David Archibald Lecture in Perth: Stop the Climate Stupidity. Following on from his popular on-line article last month, Stop the Climate Stupidity, David Archibald is giving a free lecture in Perth next Tuesday:

Never Speak Ill of a Hate-Crime Hoaxer, by David Cole.

This is why I don’t for a minute miss my five years with the now-defunct Friends of Abe [the Gary Sinise-led organization of Hollywood “conservatives”]. In those bad old days [of 2010], we were forced to maintain a steadfastly neutral stance on matters involving race. There was a formula we had to follow when commenting on anything negative emanating from the black community or from a black individual: We’d say, “Oh, how sad,” and button it with “and the Democrats are the real racists.”

For the record, neutrality on race is fine with me; it’s how I conduct my personal life and business dealings. But neutrality doesn’t work when the other side is not neutral. Bias against whites is an actual thing, and Smollett’s hoax was a deliberate attempt to incriminate an entire group of people. And that group isn’t even allowed to celebrate when the truth comes out?

Jussie Smollett, anti-white race hoaxer

Smollett’s fraudulent claims could have provoked reprisals (last week, a leftist pulled a gun on a white couple in Sam’s Club because the husband was wearing a MAGA hat), but hey, bow your collective heads, whites, and don’t dare crack a smile at the fact that a racist scammer has been exposed. Don’t be angry about how his lies may have put people in jeopardy (because certainly whites are never the victims of interracial crime). …

But no. According to [“conservative” commentator S.E. Cupp], we must only speak of the Smollett incident in a hushed, solemn tone.

My time with Friends of Abe coincided with my work helping to organize Tea Party events. Upon reflection, I now realize how good we had it back then. Every big-money GOP donor and Fox News kingpin was on our side, because we stuck to their issues. Low taxes! Foreign wars! No socialized medicine! I don’t regret those years (as a Beverly Hills homeowner, low taxation is genuinely my No. 1 issue), but looking back, having the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson and Murdoch and Ailes on our side made a huge difference. We weren’t “Astroturf,” as Nancy Pelosi once whined, but we were on the side of big money. And yeah, we did some fine things. We killed the “public option” in the first, failed iteration of Obamacare, and we delivered huge midterm wins in 2010. But how much of that was really us, and how much was the mega-donors who like their rightists the same way they like their coffee — filtered?

These big-business “conservative” kingmakers love mass illegal immigration, and they hate talk of race, because race is divisive, and one of the cardinal rules of business and politics is, never be divisive when you don’t have to. ….

That’s why the big-money GOP swamp creatures hate anything on the right that appears racially divisive, and the mouthpieces who spout the safe conservative line echo that way of thinking. Democrat bigwigs thrive on racial division — it’s their lifeblood. But on the GOP side, racial stuff gets in the way of the issues that matter to the machine and its moneymen. So, we must speak respectfully of brown-skinned illegals, lest we appear racist. And we must never push back against antiwhite bigotry. Trump broke those rules in 2016, and it worked. …

I agree with Ann Coulter that Trump is fast becoming a lost cause. But as an optimist who prefers to view the man’s cavernous cranium as half full instead of half empty, I will say this: Along with two (and perhaps one more to come) SCOTUS appointments, the other good thing Trump did was allow us our giddiness. Whether it was by calling Maxine Waters “low IQ,” or stating what most white Americans secretly believe even though they can’t say it — that it’s better to have immigrants from civilized European nations than shithole Third World dumps — Trump gave us a few years of feeling free from the pressure to treat all minorities with the respectful awe usually reserved for religious icons. …

Trump’s agenda is in shambles, and his grassroots base, which never enjoyed the perks of my beloved Tea Party, is fractured beyond repair. But let’s not lose the spirit just yet.

Facebook Whistleblower: Staff ‘Deboost’ Unwanted Content – and I Saw Same Code Used on Conservatives, by Lucas Nolan.

Recent Facebook insider leaks released by Project Veritas reveal that the social media giant’s demoting of conservative content isn’t just done by human moderators, it’s built right into the code of the website as a technical action called “deboosting.” …

The technical action she repeatedly saw … was labeled ActionDeboostLiveDistribution. Said the insider, “I would see [this term] appear on several different conservative pages. I first noticed it with an account that I can’t remember, but I remember once I started looking at it, I also saw it on Mike Cernovich’s page, saw it on Steven Crowder’s page, as well as the Daily Caller’s page.” …

The whistleblower alleges that the tag is designed to “deboost” content produced by the pages it’s attached to, specifically suppressing the distribution of livestreams from that page.

A current Facebook employee confirmed to Project Veritas that the code could reduce a “video’s visibility in news feeds, remove sharing features, and disable interactive notifications.” … The Facebook insider stated: “With these ‘deboost live stream’ things, there was no warning sent to the user… These were actions that were being taken without the users knowing.” …

The insider also noted that very few left-wing pages had been hit with a deboost tag: “I looked at the Young Turks’ page, I looked at Colin Kaepernick’s page, none of them had received the same deboost comment,” the insider stated.

The “deboost” tag appears after another tag titled “Sigma” which refers to an artificial intelligence system developed by Facebook to block potential suicide or self-harm posts.

hat-tip Charles

Tommy Robinson Turns the Tables on the BBC, by Bruce Bawer.

Tommy Robinson’s courageous truth-telling about Islam has not only resulted in years of harassment by the British authorities, an endless cascade of death threats, and, last year, a thoroughly unjust prison term that might have spelled his demise, but also, of course, a pattern of coverage by the mainstream media that has been almost uniformly deceitful and poisonous.

When he heard that the BBC series Panorama, which is the UK’s answer to 60 Minutes, was planning a story on him with the working title “Tommy Takedown,” and that its producers were collaborating with the vile group Hope Not Hate (HNH), which is Britain’s version of the Southern Poverty Law Center — i.e., a shady far-left smear machine masquerading as a noble monitor of bigots, fascists, and hate groups — he decided to go on the offensive. …

Tommy, whom [Panorama reporter John Sweeney] has been nagging for weeks to do an on-camera interview, agrees to sit down with him at a site of Tommy’s choosing — a room furnished, as it happens, with a big screen.

Before Sweeney can start asking questions, Tommy, who has brought his own cameraman along, sets about interrogating Sweeney. For instance, he asks Sweeney whether he’d ever tell any interviewee what to say about Tommy. No, Sweeney assures him. Tommy then directs Sweeney’s attention to the big screen, where Sweeney can be seen in [Lucy] Brown’s undercover video spelling out to her in some detail the three points about Tommy that he’d like her to make during their on-camera interview. If she covers those three points, Sweeney tells her, he guarantees they’ll be included in the final cut. Indeed, he pretty much writes her a script. Sweeney also asks Brown if there’s anything she doesn’t want him to ask her on-camera, and adds: “I’m not supposed to ask this.”

So it goes again and again: Tommy poses a question; Sweeney answers it with a firm no; Tommy then shows him an undercover clip that proves him a liar. ..

It showed BBC headliner John Sweeney up for the manipulative, dishonest operator that he is. …

“You’re fake news,” Tommy shouts at Sweeney. “You’re a classist, elitist … You’re a liar, you’re a fraud, you’re a racist, you’re a homophobe … You were trying to destroy my life!” The accusations are as true as can be, and the spectacle of Tommy hurling them directly, eloquently, and fearlessly into the face of this befuddled BBC boob is delicious — at once powerful and poignant, a textbook example of speaking truth to power.

Read it all, for the whole satisfying comeuppance.

Something to throw in the face of every big government/socialism advocate. Which they will promptly ignore in favour of throwing a tantrum about how it’s “my way or the highway.“

How To Fake A Hate Crime And Get Away With It — Lessons for Jussie Smollett and the Left. By Daniel Greenfield (Frontpage Magazine).

To those who have not read Daniel Greenfield, Wentworthmaven believes he is one of the best conservative writers of our day. I actually had the pleasure of meeting him recently in Los Angeles.

Greenfield posits:

Why did Jussie Smollett do it?” a thousand anxiously clueless progressives ask. To paraphrase Willie Sutton, because that’s where the money is.

Smollett’s Undoing:

The worst possible place to fake a hate crime is in an African-American city. Black cops don’t suffer from white guilt and have very little patience for fake racist hate crimes.”

Smollett’s Further Mistake:

The best place in America to fake a hate crime is still a campus. That’s why hate crime hoaxes occur most frequently on college campuses where they’re usually treated as victimless crimes.

The Entertainment Value – Political Theatre:

It’s not surprising that a celebrity would have executed a hate crime hoax. The primary motivation for hate crime hoaxes is political narcissism.”

The Left in Western culture today has little left in its arsenal to fling the way of the realists. As such, they hitch their wagon to what many have monikered, “The Grievance Industrial Complex”. A perfect marriage between Marxist/Leninist doctrine, the “Fake News Media” and the second tier minions who benefit from it financially. The Smolletts of the world have an absolute need for attention via the theatrical — a perfect melange of the Left’s ideology and Hollywood. (I know, I grew up in it!)

Denmark to focus on repatriation instead of integration under new law, by Emma R. (Voice of Europe).

h/t Stephen Neil

A Return to Sanity, is there hope?  Very much along the lines of the article posted below by Douglas Murray, the Danes finally seem to have discovered (and hopefully not too late), that their previous integration of Islamic culture did not end up being the melting pot the political left had assumed.

Read the link for a refreshing tale of how at least some are fighting back to save their very way of life.

Must We Really Be Careful What We Do Lest We Offend Extremists? By Douglas Murray (Gatestone Institute).

In Douglas Murray’s book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, he elucidates in a clear and concise manner what madness Western civilization is doing to make itself go the way of ancient Rome.

In this article, Murray uses the celebrity de jour in the UK, Shamima Begum, to tell us how both sides of the political aisle seemingly cannot help themselves. Despite all evidence, those in power cannot seem to fathom that re-admitting people who are un-repentant and have stated clearly their intentions to destroy us is — simply and astonishingly — not in our best interests.

As Murray notes:

Britain, in recent days, has had a rare distraction from its seemingly endless Brexit debate. The distraction, however, has not been an altogether welcome one. It involves the case of Shamima Begum, one of a number of girls who left their school in Bethnal Green in London in 2015 to go and join ISIS. …

Now, members of the British media have caught up with Shamima Begum, who is living in a Syrian refugee camp. The interviews she has given, in which she has expressed no remorse for her actions and has described life in the Caliphate — which included seeing severed heads in trash cans — as not especially troubling, have not helped her in her request to return home to Britain.

The Strange Death of Europe and the West indeed.

Public-Private Propaganda, by the Z Blog.

Propaganda works on the assumption that most people yield to the authority of the state and most people yield to the opinions of their fellow subjects. Propaganda does not have to convince everyone or even a majority of everyone. It just has to work on that third that are ready and willing to believe. That group will be enthusiastic enough to convince the third that tends to follow the strong horse, even when in doubt. The third prone to skepticism is then outnumbered and less inclined to speak up.

In the modern age, liberal democracies are not going to have ministries of truth or official propagandists. …

Joseph de Maistre observed that “false opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” The best propaganda is therefore struck by the believers in the private realm and circulated by honest people, who have their desire for truth perverted into a vehicle for spreading falsehoods. …

This story about the alleged rise in female infidelity shows how the privatization of propaganda is vastly more effective than what you see from authoritarian regimes. The people in charge merely have to favor certain information over others and the media bullhorns magnify these preferences. For example, on Amazon you can buy The Unabomber’s Manifesto, but you cannot buy Greg Johnson’s The White Nationalist Manifesto. The people in charge are indifferent to the former, but not the latter.

The volunteer army of box wine aunties that stalks social media looking for blasphemers is another example. You’ll note that the overwhelming majority of left-wing agitators on-line are unattached females looking for attention. The propaganda machine has weaponized unattached females, turning them into enforcers of the orthodoxy. …

This system that rewards the counterfeiters of truth and punishes the skeptics is not something created by design. It is a natural byproduct of liberal democracy. When the only authority is the general will, the fifty percent plus one, controlling public opinion became the point of everything. Once one ideological camp gains an edge, they leverage that by supporting their fellow ideologues and punishing their opponents.

PayPal Censoring Groups With Help from Leftist, Anti-Christian SPLC. By Christian Ellis.

The findings of those blacklisted highlight the majority of “offenders” are conservatives. Breitbart reports WikiLeaks, Infowars, political activist Tommy Robinson, and investigative journalist Laura Loomer are among those blocked by PayPal.

Amazon.com Bans The White Nationalist Manifesto, by Greg Johnson.

On Sunday, February 24th, 2019, Amazon.com — the world’s book marketplace — banned my book The White Nationalist Manifesto.

Amazon did not merely decide to no longer stock the book. They also removed the product listing pages. So it is as if the book never even existed.

Amazon does, however, continue to sell the following works:

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto — the manifesto of a movement that murdered more than 100 million people, specifically targeting an entire class of people — the bourgeoisie — for destruction…
• Leon Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism — a defense of political terrorism
• Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf  — also available in many editions — which is apparently less threatening to the current world order than my book.
• The Unabomber’s Manifesto …
• Valerie Solanas’ S.C.U.M. Manifesto — S.C.U.M. being an acronym for Society to Cut Up Men. Solanas published her manifesto in 1967. In 1968, she attempted to murder Andy Warhol.
• The Anarchist’s Cookbook— corrected and updated to make it extra lethal
• Osama Bin Laden’s Messages to the World …
• Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah — apparently there’s a whole library of books by Islamist terrorists for sale at Amazon.com …
• Black Nationalist Manifestos by such writers as Marcus Garvey and Elijah Muhammad …
• Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare
• Al-Qaida’s Doctrine for Insurgency: Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin’s “a Practical Course for Guerrilla War”

Really, one has to ask: Is there a book written by an honest-to-God terrorist or mass murderer that Amazon.com does not stock?

And let’s not even get into Amazon’s vast selections of pornography, sex toys, and drug paraphernalia.

Every other ethnic group is encouraged to have an identity, and indeed is lauded for it. Just not whites. And the left is so obviously whipping up anti-white sentiment and discriminating against whites. Hmmm.

George Pell: a case in which justice never had a fair chance, by Greg Craven.

All my life, I have joined in the chorus that our justice system is the best in the world. With the case of Cardinal George Pell, I am not singing quite so loud.

It is not whether you like or loathe Pell, or even whether you think he is innocent or guilty. What matters is whether we have a system of justice that is exposed to extraneous pressure whenever some media outlet or social media alliance decides that someone is or is not innocent.

What the last year has shown is that the justice system can be systematically assaulted from the outside in a conscious attempt to make a fair trial impossible. This should terrify every citizen, because every citizen is a potential defendant.

Pell Verdict: Why I Don’t Accept It, by Andrew Bolt.

Cardinal George Pell has been falsely convicted of sexual abusing two boys in their early teens. That’s my opinion, based on the overwhelming evidence.

And my opinion is also based in part on how many times Pell has been accused of crimes and sins he clearly did not do.

But at last some of the truckload of mud thrown at him has stuck. It adds up to this: Pell, Australia’s most senior Catholic, has been made to pay for the sins of his church and a media campaign of vilification.

He is a scapegoat, not a child abuser. In my opinion.

How Pell Became the Vatican’s Sacrifical Lamb, by Miranda Divine.

It’s devastating because I don’t believe that Pell, who I know slightly and admire greatly, could be guilty of sexually assaulting two choirboys in a busy cathedral after Sunday mass when he was Archbishop of Melbourne in 1996…

How hard it must have been to find 12 impartial souls after the campaign of vilification against Pell over the past two decades and the carefully orchestrated drip feed of lurid allegations by Victoria police to selected media against the backdrop of shocking revelations of child sexual abuse by clergy around the world…

Anyone who knows how crowded and open is the sacristy at St Patrick’s Cathedral after Sunday mass must know the accusations are implausible. “Only a madman would attempt to rape boys in the sacristy immediately after mass,” said Pell’s legal team.

It is the word of one man, codenamed AA, against the word of Cardinal Pell.

There are no witnesses and evidence was given that the second alleged victim, who died long ago, told his mother that he had not been sexually abused while a chorister.

Remember the “repressed memories” convictions of the 1980s, which all turned out to be rubbish? The witch trials of two centuries ago? Outside social pressure and suggestion can lead jurors to convict.

This is all part of the cultural Marxist tearing down of the Christian basis of current society.

Finally, as it happens Pell was also outspoken against the carbon dioxide theory of global warming. Funny how people who speak out against that theory always seem to get taken down or shut up.

The Mythical Rise in White Supremacist Violence, by David Catron.

The Democrats face a unique obstacle in their bid to win back the White House in 2020. To win, they need to garner over 90 percent of the black vote, which requires considerable dissatisfaction in that community with its current plight.

However, as President Trump said during his SOTU address, African-American unemployment stands at its lowest rate ever. The resultant increase in prosperity will make it more difficult for the Democrats to stir unrest.

Thus, they need to create a new source of concern among blacks, and have hit upon the fiction of metastasizing white supremacy and violence against minorities.

US Democrats, 40 years ago, apparently.

Predictably, the media has enthusiastically abetted this strategy. Indeed, it is why they were so willing to run with the preposterous Jussie Smollett story and a long list of equally absurd hate crime hoaxes perpetrated since Donald Trump became President. It is why we are increasingly subjected to editorials in the major “news” publications claiming that killings perpetrated by “right-wing extremists” are on the rise and that this alleged increase coincides with the Trump era.

Well that explains that. Like mass immigration from the third world (aka open borders), at bottom it’s all about more votes for the left.

Left’s Latest Demand: Race-Based Reparations, by Pat Buchanan.

Having embraced “Medicare-for-all,” free college tuition and a Green New Deal that would mandate an early end of all oil, gas and coal-fired power plants, the Democratic Party’s lurch to the left rolls on.

Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren both called last week for race-based reparations for slavery.

“Centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, legal discrimination and segregation, and discrimination that exist today have led to a systemic wealth gap between black and white Americans,” Harris told The New York Times. “I’m serious about taking an approach that would change policies and structures and make real investments in black communities.”

Echoed Sen. Warren: “We must confront the dark history of slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination in this country.” This history has crippled “the ability of black families to build wealth in America for generations.”

Anti-slaver ships. Slavery was abolished world-wide by white Christians.

That black Americans are handicapped by their history in this country, and cannot accumulate wealth as easily, and require compensatory reparations for slavery and segregation, is more than a controversial assertion.

Are the Democrats going to say this in their national platform in 2020? And how much will the rest of America be forced to pay, and for how long?

Warren says Native Americans, too, must be “part of the conversation.” Apparently, they suffer from a similar handicap and need the same reparations.

How far and fast has the Democratic Party lunged leftward? In 2016, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders all rejected reparations.

Have Warren and Harris thought this through?

The questions that instantly arise are: Who would qualify as a beneficiary of reparations, and who would pay the immense transfer sums involved?

It’s all about votes for the left. Principles be damned.

Jordan Peterson To the Rescue, by Bill Muhlenberg (Culture Watch)

h/t Stephen Neil

Though our greater audience likely now knows of Canadian psychologist Jordon Peterson, he’s currently on an Australian tour so this will be timely as a debrief from his recent interview.

He agreed to enter the Lion’s Den known as Q&A and as usual, turned the slings and arrows aimed at him toward his detractors.

Read on for Bill Muhlenbierg’s nice synopsis of what really took place versus what you might have read from the usual suspects in the mainstream media.

Enjoy!

Statistics, like gender, are now fluid too? By Mark Powell (Spectator Australia)

h/t Stephen Neil

“This is a serious matter indeed. If government agencies cannot be trusted to accurately report the facts, then who can we trust – and, perhaps more importantly, what is their flawed material doing in schools?”

Collectively, the Left, our Educational institutions, the Media and Government use the psychological concept of “projection” (click on the word for examples) toward the non PC realist.  This has become known in the popular culture as “Fake News” for a reason.

James Woods Rips ‘Arrogant Idiot’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: ‘You Work for Us’. By Justin Caruso (Breitbart)

The always acerbic and quite frankly brilliant James Woods schools our latest “wanna be dictator” on how the American constitutional system works.

Soon after her election, she stated, “If we work our butts off to make sure that we take back all three chambers of Congress — Uh, rather, all three chambers of government: the presidency, the Senate, and the House.”

The 3 branches of the US government are: the executive (Presidency), legislative — both Senate and the House of Representatives combined — similar to the upper and lower houses of Parliament and the judicial (the ultimate arbiter in the USA is the 9 member Supreme Court).

As AOC was elected to the House of Representatives, we should hope that she would have a clue as to the structure of the US government.

Alas, hope merely springs eternal…:-)

Woods conducts government class, yet again – Read on!

Kim Jong Un is taking a laborious 3.5-day train ride to meet Trump in Vietnam, and it could be because he’s too embarrassed to borrow a plane from China, by Aexandra Ma.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is taking a 2,000-mile, 3-1/2-day train ride to meet US President Donald Trump in Vietnam this Wednesday, most likely to save face because he doesn’t want to ask China to lend him a plane.

Kim boarded his family’s armoured train at Pyongyang Station on Saturday evening, and he plans to arrive in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi on Tuesday, the day before his summit is scheduled there with Trump. …

Last year, Kim borrowed a Boeing 747 plane from Air China, the airline majority-owned by the Chinese state, to get himself to Singapore in June for his first summit with Trump.

His 40-year-old, Soviet-made Ilyushin Il-62 plane was deemed unsafe for the voyage at the time. …

The North Korean leader did not appreciate remarks about his reliance on China last year, Cheng Xiaohe, a North Korea expert at Beijing’s Renmin University, told The New York Times.

Socialism! Happens every time.

Ocasio-Cortez: People Maybe Shouldn’t Reproduce Due To Climate Change, by Ryan Saavedra.

Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) suggested on Sunday night that people should consider not having children due to climate change because there is a “scientific consensus” that life will be hard for kids.

“Our planet is going to hit disaster if we don’t turn this ship around and so it’s basically like, there’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult,” Ocasio-Cortez said while chopping up food in her kitchen during an Instagram live video. “And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, ‘Is it okay to still have children?'”

Glenn Reynolds:

AOC was born in 1989, the same year that AP reported that “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000,” and the New York Times published a column by Al Gore headlined, “An Ecological Kristallnacht. Listen.” Presumably, she’s glad that her parents ignored such apocalyptic scaremongering.

Babylon Bee:

The nation breathed a collective sigh of relief Monday while watching footage in which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared to come out against the concept of reproducing.

Stating they realized that we really dodged a bullet this time, citizens all over the country expressed their sudden sense of comfort and serenity at the fact that Ocasio-Cortez would probably never have children. …

“This is a huge burden off my chest,” said Lyle Billings of Lawrence, Kansas. “I suddenly realized that there could be two, three, or even four little Ocasio-Cortezes running around one day. So I totally support the congresswoman’s position against having children. It’s really what’s best for the nation as a whole.”

While the nation is typically baffled at Ocasio-Cortez’s positions, her bold stand against having children has become her most popular policy position yet, garnering a 97% approval rating.

Autopsy of a Dead Coup, by Victor Davis Hanson.

For those of you not familiar with Victor Davis Hanson, I include a few biographical tidbits along with his wikipedia page here: Victor Davis Hanson

“VDH” as he is affectionately known, is a brilliant historian and classical thinker. He truly is a farmer in the San Joaquin Valley of California — an area that is the “bread basket to the world”. If  California were its own country, it would still be the world’s 5th largest economy, far surpassing Russia, (for example).  The continuing mismanagement of the state by its “progressive” policies has caused an incredibly shrinking middle class and at an alarming rate.  The old adage in the USA is that, “so goes California, so goes the rest of the nation”.  VDH has written brilliantly about this and many other topics including this linked article above where he tells us of the desperation of the left to defeat Trump, the left’s boogey man de jour.

If California is the leading indicator for the USA, it can also be said that the USA is often a leading indicator for the rest of the Western world.  Caveat Emptor — buyer beware!