Monday, March 5, 2012

Start Game: New York Times, Mother Jones, and The Nation all Lament the Death of Black-Run Detroit

"Black Power" - symbolized in the Joe Louis statue in Detroit - knocked out The Motor City
The cats out of the bag. The New York Times, Mother Jones and The Nation are all beginning to understand the implications of what happens to cities in America that represent Actual Black-Run America (ABRA), with each news organization publishing editorials and lengthy articles lamenting (and condemning) the emergency management takeover of cities like Benton Harbor (89 percent Black); Inkster (73 percent Black); and Pontiac (52 percent Black); Michael Moore’s hometown of Flint, (53 percent Black); and, inevitably, Detroit (which The Nation claims it is 89 percent Black).

The end of democracy for Black-ruled cities is coming to Michigan, a state where 60 percent of the people on TANF/Welfare are Black. Only 14 percent of the overall population is Black.

The Republican Governor Rick Snyder signed into law sweeping welfare changes last year, that instantly removed 6,500 families in Detroit from the ranks of those receiving government assistance. Knowing who receives the bulk of the welfare in Michigan, it’s obvious that Black people were impacted the most by these austerity measures.

The New York Times editorial notes that the “Auto Industry received a bailout, but Detroit was left behind.” Wrong. The majority of the citizens of Detroit subsist on handouts and EBT cards, as the taxpayer has been bailing out Black Detroit for decades. Every child now eats for free in school, another gift of the taxpayer.

There is no discernible return on investment for this act of benevolence, save for the government assisting higher rates of criminality by providing sustenance for the city’s inhabitants.

Remember this: when the steel industry collapsed in Pittsburgh, that industry wasn’t bailed out. The citizens of The Steel City rebuilt their economy into one that is attracting people from all over America. Consequently, it’s one of the whitest big cities in America.

Detroit? The only people the city attracts are those hoping to get-off to “Ruin Porn,” as the Black people who inherited the city were incapable of innovation and restructuring the economy there. Strange that white people who fled to the suburbs of Detroit didn’t have that problem.

Let this be said: Detroit was 75 percent white in 1960, and Black people at that time were roughly 24 percent of the population and were responsible for 66 percent of the violent crime. This is the reason white people flocked to outlying areas of the city, establishing economically thriving suburbs (and some of the top schools in all of Michigan) that were peaceful, while Detroit succumbed to world where the Black Undertow assumed power.

Though the city has almost half of the population it had when Black people engaged in the insurrection of 1967 (causing billions in damage, in today’s inflated currency), the crime rates, when adjusted for this decrease, haven’t changed dramatically.



In a STRESS-free Detroit, the police have even announced they are going to stop responding to emergency calls.

Every lie told about equality and race dies with Detroit. The Nation, Mother Jones, and The New York Times writers understand this fact, with the belief in “race being a social construct” only believed by those with lying eyes at this point.

To look upon the ruins of Detroit and not understand this fact should be grounds for having your sanity checked. To understand that the other cities losing their autonomy to emergency managers are almost all-Black as well… you begin to understand why this Disingenuous White Liberal (DWL) publications are foaming at the mouth, rabid to misdirect the blame to the anyone but the Black people who run the cities and are responsible for creating and maintaining the local economies.

Here’s the NYT on the story:
No one, least of all the state, wants that to happen. In Michigan, emergency managers can break union contracts, fire city officials and sell off city assets. That has already begun in four other cities, all of them largely black, that the state has taken over in the last few years. Black officials and union leaders have charged that Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican elected in 2010, has an ideological and racial agenda, and taking over Detroit, which is 83 percent black, would only magnify the tension.

Chrysler’s gleaming Jefferson North plant on the east side of town does churn out Jeep Cherokees and Dodge Durangos, and President Obama noted in a speech last week that it has been adding new shifts. But it is not enough. Just blocks from the plant is some of America’s worst urban devastation, acre upon acre of vacant land, abandoned houses, burned-out stores. A city that held nearly two million people in the 1950s is now down to 714,000, more than a third of whom live in poverty.
There are glimmers of hope on the city’s southwest side, where newcomers from Mexico and other countries have revived several avenues with restaurants, groceries and other stores. “More diversity, more immigrants — that’s the key for the future,” said Jordi Carbonell, born in Barcelona, who runs Café con Leche, a coffeehouse crowded with young patrons and laptops.
But rebuilding the city with coffee cups will take too long, and Detroit is running out of time. Crime is going up, buses are breaking and left unrepaired, and the exodus continues. Even if City Hall can stave off a takeover with union givebacks, layoffs and pension cuts, it will only be for a short time.
The solution may be in the suburbs that have siphoned off Detroit’s money and jobs and talent for decades. A true emergency manager, as many people here have suggested, would have the power to begin merging the tax base of the city with that of suburban counties in hopes of saving the region. Bailouts can come in many different forms.
Newsflash to the New York Times: the white suburbs didn't "siphon" off the money, jobs, and talents of Detroit. These citizens are the descendants of the very people who built Detroit, having been ethnically cleansed from the city via high rates of Black crime that made raising a family safely there an impossible task.

The suburbs are fine. The citizens there have been working to "bailout" the failures of Black people in Detroit via high taxation (Welfare, Section 8, and EBT cards) for far too long. The money wasted in Detroit should be going to strengthen their communities, not to the Black hole that is former "Arsenal of Democracy."

Fitting that the concept of democracy blows up in that city.

Here’s The Nation:

The implications went beyond Benton Harbor. “Since the beginning of your administration, communities facing or under emergency management have doubled,” Michigan Forward and the NAACP wrote to the governor, citing a “failure of transparency and accountability” in the process of determining which jurisdictions need an emergency manager. The financial review team assigned to Detroit, for instance, had recently met in Lansing, nearly 100 miles away—“a clear example of exclusion and voter disenfranchisement,” according to the authors. On February 6 an Ingham County circuit judge ruled that the Detroit team’s meetings must be held in public.
Of Detroit’s 713,777 residents, 89 percent are African-American. The city of Inkster (population 25,369), which recently got an EM, has a black population of 73 percent. Having EMs in both cities would mean that more than half the state’s black population would fall into the hands of unelected officials.
* * *
Everyone agrees that something must be done to “fix” Michigan’s struggling urban centers and school districts, although news of a $457 million surplus in early February prompted the state budget director to declare, “Things have turned.” But at what cost? In 2011 Governor Snyder stripped roughly $1 billion from statewide K-12 school funding and drastically reduced revenue sharing to municipalities. Combined with poor and sometimes corrupt leadership and frequently dysfunctional governments, these elements have brought Michigan cities to the brink of bankruptcy. Residents of the hardest-hit places have fled if they are able.
The state’s first emergency managers—previously known as emergency financial managers—were appointed between 2000 and 2002 by Republican Governor John Engler in the cities of Hamtramck, Flint and Highland Park to prevent them from declaring bankruptcy. Although all eventually left when their job was done—the last in 2009—all three cities are back in the red. In January the Highland Park School District was assigned an EM. (That city—population 11,776—is 93.5 percent African-American.) Others followed, in Ecorse, Benton Harbor and Pontiac, as well as Detroit public schools.
Why, oh why is it always Black people who fail? Why, oh why is it always elected Black people being brought up for ethics violations (cue The Atlantic and their lament of the investigations of the Congressional Black Caucus)
And finally, here’s Mother Jones:

"We haven't seen anything this severe anywhere else in the country," says Charles Monaco, a spokesman for the Progressive States Network, a New York-based advocacy group. "There's been nothing in other states where a budget measure overturns the democratic vote." Williams says emergency managers are able to enact draconian policies that would cost most city officials their jobs: "They couldn't get elected if they tried."
Benton Harbor, Ecorse, and Flint are also currently under emergency management. In Flint, the emergency manager has promised to restructure collective bargaining agreements with the city's police and firefighters unions. Benton Harbor's emergency manager banned elected officials from appearing at city meetings without his consent. Detroit, which is facing a more than $150 million budget shortfall, could be next: Mayor Dave Bing has proposed laying off 1,000 city workers and wrung concessions from public-sector unions in hopes of preventing Gov. Snyder from appointing an emergency manager.

The iconoclastic Occidental Dissent broke down the reliance that Black people in Michigan have on the EBT card (using outdated 2009 data), showcasing that a growing majority of them have their grocery bills bailed out each month. 

There’s a reason that Detroit has become a primary subject matter here at SBPDL and that it will continue to be discussed: the curtain falling on ABRA in not only Detroit, but in Black-run cities throughout Michigan reveals once again that nature can only be tossed out for so long. Ignoring her and collectively shutting our eyes to her fury and might doesn't mean you can't feel nature's presence. 

She’ll return with a vengeance.

In a hilarious review of Robocop 2 from a People magazine dated July 2, 1990, Ralph Novak laments the racial undertones of the movie:

The movie is also a vile insult to Detroit. The character of the city's black mayor, played by Willard Pugh, borders on racist: He's so inarticulate, panicky and given to running away that you half expect him to say, "Feets, do yo' stuff."
Knowing that nearly 50 percent of the city of Detroit is illiterate, and that the Black mayor of Southfield Brenda Lawrence touts something called Revolution Read as the key to that cities future prosperity, the character of Willard Pugh is perhaps the most honest casting of Black person in the history of cinema.

Though if you read the “You’re Gonna Be a Bad Motherfucker”: Robocop’s Racial Subtexts essay from “The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory” by Thomas Foster, you’ll get a better understanding of the white privilege endemic in the Robocop films.

The hour draws near. The End of History is only the beginning.

Sadly, conservatives will scream that liberalism ruined Detroit stating that Democrats or Unions are to blame for the similar fiasco's in the other cites of Michigan that emergency managers now run. All the while, the lily-white suburbs of Detroit flourish.

It’s time to open your eyes, people. Stop lying to yourself.

Join the ranks of Those Who Can See. The New York Times, The Nation, and Mother Jones understand what this moment is all about.

It’s time we all do as well.

The end of ABRA in Detroit is the ultimate chance to roll back Black-Run America (BRA) everywhere.



The words of Frank Owen from the article "Detroit, Death City," found in the August 2004 issue of Playboy (they really do have great articles) is apt to close this piece:
If Detroit were a character in a novel, it wouldn't be believable. What madness could possess a civilization to construct such a grand and magnificent place and then, within half a century, to obliterate so thoroughly what it had created? What talking about the state of Detroit, one is tempted to compare it to a natural disaster - some earthquake that laid waste to the landscape. Except there's nothing natural about what has happened to Detroit in the past 30-plus years. Humans built this city, and humans - an unholy and unconscious alliance of fat-cat businessmen and street-corner criminals - destroyed it. (p. 61-62)
Mr. Owen, it was white people who built Detroit. It was Black people who killed it. Same goes for Birmingham, Alabama, and Memphis, Tennessee. Richmond, Virginia too.

Same goes for Milwaukee and Baltimore. Same goes for Philadelphia.

Detroit is believable when you understand that the lessons of the city's demise are being played out all across America.

Once you go Black, you never go back. Well, unless you live in Michigan, where the concept of democracy ends when financial martial law is declared.

History is about to begin again.

Start game.


35 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mother Jones is a SIC Mag!
In Houston someone robbed GirlScouts.

Heres a post from a commenter:

Obamas economy at work again. Young American men and women have been replaced by ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT WORKERS and can't get a job because they are not bilingual.

Obama in one of his missives said 3 years ago to get bilingual.
He knew he is controlling this invasion.

Anonymous said...

This just in from Obama's 'hood: http://www.wjla.com/articles/2012/03/jeffrey-thompson-important-donor-to-city-politicians-73397.html

Dan said...

Mayor Mbonobo McChimpanzee Muhdikeszulu shouldn't be running Detroit anymore.

MB said...

Detroit = Confederate Revenge

Anonymous said...

The blacks and the liberal media seem to have a cargo cult mentality. If the natives in Detroit build the dummy runways and do the magic dances, then Whitey will come back and Whitey's money will magically appear and make everything better. But this time, it seems, Whitey isn't playing fair! Too f...ing bad!

Anonymous said...

Off topic, but...

Keith And Janet Ritter, who have lived in their Fort Washington, MD $1.29MM, 4,900 square foot McMansion for 5 years (which they purchase with no money down) without ever making a single mortgage payment, and who are not even close to being evicted...

Lets play "guess the race"!!

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/couple-lives-13-million-4900-square-foot-home-five-years-without-making-single-mortgage-payment

MuayTyson said...

Paul I applaud your enthusiasm but I can't agree with you. Liberals will him and haw forever delicately stepping around the massive elephant in the room and woe to any child who points out the emperor has no clothes.

Liberals live in a world entirely constructed on feelings and emotion when reality threatens them they insert fingers into ears and spout '"lalalalalalalala" until it all goes away.

Fuck them let it all collapse and when he black raiders leave the cities in search of food and prey I can only hope they visit the Liberals first.

Mr. Rational said...

Detroit has dozens of square miles with:

- Streets

- Water mains

- Sewer lines

- No residents

In other words, ready-made trailer park.

You could put tens of thousands of White people into Detroit in a matter of months, relocated from other places.  Just put down razor wire across the empty blocks between them and the Black Undertow, and they'd stay.

Just think what they'd do in the next election.  And laugh.

Anonymous said...

OFFTOPIC.........
GOT BLACK STUDENTS? [thats a T shirt]


Consider a feature article in The New York Times over the weekend, “To Be Black at Stuyvesant High.” It was seemingly commissioned to argue for admissions quotas at the famously competitive Manhattan public high school by pointing out that only 3.6 percent of Stuyvesant’s students are now black or Hispanic, down from 15 percent in 1970. My guess is that the story’s emphasis on a lonely black student was mostly an elaborate framing device for its more interesting but unspoken message: Holy God, look at ALL THE ASIANS!
“Although Asians comprise only 13 percent of California’s population, three-fifths of the state’s National Merit Scholarship semifinalists have Asian last names.”

Stuyvesant’s Asian fraction has grown over four decades from six percent to 72.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Please share this article by using the link below. When you cut and paste an article, Taki's /the_far_east_rises_in_the_west_steve_sailer#ixzz1oJZlhoC9

Anonymous said...

"If Detroit were a character in a novel, it wouldn't be believable. What madness could possess a civilization to construct such a grand and magnificent place and then, within half a century, to obliterate so thoroughly what it had created? What talking about the state of Detroit, one is tempted to compare it to a natural disaster - some earthquake that laid waste to the landscape. Except there's nothing natural about what has happened to Detroit in the past 30-plus years.(p. 61-62)"
But detroit isn't a character, it is a place. And the creators moved out of detroit to other areas where they continued to create. And they all lived happily ever after.

" Humans built this city, and humans - an unholy and unconscious alliance of fat-cat businessmen and street-corner criminals - destroyed it."

Does he provide any examples of fat-cat businessmen wrecking the city? I mean had they refrained from hiring blacks under any and all circumstances the cities fortunes might have shifted, but I somehow doubt that is what he was refering to.

Anonymous said...

Charlie LeDuff is revealing "The Things People Need To See" in such a way that those who can't "See" can "See" without realising it. He takes the so-called 'racist' words out of the discussion and sticks explicitly to facts, leaving people to come to the obvious conclusions themselves.

He lays the truth out like it is a 5-storey billboard in Times Square; that is to say, only someone purposely blindfolding themselves won't see it.

Dear Site Author. Something else to consider. The TV series Alcatraz currently showing on US TV (and also on my laptop for free here in the UK thanks to the denizens of the internet) brings up an interesting reality. The creators/producers had to go back more than 45 years to find an appropriately all white prison population about which to create their show. Rather than depicting the reality of prison populations today, they say "let's go back in time to when it was all white people rather than reveal the truth about criminals today". They had to go back SO FAR that the only way the could tell the story in the current age was to have TIME TRAVELLING CRIMINALS.

Yes. TIME TRAVELLING CRIMINALS.

Italian guy said...

It's not a mistery that blacks still live in the stone age... the "more intelligent" blacks are just leaching of western countries lol You want to see how the real blacks in Africa behave? here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teICjT1Lv70
I'm sorry because the integral version is only in italian (i think), but take a look at it, you won't regret it, there are scenes of South Africa during apartheid etc. and TNB too lol

Anonymous said...

race is just a skin color?????


NYTIMES.....

This year, Asian freshmen displaced the black students in a strength-in-numbers coup in which whispers of indignation were the sole expression of resistance. There was no point arguing, said Rudi-Ann Miller, a 17-year-old senior who came to New York from Jamaica and likes to style her hair in a bun, slick and straight, like the ballerina she once dreamed of becoming.

“The Asian kids, they’re just everywhere,” she said.

When the bell rings and the school’s 3,295 students spill out of classrooms into the maze of hallways, escalators and stairs like ants in a farm, blacks stand out because they are so rare. Rudi was one of 64 black students four years ago when she entered Stuyvesant, long considered New York City’s flagship public school. She is now one of 40.

Asians, on the other hand, make up 72.5 percent of Stuyvesant’s student body (they are 13.7 percent of the city’s overall public school population), a staggering increase from 1970, when they were 6 percent of Stuyvesant students, according to state enrollment statistics. Back then, white students made up 79 percent of Stuyvesant’s enrollment; this year, they are 24 percent, and 14.9 percent systemwide.

Hispanic students are 40.3 percent of the system. Currently, they make up 2.4 percent of Stuyvesant’s enrollment, while blacks, who make up 32 percent of the city’s public school students, are 1.2 percent.

New York City has eight specialized high schoo

Anonymous said...

If you really wish to get annoyed you'd look into the people Obama is allowing into the country. The number of mosques has doubled in the past decade. African immigrants have increased 400%.

What is going on?

Anonymous said...

This guy had the balls to admit he got an 84 on his IQ test.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq6Bxks3lN0&feature=channel

In the teacher biz they call that the 'shady 80s', which in a less PC age they'd call dull, now called dull-normal, or shortened to 'normal' to save precious feelings.

I like another video of his I saw, the guy isn't dumb.

I'm just kinda flabbergasted he'd admit to an 84.

It must be very lonely being a smart black person.

Whiskey said...

On this one I am somewhat with Black leaders who want no Emergency Manager. Let Black people run ... and PAY FOR their own cities. If they cannot, well let the places be turned into Mogadishu like free-fire zones. Anyone who enters into their knows its like Gotham in that DC Comics run where the place was cordoned off due to extreme violence.

Let Detroit be Detroit. Let Black people run it, without interference. They won. They ethnically cleansed Whites out. Let them pay for it.

Even Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Italy know the party is over. No more cash from Germany and the Netherlands. Not even WWII guilt will keep Germans bailing out Greeks (or Spaniards). Let Detroit go "Greek." Pay for whatever they can, or not. No bailouts. No excuses.

Anonymous said...

Michael Moore is from nearby Davison he is only from Flint for his mockumentaries.

Anonymous said...

If Detroit were a character in a novel, it wouldn't be believable.

Truth is stranger than fiction as fiction has to make sense.

Anonymous said...

"On this one I am somewhat with Black leaders who want no Emergency Manager. Let Black people run ... and PAY FOR their own cities."

But that's NOT what they want.

They want the state of Michigan to pick up their enormous budget deficit...in other words, they want to continue doing what they're doing, while white taxpayers bail them out.

Stuff Black People Don't Like said...

Whiskey,

You're talking about the "No Man's Land" storyline from Batman.

Easily one of the top story lines in comic history. Gotham is abandoned by the federal government after a devastating earthquake. They calculate the cost to rebuild the city is too great, so they blow up most of the bridges out of the city and quarentine the metropolis.

Anonymous said...

Russian transforms real life photos to show what other cities could resemble Detroit with animals added

New York Washington detroitified.

Magnifico said...

That fist at the beginning of the article is one big F.U. YT. "Now shut up and give me my welfare!!!"

Anonymous said...

Parents of girl, 3, only realise she is missing after seeing her featured in news reports

Read more:<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2110828/Parents-girl-3-realise-missing-watching-news-reports.html#ixzz1oLTit3FY'>Parentslearn their child is missing by watching TV</a>

I commend the black man who invented television and the electricity that it runs on because if he had not then the white parents
would not have been reunited "and it feels so good" with their child.

Anonymous said...

"Just put down razor wire across the empty blocks between them and the Black Undertow, and they'd stay."

Sounds like an episode of "The Walking Dead"

Midewestern said...

NYT: Black Students Face More Harsh Punishments

Some people are still in a very deep sleep. But if you read the comments after this NYT piece, you will see that some are waking up.

“Education is the civil rights of our generation,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in a telephone briefing with reporters on Monday. “The undeniable truth is that the everyday education experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/education/black-students-face-more-harsh-discipline-data-shows.html?_r=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120306

YIH said...

Why be skoo's so bad?
Le-a (Le-dash-a). 'Cuz de dash don' be silent!

Dan said...

90% of the cash spent on black skoo' has been utterly wasted. The trillion or so spent could have easily been used for a Mars landing, colonization of same and perhaps the proper education of the top cognitive 20%.

There would have been fewer blacks, fewer mouths to feed fewer idiots to imprison. More Wealth to go around for the remainder. America would look a bit more like Sweden- but with a Viking colony on Mars.

Anonymous said...

RE:

Anonymous said...

If you really wish to get annoyed you'd look into the people Obama is allowing into the country. The number of mosques has doubled in the past decade. African immigrants have increased 400%.

What is going on?????????

ANSWER: RUINATION OF THIS NATION THRU DIVERSITY...
HERE ..THIS IS FROM ANOTHER BLOG:

READ CAREFULLY
THRU SECTION8 AND ENDLESS IMMIGRATION WHITE AREAS ARE BEING
'BLOCK BUSTED'

Katrina Vanden Huevel was on Fareed Zakaria on March 4 2012 with total rage for people in Arkansas who could not accept diversity in their small town. She views them as contemptible losers who are bigots to object to what has been decided for them.
The elites are already waging the war. They are not waiting for some mythic time in the future at which war starts. They are waging it now openly. Their attitudes on TV are those of leaders in the midst of waging war, not preparing for some war to come in the future

W74 said...

Nice video of a man shooting an AK, but very, very bad form.

We used to laugh at Iraqis for their "spray and pray" method of firing. What a hilarious game that was, but when you think about it that's all you can do with the weapon. It's great for trucking through the mud to it's inaccurate at range very un-ergonomic.

Anonymous said...

Katrina Van Den Heuvel is a communist slut, nothing else.

Anonymous said...

The elites are already waging the war. They are not waiting for some mythic time in the future at which war starts. They are waging it now openly. Their attitudes on TV are those of leaders in the midst of waging war, not preparing for some war to come in the future.

Absolutely right and a very important point. Those of you talking about a future SHTF sort of war are missing it. It's here. Now. The conflict of civilizations has been engaged. Just because we don't see guys on the street corner launching rockets into buildings doesn't mean it isn't here.

They are making their gains while trying to not piss people off to the point where we actually rise up and fight back. And it's been working pretty well for them so far.

What the elites learned from the 20th century was that forcing political change either through open authoritarian regimes or through war was too expensive, too disruptive, too risky - too messy in every way.

The elites "effect change" now via the massive propaganda campaigns of a captive media and by moving enough of the most gullible, most credulous elements of the population to do their bidding. They only have to move a relatively small segment of the population to tip the scales (or the votes) in their favor. That's why our news is filled with stories about who called who a slut and the president's "brave" call to the slut herself. They know many people can be conned into looking at a clown show or a shiny trinket and they will believe and do whatever they are told.

Anonymous said...

"Sounds like an episode of "The Walking Dead"

In that case, don't forget your Zombie ammo from Hornady, carried in your Zombie ammo boxes from MTM and fired from your Zombie marked AR-15s.

That'll take care of them Walking Dead good!

Anonymous said...

It is really surprising that a black run city is a total and complete failure. A spectacular, devastating, incomprehensibly vast white conspiracy must be responsible. They should put Hillary in charge, or maybe some white liberal from Hollywood. That would fix things up.

batmanroxus said...

It's not a "black" thing, it's a socialist thing, and democrat thing. Detroit has adopted every leftist idea since the early 60s, and this is what socialist ideas lead to... EVERY TIME. and shame on the democrats for letting blacks take the blame.

batmanroxus said...

it's not a "black" failure, it's a socialist failure, and democrat failure. Detroit has adopted every socialist idea since the 60s and this is what you get with that philosophy. Socialist ideas never work, never have and never will. Shame on the democrats for allowing blacks to take the blame for this.