Category: Uncategorized

London Has Crashed and Burned Under Sadiq Khan’s Mayoralty

In a scathing piece for the Telegraph, Sherelle Jacobs eviscerates Sadiq Khan’s performance as London Mayor, likening his leadership style to that of a dictator and comparing his reign to that of Soviet leaders. Here’s an excerpt:

The mind boggles when it comes to Sadiq Khan. In many ways, he is a faceless phantom – a fascinatingly bland Labour apparatchik incapable of an original thought or phrase. And yet somehow he has managed to build himself into the consummate dictator-bureaucrat, London’s own answer to Leonid Brezhnev or Raul Castro.

For conservatives he is the ultimate source of irrit-ainment, a figure that is constantly triggering animated outrage over his provocative social media posts and controversial schemes. And yet he is a genuinely disturbing political figure, spinning his own universe of deception out of London’s dystopian hellscape.

The mayor’s triumph at forcing through his Ulez expansion project brings home all this chilling force. It is the most egregious kind of vanity project. As an exercise in green gesture politics that is set to hit low-income residents with steep charges, and penalise communities that are already beleaguered by poor public transport, it smacks of bourgeois dogmatism.

Ulez also offers a masterclass in post-truth politicking. The Tories allege in vain that Khan made ‘false’ and ‘dishonest’ claims to the London Assembly over the scheme’s consultation. It ought to be a full-blown scandal that Khan’s office funded scientists who published studies on Ulez’s effectiveness and then sought to “discredit” those whose findings contradicted grandiose claims about its impact. Nonetheless, by loudly and relentlessly blaring about a “public health emergency”, Khan has reduced the complex truth to just another version of reality.

His obsession with Ulez is truly baffling. It is hardly an election winner, with polls revealing that London is largely split over the policy. Given that most cars in the capital are already Ulez compliant, Khan has essentially launched a pious eco-war against some of London’s most deprived areas for little electoral gain.

Yet in one sense, for a politician like him, it fits perfectly. Having spent a good part of tenure dabbling in BLM iconoclasm, calling for the removal of statues of slavers from public squares, he has moved into the more spiritually ambitious business of constructing a cult of the self.

As his recent book Breathless attests, Khan wants nothing less than to position himself as Britain’s most environmentally enlightened leader – a born again green ‘activist’ who has made the journey from Land Rover driver to electric car evangelist.

Read More: London Has Crashed and Burned Under Sadiq Khan’s Mayoralty


Joe Biden sparks outrage by comparing Hawaiian blaze that killed at least 114 to a kitchen fire at his house after making tone-deaf ‘hot ground’ joke to rescuer

oe Biden has sparked outrage by comparing the Hawaiian blaze that killed at least 114 people to a kitchen fire – and joking about ‘hot ground’ to a rescuer.

The President’s motorcade was met with screams of ‘f*** you’ after he finally arrived in Maui – two weeks after the inferno which left 850 people missing and destroyed the historic city of Lahaina.

Biden compounded the anger in a garbled, meandering speech about the deaths of his wife and daughter in 1972, before comparing the horrific blaze to a kitchen fire at his Delaware home in 2004.

The 80-year-old capped off his disastrous five-hour tour by asking a rescue team whether their boots were reinforced, noting the ‘hot ground’ beneath their feet in a tone-deaf attempt at humor.

Hawaiian residents and politicians have unleashed a torrent of criticism over Biden’s failure to visit the island sooner and a paltry $700 offered to each affected family.

To date Biden has approved $8.2 million in assistance to 2,700 households, according to FEMA.

Republicans were quick to compare that to the $12.1billion in security assistance that has gone to Ukraine so far this year.

The President pledged a further $200million to Kyiv on the same day that people affected by the fires in Hawaii were offered the $700 checks.

Biden’s visit was always going to be contentious – with some bemoaning his decision not to visit earlier and opt to spend time at the beach. Others wanted him to stay away so resources weren’t pulled from search and rescue.

The President was criticized before his visit for failing to give the wildfires sufficient attention, and accused of a sluggish response to the crisis.

Last weekend, when asked as he left the beach in Delaware for his response to the fires, Biden replied: ‘No comment.’

He also appeared to forget the name of Maui, repeatedly referring to fires blazing on ‘the Big Island’.

Read More: Joe Biden sparks outrage by comparing Hawaiian blaze that killed at least 114 to a kitchen fire at his house


The cruelty of Canada’s euthanasia policy

With uncharacteristic humility, I would concede that a few positions I’ve argued fiercely in print might be viable on paper, but in practice are a disaster. The “war on drugs” being a fiasco, years ago I advocated the legalisation of recreational pharmaceuticals. But given the dirty, dangerous, dismal tent cities full of addicts in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland — which have all effectively decriminalised drug possession — it may be fortunate that glib journalists like me don’t control public policy.

I’ve likewise argued for legalised assisted dying. After all, nobody asked us if we wanted to be here (a favourite headline: “Woman Sues for Being Born”); the least we might expect is help leaving the building. Why should living be an obligation? While the strongest candidates for a gentle, legal assisted death are patients with agonising terminal illnesses, any respectable libertarian would maintain that outfits such as Dignitas in Switzerland simply provide a service, of which consumers in any medical condition should be free to avail themselves. And for lack of a better word, I’m a libertarian.

I gained an appreciation for how being alive could simply fail a clinical cost-benefit analysis in the summer of 2020. For five days, I was in such blinding pain from a nerve in my spine that I awoke each morning screaming at my poor husband: “I would rather be dead!” I wasn’t being histrionic. Well, okay, I was — but I was also brutally sincere. Had remaining alive been conditioned on such intense and unrelenting suffering forever more, for the first time I could see a persuasive case for calling it quits. During the blackest periods of those days, on which I took half an hour to descend a single flight of stairs, I was incapable of pleasure, humour, or love. The sole thought in my head was that I would do anything to get the pain to stop.

Canada has an unusually liberal programme called Medical Assistance in Dying, or Maid — although this acronym doesn’t tidy your flat but sponges your existence from the known universe. The Great White North should, therefore, represent my perverse version of Valhalla. Instead, Maid’s lax protocols make me queasy. In theory, maybe everyone has a right to die if they want to. In practice, maybe the state needs to keep a tight regulatory reign on whom it graciously provides a one-way ticket to nowhere
Introduced in 2016, Canada’s government-sanctioned euthanasia by medically administered lethal injection and legalisation of assisted suicide (there’s a difference; the latter usually entails patients themselves swallowing fatal tablets prescribed by a doctor) were initially intended to put the terminally ill who’d had enough out of their misery. Yet sister programmes in the seven other countries that permit euthanasia generally restrict the pool of applicants to people destined to die naturally within six months. Maid initially codified no such limitation, merely citing vaguely that death should be “reasonably foreseeable”, as it is for all us mortals. Hypothetically, then, even the programme as originally conceived could have been open to people whose ailments would only kill them many years hence. Yet, bolstering its critics’ “slippery slope” argument, the programme soon radically loosened its restrictions. Assisted dying is now available in Canada to all adults with a serious illness or disability, regardless of whether the source of their torment would be fatal over time.

Virology is Out of Control

Is Virology a bonafide science? Not according to a biomedical scientist, who argues that Virology is a Fraudulent Pseudoscience and is a dying field.

Virology is Out of Control

by Simon Lee, Science Officer at Anew UK.

Most people regard virology as a bona fide hard science. But is it really? Does virology follow the scientific method?

The steps of the scientific method include:

Observe a natural phenomenon.
Suggest hypothesis to explain the phenomenon.
Select independent variable (the presumed cause).
Select dependent variable/s (the observed effect/s).
Control variables.
Test/experiment.
Analyse the observation/data.
Validate/invalidate hypothesis.

Following the scientific method begins with observing a natural phenomenon, postulating a hypothesis, and then determining the independent variable (IV) which is the presumed cause, the dependent variable (DV) which is the observed effect, and controls for experimentation.

Scientific controls are used as a check and balance system in experiments when researchers are attempting to determine the cause of an effect. Controls are designed to ensure that the presumed cause (independent variable) is the only thing that could be causing the observed effect (dependent variable).

Controls allow one variable or factor to be studied at a time. It’s crucial that both the control and other experimental groups are exposed to the exact same conditions apart from the one variable under study. This allows for more accurate and reliable conclusions to be drawn from the experiments.

Virology Refutes Itself

Virologists only starting natural phenomenon is people who have similar symptoms.

Up until 1952, virologists believed that a virus was a toxic protein or enzyme that poisoned the body and that it somehow multiplied in the body itself and could spread in the body as well as between people and animals.

However, these suspected viruses could not be seen directly in diseased tissue using electron microscopy. It was also acknowledged that even healthy animals, organs, and tissue released the same breakdown products during the decomposing process that had previously been misinterpreted as “viruses”.

For decades virologists failed in their attempts to purify and isolate the assumed “virus” particles in order to directly prove the existence and pathogenicity of these particles. Virologists only had indirect evidence of decay from human and animal tissue culture experiments claim.

Read More: Virology is Out of Control  


Growing Censorship of Questions About COVID Narrative

In the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, the First Amendment is the foundation of our democracy. It protects our God-given rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.

The Hippocratic Oath requires doctors to “First do no harm.” CDC stats in early 2020 showed that COVID was little threat to anyone – especially healthy kids. Several inexpensive early treatments for COVID were known in early 2020 – including HCQ, Ivermectin, budesonide, vitamin D3, and vitamin C. Emergency Use Authorizations can be issued only if there are no available treatments. So, the EUAs for the COVID shots were illegal.

The COVID shots were rushed and experimental, using mRNA technology for the first time. Pfizer has paid $2.3 billion, the largest criminal fine in history. Moderna had never produced a vaccine. Slide 16 of an FDA presentation in 2020 showed that the COVID shots would cause many serious illnesses and deaths.

Yet, the US government, many businesses, schools, the airlines, and US military mandated the COVID shots. That was a violation of the Nuremberg Code which protects people from being forced to accept medical experiments. Anyone (including eminent doctors and scientists) who questioned the official COVID policies was dismissed as a an “anti-vaxxer” and/or “conspiracy theorist.” Yet, increasingly, the corporate media has had to admit that the policies were seriously misguided. However, they have yet to acknowledge the high level of deaths and injuries following the rollout of the COVID shots.

The Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Virtual Roundtable on Censorship was held online on August 17 for about an hour starting at 8PM ET. It was hosted by the legendary journalist Sharyl Attkisson. The discussants expressed dismay at how extensive and insidious censorship has become in the United States—and throughout the Western world. Free speech, they said, is the foundational principle of a democracy. Without it, authoritarianism can spread unchecked, and this is precisely what is happening today.

Kennedy noted that we have stumbled into the dystopian future that so many authors, such as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and others, tried to warn us about. He pointed out that an authoritarian regime  “always begins with censorship. The number one lesson in a democracy is you never censor people. There is no time in history when we can look back and say it was the good guys who were censoring speech. They were always the bad guys.”

YouTube said it removed the video of the roundtable because it violates its Community Guidelines. So, YouTube censored a roundtable discussion on censorship and won’t allow Americans to hear what a presidential candidate, a former NJ State Senator, two legendary journalists, and a lawyer taking a case to the Supreme Court discussed! YouTube is just making itself increasingly irrelevant because the video of the full roundtable is linked to further below on Rumble!

Read More: Growing Censorship of Questions About COVID Narrative

Passing Observations 200

Modern, Western societies were originally designed to stop anyone taking control. The legislative branch of government was kept separate from the other branches simply so that all the power would not be in the hands of the few. But the 1% has changed all that. Moreover, the 1% has achieved this position simply by manipulating the money and by using the money to control the politicians. I wonder how many people know, for example, that after the banking collapse of 2008, which started in the US and became global, it was American President Obama who decided not to prosecute any of the bankers who had created the crash. It was President Obama, a Democrat ostensibly representing the ordinary men and women of America, who defended the bankers, who insisted that the millions of people who lost their homes should not be bailed out and who arranged for bankers such as Goldman Sachs and J.P.Morgan to be bailed out with billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. Furthermore, it was President Obama who allowed the bankers to use the bail-outs to give themselves huge bonuses. And yet the mass of people still revere Obama, the great betrayer, and regard him as a hero. The banks were presumably grateful and it is, of course, merely a coincidence that former President Obama became strangely wealthy after his term as President came to an end. (Taken from Their Terrifying Plan by Vernon Coleman)

A few Jews are again claiming that only Jews should play Jewish characters in films and that anything else is a form of anti-semitism. I wonder if they’ve thought this through. If only Jews can play Jews then, of course, only Christians can play Christian parts and only Muslim actors can play Muslim parts. This will be a form of discrimination and will encourage racism. And, of course, if producers remake Hannibal the Cannibal the casting director will have to find a cannibal to play the part. Serial killers will have to play serial killers. War criminals will have to be played by Tony Blair.
I am amused by people who complain that they have trouble with their Twitter or Facebook accounts. I have never been allowed to have one of these accounts. The only social media account I ever had was with Linked-In and that was removed without warning or explanation. Numerous publishers stopped producing my books and after the Royal Society of Arts had a couple of complaints, I was expelled for daring to tell the truth and, moreover, for daring to share truths which didn’t fit in with the beliefs of one or two other Fellows. I no longer give a damn about any of these things. I’m still a member of the Desperate Dan Pie Eaters’s Club and I will start to worry only when DD writes and throws me out, but it goes to show how desperate the opposition has been to suppress the truth and to isolate the truth-tellers. I rely entirely on other people sharing my work on their Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Here’s a quick tip for judging a film or book if you’re not sure whether it’s worth watching or reading. Look to see if there is a review from the Guardian quoted on the jacket. If the Guardian liked it then I can guarantee that whatever it is won’t be worth watching or reading. You can thank me for this valuable tip when you see me.
If you have two locks on a door leave one of them unlocked. Any burglar will spend for ever unlocking one of your locks and locking the other.

Read More: Passing Observations 200

International political body expels Taiwan

The Central American Parliament has stripped Taipei of its observer status

The Central American Parliament (Parlacen) has voted to expel Taiwan as a permanent observer – the position it held since 1999 – and replace it with Beijing, citing Taipei’s lack of sovereignty under international law. 

The decision was adopted during the six-nation body’s session in Nicaraguan capital Managua on Monday. A group of Nicaraguan legislators proposed the motion, arguing that Taiwan’s observer status was “illegitimate” because Taipei “lacks the recognition as a sovereign state by the United Nations.” The MPs also noted that the UN “considers Taiwan a province of mainland China.” 

The Taiwanese Foreign Ministry described the vote to exclude the island as a “conspiracy” by Beijing to pressure Taipei. The ministry said in a statement that Taiwan would withdraw from Parlacen “with immediate effect to uphold national dignity.” The ministry reiterated the local government’s position that neither Taiwan nor Beijing “are subordinate to the other.” 

Read more

UK officials banned from calling Russia and China ‘hostile states’ – The Times

Beijing views Taiwan as its territory and has welcomed Parlacen’s “correct decision.” Mainland China strongly opposes any forms of diplomatic recognition of Taiwan, which has been ruled by a separate government since the late 1940s. 

In 1971, the UN voted to expel Taiwan and “restore” the Communist government in Beijing as the sole representative of China in the organization. The majority of countries have since upheld the ‘one-China’ principle, refraining from establishing formal ties with Taiwan. Beijing, however, has accused the US of violating this policy by selling weapons to Taipei and meddling in China’s domestic affairs.

Parlacen consists of Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. Out of the six, only Guatemala currently maintains formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan.

Ryan Grim’s Great Reporting Might Be Breaking the Back of the U.S. Dictatorship.

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

The U.S. Government and its news-media claim that they are a democracy and “lead the free world” (to use their now-anachronistic phrase, whose meaning ended when the Soviet Union did — it’s now purely a propaganda-phrase to promote regime-change by America’s Government anywhere in the world). However, Ryan Grim’s great reporting on the U.S. coup that had overthrown the extremely popular democratically elected leader of Pakistan and installed there a brutal stooge-regime of corrupt Pakistani generals — and that did this merely because that democratically elected leader of Pakistan had refused to buckle to the U.S. regime’s demand for him to condemn Russia and join the U.S.-imposed sanctions against Russia — demonstrates, now, for all the world to see, what ‘American democracy’ today is actually all about — which is conquest, and especially America’s craving to conquer Russia.

What this is actually about is the possibility, at last, to collapse the largest empire that the world has ever known, which is today’s U.S. empire — an empire that, like all empires, is based on lies.

Any empire is an international dictatorship, because each of its colonies loses its sovereignty to the imperial regime, and this means that every colonial resident is living under that dictatorship’s (the empire’s) regime and has no real say in how the country ultimately is governed. Today’s American dictatorship, which started on 25 July 1945, is now the largest empire that the world has ever known, and it wants to become larger still, by absorbing not only Venezuela, and Syria, and Libya, and Iraq, and Iran, but even Russia and China — which possess the means to resist no matter what (which could produce WW III if the U.S. regime is willing to push things that far).

And the U.S. regime demands to retain Pakistan. The U.S. coup against Pakistan’s democracy was carried out when the extremely popular Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, told his nation in a televised address to his nation on 30 March 2023, that “America has — oh, not America but a foreign country I can’t name” had sent  Government a message demanding that he be removed as Prime Minister.

On Friday, 31 March 2023, TRTWorld headlined “Pakistan’s Imran Khan accuses US of meddling; Washington denies charge: PM Imran Khan lashes out at US, claiming Washington has conspired with opposition parties against him and that America wants “me, personally, gone”. It opened:

Prime Minister Imran Khan has accused the United States of meddling in Pakistan’s politics –– a claim quickly denied by Washington –– as a debate on a no-confidence motion against him in parliament was postponed.

Fighting for his political life, Khan addressed the nation late on Thursday, appearing to blunder when he named the United States as the origin of a “message” he said showed meddling in Pakistan’s affairs.

“America has – oh, not America but a foreign country I can’t name. I mean from a foreign country, we received a message,” he said.

Local media have reported the message was in a briefing letter from Pakistan’s former ambassador to Washington, recording a senior US official telling him they felt relations would be better if Khan left office. … In Washington, State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters there was “no truth” to the allegations.

The next day, on April 1st, America’s National Public Radio bannered “Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan accuses the U.S. of trying to oust him”. Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper headlined on Friday, April 7th, “Supreme Court restores National Assembly, orders no-confidence vote”, and reported that Pakistan’s legislature, both of whose two main Parties represented different factions of Pakistan’s aristocracy and opposed Imran Khan, should hold a vote on whether Khan should be overthrown. Then on April 10th, Reuters headlined “Frontrunner for next Pakistani PM seen as ‘can-do’ administrator”, and propagandized forthe  newly installed Prime Minister of Pakistan, Shebaz Sharif, from the billionaire Sharif dynasty, the brother of the former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, who “has lived for the last two years in London since being let out of jail, where he was serving a sentence for corruption, for medical treatment.”

On May 12th, Ryan Grim at The Intercept did an interview with Pakistani journalist Waqas Ahmed, who reported:

Imran Khan was illegally arrested yesterday. You can say he was abducted by paramilitary forces, not the police. There was no warrant. They broke into court premises where Imran Khan was having his hearing, and during that hearing, they took him, kidnapped him, put him in a Rangers van; Rangers is a paramilitary force that answers to the Pakistani military. They put him in a Ranger’s van and they took him away.

They took him to an unknown location, not a police station. It was said they took him to an ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] safe house. He has been there since, and this is where we are at. …

He did have a hearing on Wednesday, and he said that by the NAB authorities he was reached OK, but the police kept him awake all night. They mishandled him, they roughed him up a bit. And he was taken from one location to another in the middle of the night. He thinks that his life is in danger. He feels, he said that — the message he sent out through his lawyers — was that they might inject him with something that would cause slow poisoning. So these are the fears that he has communicated to the outside world.

On June 5th, Grim headlined his interview of Imran Khan, “IMRAN KHAN: U.S. WAS MANIPULATED BY PAKISTAN MILITARY INTO BACKING OVERTHROW”, which included Khan’s saying, “The entire senior leadership is in jail. The only way they can get out of jail is if they say that they’re leaving my party.” And, “My name is not allowed to be mentioned on television, on any electronic media or print media.” Khan said that the military, and not the U.S. Government, were the principal reason for his ouster, and that the U.S. Government was against him because “the Biden administration; they somehow thought I was critical of the Americans, and I was sort of pro-Taliban. It’s total nonsense.” Grim summed up by saying, “Khan, in the interview, also speculated that the U.S. had turned on him because of his skepticism of the global war on terror and due to a misperception that he had aligned Pakistan with the Taliban.”

However, on August 9th, Grim and his The Intercept colleague Murtaza Hussain headlined “SECRET PAKISTAN CABLE DOCUMENTS U.S. PRESSURE TO REMOVE IMRAN KHAN”, and reported the entire cable sent from Washington D.C., which had produced Khan’s ouster, introducing it by saying:

The text of the Pakistani cable, produced from the meeting by the [Pakistani] ambassador [to the U.S., in Washington, after his meeting there with two State Department officials] and transmitted to Pakistan, has not previously been published. The cable, known internally as a “cypher,” reveals both the carrots and the sticks that the State Department deployed in its push against Khan, promising warmer relations if Khan was removed, and isolation if he was not.

The document, labeled “Secret,” includes an account of the meeting between State Department officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu, and Asad Majeed Khan, who at the time was Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S.

The document was provided to The Intercept by an anonymous source in the Pakistani military. … The cable reveals both the carrots and the sticks that the State Department deployed in its push against Prime Minister Imran Khan … In the cable, the U.S. objects to Khan’s foreign policy on the Ukraine war. Those positions were quickly reversed after his removal, which was followed, as promised in the meeting, by a warming between the U.S. and Pakistan. …

The day before the meeting, Khan addressed a rally and responded directly to European calls that Pakistan rally behind Ukraine. “Are we your slaves?” Khan thundered to the crowd. “What do you think of us? That we are your slaves and that we will do whatever you ask of us?” he asked. “We are friends of Russia, and we are also friends of the United States. We are friends of China and Europe. We are not part of any alliance.”

In the meeting, according to the document, Lu spoke in forthright terms about Washington’s displeasure with Pakistan’s stance in the [Ukraine] conflict. The document quotes Lu saying that “people here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position (on Ukraine), if such a position is even possible. It does not seem such a neutral stand to us.” Lu added that he had held internal discussions with the U.S. National Security Council and that “it seems quite clear that this is the Prime Minister’s policy.”

Lu then bluntly raises the issue of a no-confidence vote: “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister,” Lu said, according to the document. “Otherwise,” he continued, “I think it will be tough going ahead.”

So, whereas on June 5th, Grim’s headline story from Khan had been that “IMRAN KHAN: U.S. WAS MANIPULATED BY PAKISTAN MILITARY INTO BACKING OVERTHROW”, Khan’s understanding of the situation at that time was actually false: the U.S. had, in fact, demanded his ouster, and not because of ‘terrorism’, but because Khan wouldn’t buckle to the U.S. Government’s Ukraine position and sanctions against Russia.

This was yet another U.S. coup — and one which overthrew Pakistan’s democracy and re-installed Pakistan’s military, who represented Pakistan’s own aristocracy.

This is therefore yet another instance where the U.S. Government was clearly on the side of the dictators, and against democracy.

The U.S. Government’s position in international relations is for dictatorship and against democracy. That’s the exact OPPOSITE of what it pretends.

Even Imran Khan didn’t know the full extent of the U.S. Government’s imperialistic evilness.

The Emperor’s ‘democratic’ clothing is stripped away, and the nude that is seen by all is the would-be global dictator, ugly as sin.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.