Simple, Complex, Complicated : Love, Relationships, Power

Universe is simple. 

At the largest and smallest scale available to human conceptualisation as it stands. Simple.

This is what the best Physicists are telling us from their research into the scales of the material universe beyond normal human sensory capability.

The same simple sets of equations can be used to describe Universe, in minute and in macro detail.

Things in the mid range are complex. This, they also say, is what the data they are gathering is telling them. 

Simplicity is not primitive.

It is intelligence.

Intelligence is complex.

Academic rankings are complicated.

Things get complicated when...

,,, anyone has an agenda, regarding a population of people, because when presented with reliable evidence that counters the assumptions of that agenda or it's goals, that evidence will be dismissed, omitted, outlawed.

Biology is not complicated.

Our best scientists are showing this to be the case.

Complex, rather than complicated.

International relations are complicated.

East Enders drama's are complicated.

So many crutches. So much that us unspoken, unsaid, denied.

Explaining away the causes of chronic post traumatic stress by referring only to the symptoms presented, and deliberately ignoring the situational, enviro-social aspects of a diagnosis and prognosis towards a healing... is criminal.

And it's complicated. I I think the response to that has to be simple, and from that the complexity required to deal with the problem of political power and abuse of power will emerge, is emergng.

I think it's less evolution, as a biological process, as it is healing, a recovery process.

We are quite well evolved for loving, aware lives. It's mostly what we have done, within the biological optimal. Homo Sapiens. Primate. Healthy Biological organism. Behaviourally and physiologically.

We live under institutionalised bully systems that are hierarchically violent.

This afflicts us all.

This chronic stress is ubiquitous across our current social governance systems, and It's presence, it's dominance over our lives alters all our bio-markers for optimal biological human health as a species.

These systems are recent 'inventions'.. they can be undone, just as difficult as they were to create, and they have been, intolerably difficult processes, nonetheless they can be undone.

They are not, and never have been, inevitable.


Over the years, much of the natural behaviour of children has been pathologised.

In order to mask the political and psychological realities of the adult social world, there has been a trend of reframing any behaviour of children that is deemed 'difficult', as a medicalised behavioural issue, a matter of medicine.

Bored to distraction becomes a ‘symptom’ of something ‘wrong’ with the child or the child’s bio-chemistry.

Which is quite useful in terms of how indoctrination forms the core of any enforced social cohesion.

The stress of being subjected to the rigours of indoctrination is chronic, and it manifests over time in subtle and not so subtle behaviours. People break because they are broken by something. The powerlessness of a misunderstood child is a deep well of pain and fear, confusion and anger. When that misunderstanding is institutionalised, all hell breaks loose.

Children in primary schools presenting with symptoms of chronic stress attributed to their schooling experience, matching a similar increase in symptoms among the frontline teaching staff.

The problem of bullying is ignored.

-

“The very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human.”

Murray Bookchin.

I agree.

"Anyone who could look at humans and say that there's certain inevitability to some of the most unpalatable things we are doing, doesn't have a leg to stand on. "

Robert Zaposlky (on Joe Rogan show.)>>

Awesome show....


Cats, Virus's and Human behaviour

Toxoplasma gondii is an obligate intracellular, parasitic alveolate that causes the disease toxoplasmosis. Found worldwide, T. gondii is capable of infecting virtually all warm-blooded animals, but felids such as domestic cats are the only known definitive hosts in which the parasite can undergo sexual reproduction.

A an infected cat will birth many more Toxo spoor, transmitted in their poop.

One of Toxo's 'tricks' is to migrate, somehow, to the brain of something a cat would hunt and eat, a rodent, or a gazelle, and end up in a cats tummy. The trick is to disinhibit the rodents fear of felines. Which it does.

Zapolsky's point? Behaviour has many affectors, many elements to it's bases.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obmt_PkIfBE

But the larger point is this - there are many, many factors that come into play in terms of human behaviour, and of critical importance is the lived experience,the environment, more so than anything that is 'genetically' indicated.

Hierarchies of bullying are neither inevitable nor are they healthy.

Class is a symptom.
Imposed Hierarchy, aka Bullying, is the problem.

Suppressing the symptom does not guarantee a cure.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find, and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest flows from that.

A poem, and a song, 'Sometimes I Wish Santa', and 'Christmess'

I get it. I get the gathering of loved ones, for a week of respite from the world of work and debt and worry and political  hypocrisy.




One knows we need  more of this, the gathering of lovers, friends and family, and less work to destrory the habitat in order to make Billionaires.

All the work that goes into consumer Christmas, consumer Hanuka, consumer Eid, consumer Paddy's Day, consumer Thanksgiving, whateva 'festival' it is, all that time would be better used just loving and being. No need for gifts or extra food. Just the love.

And nothing I ever say about this is to be taken as dissing that desire for family, for relaxing, for community in any way, shape or form. That desire is gem.

Connection is human, shopping is institutional cultural behaviour.

So here are two pieces, a poem and a song. 


 Secret Santa.

Sometimes I wish Santa was secret,
that no-one knew his or her name...

more secret that the CIA

so secret that no one knew of him, or her.

Or it.

It is a thing. A concept. Santa was always dead. He's a zombie.

I wish....

that millions and millions of microplastic tyred miles and tons and gigatons of plastic
 toys and wrapping would simply vanish.

They won't.

The plastic just gets smaller and smaller and smaller until we are drinking it without seeing it.

A bit like Christmess shopping  - we do not see the poison, it is covered in glitter.

The roads are still clogged with plastic shedding metal boxes moving flesh for more shopping.

Patterns.

Faith in the myth appears to be sapping, replaced by open lies, yet we still play the game?

Mental and emotional wrapping, a clingy film of cultural appropriation and toxic mimicry.

Do it!

Unwrap yourself.

Do it now!

Feel the relief!

Imagine plastic
created to miraculously bio-degrade, by clear thinking..

designed to be
re-
up

-taken,

(sorry Liam Neeson and Luc Besson!)

"we will find you and we will re-use you!"

thus, cycling nurture into a myriad web of living, making
the world safe for all it's children... all their lives.

I will not let you shrinkwrap my Earth!

I wish.

Wish is one thing, what we do another,
Some things are assuredly worth the bother.

Christmas?

I can't be bothered.

I am immune.

Though not immune to the pollution, not immune to the poisoning of the habitat, and not immune to the love of chocolate.

--

Christmess

Here is a song about Christmess..

This song contains a question, a situation, a stance, and then a nod to John Lennon, as a mid point, and a resolution.

It's a song I really like, and I think it's best sung as a poignant ballad,a sing of long term hope and resilience, rather than a protest song... I think this version is pretty much spot on in that regard, the recording was pretty slapdash.



All my own 'work'.... several limitations apply, obvs.

I send warmest regards, and kindest feelings to all my readers, whether you agree with my presentations or not.

We are all human.

This is our life together.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.


Traumopbobia? An understanding of the limitations of the status quo of institutionalised healing.

Gabor Mate, interviewed on the matter of a behavioural analysis of Trump, Clinton and the symptoms of adverse behaviour patterning they present.



At issue is one one hand the madness of individual leaders, on the other hand a question about the kind of society in which such behaviour is not only permitted, it is promoted.

It's understandable that we tend to not want to look at hurtful experiences, or their outcomes, when they are so great as to be heart breaking, unspeakable.

And yet, in a safe place, one can see through that reluctance, and integrate, and move on more or less unencumbered by unconscious behavioural issues, and thrive fully alive again. That safe place is honesty, empathy, compassion, care, understanding.... and detailed knowledge of what is happening within any traumatised person, so that one can hear and trust..

Gabior mate says this:

" In most medical schools, although this is changing somewhat, although rather slowly, but encouragingly, most students never hear a single lecture on trauma.

For example, a few days ago, I met a young woman who was an emergency room physician in Detroit, and she had graduated from medical school in Michigan. Although I knew the answer, I asked her how many lectures she had received in medical school about emotional trauma. Not only had she not received a single lecture, but she also said emotional trauma wasn’t even mentioned once in any of the classes that she took. This absence is astounding when you consider the fact that trauma is the basis of most mental illness and most addiction. Also, and this should be obvious, there are all kinds of secondary physical consequences as well.

We just endure it and parent within it as best we can.

What is known, well established and proven scientifically, clinically and in practice on how trauma afflicts individuals and communities is a vast evidence base. The information is not that recent either.. rather the understandings have been deepened by solid reseaerch, energetic questioning of previous assumptions made possible by ever finer observation technologies, where we can see endocrine molecular biology in action, in real time.

The fundamentals have been known for at least 50 years.

And these learnings are not being integrated into the mainstream health or education systems with the same energy as the drive to privatise those same public utilities.Often what happens is a flagship example of some new understanding is workshopped, then is trialled and is bureaucratised and institutionalised, and it's original intent vanishes in material terms.

Why?

This is madness, and permitting it's continuation is also madness.

David Smail places this in the material world of lived and embodied experience.

He writes :

"
Hardly any of the 'symptoms' of psychological distress may correctly be seen as medical matters. The so-called psychiatric 'disorders' are nothing to do with faulty biology, nor indeed are they the outcome of individual moral weakness or other personal failing. They are the creation of the social world in which we live, and that world is structured by power.

    Social power may be defined as the means of obtaining security or advantage, and it will be exercised within any given society in a variety of forms: coercive (force), economic (money power) and ideological (the control of meaning). Power is the dynamic which keeps the social world in motion. It may be used for good or for ill.

    One cannot hope to understand the phenomena of psychological distress, nor begin to think what can be done about them, without an analysis of how power is distributed and exercised within society. Such an understanding is the focus of this web-site.
"
   
There are three principal strands to the site: literature and links in a) psychology and psychiatry and b) more general socio-economic analysis and reference to Smail's own work - well worth a reading....

What he is talking about is the callousness of power.

It represents an utter indiference to human suffering wherever it threatens their power, at the institutional level. This is a criminal omission.

It is a policy that is throwing accountability into the wind.

It IS a policy to NOT integrate this learning, this evidence base.

Look at the dehumanised slanging matches that parade themselves as political and civil discourse!

The bullying persists.

What does that tell us about the social dynamics of power.?

What David Smail, Gabor Mate and many, many others are saying is 'enough, already!'

The UN case on the UK's abuse of the Human Rights of so many vulnerable people with needs speaks to the truth of my observation. Much else does too.

Here is Gabior Mate's article in full. Well worth a reading.


In this article Gabor Mate joins the dots on the issue of leaders, unresolved trauma, coping with chrionic stress and our own political choices, and reveals, with some compassion the variance between opinion and evidence.

The mainstream opinion is that addiction is about the individual, whereas the evidence suggests it is about the individual in that given setting, within that given society, where power is mediated through a hierarchy, a hierarchy that reserves the right to organised violence and oppresses large groups of people. Our society is the problem, addiction is a symptom. That is what traumaphobia enables.

The pretence that the addict is the problem.

We see patterns in any population. Look at any behaviour, any action and patterns will emerge as an aggregate.

Yet the individual is not the pattern, and the response to the individual has to be precisely tailored to that persons lived experience, that persons needs and dignity, and all that goes with it.

When policy is pattern based, and it does not care to take that essential detail into acount, only harm can flow. Obviously.

Schools teaching History ought to be teaching how trauma from mass war effects behaviour, and ought to be told the story from all sides, especially those who suffered, rather than those who led the charge to war. A simple exercise in the truth, and so much misinformation, mistrust and caricaturing of  'others' would would be avoided, and indeed prevented.




Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Bullying. Political Callousness, it's just bullying. Stop it!


Rather clear blog piece by the wonderful Sue Jones, on the realities of Universal Credit, Nudge (bullying people into 'good behaviour'), The DWP, and in generakl, looking at Institutionalised Bullying as a core component of the UK Government, collaborating with mass media, and active on a massive scale.



We really do need writers and people to understand the way bullying functions within our syste,m, what it's effects are, and how to counter it, with being drawn into the adversarial combat ring, the colleseum of public discourse.

Bullying is a political behaviour, and rationalising bullying is a daily academic exercise of the system.

Here are two key paragraphs from Sue's piece.

"The introduction of Universal Credit was aimed at ‘incentivising’ people into work and to work longer hours, by ensuring that for those needing to claim welfare support, the experience was as uncomfortable as possible. Under the Conservatives, social security has been transformed into a system that meters out discipline, coercing citizens into compliance with state-defined economic outcomes, rather than serving as a national insurance-funded provision to meet people’s basic necessities, should they need it – which was the original intention behind the welfare state.

The introduction of ordeals and harsh conditionality in the process of welfare administration was designed to ensure that no-one felt secure or ‘entitled’ to claim support. The Conservatives believe provision for meeting people’s basic survival needs when they experience financial disadvantage somehow produces ‘perverse incentives’ that make being out of work a more favourable option than looking for work. "

and 



"much research – both historic and recent – has indicated that unless people are secure in being able to meet their basic needs – such as covering the cost for fundamental necessities such as food, fuel and shelter – then it is highly unlikely they will be able to fulfil higher level psychosocial needs, including looking for work. In short, absolute poverty limits human potential. It’s therefore simply not possible to punish people out of being poor. The problem of poverty is structural and material, it doesn’t arise because of some kind of moral, character or behavioural deficit on the part of poor people. "

"The introduction of ordeals and harsh conditionality in the process of welfare administration was designed to ensure that no-one felt secure or ‘entitled’ to claim support. The Conservatives believe provision for meeting people’s basic survival needs when they experience financial disadvantage somehow produces ‘perverse incentives’ that make being out of work a more favourable option than looking for work. "
~~


An utterly clear and simple exposure of the bullying perpetrated by those who hold Power over Governance and Economics. They ignore the evidence. They set it up to intimidate people back into work. They set it up to kick away the support systems. They set it up to be privatised social welfare. It harms ordinary people, and they just do not care a fig.




Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Slavery, Independence, Myth and Racism

If one's own relationship with one's partner is toxic, and one does nothing to confront that,  or is unable to see that toxicity for what it is, then it seems to me that pointing out the toxicity of others relationships and then suggesting one knows how to help them deal with that activity is a deliberate active ignoring of what is. It goes beyond not knowing.  



Truly ignorant.


Ignorance and not knowing.
For me these are two different qualities.
Ignorance is the deliberate action of ignoring something.
Not knowing is not knowing.
Tony Blair was ignorant with regards to Iraq. He deliberately ignored the fact that an invasion would lead to mass civilian deaths. David Cameron was ignorant with regards to Libya. He deliberately ignored the fact that supporting a violent 'revolution' by bombing Libyan infrastructure, and supporting violent militia would lead to mass civilian deaths.
Both knew what they were doing, and both deserve the derogatory implication of 'ignorant'.
If someone does not know about something, that is merely not knowing. Indeed not knowing is a core quality of Science, it is what drives good Science.
The problems of Power are best dealt with locally, then nationally, then internationally. We are in a toxic relationship with whoever Rules us. Being ruled over is a toxic state.

As David Smail writes:

"Hardly any of the 'symptoms' of psychological distress may correctly be seen as medical matters. The so-called psychiatric 'disorders' are nothing to do with faulty biology, nor indeed are they the outcome of individual moral weakness or other personal failing. They are the creation of the social world in which we live, and that world is structured bypower.
    Social power may be defined as the means of obtaining security or advantage, and it will be exercised within any given society in a variety of forms: coercive (force), economic (money power) and ideological (the control of meaning). Power is the dynamic which keeps the social world in motion. It may be used for good or for ill.
    One cannot hope to understand the phenomena of psychological distress, nor begin to think what can be done about them, without an analysis of how power is distributed and exercised within society."

Genuine healthy self governance is something a people must actively participate in. Voting, on it's own, is not that. But that cannot happen until a people understands the toxicity of their situation, by reflecting on the evidence before them.

We all need to grasp that our income taxes and sales taxes are the basic funding mechanism for Government, and that these are the collateral States use to guarantee their lenders that they will pay the lenders back. That this tax revenue belongs to the people not the Government, who merely hold that money in trust. That has implications. Not least that policy must be evidence based, must serve the peoples real needs and must not be subject to ideology, belief or religion.
Start at home, folks!
Let the people of America confront the abuse of Power they are funding. That way they can prevent sending their military out all over the world to interfere in other peoples lives.
Likewise the people of Britain. Similarily for each and every juridstriction. Deal with the issues at home, first. Demonstrate that it can be done, and is practical.
If they succeed in that enterprise, then they can turn attention to other states where oppression exists, and encourage the people there to follow suit. Because they have proven it can be done. Because they can provide meaningful material support in that enterprise.
Power does all it can to manipulate the people over whom they have that power to ensure that that NEVER happens. Power is bullying.

Kitty Jones has written a really useful blog piece on this. The dynamics will be easily recognised from inter-personal behaviour we have all experienced. The same dynamics apply to any Political Power system that is a dominating system, a hierarchy of power,  that exercise power over the people.

The truth about the promise of African 'Independence' after WWII, as an example.

Slavery was a separate matter. Slavery was almost an accident. The first colonies used white slaves and white indentured workers, who died in the hot climates of the Carribean and Southern parts of the colonies, from heat exhaustion and malaria. The drive to bring in slaves from areas of West Africa where immunity to malaria was common emerged as a response to the weakness of the white slaves. They had no such immunity. Nor were they acclimatised to the heat of the tropics. There was an existing slave trade in North Africa, and it was to this trade that the British and others turned. They could have taken slaves from South America, or North Africa, or Asia. But the trip across the Atlantic from West Africa was by their estimation more efficient. 
In North America, Racism was institutionalised in order to ensure slaves and poor whites did not unite, locally, to challenge their oppressors. The abolition of slavery 150 years later was not about the welfare of the slaves, it was about the Industrialists need to put a stop to ultra cheap labour, to push more and more people into the factory wage work system, which they were busy building as an international empire. If another state had used slave labour in factories, they would have been able to compete and win against the factory wage work system. That potential is what really drove the American Civil War, and the Abolition of Slavery by the British some years later, not the welfare of the slaves. But they could not come out and say that. So they used Christians and Liberals as cover for the plot.
The Betrayal of African Independence, post WWII, is the primary driver of oppression across Africa since WWII.. It had nothing to do with slavery per se. And yet it had.

School history texts claim it happened, and that it was a reward for support in both the European World Wars, but that the Africans fell into conflict with each other, (because they have always been 'uncivilised', primitive, is the standard unspoken, implication) and because of African conflict in many cases it failed.

What actually happened was that every time an African government sought to take control of the resoources of it's lands, above and below, the Europeans murdered the principals, installed their own proxies and maintained their control of 'strategic resources'. They hired in what ever local African thugs would submit to them, and put them to work.
Gaddafi understood that.
Patrice Lumumba understood that.
The ANC reneged on that, and the white liberals who supported them did not understand that.
And had nothing to do with Slavery. Which has been the primary driver of white consciousness concerning black Africans.....
It had much more to do with control of wealth creating raw materials and economic hegemony.
What is implicitly Racist is suggesting the those Black Africans who took the Crowns shilling - the ones the Europeans powers installed, after they murdered the ones who sought to claim African Raw Materials for African Wealth creation - are part of 'Africans savagery towards each other'.

And that ties into the institutionalisation of Racism in the colonies. We are back full circle, where clever lies are used to mask the reality. Gaddafi was murdered, and the State that the Libyan people  created together with the wealth of their oil revenues was destroyed because the example of an African state managing it's own resources to nurture it's own people could not be permitted to continue, and could not be allowed to inspire other states to take similar measures.

Venezuela is on the same trajectory.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Refugees, Squatting, Indoctrination, Christmas Poetry.

I have been taking a break from posting.  It was because when I began to see the full extent of the behavioural dynamic, when it is obvious that there is so much bullying going on, in matters of Civil and Corporate Governance and behaviour, that it became impossible to deal with any discourse that ignores that simple fact.



Even those who genuinely seek reform, and yet support left vs right conceptualisation of Civil Governance, who accept adversarial politics as 'normal', who therefore argue against each other, rather than deliberate upon the evidence available, as a collective engaged in a mutual exercise of good governance.

Letting the stew stew.

It's so immature, so inneffective, so dull, old and boring. Really. Trump is boring, Netanyahu is boring, Putin is boring, May is boring, Austerity is lethal and boring, Farage is boring, War is boring, and covert war is even more boring. Competition as adversaries is boring.

The brew brews.

This social system's facade is crumbling. The only solid thing is human decency, kindness, compassion, empathy, on the streets and in our homes and places where we gather and work - we can do this - and when all the facade has crumbled, and all the glitter has been cleaned off the hoardings, it will be that which brings us to recovery, not tech, not carbon taxes, not religion, not aliens, not anyone but us lot here. I feel good about that.

Soil aerated. Leaves fall,  buds grow. 

I have been writing a few pieces of poetry, to be spoken, rather than read... read them aloud, adding your own inflections and emphases.

Coin Poem.

----

This is about the health and safety report onn the danger of abstract artificial reality, which is what coin has become.

-



BitCoin
BitchCoin
MumCoin
DadCoin
ChildrenCoin
HomeCoin -
InvestmentCoin?

FoodCoin
WaterCoin
CommunityCoin
HealthCoin
PeaceCoin

StateCoin
ReligionCoin
PowerCoin
WarCoin
WasteCoin
Shit
Coin.

---

This is on the feeling of being human, in the biologically mandated sense of optimal human health.

If we look..



If we look with all our eyes we see more.
If we listen with all our ears, we hear more.
If we sniff with all our noses, we will smell more,
and the stench of Civilisation will become inescapable.
If we feel with our bodies, our hearts will be strong,
When we sing with the streams, our songs tingle,
When we walk with the breeze, our step is brisk.
When we stalk in the hunt, our breathing is even.
When we rest in the bliss, our hearts are one.
When the fire is loaded, and more besides
When our larder is fat with the gifts of life,
When we look to each other, and travellers greet,
Tis good to be human, different and sweet.


Christmas Factory 2017



I feel a poetic flow..
snow
fades in the below feezing,
slow
lee.

Angonizingly,
There is no glory in this resistance.

A White Christmas is premature and still-born.

Central heating speeds the rooves exposure.
A patchwork emerges. Warm and cold. Eating or heating.

Heating vents become prime beggar estate.
Documentaries describe this. It get's worse.

Christmas 2017 is jangling
My nerves.

My nerves were shot.

I
remember
sleeping in a factory,
a long abandoned work place,
it's bustle and noise a distant 
but not forgotten grime,
Sleeping in my day clothes,
Coat on, a hoodie and a hat,
two pairs of socks, and early Christmas trick.

With just enough credit for one phone call,
one special person,
on that special day.

Heart aching.

In that banal place,
bereft of 'mod cons'.
dusty and dirty,
in need of a deep clean,
Grief washes my cheeks,
and I am safe, for now.

Squatting. Seeking a safe, 'affordable' home.

Affordable. A caricature of the truth.
Indebted. In debt.
How much debt can you afford.
If you cannot sustain debt, then you must lose.
The economy is built on debt.
Power is maintained through debt.

The Evening Standard does not know my history,
does not know the stories of tens of thousands
who seek to bodge together a home,
as they carry the wreckage of lives lived within a hierarchically violent social system that is not so much corrupted (as in good people turned bad)
rather it is founded on violent bullying,
maintained by
indoctrination and psycho-social manipulation.



It - The Man - knows these things, because it manifests them, daily.

Opinion as apparent fact,"trust me Gov!" Is the Bible not fake news too?

"What the economy needs", "growing a workforce" : -

where do we break the spell of these spells?

The spell broke for me 
in that factory and 
in every refugee that is fleeing war there breaks that spell again, again and again.

Safe Home. Affordable Homes. Language. War.

----










Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.