February 19, 2013

Remember when Rumsfeld said "Stuff happens" when Iraq's treasures were looted?

Rumsfeld's arrogant words in 2003 on the looting of Iraq. "Stuff happens"

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Declaring that freedom is "untidy," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Friday the looting in Iraq was a result of "pent-up feelings" of oppression and that it would subside as Iraqis adjusted to life without Saddam Hussein.

He also asserted the looting was not as bad as some television and newspaper reports have indicated and said there was no major crisis in Baghdad, the capital city, which lacks a central governing authority. The looting, he suggested, was "part of the price" for what the United States and Britain have called the liberation of Iraq.

"Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things," Rumsfeld said. "They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here."

Looting, he added, was not uncommon for countries that experience significant social upheaval. "Stuff happens," Rumsfeld said. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed. "This is a transition period between war and what we hope will be a much more peaceful time," Myers said.

We were bombing and looting Babylon, and most Americans never knew it. From 2003

Babylonian Booty

It had been conquered and re-conquered a dozen or more times, by (among others) the Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Parthians, Arabs, Ottomans and British, and in February 1991, yet another foreign power raised its flag over the ancient city of Ur, near the mouth of the Euphrates: the Americans. Daring the allies to bomb the birthplace of the patriarch Abraham, Iraqis had parked their jets near Ur's 4,000-year-old ziggurat, but the planes were shot up all the same. American soldiers toured the ancient tower, then got out their entrenching tools and began digging for souvenirs. A forlorn Iraqi gatekeeper ran among them, wailing protests in Arabic, until U.S. officers put a stop to the looting. Last week, when NEWSWEEK visited the site, it was virtually deserted, except for a lone guide, the son of the old gatekeeper, keeping a wary eye on the American and British warplanes streaking overhead. "Ninety-nine percent of Americans don't know the country they'll be bombing is Mesopotamia," says Dr. Huda Ammash, a high-ranking Baath Party official. "Our country has served humanity for so long, now it's up to the international community to help protect Iraq."

February 18, 2013

Bill Nye: Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children. Evolution denial unique to US

More from the video transcript:

Bill Nye: Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children

According to Bill Nye, aka “the science guy,” if grownups want to “deny evolution and live in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine, but don’t make your kids do it because we need them.”

..."Denial of evolution is unique to the United States. I mean, we’re the world’s most advanced technological—I mean, you could say Japan—but generally, the United States is where most of the innovations still happens. People still move to the United States. And that’s largely because of the intellectual capital we have, the general understanding of science. When you have a portion of the population that doesn’t believe in that, it holds everybody back, really.

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. It’s like, it’s very much analogous to trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates. You’re just not going to get the right answer. Your whole world is just going to be a mystery instead of an exciting place.

As my old professor, Carl Sagan, said, “When you’re in love you want to tell the world.” So, once in a while I get people that really—or that claim—they don’t believe in evolution. And my response generally is “Well, why not? Really, why not?” Your world just becomes fantastically complicated when you don’t believe in evolution. I mean, here are these ancient dinosaur bones or fossils, here is radioactivity, here are distant stars that are just like our star but they’re at a different point in their lifecycle. The idea of deep time, of this billions of years, explains so much of the world around us. If you try to ignore that, your world view just becomes crazy, just untenable, itself inconsistent.

February 17, 2013

From 2000. Squeezed to Death. Iraq after years of sanctions. John Pilger paints sad image.

I am so thankful that Rachel Maddow is going have the special, Hubris, next week.

Those of us here at DU in 2002 were in shock what our country was doing. I posted this article years ago. I have wondered how in the world they could have been any kind of threat to us after all those years of sanctions and daily bombings.

From the Guardian UK March 2004:

Squeezed to Death

Wherever you go in Iraq's southern city of Basra, there is dust. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat. It swirls in school playgrounds and consumes children kicking a plastic ball. "It carries death," said Dr Jawad Al-Ali, a cancer specialist and member of Britain's Royal College of Physicians. "Our own studies indicate that more than 40 per cent of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin with, then long afterwards. Most of my own family now have cancer, and we have no history of the disease. It has spread to the medical staff of this hospital. We don't know the precise source of the contamination, because we are not allowed to get the equipment to conduct a proper scientific survey, or even to test the excess level of radiation in our bodies. We suspect depleted uranium, which was used by the Americans and British in the Gulf War right across the southern battlefields."

Under economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council almost 10 years ago, Iraq is denied equipment and expertise to clean up its contaminated battle-fields, as Kuwait was cleaned up. At the same time, the Sanctions Committee in New York, dominated by the Americans and British, has blocked or delayed a range of vital equipment, chemotherapy drugs and even pain-killers. "For us doctors," said Dr Al-Ali, "it is like torture. We see children die from the kind of cancers from which, given the right treatment, there is a good recovery rate." Three children died while I was there.

A 95% literacy rate before the 1st Gulf war.

"The change in 10 years is unparalleled, in my experience," Anupama Rao Singh, Unicef's senior representative in Iraq, told me. "In 1989, the literacy rate was 95%; and 93% of the population had free access to modern health facilities. Parents were fined for failing to send their children to school. The phenomenon of street children or children begging was unheard of. Iraq had reached a stage where the basic indicators we use to measure the overall well-being of human beings, including children, were some of the best in the world. Now it is among the bottom 20%. In 10 years, child mortality has gone from one of the lowest in the world, to the highest."

More about the care being withheld:

Just before Christmas, the department of trade and industry in London blocked a shipment of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Dr Kim Howells told parliament why. His title of under secretary of state for competition and consumer affairs, eminently suited his Orwellian reply. The children's vaccines were banned, he said, "because they are capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction". That his finger was on the trigger of a proven weapon of mass destruction - sanctions - seemed not to occur to him. A courtly, eloquent Irishman, Denis Halliday resigned as co-ordinator of humanitarian relief to Iraq in 1998, after 34 years with the UN; he was then Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, one of the elite of senior officials. He had made his career in development, "attempting to help people, not harm them". His was the first public expression of an unprecedented rebellion within the UN bureaucracy. "I am resigning," he wrote, "because the policy of economic sanctions is totally bankrupt. We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that . . . Five thousand children are dying every month . . . I don't want to administer a programme that results in figures like these."

Just including this as a background on the voices of both parties. In These Times has a paragraph called The B Team.

Strangers to the Truth

The B team

On the other side of the aisle are the shining lights of the Democratic Party, James Carville, Stanley Greenberg and Bob Shrum (the consultant who ran Kerry’s campaign and shied away from confronting the Swift Boat Veterans). These three men founded the Democracy Corps, a nonprofit “dedicated to making the government of the United States more responsive to the American people.” Recall that on Oct. 3, 2002, prior to the Iraq war resolution votes, Democracy Corps advised Capitol Hill Democrats: “This decision to support or oppose an Iraq war resolution will take place in a setting where voters, by 10 points, prefer to vote for a member who supports a resolution to authorize force (50 to 40 percent).” In other words, Carville and friends advised Democrats to cater to public opinion and let Bush have his war.

This invasion will define us forever. Perhaps Rachel's special Monday will bring it to the forefront again so our younger Americans won't forget.

February 15, 2013

Love this article by Gary Cooper's daughter from July this year.

I doubt he would have appreciated being used by Donald Kagan to promote a war based on lies.

The Tao of Cooper: Why High Noon Still Matters

The great power of High Noon, I believe, was that very simplicity. It was the story of a lone man who does the right thing at the risk of his own life. Period, full stop. And it was just the right role for my father to play. He was born in the town of Helena, Montana in 1901. He worked the family’s small ranch, went to a small town school and befriended the Native American children who lived in the area. His father—my grandfather—was a state Supreme Court judge, and he taught his son to value a code of decency and justice. “I knew the role of Will Kane was a natural for me,” my father said more than once. “My dad used to tell me stories about the sheriffs he dealt with in his days on the Montana Supreme Court Bench.”

But that Western code has ranged far beyond Helena—and far beyond the U.S as well. In 1989, Poland was holding its first free elections and needed to impress on a public that hadn’t cast a genuine ballot in more than two generations just the kind of power they were being given to wield. Outside of every major polling station a poster was thus displayed—of Gary Cooper in the role of Will Kane, with the name and logo of the Solidarity party added above his badge and the gun in his hand replaced by a ballot.

February 15, 2013

Iraq and the legacy of lies. Donald Kagan said it was our High Noon Gary Cooper moment.

Kagan was a professor of classical Greek history at Yale and an "influential advocate of a more aggressive foreign policy."

The Atlanta Journal Constitution printed his words in 2002.

The President's Real Goal in Iraq

Donald Kagan, a professor of classical Greek history at Yale and an influential advocate of a more aggressive foreign policy -- he served as co-chairman of the 2000 New Century project -- acknowledges that likelihood.

"If our allies want a free ride, and they probably will, we can't stop that," he says. But he also argues that the United States, given its unique position, has no choice but to act anyway.

"You saw the movie 'High Noon'? he asks. "We're Gary Cooper."

Accepting the Cooper role would be an historic change in who we are as a nation, and in how we operate in the international arena. Candidate Bush certainly did not campaign on such a change. It is not something that he or others have dared to discuss honestly with the American people. To the contrary, in his foreign policy debate with Al Gore, Bush pointedly advocated a more humble foreign policy, a position calculated to appeal to voters leery of military intervention.

The upcoming MSNBC special with Rachel Maddow reminds me of all the times we talked about all the lies in 2002 and 2003.

Iraq was a legacy of lies told and lies believed. A confused time. A tragic time.

In a November 1997 Sunday morning appearance on ABC, Defense Secretary William Cohen held up a five-pound bag of sugar for the cameras to dramatize the threat of Iraqi anthrax: "This amount of anthrax could be spread over a city -- let's say the size of Washington. It would destroy at least half the population of that city. One breath and you are likely to face death within five days."

"It could wipe out populations of whole countries!" Cokie Roberts gasped as Cohen described the Iraqi arsenal. "Millions, millions," Cohen responded, "if it were properly dispersed."

A year later, at a nationally televised town hall meeting on Iraq at Ohio State University, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright brought home the dangers: "Iraq is a long way from Ohio, but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face. The evidence is strong that Iraq continues to hide prohibited weapons and materials."

So much more at Mother Jones, the timeline they made in 2006.

Lie by Lie A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq

Just some excerpts:

1/30/01

Saddam's removal is top item of Bush's inaugural national security meeting. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill later recalls, "It was all about finding a way to do it. The president saying, 'Go find me a way to do this.'" Date the public knew: 1/10/04

9/12/01

According to counterterror czar Richard Clarke, "[Bush] told us, 'I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this.'" Told evidence against Al Qaeda overwhelming, Bush asks for "any shred" Saddam was involved. Date the public knew: 3/22/04

9/21/01

Justice Department lawyer John Yoo declares Fourth Amendment flexible, writing: The government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties." Date the public knew: 10/24/04

Also on 9/21/01

Bush briefed by intel community that there is no evidence linking Saddam to 9/11. Date the public knew: 11/22/05

MJ kept the list updated online up through January 2012.

February 13, 2013

TN legislature kills bill to close failed online charter that told teachers to delete bad grades.

They refused to allow discussion at all.

Since charter school expansion is apparently going to continue during these next 3 years, I wonder if some accountability could be in order. I doubt it.

Tennessee legislative committee kills bill to close Tennessee Virtual Academy

A state legislative committee blocked discussion Tuesday of leaked internal e-mail from the only taxpayer-funded, for-profit online school operating in Tennessee that told its teachers to delete students' bad grades.

The committee then killed a bill that would have closed the two-year-old Tennessee Virtual Academy, operated by Virginia-based K-12 Inc., at the end of the school year. Moments earlier, the panel approved a Haslam administration bill that is the state's first attempt to reign in the virtual school — but only after stripping out of the bill a proposed enrollment cap in the school.

....On Tuesday, Rep. Gloria Johnson, D-Knoxville, released internal TnVA e-mails leaked to her that in December instructed its teachers to quickly delete students' progress reports for September and October, delete the grades of students on an assignment that a majority had failed, and to "please consider" counting only the final grade of a student whose earlier unit average was an F.

But when Rep. Mike Stewart, D-Nashville, tried to present the e-mails to the House Education Subcommittee, the panel's top two officers — Reps. Mark White, R-Memphis, and Harry Brooks, R-Knoxville — immediately cut off the discussion and called the vote that killed the bill.

Here is more about the emails. They really did tell the teachers to delete the bad grades from two years and keep the good ones. The head of that school actually blamed it on the difficulty of handling student differences.

Tennessee Virtual Academy emails teachers to delete bad grades. For-profit online school.

...The email -- labeled "important -- was written in December by the Tennessee Virtual Academy's vice principal to middle school teachers.

"After ... looking at so many failing grades, we need to make some changes before the holidays," the email begins.

Among the changes: Each teacher "needs to take out the October and September progress reports; delete it so that all that is showing is November progress."

...Josh Williams, head of schools for the Tennessee Virtual Academy, pointed to the challenge of teaching all types of children when repeatedly pressed on the school’s poor math scores: “Each one of our students comes in with a different, unique need,” he said, adding that the school is seeking to “work as a team” and to make better use of data to address the needs.

February 13, 2013

Tampa Bay Times Bill Maxwell laments "slow death of bookstores." I'm with him on that.

I was raised in a family of readers. When we were younger our parents took us at least once a week to the library. We visited local book stores. Books were part of our lives.

Bill Maxwell is a favorite columnist, and his column made me remember a recent event.

I like hardback books. I have a lot of them, and I usually give them to the public library once or twice a year. For a change I thought I would see if a used book store would be interested since I give them away for free.

I called a couple of them, told them they were bestsellers, like new, great condition. I was told people no longer wanted hardback books anymore, and only a few more wanted paperback. They did not stock them anymore. I was shocked over that. And saddened.

Maxwell's column hit home.

Slow death of bookstores is heartbreaking

The world I love and enjoy most is shrinking.

Corporate or independent or public or whatever, I don't care. Show me a bookstore and I'll find a dozen reasons to love it and spend a few or a lot of dollars. My world is shrinking because each year, bookstores are shutting down without being replaced.

A little more than a year after Borders shuttered its 411 remaining stores, Barnes & Noble Booksellers, long the nation's largest chain, has announced it plans to close at least 20 stores a year for the next decade. The Wall Street Journal reports that since 2003, Barnes & Noble closed an average of 15 stores a year but opened about 30 a year, many on college campuses. Last year, though, it shut down 14 stores and opened no new ones.

All book lovers have a favorite store. Mine was the eclectic Borders in Fort Lauderdale, my hometown. It had one of the best, if not the best, locations of any bookstore in the country. It was on Sunrise Boulevard on the Intracoastal Waterway that flows into the Atlantic Ocean. I would make my purchase, get something to drink and find a spot beneath an umbrella on the water. I would read and watch yachts head toward the ocean. Sometimes I would take a water taxi to downtown and back.

That store is gone. It closed more than a year ago. Whenever I go to Fort Lauderdale, I drive past the building out of habit. I feel miserable each time. An old friend is dead and cannot be replaced.

I plan to keep buying hardback books as long as I can find them. Our bookstores here are limited in nature, most Christian fundamental types. Our library is different now, they don't have funds to restock as they used to do.

There is still a place for books in our world for people like me and Bill Maxwell. I think there may be many others who feel that way.

February 12, 2013

Tennessee Virtual Academy emails teachers to delete bad grades. For-profit online school.

Email Directs Teachers To Delete Bad Grades

There is a video at the link as well.

At the center of the controversy is the Tennessee Virtual Academy -- a for-profit, online public school that Republican lawmakers touted as a way to improve education in Tennessee. Two years ago, state lawmakers voted to let K12 Inc. open the school, using millions of taxpayer dollars.

...The email -- labeled "important -- was written in December by the Tennessee Virtual Academy's vice principal to middle school teachers.

"After ... looking at so many failing grades, we need to make some changes before the holidays," the email begins.

Among the changes: Each teacher "needs to take out the October and September progress reports; delete it so that all that is showing is November progress."

Millions of taxpayer dollars to open the school, a failed experiment.

More on the test scores. Lawmakers warned the school.

TN lawmakers blast online K12 school

After opening in 2011 courtesy of enabling legislation approved by the Republican-dominated legislature, Tennessee Virtual Academy is under heightened scrutiny following an inaugural year of operations that produced alarmingly low test scores: Only 16.4 percent of its middle school students scored proficient or advanced test marks in math, while 39.3 percent did so in reading/language arts.

The utter irony of this next paragraph caught my eye at once. The head of the academy actually has the nerve to excuse the grades because he says the students come with a "different, unique need". Just like public school students don't?

The "reformers" seem to live in their own reality

Josh Williams, head of schools for the Tennessee Virtual Academy, pointed to the challenge of teaching all types of children when repeatedly pressed on the school’s poor math scores: “Each one of our students comes in with a different, unique need,” he said, adding that the school is seeking to “work as a team” and to make better use of data to address the needs.

His answer to the failure is to "make better use of data"?

February 12, 2013

Chris Hayes says we face "stark choice between the war we are now fighting" and the law.

He recommends choosing the law "which we all at least pretend is the bedrock of our republic."

He was speaking of the targeted killings. He believes they need to be brought out from behind the "veil of secrecy."

How America Kills

People in the administration have told reporters that they have implemented an extremely rigorous screening process inside the White House to decide who ends up on the list, that the president himself approaches his responsibility to administer the program with solemnity and care, and that the policy has been efficient and effective in decimating al-Qaeda and other affiliated terrorist groups. A senior U.S. official said as early as 2009, ”The enemy is really, really struggling…These attacks have produced the broadest, deepest and most rapid reduction in al-Qaida senior leadership that we’ve seen in several years.”

But before any of the specifics of the program’s merits can be properly and fully debated, it has to be brought out from behind the veil of secrecy which now cloaks it. That process started this week when my colleague Michael Isikoff obtained a heretofore secret Department of Justice memo that outlines the administration’s legal arguments for why it believes it has the authority to use lethal force against ”a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qa’ida or an associated force” if an “informed high-level official of the U.S. government has determined” it’s appropriate.

He quotes a blogger Lou Siegel that he trusts President Obama to have this power, but admits he would not have trusted the Republicans.

I think this is probably the most honest defense of the program you’ll hear from liberals. They trust President Obama to wield broad, lethal executive authority with care and prudence. And besides: it’s war, would you rather, I am often asked by supporters of the kill list, that we have boots on the ground, big expensive, destructive deadly disastrous land invasions of countries like the Iraq war? Isn’t the move from wars like Iraq to “surgical strikes” in Yemen precisely the kind of change we were promised?

.."In 1832, German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz declared that “War is an act of force, and there is no logical limit to the application of that force….a clash of forces freely operating and obedient to no law but their own.” Much of the history of war and international law in the last century, particularly after the horror of the second world war, was an attempt to prove Clausewitz wrong. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves. We may find ourselves at some point facing a stark choice between the war we are now fighting and the law which we all at least pretend is the bedrock of our republic.

He says choose the law.

Digby at Hullaballoo thinks along the same lines.

Just don't call it a double standard because that would be totally wrong

The key difference between the torture memos and the targeted-killing memos is that the torture memos were written during the Bush administration, while the targeted-killing memos were written during Obama's. Another difference is that because Obama banned torture by executive order, it was highly unlikely that Americans would be affected by the practices the torture memos justified. The same cannot be said for the targeted-killing memos, which are still in force and apply to an ongoing government program.

If releasing the torture memos to the public was justified, it's very hard to understand why Americans should be kept in the dark about the details of when, how and why their own government can mark them for death.

This is a short but true pictorial about things Democrats would have much disliked if George Bush had done them. It hits home.

7 Things Democrats Would Have Freaked Out About If Bush Had Done Them

Just a couple of things. The post adds images for emphasis.

Obama had promised to end Bush's hawkish foreign policy and the "war on terror's" detention and interrogation regime.

But in the beginning of his fifth year as president, Obama's record has been surprisingly similar to his predecessor's in those areas.

Actually, the death tolls in Afghanistan under each administration look like this:

It seems Glen Greenwald, Firedoglake, are targeted for their criticisms. One day I was told I shouldn't be linking to Huffington Post as they were a right wing site.

I was reading Greenwald's Twitter feed today, and it has an angry tone. It sounds like he and the Guardian site may be reading here today. I don't agree with all he writes, but he has done some very good work.

I quit linking to Firedoglake ages ago because of the hassle. It has some good writers, it has some I don't agree with at all, a mixture. But it brings attacks.

My main disagreements with the policies of President Obama are mostly with his education policies. He and Arne Duncan are continuing the Bush policies and expanding them.

I waited almost a year to post here again after 10 years as a member. I know how it is to be threatened, and it is hard to take.

I defend Glenn Greenwald often because there have been too many condemned for speaking out if they disagreed with Obama. I don't always agree with him either.

So far I haven't seen Chris Hayes being stuck under the bus, I hope he is not. It's getting crowded.

February 11, 2013

From the preface of Greenwald's 2006 book about the Patriot Act.

It is a printable version, so I assume posting more than 4 paragraphs may be acceptable. I have the book he wrote, How Would a Patriot Act?, and I see some in the thread have taken stuff out of context.

I do not agree with everything Glenn Greenwald writes, but I very much respect that he has the guts to say the things he says.

It take courage to criticize presidents from both parties when they following disturbing policies.

A printable book excerpt from How Would a Patriot Act

What first began to shake my faith in the administration was its conduct in the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested in May 2002 on U.S. soil and then publicly labeled "the dirty bomber." The administration claimed it could hold him indefinitely without charging him with any crime and while denying him access to counsel.

I never imagined that such a thing could happen in modern America— that a president would claim the right to order American citizens imprisoned with no charges and without the right to a trial. In China, the former Soviet Union, Iran, and countless other countries, the government can literally abduct its citizens and imprison them without a trial. But that cannot happen in the United States—at least it never could before. If it means anything to be an American citizen, it means that we cannot be locked away by our government unless we are charged with a crime, given due process in court, and then convicted by a jury of our peers.

I developed an intense interest in the Padilla case. It represented a direct challenge to my foundational political views—that we can tolerate all sorts of political disputes on a range of issues, but we cannot tolerate attacks by the government on our constitutional framework and guaranteed liberties. My deep concerns about the Padilla case eroded but did not entirely eliminate my support for the president. The next significant item on the president's agenda was the invasion of Iraq. While the administration recited the standard and obligatory clichés about war being a last resort, by mid-2002 it appeared, at least to me, that the only unresolved issue was not whether we would invade but when the invasion would begin.

During the lead-up to the invasion, I was concerned that the hell-bent focus on invading Iraq was being driven by agendas and strategic objectives that had nothing to do with terrorism or the 9/11 attacks. The overt rationale for the invasion was exceedingly weak, particularly given that it would lead to an open-ended, incalculably costly, and intensely risky preemptive war. Around the same time, it was revealed that an invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein had been high on the agenda of various senior administration officials long before September 11. Despite these doubts, concerns, and grounds for ambivalence, I had not abandoned my trust in the Bush administration. Between the president's performance in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the swift removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the fact that I wanted the president to succeed, because my loyalty is to my country and he was the leader of my country, I still gave the administration the benefit of the doubt. I believed then that the president was entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to, and to the extent that I was able to develop a definitive view, I accepted his judgment that American security really would be enhanced by the invasion of this sovereign country.

It is not desirable or fulfilling to realize that one does not trust one's own government and must disbelieve its statements, and I tried, along with scores of others, to avoid making that choice until the facts no longer permitted such logic.