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Business Survival in a society ruled by Avarice and Meta’s Moral Choices

Much of today’s society is run by the ideology of Avarice. That is things are primarily judged by do they make money. If they do not then they are considered worthless. A human is valuable only in so much as they have the ability to make, spend or control the spending of money. This is not the only ideology but at present in my opinion in the West it is the dominant one. This has been even more the case since the last American elections where as far as I can tell a group of people were elected for whom Avarice is their dominant virtue. The rest of it, which is nasty indeed, is just ways to make sure money comes to them and not to others.

Upto their election, after Elon Musk bought out Twitter and destroyed it, Facebook and Meta were seen as more responsible social media empires. Not good but better than an awful lot of others. They did have fact checking and did have sanctions against trolling and such bullying behaviours. These of course implied limits to free speech but early days in the internet had shown that for true free speech to exist a strong policing of respectful language was necessary. Some people inevitably fall foul of this. The present President of the USA is one of these. Please realise if strong moderation in the early days of Bulletin Boards had not become the norm, Facebook, Twitter(X), Instagram, TikTok and such would not have come about. The evolution of social media would have died with Bulletin Boards as the trolls drove everyone else off and nobody but people like that would touch them. All that would exist is email discussions and probably things like Whatsapp where only people you know are added. We would still have the bullying albeit on a smaller scaler but we would not have the social influencers.

When the Nazi party came to power in Germany, business has the choices of adapting to their policies or facing the sanctions for not doing so. The Nazi party regulation meant 20% of small businesses went under. If there is a bigger company you can see, how pressure can be brought to bear so it will self regulate.

Zuckerberg wants to keep Facebook in the American Market which is Facebook’s biggest revenue earner. Europe is big enough to be a worry but if he has to choose between North America and Europe, North America will win every time. Zuckerberg is smart, he would have seen at least six months in advance which way the election was going. Donal Trump also did not like the fact that Zuckerberg donated money in 2001 to “donated roughly $400 million to nonprofits in 2020 to help state and local governments conduct a presidential election during an unprecedented pandemic” and had threatened him over that. So he decided he needed to make a rapprochment with Donald Trump. You can read about that rapprochment in the Business Insider.

So Zuckerberg and therefore Meta chose to side with Trump, may be I am wrong about the financial reasons. Zuckerberg gives another narrative, but one that I find too convenient. It makes me feel nervous on Facebook, it will make lots of other people feel nervous on FACEBOOK. Maybe I am wrong about greed, the need to make money to stay afloat there.

Did AI Change Facebook?

I am not providing answers here I am raising a question.

I am going to be honest, there have/are times when I end up scrolling through Facebook. This particularly happens when I am down and finding it difficult to focus. I find the scrolling provides a relief. Part of what I hope with this break from Facebook is that I can find better ways of coping with those times such as making the habit of picking up a book or doing one or so of the zillion jobs I am procrastinating on. At the moment the top two are doing a puzzle on my phone (Mathdoku) and going for a short walk but I hope to widen the options and up my ability to cope with boredom. I still find myself wanting to reach for Facebook. I have it tied down pretty well on both my phone and computers so I have not done so yet.

Following an nasty bout of flu December I ended up more down than I have been for several years and thus the scrolling got worse. It is no good saying just pick up a book, I do not have the concentration to do that in that state and the two minutes of focus just suit my brain in that state. I am not doom scrolling, far more likely to watch Irish Dance, gymnasticss, travel blogs, social interest or renovation blogs than doom laden scenarios. Basically the stuff I would read about in lifestyle magazines in 1980s and 90s. Throw in some spirituality blogs and you basically get what I looked at. It sounds pretty harmless.

Except Facebook would start trying to take me onto new creators who I had not been on before. Sometimes I found someone I enjoyed but some were mildly weird but rarely very weird and I just moved on. Then things began to change. Firstly the videos became shorter. I would no longer get a full episode but only the highlights of a video or the first part and no ability to follow on. I also began to feel that these were being posted by other channels than the original videos.

Then in January this year I got tonnes and tonnes of really weird videos. Videos that used videos with unrelated audio. I did not like this. I felt as if I was being manipulated. The videos’ audio was a male narrated voice that sounded artificial to me. It did not have the cadences of a natural speaker and it was the same voice on every single video regardless of the content. Initially there was some matching of the audio to the actual content of the video but eventually it felt as if they were two separate things.

I responded to this by doing a very tight policy on what I watched and what I liked and cutting my time watching. It pulled things back but I had to be hyper-vigilant or they started coming back into watching.

The only thing I could think of for producing this sort of video was that they were trying to produce an AI version of a successful video. It had gone around the internet looking for what were viral videos, looked for what was the transcript of audio for the videos that went viral and then found what was a popular narrators voice. Then combined the three in what was decidedly spooky.

I could control it on Facebook but it took constant vigilance and with struggling to focus it was only a matter of time before that vigilance lapsed.

Why I am Not on Facebook this Lent

This is to make clear why I am taking a break (indeed already have been taking a break) from Facebook this Lent. I have decided for my mental and spiritual well being this Lent to give up Facebook. I have for the last month or so not been on Facebook very much at all and I intend to cut out the remaining bit for the entirety of Lent. No I am not going to be looking for othe Social Media at this time. I am on a old fashioned BB Forum and will remain there but otherwise I will be absent

My main reason for this is self care. In the wake of the coming of the Trump administration I started listening to the friends on Facebook in America and I became overwhelmed with the news that they were posting. I did not get care fatigue, I just could not cope. I was like a sponge soaking up the pain and outrage they were going through. I was not helping them, and I was making myself ill. I needed to limit my contact with news. I am doing so and part of that is not being on Facebook

At the same time, I am asking myself hard questions about the nature of the World we live in and how I live in that world. I am needing space to think and to discern. This is very Lenten, I know. The way Facebook aims to grab ones attention and hold it is not conducive to this. I need time out of the shallow cluttered streams that are social media. I am taking Lent to do this. My hope is that during Lent I will be able to post a series of thoughts on this blog as I make progress a long the way. This is only part of a much bigger discernment process.

I am therefore planning on not being on Facebook at all during Lent. At Easter I will decide whether I am coming back to Facebook or whether I am leaving altogether and therefore will be deleting my account.

The One Change the Church could make to reduce Future Scandals

Like many Christians who are still loyal to the institutional church, I am tired and fed up with the number of scandals that are coming out into public knowledge. This Webpage on scandals across denominations is out of date but at least covers several denominations in the UK. That is just safeguarding, it does not deal with financial fraud, bullying (but clergy can bully laity as well) or false advertising. Do not even get me started on discrimination. Let me be honest the dark side of church is very dark and I know it.

I will say what will not fix it. A new institutional structure will not sort it. This is often what is proposed by people who have been caught up in these scandals. If it is a structured denomination then they go onto set up an independent church that freed from the damages of the institutional church can go back to ‘Biblical’ basics. If they have been damaged by an independent church then they say the Church should have more accountability and structure to avoid this happening and tend to seek out the more formal structured forms.

The only real difference structure makes is whether you want a lot of small scandals or a few large ones. A small independent chapel that has acted with impropriety is not news. It is simply an everyday occurrence. The rest of the independent churches are unaffected and go on living their lives as normal. The lack of accountability means that it only takes one or two bad people in the congregation to be not on the straight and narrow and the whole chapel is in scandal.

Now compare with a big denomination such as the Roman Catholic Church or the CofE and there you have the accountability. The problem is that when the accountability system becomes on the side of the corrupt then the evil uses the accountability structure to spread itself through the institution. Harder to get started but when it does catch it spreads. Each member of the covering for others who are implicated in the scandal and thus becoming participants themselves. To talk in terms of disease, evil in these churches is not endemic, the accountability keeps it in check. However, when it manages to infect the accountability system then the accountability system actually becomes a means of spreading the infection and then you get a pandemic.

To continue with the viruse metaphor then you go from endemic version in independent churches rather than the pandemics of the more structured churches. That is you will find if you listen closely an almost continual stream of allegations about what is happening in specific independent churches. Some of these churches may be large with thousands of members but the evil is to a certain extent contained within the church. There is no accountability system to spread it to other churches. It is also easy for other independent churches to think because it is happening in another congregation it has nothing to do with them

Neither form is good. Those with in-between structures such as small denominations or ones with looser forms of connections between churches seem to follow something like flu with ‘seasonal’ spates of scandals happening every few years. Basically, there is a negative correlation between frequency of outbreak and severity. I am indebted to St Thomas Aquinas for this observation for without his theory of governance I would have struggled to it but I am also grateful to Mark Buchanan book Ubiquity for making me aware the that many social aspect seem to organise on a power law and the more structure the stronger the bigger the power is.

So if it is not structure, what is it that the Church has wrong? My answer is that it is actually its belief in its Ecclesiology. The church is very good at promoting itself as a heavenly ordained, the people of God and the bride of Christ. It forgets to mention that it is also a human institution, a company of sinners and the great whore of Babylon. The best you get is an admittance that there is both a heavenly church and an earthly church. What I want to suggest is for us on earth a better Ecclesiology that looks at both elements is important.

There are however some important provisos about what I am saying. I am not saying that the Church is mediocre, it isn’t. Mediocracy is something the church rarely is. It is like the little girl in the nursery rhyme who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. When it is good it is very very good and when it is bad it is horrid. To look at it another way, the Church’s capacity for evil is created by its capacity for good. I am also not saying that there are good and bad churches. There undoubtedly are better and worse churches but the close dance between good and evil is intrinsic to the nature of the Earthly church. The church can be so thoroughly nasty precisely because she has the capacity to be some beatifically good.

What I am saying is the Earthly church as humans experience her is actually a battleground with hand to hand combat between the forces of Good and Evil. We all love the illusion that we have joined up on the good side and the other is bad. The illusion is to misunderstand the analogy. We are not the foot soldiers fighting the battle; we are the ground on which they are treading. What is more, the two sides have not fought themselves to a standstill but there are real victories and real defeats happening all around us. Sometimes we are going to be on the good side and sometimes we are going to be on the bad, and we are going to have to choose over and over again.

This is why stories that enable us to ask questions of why there are those who are so opposed to the church out there are important. We, the Church, including me, need to learn a humility, for the Church has betrayed and been betrayed a thousand times in this battle and we so often by our assuming that we are on the right side only add to the problem for so often in that assuming we are party to the betrayal. Too often we are the elder son, not really sure why the father wants to welcome back the younger son, maybe unaware how our bullying contributed to his leaving in the first place.

Thus cultivation of humility by all within the church, this willingness to listen to those who are hurting, yes, but also a willingness to admit we did not have it right in the past and we do not have it right now but are working at it. A willingness to admit that abuse happens, that we sometimes overlook abuse and we know that is wrong, but we are working on it. That we fail to act on the command to love, we fail to protect the weak and the vulnerable and often we ignore the violence in the use of power within our structures but we are working on it. We will not get it perfectly right this side of the parousia, we strive to live up to being the Bride of Christ but being human too often succumb to being the Whore of Babylon. Until Christ restores everything we will unfortunately not be one without the other and though we will work at defeating the Whore of Babylon within us, the final victory is Christ’s and Christ’s alone.

Christmas Chocolate Poll

This is mainly for people who get chocolates from me at Christmas. I am thinking I need to make a smaller selection this year as the normal gannet feeding grounds (IT Services Buildings) are closed due to Coronavirus. This means I actually need to be careful over quantities. Also, I expect to be sending out fewer boxes. I would therefore like to do some recipient feedback. The poll covers those I made last year

This poll is no longer accepting votes

Who made the Blind Watch Maker

I have decided that it is time that someone did this. I am not the best creative writer out there, nor am I an evolutionary biologist, but for at least the last twenty years the following has been begging to be written.

Firstly let my say honestly in my opinion evolution is elegant. It is an elegant solution to how to maximise the life sustained in an eco-system. Its elegance is that of a good mathematics solution. Mathematics has its own aesthetics, the modern computer solutions which take hours of computing power and involve going through every possible permutation are ugly. The neat classical proof of something in a dozen lines from first principles is elegant. The problem with the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem is that it is ugly and we suspect that what Fermat actually had was a very elegant proof although bigger than the margin. So proven but Fermat’s proof is not found and some mathematicians will go on looking for that proof. Mathematicians suspect that such proof if it exists probably takes less than a hundred pages and would probably open up whole new areas of mathematics.

So then I am using “elegant” in this sense when I am talking of evolution. You might suspect with the diversity that occurs evolution was actually quite complex but it does not seem to be. There seems to be two principles:

Given that only some of the creatures manage to pass their pattern to the next generation
There is a process by which genes within animals are able to mutate and change within a generation.

Given these two you have an evolutionary process. These two fairly simple processes are what drives the whole of evolution on this planet and produces the vast variety of life that exists here. That too me seems to be extremely elegant.

However there is also something peculiar, the processes have to be carefully tuned. It must not be that all creature patterns pass onto the next generation. This would mean no space for adaptation, over population or we would live in a static universe. For some reason this universe does not seem to like static stasis only dynamic stasis.

Secondly the rate of mutation must be controlled. Too fast and you would never get species, too slow and life would die out when something changes. The pace of change has to be right.

In other words to get the abundant variety of life there is no earth the parameters have had to be tuned fairly precisely, as precisely as any mechanical device.

I therefore put to Mr Dawkins and his ilk that the creation from design can be written not from some marvel from evolution such as the human eye but from the process of evolution itself. Precisely understood evolution is an elegant, finely tuned process that has all the hall marks of designer as much if not more so than any marvel it has produced.

Now I don’t personally buy the argument from design, I am afraid I go with Hume and acknowledge that showing elegance and fine tuning is not enough but that you must also show purpose and honestly the best guesses at purpose are just that guesses, however much they are dressed up in religious language.

What I do want to do, is make people aware of what the classical idea of creation within Christian theology is. The first thing is to be aware that God’s pan-time existence is very different from human. If we experience life as a viewer in the movie theatre, God experiences it far more as the director at the cutting table. It is of course wrong, we interact with the movie and for God there is never any scene which does not have his attention. It seem natural then that God can be as much responsible for the processes by which we see the universe is created, as he can be for creating elements within it. In the end these processes are only other elements.

My stance on depression

I picked up a friend on Facebook which says:

“Depression is not a sign of weakness, it is a sign that you have been trying to be strong for too long. Put this as your status if you know someone who has or has had depression. Will you do it, and leave it on your status for at least an hour? Most people won’t, but 1 in 3 of us will suffer at some point in our lives. Show your support. I copied and pasted, will you?”

Now I have toyed with taking up the challenge and putting it on my perspective but have not for two reasons.

It is manipulative trying to get people to support this statement about depression. I don’t like chain messages, I think they are almost as bad a chain mail
It is factually in accurate, Depression is common but one in three is not even featured in Mind’s estimates for Mental Distress. The worst being 1 in 4 and that covers all mental health cases even those with such mild distress they don’t go to the doctor. Secondly being strong too long is not the sole cause of depression. Just like falling out of trees is not the sole cause of broken legs. For some it no doubt is, for others it can be a whole host of things.

So where do I stand.

Firstly I suffer from Mental Health Distress, I am/have been on anti-depressants for more than five years, treating mild to moderate depression, I also take medication for an anxiety complaint. However if you met me you would not pick this up very easily. Some of this is helped by the fact mine takes the “smiling” form indeed I smile more when on anti-depressants than off them. However it leaves me with a lot of very physical symptoms. I get tired very easily, need a lot of time alone, suffer from migraines and get other painful symptoms (yes that is physical not emotional pain). When I was bad I lost the ability to concentrate for more than a few seconds (I took to reading books with a rule basically so I knew which line I was on) and became very un-proactive (it is very hard to get the energy for anything if you feel totally exhausted all the time). I do a lot despite this partially because the anxiety stays better under control if I am busy, partly because boredom is a good way of triggering depression symptoms for me and partly that is who I am.

I am telling this not simply to state my credentials but also so you realise that the form my mental health distress is unusual. There are many people out there with far more common forms of depression. For many overwhelming sense of sadness is a major feature. Just because I am up and doing things (well I am either that or curled in a small ball in my bed) does not mean other people even with similar diagnoses are able to be up and doing things. Depression does not come in only one flavour.

Also what I have experienced is relatively mild, there are lots more serious forms out there. I have no special right to insight by virtue of this experience, there are forms that although I try to empathise with I do not really experience. I have little tendency towards either substance abuse (including alcohol) and self harm for starter. Both of these symptoms are experienced by a significant number of people who are suffering from mental health distress. In some cases I suspect they are attempts to relieve emotional pain rather than symptoms.

Equally there is no single cause of mental health issues. Yes some of mine is hereditary, some is due to poor life choices and some is due to life events over which I had little or no control. I suspect I am not the only person to have multiple causes. Other people may have theirs ‘created’ by long term abuse, or dealing with tragedy close at hand or even other disability or physical illness. There are no doubt other contributing causes. Stress plays a role as does unexpressed anger but they are not the sole cause.

What perhaps characterises many mental illnesses more than anything else is that thought patterns differ markedly from the healthy. In mild forms these can almost be intangible to those around a person, perhaps a tendency to be slightly more pessimistic or worried over things but not much else. Quite often what people don’t realise is that the individual is making a huge effort to function normally. As it trips into moderate, the person still has an understanding of what normal is, but they are not able to make the effort to function in that way and inevitably display more ill behaviours. In my experience people really strive long and hard to retain some connection with normal thought patterns. However with severe the person actually has lost connection at all with normal thought patterns. What is also true is the vast percentage of people suffering from mental distress are in the mild category, the headline grabbing categories are in the severe. The services are such that there is little or no help available for people who are mild. It is not good for even the severe. Yes that means the vast majority of such people struggle on with the help of friends and family.

However to say that it is a characteristic of mental illness to have dysfunctional thought patterns is not to say that it is not physical, it is markedly physical in a variety of ways. Many people who have mental health problems will manifest physical symptoms, I already mentioned I suffer pain, but in set circumstances it can also cause me to vomit or to shake like a leaf. Just because a symptoms origin is in the brain does not stop it being distressing for the individual who is going through it. Nobody likes eating a meal then heaving it all back.Especially if you are out celebrating with friends.What is more physical treatments work, sometimes these can be as simple as mineral supplements, exercise and such.Even things like massage and aroma therapy have brought some relief to some. Other times they are complex drug regimes.There is no barrier between the mental and the physical.

Talk therapies can work and are useful. The success of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and associated therapies is to be welcomed. They are not a cure all, but they are a major step forward and at the very least make people suffering from mental distress more skillful at keeping contact with normality.

So what as someone undergoing mental distress do I want. Well firstly don’t define me as that, I do lots of other things and the more you help me hold onto those other things the more you help me function normally. Secondly when I can’t do something or my behaviour becomes odd don’t assume it is about you, its more often me trying to cope with my illness. I like many others am actually quite skilled at dealing with my illness, I can and do manage it, sometimes trusting me to manage and ask when I need help is the most constructive thing you can do. It is amazing how often people’s need to help means that I have to manage that on top of my illness. For those who want some idea of how draining this is, please read this article on spoon theory, and understand that if I am having to tell you how to help I am using my spoons to do that. Finally oddly if I start withdrawing, please try an make the effort to keep low level contact. What it normally means is that I am personally not able to sustain the contact in the form at the time, if you can take the effort out of doing it, then I probably will appreciate it. There is a gap between when I can make the effort to keep in contact and when I am no longer able to sustain contact.In that gap gentle contact is likely to sustain me rather than allow me to fall further. I know I am usually the proactive one.

On a more general note, you do know someone who has suffered mental health distress, but they may not be willing to be open about this.Try therefore when someone is behaving differently not to jump to conclusions and certainly don’t jump to conclusion because you hear someone has a mental health diagnosis. We remain individuals in our illnesses. More importantly if you have the opportunity please try and find out more about mental health issues, you never know it may be you that needs the knowledge next.

The Discipline of Joy

This is a response to Chapter four in John Ortberg’s book “The Life you have Always Wanted“. He does not say that Christian’s should be happy and smiley all the time. That is bad theology but he does suggest we should practice joy but then does not tell us what joy is.

I am going to suggest that what he means be joy is those practices that lead to celebration and I therefore think that a two fold approach is needed

Stage one is a practice which is very close to Buddhist mindfulness, the only difference being that it tends to seek out pleasant experiences rather than just taking any experience. That is when something good happens you take the time to actually experience it, enjoy it, savour it, appreciate it, there is not a good verb in English. John suggests spending a whole day doing this each week. That I would not think possible in modern life, too many commitments but it is possible to have the occasional spoil yourself day and/or to try and have five minutes when you just let yourself savour what you are experience. It might be the warm blankets over you as you lie down to go to sleep. Just feel their weight and the warmth reflecting back from your body. What I find really good for doing this is to write poems. Most of mine start with me just trying to capture some experience in words. I have to experience it first before I can find the words.

Stage two is complimentary and that is to practice gratitude. No I do not mean the idea of thanking God for the cut knee. I mean when you come aware of something as given, whether from God or from another human being, just acknowledging that. It takes all of two seconds to do. Somebody opens a door for you and you say “thanks”, a person serves you in a shop and you say “thanks” even a driver lets you into a flow of traffic and you wave your hand. It makes you aware of how many things you receive each day. Then there are things that are not due to any other human but are not under your control either: it not raining on a wet day when you leave your brolly at home, the flavour of blackberries picked while out walking, having the health you have or a good family and friends even a nuch needed parking space. To acknowledge that much of life is given and as a Christian I see it as given by God so it is natural to thank him.

The thing is that together the two work together to provide a motor out of which celebration naturally happens. A life savouring the generosity of God, can there really be a better basis for joy.

That is not to say nasty things don’t happen they do and it is totally right to be cross when they do but a discipline like this helps so that nasty things don’t overwhelm us. It provides hope in times when hope otherwise seems far away. Sometimes all we can do is savour the pain and offer that to God but God takes even that.

Graduate Tax

Is it just me but I assumed that graduate tax would be a on all graduates. Indeed the only ones who should be let off (and maybe be able to claim their loans back during the first decade) are the ones who went in the last twenty years and had to pay fees. The rest, self included have absolutely no excuse not to pay the graduate tax. People like me, got not just our undergraduate tuition at tax payers expense but also a grant to live off and then a second round of this for a second degree albeit only for a single year.

Alright so we have not planned for the tax, but then we are nearly all in better paying jobs and more settled than those just out of University i.e. we are better able to pay the tax..

If the don’t feel they can do this, then there should be a grad tax as well as current fees rather than increasing current fees

Jengie

Why so few free church liturgists attend SLS conference

Right this is the first of two short pieces in spired by attending this conference. I was the only URC person there, although there were a couple of Methodists, a solitary Pentecostalist and an American Reformed Pastor. Apart from that everyone was either high church Anglican or Roman Catholic. At one point someone said that they wished that more “Free Church liturgical theologians would come as those that do are interesting.” Well here is my reason why such people don’t come.

Firstly the discourse of the conference is totally against them coming. They define themselves as “liturgical” and free churches as “non-liturgical”. Now why would someone defined by a liturgical conference as “non-liturgical” come to it? They are wanting Non-liturgical liturgical theologians to attend. Sorry that is like asking for hot cold water or is oxymoronic. If they want free church liturgists and liturgical theologians they need to make a space for them.

Secondly our liturgists and liturgical theologians are very different from theirs. The prime task of them is to write the liturgy and they do it week in and week out. They are not primarily critics of liturgy and by that I mean those who bring their mental faculties to the task of analysing how liturgy is produced. They are primarily artisans producing liturgy week in week out. It would never occur to them that you might invite in later a poet, or musician to the creation of liturgy as if there is some secondary function they could add. The skills they bring are part and parcel of the task of creating liturgy.

Let me outline what skill a great liturgists needs in free church tradition:

The poets sense of words
The dramatists sense of flow and drama, and the liturgy as something performed
The musicians sense of the role of music
The theologians knowledge of doctrine
A religious sense of the pattern and shape of prayer through life
A sating in the Biblical text, sometimes seen with elderly Presbyterians with the Psalms where not only can they summon verses to memory at will, but their language is shaped by it.
A biblical scholars sensitivity to the meaning and interpretations of the text.
A Sociologists awareness of how people participate and comprehend the liturgy and the role it plays in religious formation.
A critques understanding of the tradition of liturgy

At the moment only about four of these functions are acknowledged in the conference. Where were the workshops where people brought examples of their own work and worked on improving it? Where were the discussions on what people understood of the liturgy and took with them? Where was the collection of folk liturgy, the prayers of the everyday people? If the Society for Liturical Studies, wants to include those from the Free churches in England it is going to have to make a space and begin to understand that valuable though the historical and critical study of Liturgy is, it is not the sole concern of an active working liturgist, at least not when there is Sundays Worship to prepare and you cannot just pick up the book and read it.