WIP

I'm not sure if it the overemphasis on competition and aggression in right wing political and economic thinking, that makes the right hostile towards women, but it seems that they consider women petitioning for their own interests on the same level as they see environmentalists as a threat to their economic ideals!

Yes, and doesn't that mean that different standards have to be applied in same-sex relationships. The main focus is on the male/female relationships that apply to 90% of us.

In other words, Hoffs-Sommers is part of the AEI team that has the job of promoting the privatization of public education today! Classrooms don't need competition....i.e. constant testing. They need a liberal arts education that teaches students about more than the basic math and english skills. Children need to learn music, art, and the social studies subjects to learn about the world around them. I was not exactly a public education fan until we had to move into a very mixed, cosmopolitan area with many first generation immigrants. My youngest boy was still in grade school, and it was the first time in his life that he was in a school that wasn't virtually all-white! That makes a big difference in how children grow to view others who are different from them. It's a subject that is taught by direct contact, and would be upended if we go the privatization route that England and the U.S. is doing now. And, then there's all the other crap that's wrong with sending education tax dollars to corporations to feed off of.....but that's a subject for another time probably!

The STEM careers are for an educated elite in any society. Trying to pretend that we're all going to be doctors, engineers or lawyers, is typical libertarian BS! * and, some of us avoided that track and chose to work with our hands back in the days when skilled trades were still paying decent money! Those were the days before globalization of course, and the driving of wages down to lowest common denominator; but many of us went that route because we like doing jobs where we're not part of some bullshit committee or "team." Our work is mostly done independently and evaluated based on our skills and abilities to find out and solve problems those 'engineers' leave in the blueprints! The collapse of manufacturing in North America has not only impacted the trades, it's also having an effect on those engineers in that STEM system. Guess they'll have to retrain and become lawyers or investment brokers now!

You know fully well that, on average, men have a big physical advantage over women, so use of force or threat of force puts many...the majority of women at risk when they are alone with a man who is a sexual predator. Trying to pretend it's a level playingfield between men and women is as ludicrous as conservative economic arguments of a level playing field between the rich and everyone else!

Not completely passive! My wife has always been sexually aggressive( which scored big points in her favour 30 years ago), and....I can't go into details obviously, but once you go beyond oral sex to penetration, the guy either can geit it up/or he can't!

And, if he knew she was drunk and still allowed her to drive home, he is also legally responsible for the consequences! It already is; and it should be obvious without need of explanation, that by our very physical natures, sex is more serious and carries greater risks than it does for men. We don't have to worry about getting pregnant or what to do afterwards, and women are more prone to contract STD's than men are. But, when it comes to the issue of consent, I still hold that we are where we are today with placing a greater burden of proof on the man/rather than the woman, because there was such a problem with guys playing games and bordering on rape...and even crossing that borderline, under the old rules. Even today, if the guy comes in armed with lawyers who want to investigate her and slut-shame her in front of the court and the rest of the world, they may cause her to back off and drop charges.....and that's the way it was done far too often in the old days, and why so many girls were so uptight and suspicious early on in new relationships.

Put yourself in the place of that guy who's with this girl who's freely downing shots. Should he just sit back and keep pouring her more drinks, or go along with her desire to get drunk? And after a half hour or so, if she says:"let's f***" or f*** me, should he go along with it? If she said "let me drive home," would he assume she's capable of doing that also? If he's with her for the first time, should he even be allowing himself to get drunk also, to begin with? If there's a court case, a lot's going to depend on whether or not they had a relationship going....whether they've already had sex in the past; if this was a first time, I would say NO, if she had AIDS or some STD, he wouldn't have a qualms about saying no, so why can't he have the presence of mind to refuse in a situation where she's intoxicated?

No, and I was going to get to your point, but I can add it in here. The problem for boys in the standard classroom education system is also a problem for girls....it's just that the majority of females, being less aggressive than males by nature, are more compliant than boys, and more able and willing to put up with crap such as sitting in a chair for six hours and listening to a teacher drone on and on. My beef with Hoff-Sommers is that she presents an issue...which as you mentioned, had already been noted by other sociologists and related observers, in a frame of a female-friendly/anti-male society favouring girls over boys in the education system. Let's be real about this: our modern public education classroom system was set up, not for the primary purpose of teaching the three R's, but getting children of lower classes used to the drudgery they would face after they turned 14 or 16, and took the jobs assigned to them by class in the mines, the mills and the factories of England, then the rest of Europe and America. The schoolmasters in the old system didn't make allowance for boys being more aggressive than girls and less inclined to pay attention...they just beat them into submission for any misbehaviours! The thinking was that public education was a worthwhile investment to train them while they were young, so they would be less inclined to be disruptive afterwards when they spent the next 20 or 30 years working until death. And just because the girls were more compliant in class, and more inclined to follow lessons, no doubt led to factory and mill operators favouring young women as sewers and other extremely monotonous line work that required sitting in place and doing repetitive movements for 12 hours....which they are still doing today....except it's been shipped overseas for lower wage workers. Presenting this standard as something that was created to benefit women over men is a joke! The actual facts are that much of the 'men's work has been made obsolete by automation and later by outsourcing most of the primary production. A quick check of wealth and earnings reveals that all of these young women graduating from medical, engineering and other advanced programs (which leads some young men to massacre them in their classrooms!) does not help them very much as they negotiate their way up the career ladder, and face the same old boys network of favoured sons standing in their way. What Hoff-Sommers and other not-so-subtle libertarian capitalists are trying to create, is a new narrative where classrooms are resegregated by gender, and the divisions between men and women are intensified....just as they were in the old days, and still are in the madrassahs of much of the world today. By their libertarian reckoning, women are already over-privileged, and therefore the government programs and benefits that they collect from in greater number, need to be abolished to level the playing field between men and women...and this is where libertarian strategizing all boils down to the money, and how to get more of it, after the ideological setups are dispensed with.

I just want to say that I get nauseated by all of the focus on "STEM" careers, and I don't give a rat's ass whether it's coming from the modern day feminist perspective of achievement-oriented women trying to climb their way higher on our already overly hierarchical class system, or the men who are trying to protect their positions from a raft of female applicants for their jobs. These are already jobs that will always make up a minority of the total workforce, so what about the rest of us? What about those of us in manufacturing/including skilled trades, where what once was a blue collar path to a respectable middle class income comparable to many entering white collar professions, is now subject to closing and vanishing industries, with jobs available subject to newer, non-unionized shops that are even allowed to bypass the provincial standards for accreditation in the apprenticeships programs. I'm just fortunate enough to be at an age where it was still possible to make a good living with your hands without working 12 or 16 hour days for barely above minimum wage! That's the new reality for the vast majority of us non-STEM people, and those born without the privileges of accumulated wealth to set us on a track of private school education and Ivy League college educations afterwards...and on to the positions of privilege in the business world that come with attending the right university, being a member of the right fraternity, and having established family connections. For most of us, here in Canada, the U.S., Europe, and especially the nations of the world locked in to the new neocolonialism of selling off resources and setting up slave-level sweatshops to pay growing debts to the IMF or World Bank, the vast majority of people in the world....male and female, are getting poorer, while a smaller and smaller minority of privileged elites and their army of functionaries - those with the STEM educations, live better and better lives! This is where social issues like women's rights and men's grievances either intersect with the broader social conditions of increasingly aggressive and rapacious capitalism, or they are just the parlor issues of the privileged classes!

Yes, I have heard about the 'dirty tricks' you mention - the kids are sick today, come back next weekend etc., and once again, it's another one of those splitting-the-baby dilemmas that I don't think can possibly satisfy both sides in a bitter divorce. Should the Court rule that the ex-wife has to allow the disneyland dad come up to her home after violence and abuse became serious enough to require a court restraining order against him on prior judgments? It can go in that direction also. It also has to be noted that the courts don't always award primary custody to the mother, even in cases where the children are young, especially if the mother has had a history of alcohol or substance abuse.....like my late sister-in-law. In her case, both her and her ex were heavy drinkers, but she had a DUI in her record, so he eventually got primary custody along with his new common-law spouse, and when they decided to pack up and move half-way across the country to New Brunswick....the Court ruled that custody should remain with him and she had to make support payments for children she could only afford to see once or twice a year. Point being, the horror stories....which likely played a role in her early untimely death before age 40, don't always happen to men in a divorce! Often, the ex-wife receives a worse deal in such cases, especially because she is less likely to be able to afford the kind of legal representation her ex-husband has, or afford a laughable judgment that she still has weekend privileges after she is separated by almost 1000 miles from her children! Not being a math guy, this is where I start getting dizzy, and just advise make sure you are mature enough before you take on a commitment like marriage, and if a split is inevitable, try to make it as amicable as possible. Where kids are involved, it's impossible to have a written contract of any kind that could foresee all possible future complications. Let's recall the context here! I was responding to the placing of onus for sexual consent on the man, because...obviously, it's the male who still has to play the active role in any sexual relationship. And if she's drunk, I don't care if he's drunk too, it should be in the back of his mind while he was downing shots, that if she was drunk and horny, he didn't have legal consent for sex, and that could come back and bite him in the ass at some later date. So, I'm looking back to the time before the shift in responsibility was made, and guys would openly discuss strategies of how to get her drunk, not what to do afterwards. It was all a game, and it wasn't cool for anyone like me, who didn't feel comfortable with this kind of deceit or the pattern we call "practicing the 4 F's" to say anything against it to others. Any guy with a conscience in the old days, who thought relationships with women might be better if we tried to learn about and understand more about the female perspective, were just not seen as cool, and had to keep our mouths shut about it....especially about ratting out friends! I know, I'm told elsewhere that even "nice guys" end up getting divorced or getting entrapped, but I still go with the presumption that if you are open and honest about your intentions and goals, things will go better for you.

To be honest, the term "women's liberation movement" seemed to vanish as the term "feminist movement" supplanted it a few decades ago. The feminists who took the women's liberation handle, tended to see women's issues as part of a wider array of liberation movements that were mostly on the left of the political spectrum. Feminism narrowed the approach to strictly women's issues...often ignoring many of the economic issues entirely. This, I'm told is one of the reasons why...in the U.S., black women didn't join in with feminist causes...."breaking the glass ceiling" and the "right to work outside the home" back in the early days, had nothing to say to most black women who had no choice other than working...whether they had children or not, and had to work at the most menial jobs with no opportunities of advancement. So, 'how we help them' is going to depend in large part on where individual feminists are coming from. If it's just about a few social issues, we can help make the world and workplaces safer and friendlier environments for women, stomp down guys making excuses for other guys who engage in sexual assault and even rape, and I'm sure many other issues. But, like I mentioned, I would rather feminists seen their issues as part of a larger framework than just problems women have to deal with today.

You're missing the point! My dislike of them and 99% of pop culture is that it is little more than a marketing tool/ not how they dress up when on stage. In music, most girls who can play guitar and learn how to write songs, get almost no traction and are ignored by conglomerate pop media. The declining health of Joni Mitchell in recent days, has got me thinking of how the pioneers among real female musicians have sort of come and gone, and the following generations of young women have even more problems getting recording contracts, or even finding a place in a band as a musician. Girls who form their own bands are immediately tagged with the dyke label and consigned to the margins. Back almost 50 years ago now, when Joni first appeared on the scene, pop music just wanted girls to look pretty and sing.....and not much has changed since then, and the crap that has come and gone (like the Spice Girls) fit the same template of girl pop star, regardless of their "girl power" slogans...it was just a bunch of empty slogans that have come and gone along with them!

Thank Christina Hoff-Sommers for those unverifiable ideas! I kind of mentioned it already, no need to go further.

I only have time for this first point - as soon as I see the name Christina Hoff-Sommers's name dropped as the acceptable feminist, I can tell I'm talking to someone who's politics are way on the right (like hers) and just wants someone calling herself a feminist for cover. In brief: Hoff-Sommers is a fellow of the American Enterprize Institute....that's usually the point where I stop reading their crap...whatever subject they are dealing with...they are getting paid by the largest, most well-funded right wing think tank that has saturated the public media over the last 40 years with their right wing propaganda! Not that there aren't others, but AEI is the biggest and worst of the lot! Now, what's really egregious about Hoff-Sommers's writing on gender issues is that she skews her treatment of the issues as much as possible towards favouring men and disfavouring women. She doesn't go over the top and openly embrace MRA clowns, but by being a woman and having Phd's she is to women what Ben Carson is to civil rights in America! A token minority for the fat cats to put up front and declare:'see, we don't discriminate, we even have a chick who backs all of our stupid ideas and rhetoric!' In brief, when Hoff-Sommers writes about problems for boys growing up now (this is an issue that concerns me too) she tries to paint the picture of a society that has over-supported women to the point where boys are falling behind in a future that will consist of amazonian women running all of the business and controlling academia. So, it's all girls' fault that boys are no longer exceeding girls in grades in many subjects today! Boys are unfairly constrained and not allowed to be aggressive as is natural for boys....seems to me that back in the day, we boys were expected to have a lot more self-control than today, so I'm not sure where those crappy arguments are coming from, that supposedly will be fixed by re-segregating schools by gender today. When it comes to grounding philosophy, Hoff-Sommers created her own brand of feminism (calls it "equity feminism) that will just institute equal by law, but not attempt to delve into the why's of wage inequality, inequality in job promotion/the tendency for women to receive more negative comments in their work records than male workers...even men who have received disciplinary actions....etc....the kind of feminism that asks the why questions she calls "gender feminism" ...and that's socialistic, so it can't be allowed.

Unless you or someone else has posted some numbers supporting the claim that men are still unfairly treated by family courts today, I'm inclined to see it as a no-win issue for all sides....sort of like splitting the baby! *I have to note that in at least a couple of cases I am familiar with, where the guy is complaining about not being allowed to see his kids or have them with him on weekends, there are extenuating circumstances, like domestic violence requiring restraining orders, and inappropriate conduct during visitations (one case, the dad and his new girlfriend went out and left two girls (under 13) unattended, and was hardly with them during their weekend visits. Why did he want that order in the first place? Something to fight for? It didn't seem to be motivated out of any love or concern for his daughters! Beyond keep your marriage together and don't get divorced, I can't think of any other viable solution to the grounding premise being what's in the children's best interests. If we step into the wayback machine, and go back to the 70's and even the 80's, guys spiking girls' drinks, or just deliberately getting them drunk, was a game for some to play. And there was no price to pay if they got caught! And what do ya know, as soon as 'yes means yes' becomes the point of reference, guys are coming out of the woodwork playing the bloody martyr!

Well, when my kids were young and all that "girl power" and Spice girls nonsense was in the spin cycle, I couldn't see any point to it beyond selling products, and I recall more than a few female cultural observers of the time, were not happy with the way they, and other female pop stars were just doing what every other female pop star before them did: look pretty, try to sing and dance a bit, make a few suggestive/but not too lurid poses (especially you - Posh!), and make sure you present the right image for your sponsors. Beyond that, their brand of pop feminism didn't actually say anything except spouting a few inane slogans, similar in my thinking to the way pop stars talking about global warming and environmental issues want to wear green/but don't have a clue about the underlying issues. Which one is that exactly? I notice there is a "men's rights" thread and even an "official" sex thread since I last dropped by, Is it one of them or a different thread that didn't come up when I searched for it?

"Some" feminists can hate whatever they like. How much power (either physical or economic) do they have to affect your life because of this hatred? I guess it's been covered since I was here last, but if you're talking about issues that negatively impact some men....like sexual assault and rape, it's not women or feminists movements that are standing in the way of them getting help. From what I have heard lately from these Catholic priest scandals that keep falling out of the closet on a near-regular basis, predator priests depended on tactics like shaming, for appearing weak and 'unmanly' if they ever came forward to report sexual assaults later.....who's fault was that? When it comes to issues like divorce.....I'm still on my first marriage....never been divorced...so I can't speak from firsthand experience, but I don't know of many couples...especially those with children, who are financially comfortable enough to divide up income and family assets in a way that can make both sides happy! Even the issues like discrimination against fathers.....I think that was more of a problem when I was young, and courts would just assume that young children should stay with their mother. On all of these 'men's rights' issues, I can't think of any where it's women...especially feminist women who are infringing on their rights! The problem again, is that most 'men's rights activist' groups do nothing about helping men, but just want to attack women for a variety of motives.....many of them about turning back the clock to some magical wonderful time in the past, when women were not in public life and didn't say much. I recall part of that world....it's not my idea of paradise!

I wasn't talking about atmospheric emissions...which are certainly rising, and at an exponentially increasing rate according to the Scripps Institute: latest reading on March 29, is 403.18 ppm....that's from Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii btw. What I was talking about was this good news story reported at Vox....which is a clickbait news site no doubt, but they were reporting on some preliminary findings that global human produced emissions for 2014 will show a decoupling....since a flat or a slight decline in emissions at a time when global economies are supposedly increasing at 3%. If true, this would be the first time that a decline in human produced CO2 emissions occurred without an economic decline in the global economies. It would mean that a growing shift to non-carbon emitting energy sources is bearing fruit. But, cynic that I am, I have another statistical term for everyone to consider: Jevon's Paradox - because past examples, like improved exhausts to reduce air pollution, show that, in a consumer demand-driven economy, ecological improvements are short term relief that cannot stop the long term trend towards more pollution and ecological destruction. In the air pollution case, more cars on the roads soon erased those improvements created by adding new catalytic converters to the exhausts, and improving fuel efficiency. Worth noting that CO2 is only one greenhouse gas. The other main culprit - methane CH4, is being released at an increasingly rapid rate in the Arctic, as permafrost melts and frozen methane, trapped in colder ocean layers as clathrates, are being released. There is still nothing resembling a complete assessment for how much stored methane is locked in to oceans and soils, or how much can be released at different temperature levels. What we have now, is the greatest physics experiment being done in human history; and the entire world is the laboratory for this experiment on the unknown! Just sayin, when the IPCC referees give a number of having 2 degrees C more room for global average temp increases, we are just taking the word of bureaucrats who've taken the percentages of risks and set up the public presentation as having some sort of carbon reserves that we can still safely burn before we enter that escalating rate of uncontrolled climate change. The promised reserve is coming from the same people who promised that Arctic Ocean would still have ice till the end of this century! And we aren't living in those times! It has to be taken into account that the changes being made today are going to take centuries or thousands of years to feel the full impacts. In the meantime, we continue adding more carbon to the atmosphere. If the oceans reach a saturation level and can't absorb more carbon, what happens then? Remember, up till now, it's been estimated that half of the carbon added to the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans. So, the oceans have already been the primary sink up till now. If that ends, we're in a spiral of rapid climate change....which has also happened in the past. There are no signs nor indications of any serious plan being proposed to deal with increasing carbon emissions, or the other ecological crises caused by overpopulation+ever-increasing economic demands. Endless growth is not compatible with life on a finite planet. At some point it starts breaking down, and that time may be starting sooner than we think.

I do, and I guess that puts me in a distinct minority among the male half of the population. When women are brought into jobs that are traditionally "men's work," the institution needs to be aware that there will inevitably be problems with sexual harassment, that can even extend right through to sexual assault and worse! Not every female employee will feel the same degrees of risk because of a wide variety of factors...including personality and shear physical size and strength. Point being that one young woman who says she's had no problems just happens to be 5'10" and has a background in martial arts...that's how she met her husband apparently! But, the exception doesn't prove the rule. Most of the women who were having problems, didn't know how to deal with them, or where to go to for help. Some started taking too many sick days, some just quit work. It took a couple or a few years until everything boiled up to the surface and the rest of us became aware of how serious the problem was. There is a basic, fundamental psychological issue that every man working in a mixed gendered environment has to become aware of....especially in situations like mine, where younger women are coming in to do those man's jobs: we still live in a patriarchy, regardless of what propaganda libertarians are flying today. And, whether it's ingrained or just something we adapt to in our culture, men feel a loss of prestige if a woman can also do the job. It's something that we may be trying to consciously fight against.....and we can do it if we try...but, at that gut level, where our unconscious thinking goes on, most guys are going to feel a loss of status if they see women doing their jobs. If they're not doing a gut-check, they can fall into the trap of cycling between sexual advances/and showing contempt for women trying to do men's work. As with racism and a whole lot of other prejudices that come from a very deep subconscious level, we have to draw them up to the surface - where our higher conscious critical thinking is done, before we can feel assured of truly being 'unprejudiced.'

That only works in the libertarian fantasyland of level playing fields! In the real world, a lot of hiring...and most of the promotions to higher positions afterwards are the products of sheer nepotism. Not that I've wanted to be in management....at least not since I've been about 25 ...but where I work, all of the young hotshots who want to wear a whiteshirt, play golf and know that if they can find their way into the right foursome, they're more than halfway there! If employers don't like certain minorities, or want to hire women or promote either to higher levels, they can come up with all kinds of alibis to explain their hiring and promotional choices. Without clear targets, it doesn't get done....or at least very few get through. The only thing the market seems to be good at, is concentrating wealth at the top....everything else is in jeopardy if left up to market forces alone! If you're going to excuse racist whites in the South for their bad attitude towards ending Segregation, you need to look at the full picture! Sad fact is that...in a highly hierarchical society (which is 99.9999% in the last 5000 years), every interest group in that hierarchy measures their wellbeing by their position in that pyramid. So, if you look back and take an historical perspective, the great failure of Lincoln and the Union forces during Reconstruction of the South, was to quickly reappoint the old Confederates and allow nearly all of them to run for re-election. And they did nothing to stop the rise of the KKK or stop the pseudo-slavery industry. The simple fact was that most of these whites who were clamouring for segregation, voter-restriction laws to prevent blacks from sending their people to higher office, and stripping black farmers of the land they had been granted after the end of Slavery....all of these things were mostly a product of poor whites who didn't have a pot to piss in, and never owned slaves or came from slaveholding families themselves! Their racism and contempt for Africans was based solely on the fact that in the highly hierarchical Antebellum South, where a small number of wealthy white plantation and business owners controlled almost all the wealth, those white farmers at the bottom of the heap felt self-assured that at least they couldn't end up in last place! And all that ended with the end of Slavery; because that raised the possibility that they could be last. And that mindset of the Jim Crow Era carried right throughout the decades afterwards after official slavery ended, and creative subterfuges had to be concocted to maintain the old systems of oppression! That's what your 'resentful' anti-integration protesters were really motivated by. And sad fact is they still won't admit their underlying motives even to this day! Who ever said there weren't women or minorities who weren't selfish and too self-centered to consider that...maybe if pressure from above made it possible for them to have some career advancement, they might want to help out someone else. This reminds me of the "breaking the glass ceiling" concern of professional and upper middle class women looking at the top jobs. A couple of years ago, the jaw-dropping example of narcissism and greed that continues on with a female CEO, should have provided a good enough example that having a woman rise to the top of the toxic heap does not necessarily do anything for employees - in brief, Marrissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO, built a private nursery next to her office so she could have time to spend with her young daughter. Not only did Mayer fail to provide the same childcare benefit for employees, she even refused to allow those with young children who could do some of their work from home to do so! She insisted they all report for duty every day at the office, and hire babysitters for their children if they wanted to keep their jobs. One law for the rich...another for the rest of us....same old, same old, no matter what gender!

Is loading up a general forum with reams of mathematical formulas much different than trolling? I don't care whether or not you get all this published or want it published and peer-reviewed. I want to know what it has to do with the real life climate model that we all have to live in? That has been the primary criticism of Richard Lindzen and the rest of the very small minority of climate research claiming low carbon sensitivity - why doesn't the new models match historic evidence? Right now, glaciers are melting...even in the Antarctic...CO2 levels are accelerating at the same time we are being told that human carbon emissions have fallen...other negative effects of carbon like ocean acidification, aren't addressed, and rainforests and every other non-human related ecological niches are in rapid decline....hence the accelerating rates of species extinctions. So, we may have lots of environmental crises all happening together at the same time....besides rising CO2 levels. So, whether our atmosphere is higher/or lower than previous estimates on sensitivity to carbon, will it even matter that much and why?

I first heard of this phenomena they call "Walmarting" or "walmartization" from some of my Michigan relations several years ago, as they found their small, local stores were closing down as more and more people drove to the Walmart or Target stores, instead of shopping locally. Once one of the big box stores (usually Walmart) has bankrupted the competition with their low, low prices, those prices start going up, up, up afterwards, when they establish something close to a local retail monopoly! My beef with Futureshop's business model is having a bunch of kids hanging around you trying to sell you home theaters or some other expensive crap they can make a modest commission at. Then when you just need accessories or something cheap behind one of those locked cabinets, you have to chase them down....I told one twit who ran off to answer questions from a prospect in the TV dept:"just give me the keys kid, and I'll go get it myself!" Then I ended up buying most electronics stuff online, like everyone else does these days. So, I'm not going to miss Futureshop, or Best Buy...never was a customer of theirs.

Some good news for a change! It's a good thing Harper didn't title it something like "patriot act" or it would have been rubberstamped without question or 2nd thought!