'Oliver Stone Under Assault Again'

[another saigon]

http://consortiumnews.com/Print/2010/071710b.html

By Lisa Pease
July 17, 2010

Oliver Stone is under attack again, which isn’t a surprise, given that no other filmmaker has been so willing to challenge the “conventional wisdom” in an effort to uncover the facts about important events.

After seeing what the media did to Stone for his excellent and provocative film “JFK,” I concluded that the press had become almost a reverse template. If the media trashes a Stone film, I know something important must be onscreen.

And the template holds true with Stone’s latest film, a documentary called “South of the Border.”

In the film, Stone talks to several leaders of the new left in Latin America, many of whom came to power in democratic elections by protesting America’s overt and covert meddling in their countries.

Stone meets, separately and in groups, with Hugo Chávez (President of Venezuela), Evo Morales (President of Bolivia), Lula da Silva (President of Brazil), Rafael Correa (President of Ecuador), Cristina Kirchner (President of Argentina) as well as her husband Nìstor Kirchner (former President of Argentina), and Raúl Castro (currently running Cuba for his ailing brother Fidel).

[EFerrari]

1. Netflix is already taking reservations.

[another saigon]

2. and mine is in.

I need to make the time to watch Crude as well on instant play.

[EFerrari]

3. The thing that fascinates me about the group of lefty liders

that have mounted this rebellion in Latin America is that, in spite of the millions of dollars flowing into their countries to the opposition from the State Department and in spite of the constant battery in the American press, they all seem to have a first class sense of humor.

That's pretty amazing.

[Hydra]

4. You're right

Chavez, for instance, even got grabbed during the attempted Coup...yet all of them are remarkably not bitter in our general direction despite how miserable our State Dept. makes their lives every day.

I chalk it up to "Doing the good work"- it's amazing how much you can do and how cheerfully when you believe in what you are doing, and you can see people benefit from it.

[EFerrari]

8. When Chavez was released and went back to Miraflores

he found the opposition had ransacked the palace. The safe was empty. When he got up to make a statement to all the exhausted staffers, they couldn't find their microphone and he said, "Did they take that too?!"

lol

[Hydra]

11. *lmao*

That's poise, right there :evilgrin:

[another saigon]

6. not only that

they have been successful in continually beating back the constant threat of US terror/regime change in the last decade and have found a real solution to their countries' ills through social programs. Instead of trying to become Empires through military follies. How come we can't here at home?

[EFerrari]

9. Imo, the size of this country works against the people.

It's too overwhelming to think about trying to organize it all. That's a smaller problem in smaller countries.

[Hydra]

10. Welcome to DU

And they can't do it here, because it would work.

And by working, I mean it would afford people opportunities and fix social ills, both of which cut at established power bases' incomes(MIC, Healthcare, For Profit Prisons, etc.).

We have a bizarre system that requires things to be constantly going wrong for it to work "correctly."

New system, plz.

[Octafish]

5. Who Killed JFK? The Media Whitewash

From a heroic author, researcher and activist:

Who Killed JFK?

The Media Whitewash

By Carl Oglesby

Oliver Stone's current film-in-progress, JFK, dealing with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, is still months from theaters, but already the project has been sharply attacked by journalists who ordinarily could not care less what Hollywood has to say about such great events as the Dealey Plaza shooting of November 22, 1963.

The attack on Stone has enlisted (at least) the Boston Globe (editorial), the Boston Herald, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and Time magazine, and several other outlets were known to have been prowling the JFK set for angles. The intensity of this interest contrasts sharply with 1979, when the House Assassinations Committee published its finding of probable conspiracy in the JFK assassination, and the mass media reacted with one day of headlines and then a long, bored yawn.

SNIP...

LARDNER GRINDS HIS AXE

The most serious attacks against the JFK project are those of the Washington Post's George Lardner, perhaps the dean of the Washington intelligence press corps. Lardner covered the Warren Commission during the 1960s, at one point ran a special Post investigation of the case, and covered the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s.

Lardner's May 19 article on the front page of the Sunday Post "Outlook" section, "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland," ran to almost seven column feet, and by far the greater part of that was dedicated to the contemptuous dismissal of any thought that Garrison has made a positive contribution to this case. Stone must be crazy too, Lardner seemed to be saying, to be taking a nut like Garrison so seriously.

SNIP...

Lardner wrote, for example, that the Assassinations Committee "may have" heard testimony linking Oswald with Ferrie and Ferrie with the CIA. Lardner knows very well that the committee did hear such testimony, no maybes about it, and that it found this testimony convincing. Then Lardner implicitly denied that the committee heard such testimony at all by adding grotesquely that it "may also have" heard no such thing. Why does Lardner want unwary readers to think that the well-established connections between Oswald, Ferrie, and the CIA exist only in Garrison's imagination?

CONTINUED...

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JFKloot.html

The truth scares the hell out of some people.

[another saigon]

14. most people, especially political crooks!

and people spoon fed "news".

It is nice to see you Mr. Octafish. I have lurked here for quite some time and have always appreciated your knowledge and information sharing.

Speaking of JFK, I am in the middle of James Douglass's "JFK and The Unspeakable". Whew' this is some heavy stuff! My biggest question so far is the Dulles link. Why has he escaped any sort of serious scrutiny? Was he mentioned in Stone's film? I don't recall it.

[Octafish]

20. Stone and Douglass helped saved Democracy.

For some reason, the powers-that-be really don't like the truth reaching the unwashed masses. Douglass's book should've earned him a spot on all sorts of talk shows, magazine and book reviews and public speaking invitations. There are some, but not nearly as many as his history deserves. Oliver Stone wrote about it:

JFK and the Unspeakable

By Oliver Stone
Huffington Post
Posted: July 23, 2009

EXCERPT...

The subtitle sums up Douglass's purpose: Why He Died and Why it Matters. In his beautifully written and exhaustively researched treatment, Douglass lays out the "motive" for Kennedy's assassination. Simply, he traces a process of steady conversion by Kennedy from his origins as a traditional Cold Warrior to his determination to pull the world back from the edge of destruction.

Many of these steps are well known, such as Kennedy's disillusionment with the CIA after the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion, and his refusal to follow the reckless recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis. (This in itself was truly JFK's shining moment in the sun. It is likely that any other president from LBJ on would have followed the path to a general nuclear war.) Then there was the Test Ban Treaty and JFK's remarkable American University Speech where he spoke with empathy and compassion about the Soviet people, recognizing our common humanity, the fact that we all "inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal."

But many of his steps remain unfamiliar: Kennedy's back-channel dialogue with Khrushchev and their shared pursuit of common ground; his secret opening to dialogue with Fidel Castro (ongoing the very week of his assassination); and his determination to pull out of Vietnam after his probable re-election in 1964.

All of these steps caused him to be regarded as a virtual traitor by elements of the military-intelligence community. These were the forces that planned and carried out his assassination. Kennedy himself said, in 1962, after he read Seven Days in May, which is about a military coup in the United States, that if he had another Bay of Pigs, the same thing could happen to him. Well, he did have another "Bay of Pigs"; he had several. And I think Kennedy prophesied his own death with those words.

Why does it matter? The death of JFK remains a critical turning point in our history. Those who caused his death were targeting not just a man but a vision -- a vision of peace. There is no calculating the consequences of his death for this country and for the world. Those consequences endure. To a large extent, the fate of our country and the future of the planet continue to be controlled by the shadowy forces of what Douglass calls "the Unspeakable." Only by unmasking these forces and confronting the truth about our history can we restore the promise of democracy and lay claim to Kennedy's vision of peace.

CONTINUED...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/oliver-stone/jfk-and-the-unspeakable_b_243924.html

Going from memory: Dulles was mentioned by "Mr. X" in Stone's movie, who wondered why would LBJ appoint to a man fired by Kennedy to investigate Kennedy's assassination. Compromised through Operation MOCKINGBIRD at the time of Dallas, the nation's news media today are now wholey-owned subsidiaries of the military-industrial complex.

Absent from history books in Texas and every other state, a bit on what is becoming more obvious every day for those who know where to look: A fact curiously missing from American history and any mention of the Warren Commission

If you like learning about the way The New York Times slammed the movie and missed a whole lot else that was going on that threatened the nation's Have-Mores of War, please visit The Lies Of Our Times archive. The issues are in PDF form, including the September 1991 issue in which coverage of the movie "JFK" is examined.

PS: A most hearty welcome to DU, another saigon. Thank you for the kind words.

[another saigon]

23. thank you for the links

and the welcome. I remember well how JFK was slammed by most of the corporate media. Hell, I watched Bill Maher a few weeks ago when he had Oliver on to talk about this latest film and was mightily disappointed. Bill perpetuated the M$M meme that Hugo is a dictator. I am so sick of these obfuscations and lies.

Please keep on posting the hidden truths!

:)

[mistertrickster]

26. Except that Stone's film didn't say Oswald had ties to the CIA. It claimed Oswald was a patsy.

Which is kind of a funny thing to say about a guy who

1. took an Italian carbine to work with him that day

2. left the building when everybody else stayed

3. went directly home and got his .38 revolver

4. shot a policeman dead in cold blood who stopped to question him

5. tried to shoot a policeman who arrested him.

These are not the actions of an innocent man, which Stone's movie claimed he was.

I'm not saying there are no holes in the Warren Commission. But there were more holes in Stone's movie, IMHO.

******

ON EDIT: I do like Stone's work however, and I look forward to his new movie. "Born on the Fourth of July" should be mandatory viewing for every member of CONgress before they vote in favor of the guerre d' jour.

[Octafish]

27. Newman's ''Oswald and the CIA'' came out after JFK movie.

The thing is, many people, including Jim Garrison, had documented ties between the agency and people he suspected of being part of a conspiracy. For example, CIA denied its ties to Clay Shaw. Supporters of the Warren Commission also claimed there were no ties between Shaw and Oswald, but, there they were.

Regarding your points: They are precisely what WC supporters Gerald Posner and Vincent Bugliosi pose to be factual. They are not. They are based on "testimony" from selected "eyewitnesses" that they interpret at the exclusion of other testimony and evidence.

1. took an Italian carbine to work with him that day
The guy who gave Oswald a ride to work said there was no way he carried a rifle, although that is what "investigators" pressured him to say.

2. left the building when everybody else stayed
Oswald was in the lunch room, sipping a Coke he'd just purchased. He was identified by a Dallas policeman who entered the School Book Depository within 90 seconds of the assassination.

3. went directly home and got his .38 revolver
Apparently so, indicating to me he feared for his life. His landlady said a police car pulled up to his boarding house and honked the horn twice. Oswald left the house and walked away from the direction where Officer Tippit was murdered.

4. shot a policeman dead in cold blood who stopped to question him
The one eyewitness who identified Oswald didn't do so until after he survived a gunshot to his head. Plus, the FBI said the bullets taken from Officer Tippit's body did not match the revolver Oswald carried when he was arrested.

5. tried to shoot a policeman who arrested him.
Perhaps so. There are reports there were two men matching Oswald's description in the theater that day.. One thing is for certain: Someone claiming to be Oswald made a big scene at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City and tried to meet with a KGB man at the Russian embassy.

Oh. Almost forgot: Oswald has been pegged as some sort of sissified lefty, which couldn't be further from the truth. The guy volunteered for a secret mission, one of several agents recruited from active duty, to "defect" to the USSR for purposes of espionage. Only a brave patriot would do something like that.

Don't know what his role, if any, in the assassination of President Kennedy. Too bad Jack Ruby, the mafia guy and government informant, killed him before we had a chance to ask.

[mistertrickster]

39. Interesting. If those "facts" are not facts, that would indeed change everything.

How about his Russian wife claiming that Oswald shot at General Walker?

If true, I could never figure out why this so-called radical leftist (Oswald) wanted to shoot both Walker (John Bircher type) and the very liberal JFK.

That never made sense to me . . .

Some people even speculated that Oswald was shooting at Connelly because as Gov. of Texas, Connelly had given him a dishonorable discharge from the Marines.

ON EDIT-- I'm open to new evidence on the JFK thing. I don't think the American people ever got the full story.

[glitch]

7. Rohter embarasses himself and the NYT (not that they aren't used to it...

...and don't deserve it).

Thanks for posting and Welcome to DU!

edit: the response to Rohter is scathing,
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/print/oliver_stone_responds_to_new_york_times_attack_20100628/

[EFerrari]

12. If the press corpse had just ignored the film

it might have sputtered out in small venues.

But for some reason, they just had to try to frame it even if it meant kicking the film higher in public awareness.

Suckers! lol

[glitch]

13. Flailing about, they must feel it all slipping away.

Unconsciously or otherwise.

The Democracy Now interview with Oliver Stone was very impressive.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/21/academy_award_winning_filmmaker_oliver_stone

[EFerrari]

15. The one with Laura Flanders was good, too.

http://www.grittv.org/2010/06/26/oliver-stone-and-tariq-ali-south-of-the-border/

:hi:

ETA: No transcript for this one, only a short summary.

[glitch]

16. Thanks! I missed that one.

:hi:

[me b zola]

17. Can't wait to see it. n/t

[stray cat]

18. My understanding is its not really a factual film but some documentaries are not

and are more subjective and opinionated rather than strongly fact based.

[EFerrari]

22. The New York Times already tried to discredit the film in that way

and they got their ass handed to them.

[fishwax]

19. I'm looking forward to seeing it

:kick:

[SunnySong]

21. Did he make a sequel to Alexander?

:hide:

[MajorChode]

24. Kinda funny that you would use "facts" and Oliver Stone in the same sentence

[Octafish]

25. That's exactly what Rush Limbaugh would say.

Oliver Stone has shoved more than a burr of truth up the pimply backsides of the powers-that-be. For instance:

(President Kennedy) withstood pressure from the CIA and the military to follow-up the foundering Bay of Pigs invasion with a military assault on Cuba.<18> He rejected advice to use force in Laos, pushing against the defense establishment to achieve an ultimately successful negotiated settlement.<19> He shouldered aside the defense and intelligence establishments to advance a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets.<20> And as historians Ernest May and Philip Zelikov discovered from live voice recordings made during the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK was often “the only one in the room who is determined not to go to war.”<21>

This is the same Kennedy we discover in Perils of Dominance, an important new book by Gareth Porter.<22> Porter documents in chilling detail that, in isolation and with virtually no real allies to help him, Kennedy orchestrated numerous Machiavellian ruses to frustrate the “national security bureaucracy’s” determination to march headlong into war.

SOURCE:

http://www.history-matters.com/essays/vietnam/JFK,%20Vietnam,%20and%20Oliver%20Stone/JFK,%20Vietnam,%20and%20Oliver%20Stone.htm

Gareth Porter knows what he's talking about. And his work supports what Peter Dale Scott, John Newman and Zachary Sklar discovered. That Kennedy was working toward peace -- from Havana to Berlin to Brazzaville to Moscow to Washington. And that is the first truth on which Stone crafted his film.

There's nothing funny about peace and a murdered president. That's what Stone tells and that's why Stone's movies are so important.

[MajorChode]

28. That's exactly what a jackass would say

That seems to be in vogue here at DU when someone presents an inconvienient truth. You simply pull an ad hominem right out of your ass and compare them to Limbaugh, Beck, et al, which relieves the author of any responsibility of providing anything that approaches substance or even good sense.

It doesn't really matter what Gareth Porter or whoever else you can come up with thinks, because nobody knows what Kennedy would or would not have done. Even if someone can pretend to know, it doesn't change the reality that quite a bit of Stone's film either took quite a bit of editorial lattitude with history, or were outright fiction. So Stone's film might have been directed wonderfully with brilliant acting and was close to a technical masterpiece, but it's still a work of fiction very loosely based on history. Those who see it as a documentary aren't living in the world many call reality.

[Octafish]

30. Wrong. We know what Kennedy was thinking because he left a paper trail...

...and he spoke with people he trusted.

For the record, JFK ordered the United States to withdraw completely from Vietnam.

National security Action Memorandum 263

LBJ countermanded those orders, committing the US to helping Vietnam with NSAM 273.

National Security Action Memorandum 273

FWIW: LBJ lied or led -- take your pick -- America into war with his Gulf of Tonkin nonsense.

PS: There was no personal attack in what I wrote. What you wrote echoed, verbatim, critics of Oliver Stone -- some Repuke, some Dem, some something else -- one of whom is Rush Limbaugh.

EDIT: Last sentence for clarity.

[another saigon]

32. I suspect

someone has not kept up with their reading regarding the murder of JFK. Tragically there are still many Americans who believe that farce of an investigation put on by the WC. I imagine it is being taught as gospel in school as well.

[Octafish]

33. Poor choice of words on my part. Shuddasaid: 'That's not nice. Stone is interested in the truth.'

Thank you, another saigon. I see someone criticize a champion of truth and my brain short-circuits into defensive mode.

We are in strange days. Kids in public school largely are taught to memorize answers to standardized testing bushwa at the exclusion of all else, principally how to THINK and enjoy LEARNING. Meanwhile, they watch hours of tee vee per day, the principal source of information for adults, too. That means most heads are filled with what the corporations and the government want them to be filled with, which is not necessarily the truth.

[another saigon]

34. one quibble

it seems to me we are at the point where we are rarely given the truth. For example, I can not believe my ears when I hear this for justifying the continued carnage in the MidEast....

“disrupt, dismantle and defeat” Taliban insurgents and their al-Qaeda allies in the region"


What a CROCK!



The Afghanistan Rights Monitor's (ARM) mid-year report on Civilian Casualties of Conflict (.pdf) blasts the happy-talk coming out of the Obama Administration about the deteriorating security situation and its effect on civilians:

Despite the high-profile spin in Washington and Kabul about progress made in Afghanistan, the Afghan people have only witnessed and suffered an intensifying armed conflict over the past six months. Contrary to President Barrack Obama’s promise that the deployment of additional 30,000 US forces to the country would “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” Taliban insurgents and their al-Qaeda allies in the region, the insurgency has become more resilient, multi-structured and deadly. Information and figures received, verified and analyzed by Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM) show about 1,074 civilian people were killed and over 1,500 were injured in armed violence and security incidents from 1 January to 30 June 2010. This shows a slight increase in the number of civilian deaths compared to the same period last year when 1,059 deaths were recorded.

…In terms of insecurity, 2010 has been the worst year since the demise of the Taliban regime in late 2001. Not only have the number of security incidents increased, the space and depth of insurgency and counter-insurgency-related violence have maximized dramatically. Up to 1,200 security incident were recorded in June, the highest number of incident compared to any month since 2002.

The administration and their allies have continuously that "we're making progress," "we're turning the tide," or "we've begun to reverse the insurgents' momentum," but the data doesn't support their assertions. As ARM's report shows, civilian casualties continue to climb even as more troops flood into the country–troops executing a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy supposedly premised on "protecting the population." The rise in troop levels and civilian casualties has been accompanied by an increasingly large and sophisticated insurgency and a widening lead in sympathy or support for the insurgents in key districts of Afghanistan.

Even the portion of the report that blasts the insurgent factions for their outrageously immoral tactics is bad news for the U.S. The report slams insurgents use of IEDs and suicide bombings as weapons of choice. A number of news outlets have noted this portion of the report along with the drop in U.S./NATO-caused civilian deaths, but it's a safe bet you won't find too many honest-to-God COIN-lovers cheering about the stats noted in this report. COIN doctrine asserts the importance not just of the protection of civilians from killings by counterinsurgents (in this case, U.S. and allied forces), but the protection of the people in general. Counterinsurgency doctrine says that people aren’t going to switch to your side if they think they’ll get killed for it, no matter how few cause civilian deaths your team causes.



http://rethinkafghanistan.com/blog/

[MajorChode]

35. Gotta love tactics like those

1) Make a personal attack, then claim you didn't make a personal attack.

2) Don't argue based on what someone said, argue based on what you wished they had said.

3) Pass off opinion as fact.

Let me straighten a few things out for you.

First, you DID make a personal attack. Whenever you dismiss what someone else says because you claim some happy horseshit like, well Rush probably said the same thing, that is nothing more than ad hominem. It is a personal attack. It's guilt by association. In short, it's bullshit, and you either know that or should know that. Now you can pretend it wasn't all you want, but that doesn't change reality, which you seem to have very little use for.

Next, I never claimed what Kennedy was or wasn't thinking. I said there is simply no way to know what he would have done, which you pretend to know, but can't possibly know. Thinking something and doing something are often two very different things. Obama also had quite a few thoughts himself which he never followed through with. If you want to contradict someone and claim they are "wrong", try actually contradicting what they actually said instead of what you wished they had said. What makes this even more hilarious is that the 'evidence' you offer doesn't come within a cab ride of your claim. There wasn't 1,000 troops in Vietnam at the time, there were over 16,000, and the withdraw of those 1,000 troops was more of a pipe dream contingent on meeting certain objectives, which were never met. So even if I had made any claims about what Kennedy was thinking (and I didn't), what you are trying desperately to pass off as a contradiction, isn't. So you can cherry pick which historians you think know what they are talking about, but this is by no means a consensus view by historians and is contradicted by JFK's own brother.

In ''Kennedy's Wars'' (Oxford, 2000), the historian and strategist Lawrence Freedman maintains that despite anecdotal evidence of a desire for a withdrawal from Vietnam after the 1964 elections, it was ''less of a definite decision than a working assumption, based on a hope for stability rather than an expectation of chaos.''

Robert Kennedy seemed to confirm this. When asked in 1964 what his brother would have done if the South Vietnamese had been on the brink of defeat, he replied, ''We'd face that when we came to it.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/25/weekinreview/the-world-new-chapter-old-debate-would-kennedy-have-quit-vietnam.html

Finally, you are focusing in on one aspect of Stone's movie, and trying to pretend that somehow vindicates the rest of the fictionalized nonsense pretending to be history, which is par for the course on other Stone films as well.

So not only is your post duplicitous on what constitutes your personal attack, you cherry pick who you believe and try to pass that authority opinion off as fact, you completely ignore relevant arguments (which didn't go unnoticed BTW), and you invent arguments of others so you can burn those strawmen down. I really have no interest in discussing a subject with someone who argues completely by fallacy and has no use for reason or even reality. So you and saigon have fun patting each other on the back, because I'm out.

Have a nice day

[Octafish]

36. You know, I learned them from you.

DU, from Sept. 2, 2009: You're peddling Limbaugh's bullshit

Re-reading this thread, and the post that brought your reply, I see I did use a poor choice of words. To better reflect my feelings on the subject it should read: "You echo the sentiments of many people, from across the political spectrum. And you're all wrong."

Regarding Kennedy and Vietnam: The slain president's brother, Sen. Robert Kennedy, ran for President to end the war in Vietnam. The war continued five years after his assassination.

[hootinholler]

37. BWAH!

:rofl:

petard meet hoist...

-Hoot

[MajorChode]

38. Obviously not well enough

There's a not so subtle difference that you either conveniently ignored, or are too ignorant on the matter to differentiate. I did address the poster's argument directly, mater of factly, complete with actual facts (instead of opinions passed off as facts). It's kind of hard to claim a logical fallacy of not addressing the person's argument when I offered a pointed and exact response to their argument, no?
For further reading:

The argumentum ad hominem is not always fallacious, for in some instances questions of personal conduct, character, motives, etc., are legitimate and relevant to the issue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Now for your correction which uses an even piss-poorer choice of words:

You echo the sentiments of many people, from across the political spectrum. And you're all wrong.

Just because you disagree, doesn't mean I'm wrong. Think about that long and hard and check my sig line. You make a very common mistake made by those who either have no ability or interest in engaging in substantive discussion by trying to pass off your opinion as a proof that someone else is "wrong". The reality is you have proved nothing other than your own penchant for fallacy. That's why I'm done debating you regarding Kennedy or Stone.

Cheers!

[Agony]

29. while you are waiting you could watch War on Democracy

by John Pilger, I am sure he will be (has been) assaulted too.


The War on Democracy

John Pilger reports that, in spite of a history of repeated US-backed suppression, popular democratic movements are gaining ground in Latin America.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/video/page/0,,2150097,00.html
http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/wdem.html

Cheerio!
Agony

[another saigon]

31. excellent film!

I have watched several times. Pilger is one of the best.