This morning David A. Graham’s piece at Atlantic, “Big Cities Are Ungovernable”, caught my eye. I suspected that I knew what it was about and I was right. It was a reaction to Lori Lightfoot’s rejection at the polls. Here’s the meat of it:

A mayor can try to hire more police officers or reform the department, but that’s slow. She can seek new leaders, but Chicago, for example, has churned through police superintendents recently to little effect. (The current one yesterday announced plans to resign, facing the alternative of being sacked by whichever candidate wins the April runoff.) Pushing too hard risks alienating police, who can either come down with “blue flu,” potentially sending crime higher, or line up behind a challenger; the Chicago police union endorsed Paul Vallas, the top vote-getter on Tuesday. Most cities have little control over gun regulations. A mayor can try to address root causes through economic development, but that, too, is slow and subject to larger trends.

Lightfoot proved (ironically enough) not to be fast enough on her feet to navigate these currents, but her failure should be seen not just as one politician’s misstep but as a sign of the ungovernability of big cities today. She’s the biggest major-city incumbent to get turned out in some time, but she could be a trendsetter.

I reject the thesis. Cities are not “ungovernable”. Neither presidents nor governors nor mayors are sovereigns. Cities, states, and countries have always been complex. What has changed is that relatively inexperienced people are being elected to high political office and they don’t have the political skills to do their jobs.

What do I mean by that? Creating a base of support, carving out alliances, and rewarding supporters are all parts of the job of mayor, of governor, of president. Those aren’t written into the statutes but they’re parts of the job nonetheless. Lori Lightfoot had never held elective office before being elected mayor of Chicago. She had no constituency. She didn’t try to create one. She tried to rule by fiat. She built no alliances. She didn’t think she had to. She alienated lots of people with her imperious manner and occasionally bizarre behavior.

Now she knows better but it’s too late to do Chicago any good.

The obvious solution is not a popular one: leave outsiders outside. Elect governors to the presidency; elect mayors to be governor; finding good mayors is hard. You can elect individuals who’ve served on the city council but they may lack the organizational skills to be mayor. County states attorneys are good possibilities—that was the job Richie Daley held before he ran to be mayor but in the Daley home the kitchen table conversation was obviously Chicago politics and the mechanics of being mayor. Some business executives might be a possibility, particularly if their companies are large enough for bureaucracy and politics to be significant parts of running them.

When you look at a failed mayor like Lori Lightfoot in all likelihood you will see someone without any of those skills. Paul Vallas had been CEO of the Chicago Public Schools. He is light in experience with elective office. Brandon Johnson has never held a job that required significant organizational skill. He undoubtedly has political skills and he has a constituency—the CTU. Is that a qualification or a disqualification?

I am taking the rare step of quoting in full this letter to the editors of the New York Times, published as an opinion piece titled “America Is In Over Its Head”:

The greatest blunder President Vladimir Putin may have made so far in Ukraine is giving the West the impression that Russia could lose the war. The early Russian strike on Kyiv stumbled and failed. The Russian behemoth seemed not nearly as formidable as it had been made out to be. The war suddenly appeared as a face-off between a mass of disenchanted Russian incompetents and supercharged, savvy Ukrainian patriots.

Such expectations naturally ratcheted up Ukrainian war aims. President Volodymyr Zelensky was once a member of the peace-deal camp in Ukraine. “Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are ready to go for it,” he declared one month into the conflict. Now he calls for complete victory: the reconquering of every inch of Russian-occupied territory, including Crimea. Polls indicate that Ukrainians will settle for nothing less. As battles rage across Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukraine’s leaders and some of their Western backers are already dreaming of Nuremberg-style trials of Mr. Putin and his inner circle in Moscow.

The trouble is that Ukraine has only one surefire way of accomplishing this feat in the near term: direct NATO involvement in the war. Only the full, Desert Storm style of deployment of NATO and U.S. troops and weaponry could bring about a comprehensive Ukrainian victory in a short period of time. (Never mind that such a deployment would most likely shorten the odds of one of the grimmer prospects of the war: The more Russia loses, the more it is likely to resort to nuclear weapons.)

Absent NATO involvement, the Ukrainian Army can hold the line and regain ground, as it has done in Kharkiv and Kherson, but complete victory is very nearly impossible. If Russia can hardly advance a few hundred yards a day in Bakhmut at a cost of 50 to 70 men, since the Ukrainians are so well entrenched, would Ukrainians be able to advance any better against equally well-entrenched Russians in the whole area between Russia and the eastern side of the Dnipro delta, including the Azov Sea coastline and the isthmus leading to Crimea? What has been a meat grinder in one direction is likely to be a meat grinder in the other.

Moreover, Russia has nearly switched its state onto a war economy setting, while the United States has yet to meet the war production needs of its foreign partners. The war has already used up 13 years’ worth of Stinger antiaircraft missile production and five years’ worth of Javelin missiles, while the United States has a $19 billion backlog of arms delivery to Taiwan. Western news reports have focused on the Russian men avoiding Mr. Putin’s draft orders, but the Kremlin still has plenty of troops to draw on, even after its call-up of 300,000 soldiers last September.

The debate about sending heavy war materials to Ukraine — which has consumed the German press in particular — is in this sense beside the point. It is not clear when all of the Leopard 1 and 2 and M1 Abrams tanks promised by NATO will be operational. Ukraine has requested 300 to 500 tanks, and NATO has promised only about 200.

That Mr. Zelensky has staked so much of his diplomacy on these armament shipments makes sense: He needs to communicate to the Kremlin that Ukraine is prepared for a long, slogging conflict. But in terms of battle-ready material for the next six months, very little of the promised bounty will be deployable. If Mr. Zelensky wants to complete his self-image as Winston Churchill sooner rather than later, he will want to hasten the day when he can toast NATO’s — which is to say, America’s — entry into the conflict.

The problem for Kyiv is that — public assurances aside — Washington has no interest in directly entering the war. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has already voiced his view that total victory for either Russia or Ukraine is unachievable in the near term. President Biden and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, have been adamant about keeping the United States from directly entering the conflict. The American public has shown no appetite for direct involvement, either. The United States may even have an interest in keeping the fighting going as the war reduces Russia’s ability to operate elsewhere in the world, increases the value of American energy exports and serves as a convenient dress rehearsal for the rallying of allies and coordination of economic warfare against Beijing.

Less noticed is that the Kremlin’s war aims may have — out of necessity — been scaled back. Apparently reconciled to its inability to effect regime change in Kyiv and capture much more of Ukraine’s territory, Moscow now seems mostly focused on maintaining its positions in Luhansk and Donetsk and securing a land bridge to Crimea. These are territories that even in the best of circumstances would be difficult for Ukraine to reincorporate.

As it stands today, Ukraine’s economic future appears viable even without the territories currently occupied by Russia. Ukraine has not been turned into a landlocked country and it remains in control of seven of the eight oblasts with the highest G.D.P. per capita. Ukraine would risk jeopardizing this position in a counteroffensive. Paradoxically, continued fighting also serves some Russian interests: It allows Moscow more chances to pummel Ukraine into being a de facto buffer state, making it an ever less attractive candidate for NATO and European Union membership.

The historian Stephen Kotkin recently argued that Ukrainians may be better off defining victory as accession to the European Union rather than a complete recapture of all Ukrainian territory. And yet, except for countries that were neutral during the Cold War, each historical case of E.U. accession has been preceded by membership in NATO, which since the 1990s has acted as a ratings agency in Europe, guaranteeing countries as safe for investment. This fact is hardly lost on the Ukrainian population: Polls (which have mostly excluded Luhansk and Donetsk since 2014) show that interest in the country’s joining NATO appears to have jumped since the start of the conflict.

Only Washington ultimately has the power to decide how much of Ukraine it wants to bring under its umbrella. The actual official reluctance to include Ukraine in NATO has rarely been clearer, while the public embrace of Kyiv has never been more florid. In the meantime, European leaders may soon find themselves in the unenviable position of convincing Ukrainians that access to the common market and a European Marshall Fund is a reasonable exchange for “complete victory.”

I don’t agree with it in full. I do agree with this passage:

The trouble is that Ukraine has only one surefire way of accomplishing this feat in the near term: direct NATO involvement in the war. Only the full, Desert Storm style of deployment of NATO and U.S. troops and weaponry could bring about a comprehensive Ukrainian victory in a short period of time.

If you think otherwise, please present your plan.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune are talking about political machines, too:

Lori Lightfoot, who was cast out of office Tuesday night, was no machine politician. In fact, her future biographer likely will declare her to be, or have been, about as far from a machine politician as it is possible to travel. But when it came to Brandon Johnson, one of the candidates who won a spot in the runoff with Paul Vallas to succeed her, that old-school adjective reappeared Tuesday night.

Except the boss was not the Cook County Democratic Party but the Chicago Teachers Union.

Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd, marveled at Johnson’s ground support on polling day, saying there had been at least three CTU members or staffers in precincts he had visited Tuesday in neighborhoods such as Old Town, Streeterville, Lincoln Park, Wicker Park and the Gold Coast, Fran Spielman reported early Wednesday in the Sun-Times. Voters in those areas abandoned Lightfoot, who had warred with the CTU, in large numbers and chose the more progressive Johnson instead.

“They’re everywhere,” Hopkins told Spielman, referencing the CTU workers. “It’s a saturation ground game — even in precincts where Johnson was not expected to do well. If they have that many people to spare, that’s incredible. It’s something to see. This is the new machine.”

Hopkins, who is supporting Vallas, has a partisan view and agenda. But the evidence Tuesday night, when a lesser known candidate with largely socialist positions vanquished a sitting, center-left mayor with a growing national profile in sympathetic media outlets, certainly suggested he had a point. Much media attention had been paid to the vast amounts of money that the CTU had injected into the mayoral campaign, but the ground game probably proved to be the more significant mover of the numbers and perhaps a harbinger of what is to come in the April runoff.

An argument could be made that the politically pejorative “machine” can be applied to any coalition one does not support; you could call the business community a “machine,” or use it to describe the Fraternal Order of Police, or firefighters and first responders. Or you could apply the term to racially identifiable groups. And anyone who was out there ringing doorbells for their candidate was not only exhibiting their constitutional right but also showing admirable commitment to the political process.

But while we congratulate Johnson and Vallas on making it to the runoff, we do remind them of the long history of fealty to sponsoring organizations, leading to corruption and moral compromise. The old machine was often compared to the Politburo and not without reason. We note the importance of transparency. And we assert that asking about a candidate’s independence from a larger agenda is not only a fair question but also one that demands an honest answer. Especially if we are talking independence from an entity that is doing a very fine job of helping them get elected.

I haven’t seen a precinct captain around here for at least 20 years. There’s a good reason for that. Precinct captains were recruited by promising them cushy (sometimes no-show) patronage jobs and the political parties don’t have those to offer any more.

But the CTU does.

The Trib endorsed Vallas; the Sun-Times no longer endorses candidates.

It always catches my eye when an outlet with national distribution produces an editorial about Chicago and this Wall Street Journal editorial on the outcome of the mayoral primary election was no exception. Here’s the relevant passage:

Paul Vallas, the former schools superintendent, was the big winner on Tuesday with 33.8%, and his success shows how much voter priorities have changed. Chicago is a progressive city, and when things are going well voters have the luxury of picking candidates who massage their values. In 2019 Mr. Vallas was an also-ran in the mayor’s race, while Ms. Lightfoot went over well at Lincoln Park cocktail parties.

This year Mr. Vallas’s vow to stop the city-wide crime wave and fix broken schools resonated with voters. In 2022 Chicago’s homicide rate was five times higher than New York City’s and two and a half times higher than in Los Angeles. Those numbers don’t include the other felonies such as carjacking and theft that now plague the city’s streets.

On schools, Chicago voters are waking up to the damage from the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) that has become a political colossus focused on wielding progressive power instead of improving outcomes in city schools. About four-fifths of high-school students in Chicago Public Schools are not performing at grade level, but the system keeps graduating them. The union resists reform while using the threat of walkouts and strikes to extort higher salaries and bigger pensions. It resisted reopening schools for months during the pandemic—despite pleas from Ms. Lightfoot. No wonder Chicago has seen public-school enrollment fall by more than 80,000 students in the last decade.

Mr. Vallas will square off in April against second-place finisher (20.3% as of Wednesday) Brandon Johnson, a former union organizer who promised higher taxes and even more money for teachers and failing schools. It’s no exaggeration to say he is a wholly owned subsidiary of the CTU. The teachers current labor contract expires in 2024, and if Mr. Johnson wins the union will be on both sides of the negotiating table.

Mr. Johnson has received $931,308 from the CTU, as well as $1,557,846 from the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers, according to the Illinois Policy Institute. Other unions gave him $1.3 million, but the total of all his non-union contributions is less than $200,000.

The emphasis is mine. IMO “Chicago is a progressive city” is either an exaggeration or a misconception. Chicago is unquestionably a Democratic city but “Democratic” and “progressive” are not synonymous any more than “Republican” and “conservative” are. According to Pew Research 52% of Democrats are moderate, conservative, or very conservative. I would say that most Chicago politicians are plain, old-fashioned “bring home the bacon” machine pols. I’m not sure where that places them on the political spectrum. Probably anywhere that gets them re-elected or puts a dollar in their pockets. Yes, there are some actual committed progressives and, importantly, I believe that those punch above their weight. But Chicago isn’t progressive in the sense that New York, San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle are. Probably not even in the sense that Boston is.

I don’t know who will be elected in April. I know that I will vote for Vallas because he’s the only real chance that Chicago has. I don’t know who his primary contributors are but, if past campaigns are any gauge, they aren’t public employees unions as Brandon Johnson’s very obviously are based on that last paragraph quoted above.

Let’s not lose track of the reality that political contributions made by public employees unions are an inherently corrupt proposition. Their source is tax dollars. When those are recycled into political contributions they create pressure for higher taxes which produces more tax dollars to be recycled into political contributions. IMO there are only two remedies for that:

1. Ban public employees unions
2. Ban political contributions including in kind contributions made by public employees unions

Since I think there are good reasons for public employees to engage in collective bargaining, I support the second. If Brandon Johnson is elected mayor, he will owe the public employees unions that contributed to his primary and general election campaigns and we should expect him to pay off. That will not help Chicago. Neither will defunding the police.

BTW Paul Vallas’s promise to increase the number of police officers probably won’t help Chicago, either, for two reasons. First, Chicago already has more police officers relative to its population than other major cities and, second, the empirical evidence that more police officers translates into less crime is weak.

My own view is that although more bad mayors can drive additional nails into Chicago’s coffin if the city is to be saved rescue will need to come from Springfield or Washington.

Update

I neglected to mention that in the previous mayoral primary, the one that ultimately led to Lori Lightfoot being elected mayor, she did not get the plurality of votes of black Chicagoans. The plurality of black Chicagoans voted for the most conservative candidate running at that time.

Here’s an interesting development. A team in California and Japan has developed a design for a fusion reactor using hydrogen and boron rather than the coonventional dueterium and tritium that have been in use. Darius Snieckius reports at Recharge:

An innovative nuclear fusion technology that uses no radioactive materials and is calculated capable of “powering the planet for more than 100,000 years”, has been successfully piloted by a US-Japanese team of researchers.

California-based TAE Technologies, working with Japan’s National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), have completed first tests of a hydrogen-boron fuel cycle in magnetically-confined plasma, which could generate cleaner, lower cost energy that that produced by the more common deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion process.

“This experiment offers us a wealth of data to work with and shows that hydrogen-boron has a place in utility-scale fusion power. We know we can solve the physics challenge at hand and deliver a transformational new form of carbon-free energy to the world that relies on this non-radioactive, abundant fuel,” said Michl Binderbauer, CEO of TAE Technologies.

A spokesperson for NIFS, which formed its partnership with TAE in 2021, noted: “Hydrogen-boron… enables the concept of cleaner fusion reactors – this achievement is a big first step towards the realisation of a fusion reactor using advanced fusion fuel.”

The experiments were carried out in NIFS’ large helical device, known as a stellarator, but TAE is developing a so-called field-reversed configuration reactor that promises “a variety of benefits over stellarator and tokamak reactors, including having a compact footprint and more efficient magnetic confinement that will yield up to 100 times more power output, according to the scientists, who published their findings today in the journal Nature.

This new design doesn’t solve the problems that are holding back practical fusion but once those problems are solved it should allow the resultant reactors to be cleaner and safer.

Jason L. Riley devotes his Wall Street Journal column to an explanation of why you can’t blame crime on poverty:

The belief that poverty is the root cause of crime may be popular, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. For starters, most poor people aren’t criminals. In a previous era, when Americans were significantly poorer than they are today, crime rates were significantly lower. Crime during the Great Depression was lower than during the 1960s, a decade of tremendous economic growth and prosperity. In 1960 the black male homicide rate was 45 per 100,000. By 1990 it had climbed by more than 200% to 140 per 100,000, even though black average incomes by then were much higher, and the black poverty rate much lower, than 30 years earlier.

In a recently published book about criminal-justice reform, “Criminal (In)justice,” Rafael Mangual notes that this disconnect between crime and poverty continues today. Mr. Mangual writes that between 1990 and 2018, murders in New York City declined by 87%, a period during which the city’s poverty rate increased slightly. Black residents today “experience poverty at a lower rate (19.2 percent) than their Hispanic (23.9 percent) and Asian (24.1 percent) counterparts, who account for much smaller shares of the city’s gun violence.”

I would phrase it a little differently: I don’t think that poverty is the sole cause of crime and maybe not its most important cause. What is?

Some of the crime statistics lower than Chicago’s enjoyed by major cities like New York and Los Angeles can be explained by those cities smaller percentages of black population. Maybe there is a “critical mass” for street gangs analogous to what was found in the Bakke decision. That would explain a 20% difference in homicide rates between Chicago and New York but not a 500% difference.

I think that Chicago’s political corruption and a far too cozy relationship between black gangs and Chicago politicians are a major cause. That corruption extends right to the police department. The implications of that are unsettling. It means there is no quick and easy fix and in particular not one that will be effected by Chicago politicians. They can’t even be solved at the ballot box, not with voter turnouts as long as we’re seeing Chicago’s crime problems need solutions from Springfield and Washington.

I am not an expert on China and I don’t pretend to be one on TV. That said I’m probably more an expert on China than 97% of Americans. I wanted to call attention to this op-ed at the Washington Post by Nicholas Eberstadt:

China is in the midst of a quiet but stunning nationwide collapse of birthrates. This is the deeper, still largely overlooked, significance of the country’s 2022 population decline, announced by Chinese authorities last month.

As recently as 2019, demographers at the U.S. Census Bureau and the United Nations were not expecting China’s population to start dropping until the early 2030s. But they did not anticipate today’s wholesale plunge in childbearing.

Considerable attention has been devoted to likely consequences of China’s coming depopulation: economic, political, strategic. But the causes of last year’s population drop deserve much closer examination.

China’s nosedive in childbearing is a silent alarm. It signals deep disaffection with the bleak future the regime is engineering for its subjects. In this land without democracy, the birth collapse can be read as a landslide vote of no confidence in President Xi Jinping’s rule.

My immediate reaction to the piece was “now do the United States”. Here’s the U. S. birthrate:

and the U. S. marriage rate:

The statistics for the native born are actually somewhat worse than that—the birthrates of immigrants are slightly higher than for the native born.

If declining birth and marriage rates signal pessimism and a loss of confidence in the government in China, what do they signal here in the United States?

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has made history again. She is the first Chicago mayor in 40 years to fail to be re-elected. Now Paul Vallas will face Brandon Johnson in the runoff to be held in April. That will be a contest between the anointed candidate of the Fraternal Order of Police and the candidate endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union who has run on a platform of defunding the police. We’ll see.

Lori Lightfoot was elected four years ago largely on the basis of not being Toni Preckwinkle. She is still not Toni Preckwinkle but that wasn’t enough to be re-elected—she needed to be an effective mayor and has not succeeded at that. In addition to not being Toni Preckwinkle she prevailed in the primarily election last time by getting votes from the Northwest Side. She forgot the old dictum, “Dance with the one what brung you”.

Update

At the Sun-Times Fran Spielman quotes Joe Ferguson’s reasonable take on what happened:

“At the front end, she did not govern the way she ran. And at the back end, she ran the way she governed,” Ferguson said, apparently referring to Lightfoot’s recent warning that any South Side vote for “somebody not named Lightfoot is a vote for Chuy Garcia or Paul Vallas.” At that same campaign stop, she declared: “If you want them controlling your fate and your destiny, then stay home. Then don’t vote.”

“Her greater interest was in holding the power in a transactional way,” Ferguson said, “and not governing as the times called for and that she promised she would.”

Pressed for specifics, Ferguson pointed to Lightfoot’s own campaign themes and 2019 transition report. He argued the “vast majority” of promises made in that report “never got implemented and, in critical areas, she did the opposite of what she said she would do.”

Exhibit “A” was reforming the police department. It was supposed to be Lightfoot’s greatest strength. She served as Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Police Board president. She co-chaired the Task Force on Police Accountability, which championed a series of reforms laying the groundwork for a federal consent decree in the furor following the shooting of Laquan McDonald by Chicago police.

“She brought in, as the interim [police superintendent], the person in the United States who had successfully transformed a big-city police department under terms of a consent decree,” Ferguson said, referring to Charlie Beck, the retired Los Angeles police chief.

But then, “she brought in a permanent superintendent who undid all of that in a matter of two weeks, then never held him to account,” Ferguson added, referring to CPD Supt. David Brown, whom Lightfoot lured from Dallas.

All of Mayor Lightfoot’s opponents in the primary vowed to remove that permanent superintendent.

Update 2

Chicago Police Department Superintendent David Brown has residnged, effective March 16. ABC 7 Chicago reports:

CHICAGO (WLS) — Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown will resign his position on March 16.

Lightfoot made the announcement in a statement Wednesday afternoon, saying Brown informed her of his resignation today.

“I accepted his resignation and want to commend him for his accomplishments not just for the department but the entire city, including setting a record number of illegal gun recoveries for two consecutive years; leading a double digit reduction in violent crime in 2022; significant, consistent progress on the consent decree; standing up a full time recruitment team that yielded over 950 new hires last year; significantly expanding the resources for officer wellness; and promoting more women to the senior exempt ranks than ever before in the history of the department,” the statement read. “I personally want to thank him for his service to our city.”

Brown said in a statement he has accepted a job as COO of Loncar Lyon Jenkins, a personal injury law firm in Texas.

“It has been an honor and a privilege to work alongside the brave men and women of the Chicago Police Department. I will continue to pray that all officers return home to their families safe at the end of their shift. May the Good Lord bless the city of Chicago and the men and women who serve and protect this great city,” Brown said in a statement.

I’m not sure which cliche desribex his action best: the hand writing on the wall, getting out while the getting is good, or the rats leaving the sinking ship. Both Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson had said that if elected they would fire Supt. Brown and one of them will, indeed, be elected.

While I was puttering around on RAND’s site, I came across this document which I found interesting: “Russian Grand Strategy: Rhetoric and Reality”. I materially agree with their findings. Here is a summary of those findings:

• Russia’s actions are materially aligned with what they have declared as their grand strategy. The alignment is not perfect but largely perfect.
• The Russians believe that the global order is in transition. The “unipolar” world with the United States a the sole superpower has failed and it collapsing and will be replaced by a multipolar world. Imagine the U. S. as a “soft empire”. Several rebellious provinces of which Russia is one are seceding from that empire.
• Russia sees itself as major power.
• Russia should be recognized as a major power.
• Russia sees itself as the natural leader of the Eurasian region, essentially a bridge between Europe and the Far East.
• Russia intends to forge partnerships with other “rebellious provinces”, the “new centers of power”. Those include China, India, and Brazil among others.
• Russia is open to selective cooperation with the West.
• Threats to Russia include NATO force posture enhancements, Western use of non-military measures to promote instability, terrorism, cyberattacks, etc.

By “agree with their findings” mean that I agree that’s what the Russians think rather than I think that what the Russians believe is necessarily true.

It should be noted that their observation about Russia, to the effect that Russia’s words are consistent with its pursuit of its grand strategy, places Russia in stark contrast with the U. S. We have a grand strategy but it is an emergent strategy. Consequently, the statements of our political leaders may or may not be aligned with that strategy. Shorter: you can’t place too much weight on what we say. We don’t do what we say.