Season 8, Episode One March 24, 2024

On this episode, we’ll hear about when water flows and when it doesn’t, Aryans, a lot of balls, and a study about fact and opinion...but first, (Not the Headlines!)

Transcript

Hello!  Welcome to the first episode of season eight, and thank you for putting your ear to the Listening Tube!  I’m your host, Bob Woodley.  If I play my cards right, I could be the next Speaker of the House!  On this episode, we’ll hear about when water flows and when it doesn’t, Aryans, a lot of balls, and a study about fact and opinion...but first, (Not the Headlines!)

If you’re a regular listener to the program, or even if you’re an irregular listener to the program, you might recall back in early February that I came down against the border bill that was trying to make its way to the President’s desk.  It never made it.  I’d like to think it was because of my influence on the national conscience; of those in charge of creating laws.  As it turns out, my opinion had nothing to do with it.  Enough of the legislators were able to figure out on their own, or with the help of their staff, that the bill had too many things wrong with it to justify the parts that were right.  That’s why it never made it past the Senate, where it was written.  
But the press is blaming Donald Trump for the failure of the bill.  He doesn’t even have a podcast!  He is influential, though, and a couple of trick questions from Yahoo! News proves it.  In coordination with YouGov, a poll was taken about support for the border bill before and after the respondents were told how Donald Trump feels about the proposed law.  Then they measured the difference.  The story https://www.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-newsyougov-poll-bipartisan-border-security-bill-very-popular-with-republicans--until-theyre-told-trump-opposes-it-193011739.html?ncid=facebook_yahoonewsf_akfmevaatca&fbclid=IwAR10i4TLDMbuB8d1j7Ms1wZxXWoifTPdowz7b2CX2RP-r2tzX3El3t36id0 says that 64 percent of Republicans questioned agreed with a statement about the bill until they were told Donald Trump was against it.  Then only 34 percent agreed with the statement.  That would certainly indicate that Donald Trump’s opinion means something to a lot of people.  Now, to get a true gauge, they could’ve also asked the respondents how they felt knowing Bob Woodley was against the bill, you know, as a control group, but they didn’t do that, so the methodology is flawed from the start, but we’ll learn from it what we can.
When I say trick questions, I don’t mean “Did you stop beating your wife yet?” and “Did you stop beating your wife because Donald Trump told you to?”  No.  The actual questions used in the survey was this:  Do you favor a “$20 billion bipartisan border deal” struck by “a group of Republican and Democratic senators” that would “raise the bar for asylum, hire more asylum officers and border security agents, make it easier to expel migrants and automatically close the border if illegal crossings reach a certain average daily threshold.”  Well, when you put it that way, there’s a good chance you’ll get a favorable rating among any political position.  They don’t tell you that bipartisan means that more than half of Senate Republicans voted against it.  Yet they still say it was passed by a “group of Republican and Democratic Senators.”  Putting Republican first in the sentence to indicate it was Republican initiated and Republican supported.  As for the next part of the question, practically all Americans want to raise the bar for asylum.  Conservatives, certainly, would want more asylum officers because it has the word officers in it, and more border security agents because that has three words that make conservatives mouth water.  It’s already easy to expel migrants, our government just isn’t doing it, and automatically closing the border if illegal crossing reach a certain average daily threshold should only be applicable if the average daily threshold is none.  But the bill allowed up to 5-thousand a day.  None of that information is in the survey.  The survey was written in a way that would result in the desired response.  It was designed to be asked only of Republicans, and the results of the survey reflect only the responses from Republicans.  The fact that only 64 percent of them agreed with the statement would indicate that there was some suspicion to begin with.  Forty-six percent disagreed right off the bat.  But the percentage of those who agreed dropped from 64 to 34 percent once they were told Donald Trump didn’t like the bill.  That 30 percent drop might mean something if there was a control group...but there wasn’t.  I’m still available for control group comparison.
Another noteworthy thing about the survey is that it happened more than a month after the bill failed in the Senate.  It’s sole purpose was to create a way to continue the narrative that Donald Trump is in control of the Republican Party, and that he’s using his influence to keep illegal immigration moving so he can use it as a campaign issue against Joe Biden.  Now, the Democrats are arguing that the Republicans had what they wanted and turned it down at the direction of Donald Trump.  To be clear, none of the respondents changed their minds when Trump was added to the equation.  Two groups of people were asked the same basic question, but one group was told Donald Trump was opposed.  What the question and answers really shows is that people aren’t influenced as much by Donald Trump as they are by their distrust in the media.  What they really told us is that if Donald Trump is against this statement, even though it sounds good the way you put it, there must be something more that you’re not telling me.  And that’s exactly the case.
As I may have indicated, I came out against the border bill before Donald Trump did.  So when I saw a recent post on Yahoo! News about the aforementioned survey on social media, I replied that it was a bad bill, and anybody who read it wouldn’t need Donald Trump’s opinion to come to that conclusion on their own.  I didn’t take Donald Trump’s opinion into consideration when I formed my own.  I would suspect many other people also didn’t take Donald Trump’s opinion into consideration, either.  Regardless of on which side you land.  But within minutes of me posting my opinion of the bill in the comments, a bill on which I formed an opinion long before I heard of Donald Trump’s take on it, I was attacked as a Trump cult member.  Allow me to quote David Fair, who said, “It is a fantastic bill that is desperately needed. Only Trump Cult freaks and Russian trolls oppose it!”  He then added, “Bob Woodley You must be either a sick Trump Cukt freak or a Russian troll POS!  Jay Corcoran asked me to specify the parts of the bill that don’t meet my needs.  My response was that I don’t expect federal bills to be written to meet my needs.  To which David Fair chimed in, “He can’t. He has never seen it. He just opposes it because he was told to by his cult leader.”
I’ll admit I have been very critical of President Biden.  If I haven’t been as critical of President Trump, it might be because this program has only existed during the Biden Administration.  But I got attacked by people on social media for voicing my opinion of a story written about a bill that never became a law.  I was called a cult follower, even though I specifically said that I formed my own opinion without any help from the alleged cult leader.  All as a result of a story written to create a desired response so that it could be used as a tool for a political agenda.  Under the heading of Yahoo! News.  This story by Andrew Romano was published on March 14th, about a month after the bill failed, about a survey that was taken between March 8th and March 11th.  I saw the social media post on March 15th.  I made my feelings public when I published the February 11 episode of the Listening Tube https://www.buzzsprout.com/1940478/14481707-season-7-episode-10-february-11-2024.mp3?download=true.  There’s clearly an agenda for the Yahoo! News/ YouGov poll and accompanying story about it.  The agenda isn’t to inform you about anything important.  The story is a demonstration of the lengths some will take to create a narrative meant to mislead you, or attempt to plant a seed in your mind that will lead you to believe one thing instead of another.  Both may be true.  But it’s up to us to stand our ground when confronted by internet bullies, especially those who completely misunderstand the point you’re trying to make, and criticize anything they see as pro-Trump, even if it isn’t.  This is America, after all, and we’re all entitled to our own opinion.  We’re also entitled to speak that opinion, thanks to the First Amendment to the Constitution.  Those who try to silence you while pretending to protect democracy are displaying an illness called ignorance of what it means to be an American.  Never forget that you have the right to say what you feel.

There are exceptions to the freedom of speech, though, and a recent Harris poll done for Axios claims that college students think our freedom of speech doesn’t go far enough.  The survey itself asked over 4000 Americans their opinions about free speech.  Other than the vultures who attacked me on social media for expressing how I felt, most people are in favor of free speech.  But there are some clear lines of delineation when it comes to age and gender.  To be clear, only 643 of the 4,168 adults in the survey were students of some type, so the margin of error is plus or minus 4.8 percentage points, much lower than the 2 point plus or minus for the overall survey.  
But before we get to the survey and what it tells us, let’s look at the headlines accompanying the two stories about it.  The Axios https://www.axios.com/2024/03/14/college-students-campus-free-speech-axios-vibes headline says, “College Republicans and Democrats agree:  Defend speech that hurts feelings” while the headline from The Hill https://thehill.com/homenews/education/4531633-more-than-two-thirds-of-college-students-say-free-speech-protections-should-extend-to-threats-inciting-violence-poll/ says, “68 percent of college students say free speech protections should extend to threats, inciting violence: Poll” accompanied by a photo of Jewish protesters.  I’m sure they didn’t mean that to indicate that Jewish students want violent speech protected.  But you never know.  Besides, as we do know, the person who wrote the article rarely writes the headline.  Both articles cited the same survey, but each of them looked at it in a different way.  But both articles chose to focus on the subset of 643 college students as the main take away.  The other 3,525 people who took part in the survey were treated as merely a control group.  Even though we all know how important a control group is, the control group isn’t usually 5 times larger than the focus group, and have nearly 3 percentage point difference in accuracy.  Despite that, the story in the Hill didn’t even mention until the last paragraph of the story that all the statistics prior only applied to a small subset of the overall survey.  The story on Axios made it clear in the first four paragraphs.  Neither story said exactly what questions were asked, nor could I find them anywhere else.  But the results show that more college students are for pushing the limits on speech even if it results in violence than the general population.  When we speak without the threat of violence, even if the speech may be found upsetting to others, most of us, 77 percent, agree that such speech should be protected.  In other words, you can tell me I’m an ass, but you can’t encourage somebody to punch me in the face because of it.  I can live with that.  The survey also showed that men are more likely to support violence-inducing speech than women.  What I find troubling is that college students of both genders supported expanding free speech rights to include encouraging violence, with 61 percent of women and 74 percent of men approving.  Perhaps most surprising is that there was no difference between Democrat and Republican students.  Additionally, a majority of students think their school is more concerned with money than free speech, and that their schools are biased toward Israel and against Palestinians.  As an aside, I think it’s the media’s fault for the students equating Hamas terrorists with Palestinians.
The CEO of the Harris Poll was quoted in the Axios story when speaking about students as saying, “They're on the cusp of activism because of the lack of control they feel over their future."  That’s one way to look at it.
I have another take.  If these college students don’t grow out of the notion that incendiary speech is okay, we’re in trouble.  If you advocate for speech that incites violence, then that means you’re alright with the resulting violence.  You can’t encourage me to be punched in the face and then turn around and say, “It’s a shame Bob got punched in the face after I encouraged people to punch Bob in the face.  I never intended for that to happen.”  
The reason we have the freedom of speech is because it stops short of violence.  It all goes back to “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”  Physically.  Now, you might be thinking, “But Bob, isn’t that the way is it right now?  You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.”  And you would be correct.  And that’s how we want it.  The only result from allowing an expansion of free speech law to include incitement to violence would be more violence.  Is that what we want?  Do we want people to call out for physically attacking someone or some group of people because of a difference of opinion?  Do we really want to advocate more violence by hiding behind the First Amendment?  According to this survey, that’s what college students want.  They’re advocating for violence.  That should be a major concern.  Younger people today are more tolerant of violence than past generations.  Blame it on whatever you want.  But when it comes to expanding the freedom of speech to include incitement of violence, I would say the line in the sand should stay where it is.  Violence isn’t the solution, and neither is speech that encourages it.  There are exceptions, of course.  If there’s an escaped convicted murderer in your neighborhood, feel free to use lethal force to protect yourself.  Or maybe just punch him in the face, if that’ll suffice.  Otherwise, we’re better off if we can talk things out or agree to disagree.
One of the things that led to humankind’s ability to conquer the elements, make tools, develop art and music, and flourish as a society was the diminished threat of violence.  When mankind began working together in groups instead of fighting for available resources, we were able to improve our lives.  The less time we spend worried about being attacked, the more time we had to making things that were a benefit to the whole society.  Civil order allowed that to happen.  In addition to our tasks of finding and eating food, sleeping and procreating, we were able to think of and invent stuff without worrying about a spear to the ribs.  It’s the difference between mankind and other mammals.  A squirrel’s life also consists of eating, sleeping and having sex, but they also have to avoid predators.  Civil society is meant to eliminate the need for mankind to have to avoid predators.  If we allow speech to encourage violence, the resulting violence could make us go back to living like squirrels.  Too worried about violence to make progress as a society.

Let’s Go Back liner 

1903
Niagra Falls goes dry.  It was caused by an ice jam up river.  Freezing winds cause the ice jam and the water stopped flowing long enough for entire families to romp around on the riverbed, according to a story in the West Gippsland Gazette in May of that year.  West Gippsland is in Australia, so I’m guessing that’s how long it took for news to travel that far.  It was a bit of a challenge to find any other account of the 1903 occasion, but there was plenty about another time it happened.  Way back in 1848, an ice jam caused the same phenomenon.  That time, according to mental floss dot com, people were able to retrieve muskets and other weapons from an 1814 battle.  Neither interruption lasted very long.  Within a few days, shifting winds and cooperative weather allowed the ice jams to disperse, releasing the flow again.  But there was another time the falls were dry, but the third time, it was on purpose.  The Army Corps of Engineers built a dam at the mouth of the river to let the falls go dry.  Why?  Well, the American Falls part of it had experienced large erosion events in the 1940’s and 50’s.  So, after thought and planning, the water was stopped to allow engineers and geologists and the like to study the structure and see if there was a way to preserve it for a longer period of time.  There was also the question of removing the giant boulders that had broken away and now lay at the bottom of the falls, decreasing the distance the water had to fall before hitting the bottom.  Ultimately, some reinforcements were made and other steps taken to reduce the erosion of the falls from five feet a year to just three or four inches every 10 years, according to Niagara falls up close dot com. The boulders at the base of the falls were allowed to stay, as they act as a buttress against the face of the cliff.  The project took six months.  From June to November of 1969.

1913
Over 360 are killed and 20,000 homes destroyed in the Great Dayton Flood in Dayton, Ohio.  Almost a foot of rain fell in the Great Miami River watershed, according to reports from the time.  A storm system that included a dozen tornadoes moved across the country from Nebraska headed east.  Buy the time it got to the Dayton area, it left behind flood waters 20 feet deep.  A story on history dot com says houses floated off their foundations, with people jumping from rooftop to rooftop of floating houses until they were lucky enough to find solid ground.  People were stranded on telephone polls.  Broken gas lines caused widespread fires.  
For weeks after the storm, cities down the Mississippi river would also flood.  The storm would cause damage all the way to Vermont.  More than 14 states with damage and over a thousand people killed.  Climate Change!   Said nobody.

1920
The United States Senate rejects the Treaty of Versailles for the second time (the first time was on November 19, 1919).  The Treaty of Versailles was the treaty that ended World War I.  So, why did the U.S. not agree to it?

Look that up liner

Politics, of course.  To be more specific, there were two reasons the U.S. Senate didn’t agree with the treaty.  One, because President Wilson, a Democrat, didn’t include a single Republican in the negotiations, which lasted for eight months and included 145 meetings among the four major representatives, including President Wilson.  And the Senate was controlled by the Republicans.  Now, they didn’t just do it out of spite.  The other sticking point was the creation of the League of Nations.  The treaty, according to wikipedia, included a provision that allowed the League of Nations to “make war without a vote by the U.S. congress.”  The Republicans weren’t alone in their dissent, though.  There were a number of Democrats who didn’t agree with the treaty, and to make it even tougher, a two-thirds majority was needed to approve a treaty. 
An examination of the different factions of the Senate at the time reflects the diversity of its members.  Two of the groups that kept the treaty from passing the Senate were groups who thought the treaty was too beneficial to England.  The Irish Catholics and the German Americans.  In the end, the Americans would sign their own peace treaties, the League of Nations would be organized anyway, and the Versailles Treaty would eventually be used by Adolf Hitler as a flashpoint to rally the German people, leading to World War II.

1935
Shah Reza Pahlavi formally asks the international community to call Persia by its native name, Iran, which means 'Land of the Aryans.'  Before you start calling Iranians skinheads, there’s a difference between the two, even though they use the same word.  According to world history dot org, the word Aryan in old Iranian languages meant “noble or lord.”  It was never meant to identify an ethnic distinction, but certainly class or a more refined civilization.  There’s a theory that a Frenchman in the 1800’s came up with the idea of Aryan Blood and white supremacy.  Those ideals would transform the word into the way we interpret it now.  But it was a British political philosopher who’s works inspired Hitler, as well as a man named Alfred Rosenberg.  Some claimed Rosenberg had no German blood, but he had already led the Nazi party while Hitler was in jail. 

Fortunately, it was this week in 1945 that Hitler issues his “Nero Decree” ordering all industries, military installations, shops, transportation facilities and communications facilities in Germany to be destroyed.  The Russians were closing in from the east, and the western allies were coming in the other direction.  Everything had to be destroyed to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.  The legend is that Nero fiddled while Rome burned.  Hitler, while having no fiddle, settled for the burn.

1954
Willie Mosconi sets a world record by running 526 consecutive balls without a miss during a straight pool exhibition at East High Billiard Club in Springfield, Ohio. The source where I found this tidbit said the record still stands today.  But a little research revealed that the record was broken in 2019 by a man named John Schmidt, who ran a hundred more, all in a row as confirmed by unedited video examined by the Billiard Congress of America.  The record now stands at 626 consecutive balls made if you’d like to take a poke at it.

1960
Arthur Leonard Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes receive the first patent for a laser.  I know lasers have opened up whole new fields of science, but the greatest impact they may have had on my life is the use of lasers when used to accompany music.  From rock concerts with laser light shows like Pink Floyd, to discotechs in metropolitan cities around the world where laser lights add a visual element to the beats of dance music to laser light shows in planetariums choreographed to the music of popular bands and genre's, lasers have become as common as something you might use to tease your cat.  Which I have.  Today we use them to repair our eyesight and scan the barcodes on our groceries.  A Smithsonian story about the laser quotes one of it’s developers as saying the laser was a solution looking for a problem.  Well, since 1960, it’s found hundreds of problems for which it is the solution.  And beyond a trippy light experience at a rock concert, lasers are now helping to create holograms of performers who are no longer with us, allowing us to be entertained by them long after their demise.

1980
On the season finale of the soap opera Dallas, the infamous character J.R. Ewing is shot by an unseen assailant, leading to the catchphrase “Who shot J.R.?”  Television was different back then.  Few people had the means or equipment to record a show and watch it later.  Tens of millions of people were watching the limited menu of television programs.  There was no social media at the time, but people kept occupied for the next eight months by talking about who shot J.R.  I’ll admit, I didn’t watch the show, as I was a senior in High School and had better things to do with my evenings.  But in November of that year, 350-million people around the world, according to history dot com, tuned in to find out whodunit.  It’s nearly impossible to get an audience of that size for any event today, let alone a fictional drama. One hundred six million watched the final episode of MASH in 1983, but that number is only viewers in the United States.  Today, the Super Bowl is America’s top viewing choice. 

Phone and email liner

One of the reasons I started the Listening Tube podcast a little over two years ago was because I was unhappy with the way I’d seen the news media turn from information-driven to agenda-driven.  One of the ways that transformation took place was, and still is, the way opinion has been inserted into the news, often labeled as “analysis.”  News hosts bring in experts to spew information that, on the surface, may seem like it’s meant to help you understand what the news means to a majority of us, or perhaps a subset of us.  And while that commentary may be helpful, it’s an opinion.  Knowing the difference between opinions and facts seems to be a lost art among many of us.  
That’s not my opinion.  It’s based on a study done in 2018 and 2019 with a list of 12 statements designed to find out how good people are at distinguishing fact from opinion.  More recently, the study was reexamined by two people at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/fact-opinion-differentiation/ to look a little deeper into why we sometimes can’t tell the difference between fact and opinion.  Here are the twelve statements used in the survey, keeping in mind that this happened 5 years ago, in 2019:
1. Immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally have some rights under the Constitution.  That’s a fact.
2. ISIS lost a significant portion of it’s territory in Iraq and Syria in 2017.  Also a fact, but the analysis admits that the word significant is subjective.  Had the statement read 95% of it’s territory, it would have been more accurate.
3. President Barack Obama was born in the United States.  While listed as a fact, there are people who don’t believe it.  Interestingly, just because you don’t believe it, doesn’t make it an opinion.  It’s no one’s opinion that President Obama was born in the U.S.  It is the opinion of some people that he wasn’t.
4. Health care costs per person in the U.S. are the highest in the developed world.  That’s a fact, and most people identified it as such.
5. Spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid make up the largest portion of the U.S. federal budget.  That’s a fact.  About half of the respondents got it wrong.
Statement #6 says, The Earth is between 5,000 and 10,000 years old.  While that particular statement of fact is incorrect, the interpreters of the data determined that its factual error doesn’t make it an opinion.  It’s still a statement of fact, despite being incorrect.
Now we get into the statements of opinion.  Statement number seven says, Immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally are a very big problem for the country today.  Back in 2019, Barack Obama was known as the deporter in chief.  Today, one can argue that this statement is a fact rather than an opinion.  But that’s just my opinion.
8. Abortion should be legal in most cases.  That is an opinion.  In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court decided it should be a State’s opinion rather than a federal one.
9. Increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour is essential for the health of the U.S. economy.  Also an opinion.
10. Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient.  That is an opinion.  Only because somewhere out there, there’s a government agency that is efficient.  Until we can prove that all government agencies are wasteful, we have to call that an opinion.  It may be easy to assume it’s a fact that all government is inefficient, and I encourage any government agency at any level to show how efficient they are by bragging about it.  Send your proclamation to thelisteningtube@outlook.com.
11.  Democracy is the greatest form of government.  That is most certainly an opinion.  There are many who would argue that socialism, communism and authoritarianism are all superior to democracy. There’s a lot of talk among the Left wing about protecting Democracy.  The United States is a Constitutional Republic.  It’s been working for almost 250 years now.  Let’s try to save that instead. The last statement reads, Diversity helps make America great.  That, too, is an opinion.  However, if you deny it’s a fact, you’ll be ostracized and condemned as a racist.  Less than half of respondents agreed it was an opinion.  Perhaps because they see diversity making America great, and accept it as fact.  But making America great is subjective.  You might believe that we all would want America to be great, but MAGA, or Make America Great Again, is now used as a label for America’s enemies by the opposing party.  So what’s great for one American isn’t great for another American.  That’s why it’s an opinion.
Obviously, most of the statements have a political undertone.  That factored into how some people viewed the statement.  This new study of the results shed some light on that.  One conclusion was that people with higher levels of civics and current events knowledge, education and cognitive ability were more likely to assess the statement correctly.  But politics certainly played a role in how the statements were assessed and categorized.  That conclusion was only half right.  As it turns out, the more civics and current events knowledge you have, the more likely you are to assess the statement incorrectly.  Cognitive ability and education had a more positive outcome.  
Looking at that evidence, you might conclude it’s better to pay less attention to civics and current events if you want to be able to distinguish fact from opinion.  It’s better to rely on what you already know and your ability to process information and form a conclusion than it is to expose yourself to the news and civic expectations.  In other words, trust your gut instead of what you’re being told by somebody who’s allegiance you don’t know.
The fact that half of the respondents of the 2019 study would have done just as well if they flipped a coin is troubling, though.  It’s hard to change someone’s mind once they believe they have the facts.  But if half the people are interpreting opinions as facts, then only half the people have the facts while everyone thinks they do.  What a lot of people fail to determine is from where their facts originate.  Just because your favorite television personality said it, doesn’t mean it’s a fact.  But when you consider it to be, the result is people who watch two different talking heads on tv have two different opinions about what the facts are, and both may be wrong.  That’s just my opinion.
You may have noticed that the Listening Tube is a mix of fact and opinion.  I know I insert my opinion about the facts throughout this program.  My hope is that I don’t make it seem like my opinion is fact.  I do cite my sources for many of the topics I cover, so you’re always free to see where I’m getting the information I pass on to you.  I hope my opinions provide some wisdom, insight, and with any luck, some entertainment, whether you agree with me or not.  One of the reasons I started the Listening Tube was because I have an opinion about how the media manipulates the facts; how stories are chosen and created and written and produced by the legacy media to influence us.  I wanted to provide the tools to determine these things as you consume news, and recognize when opinions are being delivered as facts.  I’ve been at it for two years now, and studies like this kinda make me feel like I’m not getting the job done.  Although I’m sure if you’re a fan of the Listening Tube, you would have scored in the top percentile of an easy test like fact or opinion.  Do us all a favor and share The Listening Tube podcast with as many people as you can.  If more of us can tell the difference between fact and opinion, we’ll be able to agree on a lot more, and get more done instead of arguing about what the facts are.

The Listening Tube is written and produced by yours truly.  Copyright 2024.  Thank you for putting your ear to the Listening Tube.  Subscribe today.  I’m your host, Bob Woodley for thou ad infinitum.