Vice-President Kamala Harris building a coalition to unite U.S. - gives brilliant speech on the Ellipse in D.C.

The Harris-Cheney partnership is not just a political marriage of convenience- opinion published in The New York Times by David French.

One of the great joys of my life is my decades-long friendships with people who are far to my political left. 

• They’re as pro-choice as I am pro-life. 
• They have different ideas about what religious liberty means.
• They opposed Operation Iraqi Freedom, but when I volunteered to serve, they printed T-shirts with my name on them as a symbol of support. 
• After I got there, they helped flood my unit with care packages.

And for election cycle after election cycle, the conservatives and liberals in the group debated the races — sometimes in email threads that stretched into thousands of words — but none of it shook our friendships.

Baseball brought us together. We met in law school, discovered our shared love for the game and formed a fantasy baseball league (yes, I’m fully aware of my abject nerdiness). It was a fun political marriage of convenience between relative strangers that I thought might last through law school, at most.

But 33 years later, our shared values have kept us together — a commitment to truth and compassion in our dealings with each other, a respect for open debate and honest inquiry, an underlying humility that told us that we needed to hear opposing views because none of us is perfect and a willingness to be able to live with disagreement without surrendering to bitterness or anger.

This part of my life is one reason I’m not surprised to see the easy rapport onstage between Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney, or to watch the mutual affection between Adam Kinzinger and the crowd at the Democratic National Convention this summer. I’ve seen Democrats erupt in applause and appreciation for other, less famous, Republicans who’ve laid careers (and sometimes their lives) on the line to defend American democracy.

There are political positions, and then there are deep values, and ultimately — when it comes to the deep values — like often finds like, and friendships that seem unusual can suddenly make sense. And so it was with us. Over time, the baseball part of our relationship faded into the background. The friendship is now the core.

It’s easy to be cynical about politicians (and pundits, for that matter). In fact, it can be naïve not to be cynical about politicians (or pundits, for that matter), but it remains a fact that not every move they make is coldly calculated self-interest. Maybe there is some place for some dissenting Republicans in a Harris administration, but if cold self-interest were the only factor in play, there is a much easier path to power for Republicans in 2024. They can bend the knee to Donald Trump.

I’ve spent much of the last nine years in the company of Republicans and former Republicans who can’t abide Trump, and while they’re a collection of human beings like anyone else — full of quirks and foibles and manifold imperfections — there is a common thread. There’s a sense that the Republican Party has changed its deep values, and that any remaining policy agreements are the decaying artifacts of times past.

I worry sometimes that the effort to describe this emerging American realignment is hampered by the shorthand phrases we use to describe big concepts. “Democracy is on the ballot” has a nice ring to it — and the virtue of raising the right kind of alarms after “Stop the Steal” and Jan. 6 — but it’s imprecise and potentially wrong. After all, I fully expect that America will have another election in 2028. My alarm is rooted more in the kind of democracy we’ll have than whether we’ll have any kind of democracy at all.

I’m perhaps more persuaded by a different, far less catchy slogan: the rule of law is on the ballot. If Trump wins and exempts himself and many thousands of his supporters from legal accountability, it’s more like America will have something like royal justice, where accountability exists for all but a ruthless ruling class.

We know that Trump loves the aesthetics and personality of royalty and autocracy. He lives an opulent, gold-trimmed life and has openly envied the perceived absolute loyalty and obedience that kings and dictators command. He has long sought their authority. Now he wants their freedom from accountability.

But when I speak of the deep values that are driving some Republicans toward Democrats and some Democrats toward Trump, I’m speaking of something beyond policy, to ways of thinking, being and knowing that make pluralism possible.

This week, Americans were treated to two very different closing arguments — one in Madison Square Garden (Nazi reenactment rally - 1939 redux) from Trump and his allies, and one in the nation’s capital on the Ellipse, from Vice-President KamalaHarris. The difference was striking.

Esquire Magazine headline: "Kamala Harris Had One Hell of a Night with That Speech at the Ellipse"

At the Capitol, on Tuesday night, Harris made the case for unity. “Unlike Donald Trump,” she said, “I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at my table.”

Days earlier, at Madison Square Garden, an (flopped) insult comic called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage,” Tucker Carlson engaged in racist mockery, saying Harris would be the first “Samoan, Malaysian, low I.Q. former California prosecutor” to become president, and Trump himself, well, he was exactly who he’s always been.

When I watched Trump and his allies speak, my lawyer’s mind drifted to a common law concept called the “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” In law, extreme and intentional mistreatment of individuals could be so outrageous that it actually gave rise to a right to sue in court for damages.

That right is rooted in a transcendent cross-cultural revulsion at the idea that one would actually try to inflict pain on a fellow human being. In a very real way, Trump’s campaign — and the entire MAGA ethos — is rooted in a political version of that legal concept. He is trying to hurt his perceived enemies.

When we say that Trump attacks democracy — or that Trump attacks the rule of law — those are just symptoms of the underlying disease. He hates everyone who doesn’t serve him, and democracy and the rule of law have been two of the principal obstacles to his cruelty.

Those obstacles exist by design. The founders feared the damage that demagogues could do in democratic societies, and they placed roadblock after roadblock in their path. They divided power. They ratified a Bill of Rights. They established four-year terms for presidents so that they’d be accountable for their performance. 

During the second founding after the Civil War, the United States abolished slavery, codified equal protection of the law and extended the protection of the Bill of Rights to guard against oppression by governments at every level of American society.

Think back to my description of my friendships. There was passionate disagreement, but never cruelty. In those rare times when anger burned too hot, alarm bells rang in our collective conscience.

These basic principles of friendship are also basic principles of community. We can endure conflict. In fact, conflict is both healthy and inevitable in a diverse democracy. Truth and wisdom are not exclusive to any single American community. But nothing can close our minds and hearts to the virtues of our neighbors faster than outright cruelty and malice. That’s exactly the moment our consciences should rebel, when we should raise our hand and say, “Stop.”

That’s why it’s important to see former bitter political rivals unite as ex-presidents to present a united front in times of political transition or national mourning. That’s why it was important when Tip O’Neill, then the House speaker, was at Ronald Reagan’s bedside after he was almost killed in an assassination attempt. That’s why it’s touching to see George W. Bush and Michelle Obama hug in a moment of seemingly genuine affection.

That’s not the “uniparty” or “regime” or “elite” displaying malignant solidarity against the people. It’s leaders showing us what decency in a pluralistic democracy looks like.

It is just as difficult for a career pro-life lawyer to extend his or her hand to a career pro-choice activist as it is for the career pro-choice activist to take that hand. These are not small differences. Nor was it (or is it) a small thing to disagree over the Iraq War. But none of us should be arrogant enough to presume that disagreement over even the most consequential issues is proof of the thoughtlessness, much less bad character, of our opponents.

The longer that MAGA persists as the dominant faction of the Republican Party, the more we will see this realignment take place. At the level of deepest values, like will continue to find like. It’s not just conservatives who are crossing the aisle to join Democrats, there are liberals who are crossing the aisle to join Republicans.

MAGA brags that it’s expanding the Republican coalition to include Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard and people who like and admire them. Conspiracy calls out to the conspiracist.
Make no mistake, the realignment is not yet complete, and it may never easily track onto partisan politics. I voted for Kamala Harris this week — the very first vote I’ve ever cast for a Democrat in national politics — but if she wins I will oppose any effort to revive Roe, legislatively or judicially.

There will be arguments. Some may be intense. But this much I know — temporary tolerance can build into permanent affection. Wary partners can become fast friends. Many of us have been ejected from places we never thought we’d leave, and some of us have entered rooms where we never thought we’d be welcomed. And it is in these spaces where the seeds of American renewal are planted and nurtured.
Some other things I did:  I thought long and hard about what to write in these last days before the election, and I settled on a trilogy of sorts. Today’s newsletter was the second piece. The first came on Sunday, when I reflected on what I’ve learned from the ongoing failure of the Never Trump movement. Why did so many Republicans seem to change so much, so fast, and why did I misjudge the people I thought I knew so well?

If you came of age politically during the Reagan Revolution, you thought of the Republican Party as fundamentally and essentially ideological. We were the party of limited government, social conservatism and a strong national defense, and these ideological lines were ruthlessly enforced. Even after Reagan left office, ideological heresy against Reaganism was punished with the dreaded label “RINO” — Republican in name only.

In fact, that’s a prime reason so many conservative writers dismissed the Trump phenomenon out of hand. We were all familiar with the unyielding ideological litmus test. Many of us remembered the slings and arrows directed at anyone who stepped out of line. The story we told ourselves behind closed doors was the story we told in public — the Republican Party was a party of ideas and those ideas defined the party.

Right until they didn’t. Trump has changed the equation entirely. He’s a big-government, isolationist libertine who — despite nominating half the justices who helped overturn Roe — has made the G.O.P. platform more pro-choice than it’s been in almost 50 years. Not only has he not been punished for this ideological transformation, but devotion to him is the new Republican loyalty test.

Don’t think for a moment that is because he won an intelligent ideological argument. When he gained a critical mass of support, millions of Republicans faced a stark choice: ideology or community?

I also wrote a first round of thoughts for our blog about the Harris-Cheney alliance and the differences between the MAGA movement and the Harris coalition:

MAGA has a high floor and a low ceiling. The ferocity and group solidarity of MAGA means that it’s hard to ever see Trump polling below his 2016, vote share. His (cult❗)support is baked in and unshakable. At the same time, the same characteristics that bind MAGA together repel much of the rest of the country.

Harris’s coalition, which ranges from Liz Cheney to the Squad of congressional progressives, has a lower floor and a higher ceiling. Harris doesn’t enjoy the cult following of Trump, but there are more Trump opponents than Trump supporters, and if she can extend a welcoming hand to as many people and factions as possible — without alienating other people and factions — then she’ll probably win.

Another Mad King Syndrome: Ron DeSantis and his Trumpzi puppeteer

Ron DeSantis Is a Man Of No Qualities

(Donald Trump has competition for the title of being a "Mad King", described by William Shakespeare in "King Lear".

Echo essay published in Esquire Magazine by Jeff VanderMeer.

As Ron DeSantis provides safe harbor for oppression in Florida and exports bad policy across the country, it's clear that he represents an existential threat to American democracy—even if he fails to become president.

Ron DeSantis with his puppeteer TFG (The Former Guy) Trump.

After four years of punishing the people of Florida with actions largely meant to increase his personal power, Governor Ron DeSantis appears to be bringing his corrosive brand of politics to a presidential run. But DeSantis only looks like an even remotely reasonable or centrist candidate when viewed in a line-up between his gubernatorial predecessor Rick Scott and ex-U.S. catastrophe Donald Trump. That he sits comfortably between the two, accompanied by a host of extremists, should be cause for alarm, not suggestions that he is anything other than an authoritarian.

While the slogan “Make America Florida” gains traction on bumper stickers and pundits debate DeSantis’ electability, DeSantis continues to plunge ahead with culture wars in schools that sunder communities, gaslight Floridians about the environment, and implement anti-scientific policies across life-or-death situations. But there is still—even after three years of a badly mishandled pandemic—nothing to apologize for, nothing to be accountable for, and nothing to be transparent about, to anyone.

A Florida political system that has over the course of several Republican governors maximized voter suppression and gerrymandering has contributed to DeSantis’ unprecedented ability to centralize power in Florida and muffled most effective opposition. It is in this context of restricting voting rights, too, that disastrous policy decisions opposed by millions of Floridians have been portrayed as somehow not subpar, but superlative.

In certain quarters, these (IMO Maine Writer- draconian!) policies are bally-hoo’d as a form of “freedom” and “liberty.”


Just like destructive Republican governors before him feathered the nest for DeSantis's success by destroying safeguards and institutions—making it possible for DeSantis to become more predatory and authoritarian—Trump has set the table for DeSantis at the national level. Trump's coalition of white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, disgruntled rightwing journalists, and evangelicals now becomes how DeSantis, who otherwise might be unelectable, can see a path to the White House.

With DeSantis’ explicit approval, the Republican-led Florida legislature stamped out as much home rule as possible, continuing Scott’s legacy, and rendered cities and counties less able to govern effectively. This helps the special interests that fuel DeSantis’ campaigns, but does nothing for ordinary citizens.

DeSantis’ unchecked power in the state is reflected in his ability to bully that same legislature into a redistricting that removed traditionally Black voting blocs, despite the legislature preferring a more moderate plan. That he worked with national operatives to push this effort to completion hints at the networks DeSantis already has access to, even before formally announcing a run for president.

Where Scott, an austerity Republican, had not already retired or removed competency within state agencies during purges disguised as fiscal responsibility, DeSantis has continued to politicize as many positions as possible, removing vital experience from state agencies. As a feature, not a bug, of these actions, DeSantis has made many of these institutions much less transparent and accountable to Floridians.

But DeSantis has crossed boundaries Scott only dreamed of breaching—including a shameless streak of political pay-to-play. A October 2022 Tampa Bay Times article revealed that “since assuming office in 2019, DeSantis has accepted roughly $3.3 million in campaign donations from 250 people he selected for leadership roles—a 75% increase in the number of donors appointed” over Scott’s first term in office.

As DeSantis blurs the line between matters of state and his personal campaigns, he often talks about fighting the “corporate media” as a sop to his supporters, portraying himself as a modern-day American hero standing up for the common man (and, sometimes, woman). Yet his campaigns have largely been backed and supported by huge corporate conglomerates or elites.

DeSantis’ recent efforts to remove a state’s attorney reelected by the voters and reappoint an extremist judge rejected by the voters demonstrate a willingness to keep pushing the legal limits of his authority, in pursuit of more centralized control of Florida. Blurring the lines between the governorship and his campaign, DeSantis celebrated his executive order suspending “woke” Hillsborough prosecutor Andrew Warren Marshall at a rally described as “campaign-like,” complete with cheering crowds. Internal communications from the governor’s office suggest DeSantis wanted a fight with a Democratic attorney, to further push the governor’s “woke war.”

But what has DeSantis been successful at?

Helping DeSantis is a personal media machine that includes Christina Pushaw, former press secretary, constantly on the attack on social media. Within DeSantis’s dismal inner circle of anti-vaxxers, big developers, and people who have been arrested, Christine Pushaw serves proudly as a kind of resurrected middle-school bully. Pushaw spends a lot of her time punishing journalists on social media, acting as if facts were hand grenades strapped to puppies. This coarsening of the discourse makes almost every issue in Florida a slow grind to move through, but also as gray and lifeless as a Brutalist trompe-l’oeil. There is also, in all of this, a trickle-down effect of local Florida politicians fearing Ron, using Ron as an excuse, acting like Ron or like Ron’s inner circle, employing Ron’s tactics, giving voice to his rhetoric, believing what they think Ron believes (making it reasonable), worshipping Ron’s success.

But what has he been successful at?

Ron DeSantis will tell Americans in his new book Courage to Be Free (❓) 

Ron DeSantis is a man of no qualities!

...that his heart “was always for the people of Florida” and pay lip service to Florida’s rich history. He will paint himself, possibly into a corner, as a hero—a David to the Goliath of corporate media, even as he takes millions from huge corporations. He will tell you he is saving the Everglades, even though most of his promises remain unkept and the measures undertaken inadequate.

DeSantis will likely exaggerate a military career that resulted in him receiving a Bronze star for classified duties during 2007-2008, only for him to leverage that honor by characterizing his service as a lawyer as indistinguishable from being a fighter pilot in ads for his 2022 campaign. Another DeSantis ad stated that God made DeSantis on the eighth day because, as God allegedly put it, “I need a protector.”

Politically, DeSantis’ first job as a member of the House of Representatives (2012-2018) displayed more evidence of his allegiance to corporate interests than being “God’s defender” of ordinary Floridians. The League of Conservation Voters gave DeSantis a 2% rating for voting against clean water and air efforts, and for Big Agriculture—only pushing back against a Big Sugar provision in a Farm Bill. These votes presaged a governorship greenwashed by its second year, despite DeSantis anointing himself a new Teddy Roosevelt of conservation.

Details about DeSantis’ military career may be sacrosanct, but recent insight into his stint as a high school teacher in Georgia provides a view of DeSantis that also undermines the idea of divine guidance. In addition to being “cocky and arrogant”—not traditional Christian values—DeSantis fraternized with students in an unprofessional way, made Black students uncomfortable with comments dismissive of slavery, and displayed “cruelty in humor” during a public prank in which he coerced a student to chug milk until the student vomited.

And while national pundits applauded DeSantis’ hurricane response, what many Floridians saw was DeSantis in spotless wading boots delaying disaster relief for a photo op while wearing the tasteless advert of a reelection badge. Or DeSantis admonishing hypothetical looters as survivors worried about digging through the wreckage to find their dead. Or, even as Florida enjoyed record surpluses and still sometimes wearing his reelection swag, DeSantis establishing and stumping for a potentially fraught private nonprofit fund for the hurricane’s victims.
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But much worse still, in terms of disaster, DeSantis had already politicized the pandemic. COVID broke communities in Florida, even if some still do not know they were broken, or how broken. It left communities to fend for themselves, even in counties that tried to provide decent messaging, all while people we loved died or got sick, or got sick and died later.

Into these horrors, DeSantis inserted a counterfactual surgeon general who did not believe in masks or vaccines, and punished businesses and school boards that tried to follow the facts by instituting local mask and vaccine mandates. A state-wide communication failure and full-on disinformation campaign arguably increased death and suffering–culminating in DeSantis’ call to establish a COVID jury to help justify his decisions. DeSantis used his messaging, and his proxies’ messaging, not just to push a political agenda rather than a public health agenda, but to break down political resistance at the same time. DeSantis, in part, built his political machine on making Florida sicker.

Despite these discrepancies between image and substance, DeSantis will try to portray himself as a benevolent, successful man, “presidential” in the sense of not doing any of the things he has done as a politician. Helping that narrative will be his wife Casey DeSantis, who will provide the optics of a perfect family, scripted by a skilled media team. Her attire at her husband’s inauguration generated praise conjuring up the illusion of Jackie Kennedy, as cynically intended.

But there’s no Camelot waiting at the end of a DeSantis presidential run. Along the way, we will be subjected to more manipulative optics and endure, insult to injury, the strained extended metaphors common to authoritarians, including the one at the heart of DeSantis’ inaugural speech: “In captaining the ship of state, we choose to navigate the boisterous sea of liberty rather than cower in the calm docks of despotism.”

Normalization of cruelty matters. Normalization of authoritarianism matters. Normalization of Orwellian approaches to governance, anti-democratic to their core, matter. It is dangerous to let fascism become a concept that lazily yawns and breathes in the morning air, whistles a cheerful tune on the way to a café coffee and a breakfast sandwich, before getting down to the serious work. Thankful that, once more, it has not had to explain itself.

It is dangerous to let fascism become a concept that lazily yawns and breathes in the morning air.

The business of state, which for DeSantis is often the business of his own personal politics, will continue. His fifteen-week abortion ban may become even more restrictive and concealed carry of weapons without a permit is back on the legislative agenda. In addition to a brutal campaign of suppression of queer identity, DeSantis has supported his crusade against Critical Race Theory (CRT) by trying to destroy New College with extremist (and incompetent) board appointees, and by sending a letter to all public universities asking for information on their race and diversity teachings—even as professors quit rather than subject themselves to censorship. CRT allows far-right Republicans to combine a strawman with a bogeyman in pursuit of the perfect bogus woke war, while the demonization makes it hard for colleges to effectively serve their students.

DeSantis may be less flamboyant than Trump, but he supports a style and substance of governance just as inflammatory. He weaponizes others’ emotions to create an image of himself as imbued with the qualities of some quasi-religious savior of Florida while actually making people’s lives worse. He then, over and over again, continues to inflame the discourse so the sleight of hand that is his charisma doesn’t gutter out—because the issue contains the igniting ember, not anything in DeSantis’ personality.

What this means for a DeSantis presidential campaign is unclear, despite pundits doing what they do best: throwing civilized barbaric yawps into the void and hoping the echo that comes back is the future. The chaotic DeSantis style of “governance,” from which it is difficult to pivot to whatever center remains, has only two clear benefits: it gives DeSantis more state control and more national media coverage.

The most memorable description of DeSantis at the beginning of his turn to the far right came from Nate Monroe of the Jacksonville Times-Union, who wrote that Florida’s “mad king” was “sinking ever deeper into strange and dark fever dreams.” Monroe was referring to DeSantis’ “Darwinian COVID-19 herd immunity experiment,” hiring of COVID conspiracy theorists, and as the pandemic raged, a crackdown on nonviolent Black Lives Matters protestors in the state by expanding “Stand Your Ground” laws to absolve motorists driving into marchers. (In 2022, this law would be condemned by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of on Racial Discrimination.)

This is the Ron DeSantis of Florida, who wants to become the Ron DeSantis of America❗ OMG!

In the end, it may not matter whether DeSantis is a “mad king,” a cipher like Rick Scott, an ideologue, an oligarch, an autocrat, or a rather ordinary politician in the right place at the right time. The effects of DeSantis’ actions remain the same, while in his rhetoric he often takes the term “bully pulpit” as literally as possible.

Mad King DeSantis❗ 

Florida and its people don’t deserve this desecration—no place does, even as DeSantis and his Republican predecessors have managed to turn an absolute paradise into a place that is close to a failed state. Because what Ron DeSantis does, at base—including to his base—is simple. He inflicts damage in pursuit of political gain. On purpose and with abandon and with no regard for collateral harm.

What trickles down, then, in the end, along with all of this “freedom,” is nepotism, corruption, cruelty, greed, and—both by design and as a byproduct of all the rest—shockingly bad ideas about governance.

Why would you want any of this inflicted on the nation?

This is the Ron DeSantis of Florida, who wants to become the Ron DeSantis of America. To tell us to our dying day that we are not communities of loving grace and communion, that we are not all connected, that acts of loving kindness are for fools and traitors. To tell us that only some of us matter, not all of us.

Maybe, in the end, if we do not heed the warnings, DeSantis will tell us, in a thousand lacerating ways, direct and indirect… that none of us matter.

JEFF VANDERMEER

Jeff VanderMeer is the New York Times-bestselling author of Annihilation and twelve other novels. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Nation, Current Affairs, and many others.

Fair winds and following seas to Senator John McCain- Farewell letter

Senator John McCain (1936-2018) farewell letter

My fellow Americans, whom I have gratefully served for 60 years, and especially my fellow Arizonians: Advice for challenging times.

(Published in Esquire.com Magazine)

Thank you for the privilege of serving you and for the rewarding life that service in uniform and in public office has allowed me to lead. I've tried to serve our country honorably. I’ve made mistakes, but I hope my love for America will be weighed favorably against them.

I've often observed that I am the luckiest person on earth. I feel that way even now as I prepare for the end of my life. I’ve loved my life, all of it. I’ve had experiences, adventures and friendships, enough for ten satisfying lives, and I am so thankful. Like most people, I have regrets. But I would not trade a day of my life in good or bad times for the best day of anybody else’s.

I owe this satisfaction to the love of my family. No man has never had a more loving wife or children he was prouder of than I am of mine. And I owe it to America. To be connected to America's causes—liberty, equal justice, and respect for the dignity of all people—brings happiness more sublime than life’s fleeting pleasures. Our identities and sense of worth were not circumscribed but enlarged by serving good causes bigger than ourselves.

'Fellow Americans'—that association has meant more to me than any other. I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world's greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil. We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world. We have helped liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. We have acquired great wealth and power in the progress.

We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.

We are 325 million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country we will get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before. We always do.

Ten years ago, I had the privilege to concede defeat in the election for president. I want to end my farewell to you with heartfelt faith in Americans that I felt so powerfully that evening. I feel it powerfully still.

Do not despair of our present difficulties. We believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We make history.

Farewell, fellow Americans. God bless you, and God bless America.