interested in trying heroin, cocaine, meth, crack; basically anything that comes in a white powder.  These would all be things to avoid.  The anecdotes I read or hear about involving those drugs don't tend to end well.  Most of us have seen too many "VH1: Behind the Music" episodes where some band member got addicted to some heavy stuff and died or broke up the band to try any of that shit ourselves. According to a 2007 Zogby poll, 99% of us wouldn't use hard drugs if we could.


3.)  Why does the "slippery slope" start with weed?
Prohibitionists point out that most of the people currently in rehab for hard drug addiction started smoking weed first.  In Latin, this is known as the "Ad hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy.  Just because A happened before B doesn't mean A caused B.  Just because someone smoked weed before they started smoking crack doesn't mean the weed wasn't enough for them.  First, while I've never had crack and never will, I'm pretty sure there's a world of difference between the high caused by weed and the high caused by crack, but more importantly, why does the slippery slope start at weed?  What about alcohol?  I'm willing to bet those same people in rehab for hard drug addiction started drinking alcohol before they ever smoked weed.  Why isn't alcohol the gateway drug?  Or coffee?  Coffee is a stimulant that puts you in an altered state of consciousness.  Why isn't coffee a gateway drug?  I bet a lot of those people in rehab trying to kick heroin started with a cup of Folgers in the morning.  I guess prohibitionists must figure that weed is the top of the slope because it's illegal, which further shows the kind of intellect we're dealing with.

4.) If marijuana were a gateway drug, and if it was as addictive as prohibitionists claim, one would expect to see a corresponding rise in the use of hard drugs along with the growing popularity of marijuana, but no such rise exists.  
While marijuana has been and remains popular, hard drugs remain significantly less so.  Most people who smoke pot DON'T go on to use hard drugs.  Statistics like these consistently show that the number of people who use hard drugs is always a FRACTION (usually a SMALL fraction) of the number of people who smoke pot.


Seriously, does anyone really buy the gateway argument anymore?

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Prop 19: An Autopsy

Well, it’s official. Prohibitionists were once again able to scare people into believing the world would come to an end if we legalized pot. The marvelously effective war on drugs survives to give us the illusion of having protected us from the downfall of society for at least another two years. The measure was pronounced dead at 10 p.m. Pacific Time with 93% of precincts reporting in. The final tally was 54% opposed, 46% in favor. Let’s take stock of what happened and see where we went wrong.

This is due, in no small part, the Attorney General Eric Holder coming out and threatening to “vigorously enforce” the Controlled Substances Act in the state of California should the measure have passed. The polls for Prop 19 were looking pretty good until he came out and made all the moderates fill their Huggies and say “No”. The thing is, this is a legal battle we might very well have won. Legal precedent says federal law trumps state law, but legal precedent also says that California state authorities have to abide by state law. A.G. Holder can’t make the police in California arrest stoners. Also, alcohol prohibition ended partly because cities and states began to refuse to enforce the laws against it. Realistically, Holder and the D.E.A do not have the money and the man-power to police the whole state of California by themselves. They would’ve made examples of a few big growers and sellers, but most Californians would’ve been quite safe.

There was a lot of talk about live polls vs automated polls. Automated polls for Prop 19 showed much more support for the measure than live-caller polls. There was speculation that people were uncomfortable admitting they supported the measure to a live poller but felt okay telling the truth to an automated poll. It sounded reasonable and it was a hope I clung to when the polls dropped sharply after Holder came out and breathed fire at us. What went wrong? My suspicion is that, although those polled might have felt more comfortable admitting their support for the initiative to a non-human poller, the automated polls didn’t include people who didn’t feel like answering an automated poll. Think about it. You answer your phone and hear an automated voice asking in a recorded or maybe text-to-speech voice if you’d like to answer a few questions. I suspect a lot of people’s answer was “Click.”

I’m somewhat inclined to blame the stoners for not putting down their pizza-grease covered X-Box controllers long enough to get out and vote. I’m more inclined to blame the youth who are too stupid to vote. There may be some truth to both of those, but I think mostly it’s just that people are still afraid of pot. It’s still a big scary boogey man to a lot of people. I don’t think the “Yes on 19″ people did enough to address people’s fears. I don’t know how they could’ve missed that. In particular, they didn’t manage to pacify parents who are worried about their kids smoking pot. I think the number one thing that needs to change about the marijuana debate is that we need to get rid of this idea that you’re protecting your kids from pot by going after stoners. You’re not. “Yes on 19″ should’ve driven home the point kids are already smoking pot because it’s not properly regulated. They should’ve hammered parents on the fact that it’s easier for kids to get their hands on pot than booze. This isn’t rocket surgery, folks; it’s all about the kids. “What about the children?! Won’t somebody think of the CHILDREN?!”. I know they addressed this point briefly in their ONE TV spot they managed to release, but they should’ve devoted a whole series of ads to this.

I imagine two commercials for this. The first one, I already made, as you may have seen in my post "Don't Fear the Reefer".  The second goes like this: We see a guy in his late teens/early 20′s – a scruffy-looking character – selling weed to a kid who’s about 12 or 13. As the commercial begins, the kid walks away. The dealer looks at the camera and says, “I HOPE they don’t legalize weed. I’ve got a business to run; clients who count on me and money to make.” Then another aouple of kids walk up and he starts talking to them. Cut to the first kid walking down the street with his bag of weed. The kid looks at the camera and says, “I HOPE they don’t legalize weed. No one’s gonna believe I’m 21 for another 5 years at LEAST; even if I CAN find a good fake ID.” Then the voice-over guy says “Prohibition: Giving you the illusion of protecting your kids from marijuana since 1937. Vote Yes on 19.”

You could also have another commercial with a guy who looks like he’s from a Mexican drug cartel. He looks at the camera and says, “I HOPE they don’t legalize weed. I’ve got a business to run.”

Actually, what they should do now is make those same commercials, but instead of the characters saying “I HOPE they don’t legalize weed.”, have them say “Thanks, California!”. They could also show employees from under-funded government programs and have them say “Thanks, California. We didn’t need that money anyway.”

Another concern people were actually dumb enough to swallow was the idea that people can show up for work stoned with impunity. This is an idea I never had any commercial ideas for because I never thought a reasonable adult could take it seriously, but I guess if they’re dumb enough to think they’re protecting their kids by arresting stoners, they’ll swallow anything. I guess I’d just have a guy looking into the camera and saying, “Look, I’m smart enough to know that if I come into work drunk, they’d fire me, so what makes any of you think I’d be dumb enough to come to work stoned and why would you believe there’s nothing they could do about it if I did?


Well, at least it’s been decriminalized down to a simple infraction. Let’s learn from this defeat and be prepared for 2012. Let’s write the measure more carefully next time; I know there were several complaints about THAT, too. Let’s work on addressing people’s baseless, asinine fears a little more forcefully, next time, guys.

Oh, and screw you, California. Enjoy your crushing debt, you jack-asses

Don't Fear the Reefer

I’d like to take a moment to come out as a supporter of legalizing marijuana.  I’m not gonna lay out all the reasons I feel that way (how prohibition doesn’t protect your kids from getting it and how it’s not a gateway drug and so forth) but I thought it’s important to say that; partly because I’m thinking that my online business may have something to do with the field of marijuana activism.  It’s really important to me.  For me, this isn’t just about people’s right to smoke and get away with it.  This is about the fact that marijuana is in no way dangerous enough to justify the punishment suffered by people who get caught smoking it.  Except in those few states where possession is considered a civil infraction, those who are arrested for smoking pot get a criminal record.  Having a criminal record – especially for a drug offense – greatly impacts a person’s ability to get a job or funding for education.  This is a huge deal.  This is a direct road to poverty, which lies at the heart of most of America’s problems.  Marijuana isn’t bad enough to warrant denying people a job or an education.  It isn’t worth the impact on society in terms of the poverty prohibition leads to.
I have a couple of text-to-speech PSAs about this on Youtube. Enjoy:

Alcohol: The Gate-Way Drug

Prohibition: Save the Children!

Say No to "Drugs"

The word “drugs” is a fear-based label used to avoid and discourage any critical thought about the class of substances involved. It brings to mind a host of terrible images and words that are associated with it. Prohibitionists-mainly people who’ve never tried a “drug” in their lives and have no idea what they’re talking about-hear the word “drugs” and immediately think of any given character from “Requiem for a Dream”; dirty, shaky, sallow addicts with dark circles under their eyes shooting heroin or snorting cocaine in an abandoned building or under an overpass somewhere. The vice-like grip of fear it has on people’s minds is quite possibly the primary reason it’s taking so long to end prohibition. People hear the word “drugs” and they immediately think very bad things about it.

Part of the problem, here, is that I have a different idea of what constitutes a “drug”. When I think of the word “drugs” I think of something that is A.) highly addictive and B.) very bad for one’s health. For decades now, the scientific consensus has been that marijuana is neither of those things, but we’re not interested in facts, are we? Every time there’s a government inquiry commissioned to determine just how dangerous marijuana is, in America or around the world, they always come back with the same result. They always come to the conclusion that marijuana is about as dangerous as coffee and the laws against it create more problems than they solve. Unfortunately, the typical course of action is to ignore these objective scientific results. That’s how powerful the word “drugs” is. The fear of “drugs” trumps the objective science almost every time.

I’m also familiar enough with the drug culture to know that many other “drugs” are not nearly as hazardous and addictive as prohibitionists would have us believe. I’ve seen the diagrams showing that alcohol, tobacco, and prescription medication kill literally hundreds of times more people every year than the “drugs” we’re all suppose to be afraid of. Don’t get me wrong; I know there are some drugs out there that are legitimately dangerous and should be avoided. Heroin, cocaine, crack, meth; basically anything that comes in a white powder. These would all be things to avoid.

I guess what I’m saying here is that we desperately NEED to start making a distinction between “Hard Drugs” and “Soft Drugs”. Prohibitionists don’t see any difference between drug use and drug abuse. Also-for reasons I’LL never understand-they don’t classify alcohol and tobacco under the “drugs” heading. Technically, caffeine is a drug, too. One of the most popular arguments against ending marijuana prohibition is that it’s a “gateway-drug”. This is a variation on the Slippery-Slope argument. There are a few different reasons why this argument is false, but the one worth mentioning here is that there’s no reason to believe that the “slippery-slope” starts with pot. I’m willing to bet that most of the hard-core drug addicts drank alcohol or coffee before they ever touched a joint or a needle. Why isn’t alcohol the gateway drug? Or coffee? Surely it was their coffee habits that led them to drink alcohol which introduced them to pot which sent them on a downward spiral toward crack, right? Maybe we should arrest Juan Valdez and throw him in a cell with Al Capone and Pablo Escobar.

 The point is that we need to change either the word “drugs” or the language and images that come to mind when people hear it. I don’t like the word because it’s normally used in a negative context by people who’ve never tried any. Unfortunately, there’s not really any other word for them and I think most of the people who are really good at manipulating language are prohibitionists. Maybe instead of trying to change the way people think about drugs, we should point out the hypocrisy of condemning drug users with a beer in your hand.

The God Delusion: A Review

I recently finished reading Richard Dawkins’ book “The God Delusion”. What follows is not a comprehensive review of the book; just my thoughts about it.

I try to keep an open mind, but I have to admit I started the book doubting that Dawkins could shake my faith, if you could call if that. Though he presented some good arguments and gave me a lot to think about, ultimately, I was right. I’d already heard a lot of the arguments against God’s existence before and, though Dawkins elaborated on the old arguments and presented some new ones, I didn’t feel he’d eradicated the idea of God. Indeed, his central argument is based on at least one questionable premise, as we shall see.

First, let me say that I really consider myself an agnostic. To use Dawkins own scale of belief, I’m a 3 on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being someone who “knows” there’s a God and 7 being someone who “knows” there isn’t one. A 3 means I don’t know for sure if there’s a God, but I’m inclined to believe in one. Interestingly, Dawkins himself states that he is a 6 on that scale; he doesn’t know for sure that there’s no God, but he’s very much inclined to doubt it. Dawkins addresses Agnosticism early on in the book and divides it into two types: Temporary Agnosticism (the idea that we CAN know if there’s a God if we have enough evidence) and Permanent Agnosticism (the idea that we can NEVER know if there is or is not a God no matter how much evidence we gather. He stresses that just because we may never know for sure if there’s a God or not doesn’t mean that his existence and non-existence are equally likely, and I agree. He then proceeds to make arguments that, to him at least, would seem to put the odds AGAINST the existence of a God. Don’t get me wrong, he DOES make some good arguments, but I don’t think he does an adequate job of defeating the idea of a God.

I am also, for the most part, a Deist. For the unfamiliar, there are two kinds of believers in the West: Deists and Theists. A Theist believes in a personal God; one who answers prayer and performs miracles and talks to people and is regularly involved in our daily lives. I’m not a big believer in prayer. For every person who gets what they pray for, you’ll find at LEAST one who didn’t, so God’s help is, at best, unreliable. Theists argue, “But God has a plan.” Well, if God has a plan, there’s no point in praying, is there? If want you want is part of God’s plan, there’s no need to pray for it. If what you want isn’t part of God’s plan, he’s probably not gonna change his mind and who are you to ask him to do it? Dawkins quotes Ambrose Bierce who defined prayer thus: “To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.”

But I digress. I DO believe that God performs miracles, though rarely. I’ve heard too many miraculous stories to think that miracles don’t happen and I don’t think Science does an adequate job of explaining why they happen. I think that God does communicate with us, but virtually never uses a voice or words of any kind. I think he makes his point in other ways, like experience, for example. Deists don’t believe in a personal God. We think that God lit the fuse on the fire-cracker that was the Big Bang, but has since been relatively uninvolved. We see the universe as a self-sustaining system. Deists believe we don’t need God to explain the universe or anything in it, and I don’t think we do. We basically believe in the Big Bang and Evolution but believe these were God’s ways and means of creating everything. If there is a God, I think he purposely avoided leaving behind any evidence of his personal involvement in the creation of the universe and the life within it. If God had left behind any conclusive evidence that he exists and created the universe; if we discovered proof that there is, indeed, a God, all Hell would brake loose. This is one reason I think Science tries to rule out using God to explain anything. The moment you accept that there is a God, then people would immediately start fighting over whose God it is. Church leaders, and possibly leaders of other faiths, would start pushing for their religious laws to be made the law of the land. Hell, they do that NOW. It would not be a GOOD thing to find proof that there is a God unless there came with it a list of rules and standards of morality and I don’t think God wants that. I believe he wants us to have free will to choose or not choose what we believe or don’t about how we should live. If we knew there was a God, we’d just stand around waiting for orders instead of thinking for ourselves. I think if God wanted to say anything to us, it would be something like “No, really; go on about your business. As you were. Nothing to see here.”

Dawkins spends much of the book delivering a scorching indictment of religion. He attacks the evils that religion has visited upon the world and highlights the unjustifiably high regard in which it is held even in modern society. I quite agree. It’s appalling the things people can get away with when the things they do are committed in the name of religion. Most of his venom is directed at Christianity because Christianity, more than any other religion, has been responsible for so many crimes against humanity. Attacking the evils of religion is a pretty standard weapon in the atheists arsenal, but attacking religion is not the same as attacking God. I don’t blame God for the messes that we have created, nor do I expect him to clean them up. If God solved all our problems for us, we wouldn’t learn and grow.

Early on in the book, Dawkins asks why Philosophers and Theologians are any more qualified than anyone else to comment of matters of morality and answer life’s most profound questions. He asks why people think that Science has nothing to say about right and wrong. The answer to the first question seems fairly obvious to me. Philosophers and Theologians are moral qualified to address morality and life’s biggest questions for the same reason a surgeon is more qualified to perform a heart transplant; they’ve been trained to do it. Even if you disagree with the idea that God exists, a person who is well-versed in theories of ethics and knowledge and value and reality is more qualified to comment on those things than someone who has not been so trained. As for the second question, I believe Science may very well have something to say about morality and answering the big questions, but that’s a topic for another essay.

As stated before, one of my primary reasons for suspecting that there is a God is that so many people have believed in one and, of those, a good portion claim to have had experience with God directly. Dawkins dismisses this argument, pointing out that some people claim to have seen pink elephants, too, but that doesn’t make them real. Yes, but I’m pretty sure the number of people claiming to have seen pink elephants and the like is vanishing compared to the number of people who claim to have seen and/or heard God. Again, it’s the sheer number of people who seem to have had very similar experiences that leads me to suspect that they’re not completely full of shit. Dawkins actually counters this by pointing out that sometimes it’s hard to explain how a large group of people could have the same delusion, but it would be even harder to explain the phenomenon if it were real. I don’t think the existence of God is THAT far-fetched.

He points out that the brain is capable of being fooled by an illusion. Again, this is true, but just because illusions exist and the brain can be fooled doesn’t mean that God is a delusion. Computers, especially when used for movie effects, can recreate a lot of things that really do exist. Just because something can be created or recreated doesn’t mean it was never real to begin with.

Dawkins is a scientist though and through and tries to use science, particularly Darwinian evolution by natural selection, to explain or disprove a lot of ideas throughout the book. His central argument against the existence of God is that if God created the universe, who created God? Whoever or whatever created God must have been more powerful than God himself. But then, who created this one who created God? And who created THEM? It gets into a kind of infinite regress that Dawkins believes assures us that there is almost certainly no God. Here’s my problem with that argument: His argument assumes that God had a beginning. It assumes the existence of Time, which is a concept that has been called into question going back perhaps as far as Einstein. Quantum Theoretical Physicists have postulated for decades now that time may not exist. Indeed the very existence of the world around us has been called into question. Einstein himself said that “Reality as we know it is an illusion.” It is widely believed among Quantum Theoretical Physicists that the world around us is an illusion; which, I think, lends some credibility to the possibility of there being a God and what we would call a spiritual plane of existence. The idea that “Life is but a dream” has been around for centuries in Eastern religions and philosophies. Again, the premise that God must have been created and had a beginning seems questionable to me because it presumes the existence of time. Dawkins seems to be aware of Quantum Physics as he talks about it a bit toward the end of the book. He does not, however, get into the idea that the world is illusory and time may not exist. Still, I have to suspect I’m not the first person to have thought of this. I’d be somewhat surprised if this hadn’t occurred to him or at least pointed out to him. I wonder what his response was.

He tries to explain the existence and ubiquity of religion in purely Darwinian terms. He thinks that we evolved religion either as a by-product of something else or because it was advantageous to our survival. I felt he was really reaching during this part. I think his need to rule out God caused him to come up with some fairly dubious answers of his own. I remember thinking, “Jesus Christ, dude; not EVERYTHING revolves around evolution.” On the other hand, suppose there IS no God. How DO we explain the popularity of religion. In that case, Dawkins may have a point, but I guess that’s just another reason I suspect there IS a God. I have trouble believing that our belief in one can be explained by evolution.

I think I’ve done a better job of explaining where I DISAGREE with Dawkins than I have of explaining where I agree with him. First of all, I agree with him that religion has and still does terrible harm to individuals and to society as a whole. It has done a lot of good things, too, but I think the bad outweighs the good. People are able to get away with WAY too much bullshit when they do it in the name of religion.

Second, he points out that God is used by Creationists to explain anything Science can’t. This is absurd. You can’t just attribute something to God just because Science hasn’t been able to explain it yet. Of course, Creationists do this in a desperate attempt to get Science to conform to Scripture instead of the other way around, but that’s still no excuse. There have been many things we attributed to God in the past and then Science came up with a better explanation for them later. Besides, exactly HOW do Creationists think God made everything? Did he just snap his fingers and POOF! the world into existence? Maybe he folded his arms and nodded his head like the woman in “I Dream of Genie”. C’mon, guys; you’ve gotta do better than that. You can’t just leave it at “God just POOFed everything into existence.”

This is another insidious thing about mainstream organized religion, though; it tries to stop people from thinking too hard. No need to wonder where we came from; just chalk it up to God. If we followed religion’s lead, science would lose half its motivation. After all, who needs science to discover or explain anything? We have God for that, right? Thank God we don’t really believe that or we wouldn’t have made it out of the Dark Ages.

Finally, Dawkins points out that no one takes the Bible 100% seriously anymore; not as far as morality is concerned. Theists sometimes object that we need God to explain morality; that WITHOUT God, there would BE no morality. Shall we look to the Bible for moral guidance? Certainly not. The Bible – particularly the Old Testament – is fraught with rape, incest, murder, and wholesale genocide all done under the direction of God or with his approval. The Death Penalty is recommended for all manner of minor offenses. One man was stoned to death for gathering firewood on the Sabbath. The fact that we no longer follow the old rules and kill people for this or that, Dawkins points out, shows that there is another standard of morality at work. We must have a standard of morality by which we pick and choose which Bible verses to obey and which to ignore. Whatever that standard of morality is, it did not come from the Bible.

It’s a thought-provoking book I would recommend to anyone regardless of where you lye on Dawkins 1 – 7 scale. I submit that most people who choose not to read it are afraid of having their faith shaken. Many will not read it for that reason. Again, Dawkins presents some wonderful arguments against religion, but I don’t quite buy his arguments against God. He does a good job attacking the Theist God, but doesn’t do a whole lot of damage to the Deist God, which is the one I believe we have, if indeed God exists at all. Despite Dawkins best efforts, I still have to suspect he does.

But of course, as Dennis Miller used to say, I could be wrong.