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Episode 169 - Modern Eclipse Lunacy, Part 3: Richard Hoagland's Claims

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Recap: In the final regular episode in the three-part Solar Eclipse of August 2017 series, several of the claims made by Richard Hoagland are addressed. Three types of claims are examined: Whether shadow bands indicate there are glass structures on the Moon, whether the Accutron watch readings indicate there is a hyperdimensional physics, and alleged disinformation.

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Episode Summary

Claim: In the previous two installments of this three-part series, I discussed a plethora of wacky modern ideas related to solar eclipses, and I addressed some of the flat Earth claims. In this episode, I'll be addressing claims from a fan favorite, Richard C. Hoagland. I haven't really addressed Richard's claims for awhile, so very quickly, the reason why I tend to have episodes featured around his claims is that he's in the business of manufacturing inane claims related to all sorts of astronomy - especially planetary science which is my field - and he's been in that business for over three decades at this point. Hence, a lot of material for this show.

There are three primary categories into which the claims fall, and I'll address them in this order: Glass structures on the Moon, his accutron measuring "tremors in the force," and lizard man and other disinformation. I'll warn you now that this is a clip-heavy show, part of why it took so long, also because he's been talking about this since August 20 at least through the month of recording this, last talking about it as of December 3.

Glass Structures on the Moon

First up are glass structures on the Moon. By way of introducing this topic, I'll play this minute-long clip. [Clip from The Other Side of Midnight, 20 August, 2017, starting 01:31:25]

Caller: "What do you think I should do?"

RCH: "Well, do you have a big white sheet with you?"

Caller: "Do I have a big white sheet?"

RCH: "A big white sheet. A big bed sheet."

Caller: "Yes, I can get that"

RCH: "You want to spread that on the ground, and as the eclipse approaches, as totality approaches, you want to watch and photograph the sheet because you may see something called 'shadow bands' rippling very faintly across the sheet. If you take CCD images with any good, high-, you know, high— CCD camera now, you can amplify those, you can enhance those, so the shadow bands are really, you know, high contrast. No one has known for hundreds of years what causes shadow bands. There's all kinds of theories, again. My theory now is the shadow bands are the glass refractions of the corona at the edge of the moon, just like a lens, magnified by sweeping across the Earth at high speed."

So, what does all that mean? Unfortunately, Richard did not provide a brief, cogent statement about what he means by all of this, but really nothing that Richard says is brief. I can say that without fear of him being insulted because he and others often make light of his inability to say anything briefly. Anyway, I can summarize it in brief: Richard thinks that an ancient, advanced civilization build glass structures on the Moon, and over the œons, they have been broken up by meteorite impacts, and so you have giant glass shards and ruins of buildings on the moon. All glass. He claims various lines of evidence for this, all of which have been debunked by myself and others, so I'm not going to go into them in detail here. Instead, I want to discuss the other phenemenon which Richard tasked his listeners to record. [Clip from The Other Side of Midnight, 20 August, 2017, starting 01:42:15]

RCH: "Do you have a big, white bed sheet to spread on the ground?"

Caller: "Um, probably can get one. I'll see."

RCH: "'Cause you need to look for shadow bands, because again, they are a mystery, hundreds of years old. There's all kinds of theories, no one really knows. My theory it's the glass structures that are imaged in that CCD image that refract the-the corona, and you literally, it's like— it's like, looking at uh, light through water? If you ever look at the bottom of a swimming pool, can you see the ripples? And if you get video it'd be fantastic, if you get stills, that'd be fantastic, and then you send them to us so we post them for next week."

That relatively brief exchange explains a bit more about what Richard is talking about and why he thinks shadow bands would be a good indicator of whether his ideas are correct. To talk now a bit more about the background information here, shadow bands are a real phenomenon, they do take place during total solar eclipse - or really just before totality and just after - they have been observed for over a thousand years - the oldest known writing going back to the 9th century in Iceland, but we are pretty sure we know what they are.

What they look like are exactly what Richard described at the bottom of a clear swimming pool: Thin bands of shadow that move around. I did not see them myself during the August 2017 eclipse, but I did have a camera phone going aimed at a white cooler and we did record them as the sun went into totality. They were very brief, just a few seconds, but they were definitely there.

Before I get to why we think they happen, though, Richard's analogy of water at the bottom of a swimming pool is exactly wrong. Why? Because his analogy is exactly right for why we think they happen, which means it's exactly wrong for why he thinks they happen. He's arguing that shadow bands occur because they are light refracted by these glass domes. That could happen, if there were glass domes or ruins, but they shouldn't look like shadow bands. What you would see is an effect I suspect many of you have seen if you have any sort of crystal through which the sun has passed.

For example, I have a plastic multi-faceted "crystal" that hangs from a lamp, and sometimes I'm in bed and the sun hits it just right. When that happens, I start to see a rainbow in my eye. As the sun moves, the blue changes to green, yellow, red, and then goes away. Same thing happens if you have something sitting on a shelf and the sun goes through it, you get rainbow colors on the shelf or ground or wall or wherever. The crystal is refracting the light like a prism. It's not creating tiny thin wobbling bands of shadows. Richard's explanation just doesn't pass the basic "does this make sense given what we know about refraction through broken glass?" question.

Why his pool analogy makes sense is because that IS what we think causes shadow bands: Earth's atmosphere is a gas envelope that can act like a fluid. It's just a low-density fluid. The atmosphere itself refracts light, and the amount of refraction changes based on the density or temperature. When the light from the sun is extremely well collimated, basically like a laser, which only happens when the light is coming from a tiny portion of the sun just before or just after totality, then the tiny density variations in the atmosphere will refract the light around and where there's a little less, you get a shadow band.

What you're seeing is turbulence in the atmosphere, just like turbulence in a swimming pool causes them on the bottom. Shadow bands WOULD happen all the time on Earth except that our sun is not a point-source of light, it has an angular size in our sky, and so the light from one "side" of the sun that you get cancels out any shadow bands that would be caused by the light from the other side. It has nothing to do with glass domes.

The *REVERSE* of shadow bands is why stars twinkle: Turbulence in our atmosphere causes the light from the star to be bent ever-so-slightly. When you're in a region where there would be a shadow band, the star looks just a tiny bit less bright. When you're not, it looks its normal brightness. Because it's effectively a point source of light in our sky, its light is collimated, and that's why you see this effect. Planets rarely twinkle for that reason: Even though they look like a point source to the unaided eye, they do have a much larger angular size as seen from earth than stars. So, the light from one side of it interferes with shadow bands that may occur from the other side, and hence it's hard to get planets to appear as though they're twinkling.

My explanation notwithstanding, Richard talked a lot more about shadow bands in his August 20 show, the day before the eclipse. [Clip from The Other Side of Midnight, 20 August, 2017, starting 01:54:37]

RCH: "This is one of the reasons using a telescope, with real high magnification, so you can really zoom in on that limb, or looking with binoculars - you know, very high-powered binoculars - which of course you gotta steady — Th-the glass of the lenses will cut out all of the UV. Remember, ultraviolet does not go through glass, that's why you gotta have quartz prisms and quartz lenses to image and take spectroscopy in the ultraviolet. So by looking through a telescope, or looking through binoculars, you are totally totally safe during totality - only during totality, you don't want to look at the raw naked photosphere of the sun with those glasses - but you'll have warning […]. But you wanna look for these glass structures 'cause I am absolutely convinced those are the structures causing the shadow bands, after hundreds of years of mystery, I think that's the answer, and those close-up CCD NASA images up on, uh, 'Radio with Pictures,' they show you what's there, just waiting to be seen with your own eyes."

Keith Laney: "So the shadow bands would be somewhat akin to the phenomenon we see in the Surveyor images of Sinis Medii in twilight—"

RCH: "Exactly! Or, olook at the bottom of a swimming pool, with the sun kind of off at an angle, you'll see dark bands and light bands criss-crossing the uh bottom of the pool? That's the refraction effect of water, glass of course has a higher refractive index, so across a quarter of a million miles, a small dispersion gets to be huge." [chair squeaks]

Listeners from the BellGab forum will recognize the infamous Hoagland Chair Squeak at the end of that, but here he gave a bit more detail and again he's wrong because things work the opposite way. Any refraction by glass structures a quarter million miles away would be completely washed out by the time they get to Earth. They would not show up as shadow bands just a few centimeters apart.

But despite this, and despite never discussing any measurements or example images or animation that people sent him or he recorded himself, Richard the next week, on August 27, claimed victory. [Clip from The Other Side of Midnight, 27 August, 2017, starting 02:31:30]

RCH: "And I can announce tonight, with the imagery that's on The Other Side of Midnight, under 'Radio with Pictures,' that we have been photographing the glass structures on the Moon for decades. And no one has known because they've been masked by the inner corona. When the technology of imagery, when the technology of the CCDs has developed to where you can see […] that stunning, incredible eclipse photograph […]. If you look at the moon during a total eclipse, you can see with the eye, particularly if you have binoculars or a telescope, you can see along the lunar limb, these stunning shards of the ancient glass domes. They're now photographable. Thousands upon thousands of amateurs, in the most attended, uh, eclipse in history, looked at the moon, took photographs, thous—millions of pictures, of these ancient domes as that brilliant glowing ring, right— hugging the periphery— the limb, the dark part of the moon's shadow. It's been there all of history. And only now do we understand and recognize, based on the Apollo data and the Chinese data, what in fact we've been gazing at for millennia.

Robert Morningstar: "They are fantastic pictures."

RCH: "They're stunning! They're absolutely stunning!"

Richard made an interesting point — millions of people watched the eclipse and took millions of photos. But in spite of that, somehow, only Richard and his very tiny circle of cohorts think that those pictures reveal anything about glass domes or ruins on the moon. This is despite Richard's very common fanaticism about "citizen science," as in this stuff will be obvious when common citizens are able to take these kinds of pictures for themselves. Only, if that's the case, this would seem to falsify Richard's assumptions, because it's only him that's interpreting the data this way.

But, that didn't stop him from crowing about this over three months later. [Clip from The Other Side of Midnight, 03 December, 2017, starting 01:57:14]

"I know the experiment that will instantly prove that there are structures on the Moon. In fact, a whole bunch of ordinary people, citizen scientists, Curtis, have already done the experiment, they just don't know it. Everyone who's listening to my voice, who took photographs, video of the eclipse, of the total solar eclipse that crossed this country this summer, this past summer, you need to look at your footage. If you shot it with a decent telescope and you had a decent plate scale, meaning that the limb of the moon kinda filled most of the frame, you have recorded during that eclipse stunning color video of ancient glass structures on the moon's surface. Don't believe me? Go look at your pictures. Uh, I'm going to be publishing something major on this in the next few weeks 'cause this was the major break-through of the eclipse of the century, of 2017, all kinds of thousands of ordinary people got incredible, priceless video, of glass stuff on the moon, that is not the corona, it's not flares, it's not the chromosphere, it's none of the normal stuff during an eclipse, in fact it is the bottoms of some of these ancient glass domes!"

If I may digress slightly before leaving this topic, and resort to something a bit more personal, to me, this is ego. Richard has been accused by many to have an ego the size of the civilizations he purports to think lived in the solar system in ancient times, and this statement epitomizes it. In substance, it is effectively him claiming that a phenomenon, which is fairly well understood, is actually something completely different. That millions of still images and movies taken by millions of people that they think show one thing, Richard alone knows is something different. As a common saying goes that I'll twist a bit, if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, chances are it's a duck, not a birthday cake filled with leprechaun gold.

Accutron

Moving on, the next set of claims gets back to Richard's infamous broken watch, the Accutron. I discussed this in extreme detail in episode 82, so very, very briefly, Richard thinks that his watch that's over four decades old is somehow a perfect sensor that can detect what he terms "hyperdimensional physics" effects on our world. The sensor works by having a tuning fork inside of it, and that fork must vibrate at a certain frequency, unless certain physical properties are changed, like its mass, which he claims can only happen by other dimensional energy manifesting in our dimension. He ignores mundane things like dirt on the watch can affect it, or that temperature will affect the frequency.

Anyway, the frequency of the tiny tuning fork in the watch is measured by a third-party device. One must take the third party device, put the watch in it, connect that to a third-party measuring device that will measure the tuning fork frequency, connect that device to a converter cable and plug that into a USB port on a computer. As I said, I've talked extensively about this, written extensively about this, and Expat has also written extensively about this on his "Dork Mission" blog, so I'm not going to go into more detail on that. It's also relevant that the guy who makes that third-party device to measure it has stated that he thinks Richard's watch is broken.

But it is important to point out in what will sound like an ad hominem attack, but really isn't, that Richard is not known to be good with modern electronic technology. This is not an ad hominem because it goes to one's ability to properly plug cables into each other and devices, and run the computer and the software properly. That sounds really basic, I know, but Richard when he first started his radio program in July 2015 announced he was having issues because he didn't know what a USB cable was. Additionally, throughout the at least three different networks and now Blogtalk Radio that he's on, his show has been plagued with technical difficulties, including not being able to operate Skype and add people to a conversation. This has led to almost as many shows cancelled as have not.

So I hope that you will forgive me for pointing this out, but I have to think that his lack of technical ability could easily contribute to the crazy readings he gets from his watch.

With that out of the way, you might be wondering what crazy readings I'm talking about. [Clip from The Other Side of Midnight, 20 August, 2017, starting 02:13:55]

"Th-th-the psychological an-an-and consciousness aspects of this eclipse, uh, are probably going to be very significant and I'm already seeing evidence in the accutron measurements – I was doing setup this afternoon, and um, this evening, and for 10 minutes, at uh, 7:03 [coughs], we had the most extraordinary set of readings, uh, that have not happened, you know, in the days before or in the hours since. Just for that 10 minutes, there was a huge excursion of the accutron, the frequency, it went down by almost uh— Well it went from 360 which is the baseline frequency of the, of the tuning fork, down to 330 cycles per second. That means the tuning fork is moving that much slower. Now, when you think of the physics of this little tuning fork, there's only two things that affect the frequency of a vibrating object. One is the um, uh, mass of the object, and the other is the force that's being applied to the object, and you have what's called 'natural resonance frequencies.' Well, these little tuning forks in the accutron are specifically cut so they are tuned to 360. They are supposed to resonate at 360. To change, suddenly, dramatically, down to 330, and in waves - it was spikes and waves as I'm— I'm going to post this, uh, at the end of the show on 'The Other Side of Midnight' so people can see the precursors. I have not had time to go back and look in the uh astronomical, you know, files we have, and the uh, the databases of celestial or uh, uh, you know uh, the other astronomical programs. But it was almost as if the moon has crossed something, had brushed against something, and that alignment had caused a literal tremor in the force. 'Cause it was confined, it was a given duration, it was unmistakable, huge spikes of waves, and then it died out, and it's been quiescent now for hour after hour after hour."

So there you have his basic idea, and even before the eclipse, he was claiming he was getting weird readings. Practically any real scientist would tell you right then and there that you probably have faulty equipment, or at the very least, if you are getting an effect when you don't think you should be, then something is wrong with your model.

Besides that, he demonstrated a lack of understanding of how tuning forks work! The equation for the frequency of a tuning fork is related to the length of the prongs, the material strength of the material it's mad of, the second moment of area of the cross-section of the tuning fork to the fourth power (the second moment of area being related to how the shape is distributed in space), the density of the material, and the cross-section of the area of the prongs.

No where in there is there force. In fact, tuning forks would be fairly useless if they were dependent on force because that would mean if you hit it slightly differently when you're trying to tune something, you'd get a different pitch. Not useful.

But you also might be wondering where temperature comes in because I said temperature can affect the pitch. Temperature comes into the factor of the material properties, called Young's modulus, which describes how elastic the material is. If temperature goes down, things get stiffer, and so the pitch will change, going down slightly. If temperature increases, pitch increases slightly. This might be one reason why the watch company stopped making them, because if you go from your warm house to the outside snow right now in Colorado, your watch would go from running either correctly or fast, to either slow or correctly. Or some combination of that.

It should go without saying that if you're going to be a good scientist, you should understand how your equipment works. In fact, that was one reason why I stopped working in a certain field, studying Saturn's rings, in grad school, because I didn't understand the way the computer code I was using worked and I didn't have any interest in understanding it — I decided that was probably a good sign I shouldn't be doing that research.

Moving on, Richard had a response for skeptics like me. [Clip from The Other Side of Midnight, 26 August, 2017, starting 00:42:15]

RCH: "A lot of people - a lot of skeptics over the years - have said, 'Ah, Hoagland! You're not measuring anything, it's just noise.' Because their model is that if you have a little tuning fork in this accutron, and it's, you know, going tick-tick-tick-tick 360 times per second. According to Newton, you know, F=m*a, that frequency should not change. Unless you mechanically hit the watch, or you drop it, or, you know, you super-cool it with liquid helium or something, so it undergoes a thermal shock and contracts, that frequency should hum like a, you know, well-oiled kitten - mixing our metaphors very madly - forever! Except you guys were up there and you watched the screen and what did you see that little humming tuning fork actually doing?"

Guest: "Wh-what I was seeing was uh, the peaks into the thousand Hertz range, when normally it's at 360 Hz, and peaks into the thousand Hertz range, and uh, and after the eclipse it was going below the 360 Hz, uh down into like 40 and such. And there was a little bit of that in the beginning of the eclipse, too, it was uh, you know, it was shocking to me seeing that on a graph."

RCH: [laughs]

According to Richard, these were important results, and they were different from what he observed in 2012. Which was not a total solar eclipse, it was an annular eclipse. [Clip from The Other Side of Midnight, 26 August, 2017, starting 00:56:36]

"Graph #10, that's the comparison in the 2012 measurements, and the 2017 measurements, and that stunning difference guys is because— I feel so dumb not remembering this, there's an 11-year solar cycle! Remember? Solar maximum, solar minimum. In 2012, we were close to solar max, and in 2017, this fall, the projections are it's minimum for the 11-year sunspot cycle. So what we were measuring is what I predicted 20 years ago, the inverse-proportionality of the torsion field to the entropic surface activity on the sun! Meaning, when there's a lot of sunspots, an' a lot of flares, an' a lot of coronal activity, there's almost no accutron torsion fields to measure! When the sun is at a minimum, few sunspots, very quiescent, very symmetrical corona and all that, the torsion field is going nuts 'cause the cycle is driven in exactly the reverse of what we see in 3D in terms of so-called 'solar thermal activity.' 'Cause hyperdimensional torsion fields are negentropic. They are windows to a universe of super-conductivity where there is no losses due to heat and all that. That's what we measured, Keith, and you saw it, and see it, right there on the screen, it's now immortalized, and I can do now detailed comparisons of structures in the sun and moon and all that. But the real big difference I think that these things are happening with the destroyers, with the eclipse and all that, with the— with the hurricane, the background field is now so much stronger in the hyperdimensional realm, it's mandating 3D effects. And since the science doesn't cover the 3D effects, the mainstream is left up a creek to figure out what's really going on."

For reference, his statement about "the destroyers" was how in the past few months before the eclipse, several US navy destroyers had collisions. 2017 also had a devastating hurricane season, primarily impacting Houston, TX, Florida, and destroying the infrastructure of Puerto Rico. Yes, Richard has the audacity to play off of those kinds of tragedies to advance his brand of crazy.

With that in mind, I went to look at his graphs. Expat has documented that Richard generously mislabels and misrepresents the dates of when his so-claimed "data" are taken, less generously lies about it, and this is yet another case of that. When Richard was on Coast to Coast AM back in 2012, he presented what he claimed were accutron traces from the eclipse. He talked about and showed wildly varying frequencies from the watch.

Now, more than five years later, the comparison he chose to show from 2012 shows practically a flat line, while the traces from 2017 go crazy. Even if the evidence did not exist that he is misrepresenting his data from 2012, and we just went by these traces, it bolsters my hypothesis that his watch is further breaking down over time. Richard likes to portray himself as a scientist. He clearly doesn't know - or at least portrays the opposite - practices of how a scientist would operate. The cherrypicking, improper labeling, and/or faking of his data would also be enough to get him thrown out of any scientific establishment and have all funding revoked, due to one simple word: "fraud."

Lizard Man and Other Disinfo

Moving to a lighter subject, the final topic about the August 2017 eclipse was only addressed in his pre-eclipse episode, and that's weird shiznit going down during or surrounding the eclipse event. First up is something he actively encouraged listeners to look for: UFOs. [Clip from The Other Side of Midnight, 20 August, 2017, starting 01:32:53]

RCH: "Keith was, was, looking at uh, uh, what might be happening in comparison with what happened over Mexico City during the eclipse in 1991. Various people all across Mexico during the totality of the 1991 eclipse over Mexico reported [cough] UFOs."

Guest: "—FOs. That's right!"

RCH: "—in the sky. If someone in 2017, the year of disclosure, wanted to actually make a big grandstand move, with the biggest number of eyeballs, and the largest number of cameras, and the largest number of Americans, in the most technologically advanced country on the planet, all looking up at the same time, maybe somebody will stage a kind of a uh, uh, sit-in in the sky, next to the eclipsed moon. And wouldn't that be amazing because every camera in the western hemisphere would record it, and there'd be no way to stuff that genie back in that bottle. So, obviously that's the next thing you want to look at, you want to look around the sky for things that don't belong!"

Guest: "Oh, wouldn't that be neat!"

As with many of Richard's claims, this did not pan out, and he has not since addressed it. But, with all the hype surrounding the eclipse, there was some that Richard, nor his callers, nor his guests took lightly. [Clip from The Other Side of Midnight, 20 August, 2017, starting 02:23:35]

RCH: "It's some kind of distracted, uh, disinfo effort."

Guest: "I mean they're—they're advising two counties, Lee and Sumpter counties, to be— to— it says that they 'should remain ever vigilant' because this lizard man was first spotted in 1988 by a 17 year-old-kid, [RCH: "Okay..."] who was driving at like 2:00 in the morning, in the summer, got a flat tire, you know, just, kind of this [unintelligible] situation. He claimed he saw a red eyed devil about 30 yards away, got in his car, the alleged creature jumped on his roof - right? - he threw it off, he sped away, and—. Now, at the bottom of this article, I mean, the Greenville police tweeted some— or Facebooked something but, this is another thing that really caught my eye. This NASA map. It's called 'Sunsquatch.' 'Best spots to see the eclipse and bigfoot [RCH: "What!?"] at the same time' [RCH: "What!?"]. Th-the map shows where the path of totality and bigfoot sightings overlap in the United States, and— [interrupted, remainder unintelligible]"

RCH: "Can you send a copy of that to Kynthea so we can post it? 'Cause this is— You know, given NASA, 'never a straight answer,' uh, this to me seems like real efforts at distraction. What are they wanting people not to look at so they're focusing them on fear and fearporn on the ground during the most amazing celestial spectacle you could ever see.

Keith Laney: "Richard, they're trying to automatically associate any strange phenomenon to hoodoo caused by eclipse hysteria, or—"

RCH "—Ohhhhhhhhhhh—"

KL: "—that's what it sounds like to me."

There are several things to say about this, the reaction by RCH & Co. not withstanding. First, the eclipse was a public relations boon for NASA, professional, and amateur astronomy groups, getting people interested in science in a unique way that hasn't happened for decades in the US and won't happen again for almost another decade. I would interpret this as a group having fun and trying to piggyback on the eclipse in a humorous way and trying to get tourists to that particular town to spend their hotel and food dollars there and not somewhere else.

The sunsquatch graphic was done by NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio, a slightly independent group of folks who create visualizations for NASA data to try to enhance the public outreach of the agency. I would interpret that the exact same way, almost like an April Fools Day graphic. The people who work in these organizations are just like you and like to have a bit of fun now-and-then.

I've posted links in the shownotes to two articles talking about the lizard man map, the Richmond Times-Dispatch having been linked from Doubtful News and discussed on episode 22 of their podcast, and The Post & Courier article having been sent in by that caller and posted on Richard's show's website. The former has no comments. The latter does, one asking whether the site was supposed to be satire, and another asking them to stop making South Carolina look ridiculous, they already have enough stuff that makes them look like a bunch of buffoons and don't need anything else. Another told them to slow down on the drugs, while another commenter suggested that lizardmen do become more active during an eclipse, but not to ask him how he knows that.

In other words, this was a light-hearted, playful attempt to piggyback on the eclipse craze. I think that's how a normal person would interpret that.

Wrap-Up

But, as you know by now by listening to this episode and if you've listened to others, Richard Hoagland is not a normal person, and he does not attract people who are normal. Instead, once you start to believe in some forms of pseudoscience, you are easier to convince of others.

Literally today, as I record this, I was asked why I try to point out the flaws in Richard's claims. I said that any form of pseudoscience is a gateway to others. Even if you don't believe Richard's claims per se, even listening to them, or believing there may be an element of truth in some of them, will open you up to believe in others. It's not just what you think about things, but it's HOW you think about things that is important in this world. And at least in the US, this is a time when we need critical thinking and evaluation more than we have needed it in a long time.

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