Poor Whoopi Goldberg must have thought she was having an acid flashback while listening to her co-host on The View, Elisabeth Hasslebeck rail on about Barack Obama’s failure to even mention the word “democracy” during his 55 minute speech at Cairo University last week. Not only did Obama mention the word numerous times, he even made it one of the six cardinal points of his speech, as in: “The fourth issue that I will address is democracy.”

One of Whoopi’s more memorable roles was Guinan, the mysterious bartender on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Guinan was an alien with a unique ability to monitor the time lines in alternate universes. Which is where Whoopi must have found herself as the set of The View morphed into the set of the Enterprise’s Ten Forward right before her eyes under the impact of Hasslebeck’s powerful cognitive distortions.

Guinan, the Starship Enterprise’s alternate reality surfing bartender

Hasslebeck and her wingmen were apparently pushed over the edge by both the tone and substance of Obama’s speech. Billed as a major address to the Muslim World, Obama sought to open up a new dialogue with the world’s 1.5 billion  Muslims based on mutual respect, a frank repudiation of the previous 8 years of Bush-Cheney cowboy, might makes right, American exceptionalism.

As if further evidence was even needed that Obama is a Secret Muslim Manchurian Candidate, he even quoted from The Quran!:

Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.

Whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.

How in the world are wingers supposed to make sense of that? Laying down and maintaining the neural pathways for integrating authoritarianism, cognitive dissonance and even sadism into a consistently whacko world view, is, as George W. Bush would say, hard work.

The View commands a daily audience of millions. It’s probably too much to expect that one of its hosts be required to perform a complex task like a word search before denouncing a speech for being devoid of content that it clearly contains.  But I guess there’s room for everything in a multi-verse of near-infinite possibilities.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the most interesting question is not what the wingers believe, or even why they believe it, but how in hell they can believe it at all.

I will conquer
Space around me
So maybe I’ll win
Saved by zero
Maybe I’ll win
Saved by zero
—The Fixx

If you want to smell the fear you must click it

Zero:  A contemptibly worthless, undistinguished person…

The Republican Party is rife with Zeros these days. The nine nincompoops above are just a random gaggle selected from the dozens and dozens of them pining to spend time in the GOPper boxes of national leadership-ness-ness.  The assortment of  war criminals, gas bags, elderly has-beens, living and dead, and a burgeoning bunch of weiner wanna-bees will continue to plague the nation until the electorate relegates them to the slag-heap of history.

Why are there so few qualified leaders?  Because the number of capable leaders has never exceeded one percent of the population.  That makes it even more critical that we elect only the best qualified individuals to leadership positions in society.

Leadership is vital to progress.  Wisdom, insight, and foresight are indispensable to the endurance of any nation, and just now all such essential qualities are in short supply in our government, despite the fact that Barack Obama shows every sign of being able to fill the shoes of leadership we so desperately need.

Obama’s speech in Cairo is a stirring demonstration of his willingness to confront the changes that are needed now, but it is just the beginning of his efforts to grow into the enormous job confronting the United States and the world.  We certainly haven’t exhausted our national stamina and courage in confronting our many problems just yet, but if you’re not already doing so, it is time to add real prayer to our arsenal of hope.  Pray for our country, pray for our people, pray for our president.  And if you’re feeling really generous, pray for our world.  And remember, prayer is not a technique of escape from conflict, but rather a stimulus to growth in the very face of conflict.  Dig it.

Society is the offspring of age upon age of trial and error; it is what survived the selective adjustments and readjustments in the successive stages of mankind’s agelong rise from animal to human levels of planetary status. The great danger to any civilization at any one moment is the threat of breakdown during the time of transition from the established methods of the past to those new and better, but untried, procedures of the future.
—The Urantia Book

“Look out behind you!” – An ancestral Rethuglican deception ploy

The ability of primates to deceive a perceived competitor for access to resources or mates conferred obvious survival advantages on those who mastered it.

So successful were the results that their victims had to develop effective countermeasures. In time, they evolved the ability to detect physiological clues– facial expressions, vocal inflections, furtive glances, and other ‘tells’– to divine an aggressor’s intent.

Would-be thieves and social dominators were thus held in check until they could, in turn, develop a counter to the counter. The problem: how to mask the neuro-muscular reactions resulting from the intense scrutiny visited upon them by their intended victims. Through much trial and error, they learned that the only really fool-proof means of deceiving their victims was to first deceive themselves into believing that their own intentions were benign. Thus the practice of self-deception– true lies– was born.

Having emerged from the jungles, crossed the savannas, and forded the swamplands of D.C., their descendants are now laying siege to The Hill, the greatest repository of power and dispensary of resources on the planet. (As for access to mates, it’s what Henry Kissinger said: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”)

Having developed the practice of deception/self-deception into an art, if not a science, the tribe of primates that call themselves “conservatives” use all the means of dominance and control at their disposal. In the current media age, that means flooding the infotainment channels with buzz words researched by the likes of Frank Luntz and woven into hate speech narratives from the wingnut commentariat. That would include Rush Limpbot, Michael Savage, Michelle Malkin, G.Gordon Liddy, and the entire stable of opinion[h]aters at Fux News.

The psychological energy required to maintain such vicious delusions is so great that they can’t help but believe their own lies, a necessary prerequisite for disarming the deception detectors of their target audience.

The practice of amygdala politics stokes the fires of fear in their intended audience, mainly poor white males. Existential threats in the form of mushroom clouds have been replaced by oldies but goodies like affirmative action (Sonia Sotomayor), a secret Muslim plot to take their guns away (Eric Holder and Barack Obama), and nightmares of all-consuming vaginas culminating in their collective retroactive abortions (fill in the blank).

Self-deception comes with a constellation of psychological phenomena, among them: false memories (e.g., Reagan’s insistence that he hadn’t illegally sold arms to Iran: ”My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.); delusional misidentification syndrome (the USA is a conservative, center-right country), and confabulation (the whole spotty Iraq/War On Terror narrative).

The underlying neural circuitry that makes self-deception possible is complex and the subject of much debate and research among neuroscientists. Valuable insights have come from the study of brain-damaged patients, steeped in denial:

Ramachandran [1996] has proposed that the left hemisphere is primarily responsible for imposing consistency on one’s script, while the right hemisphere is the “anomaly detector.” The left hemisphere therefore is the source of self-deceptive behaviors, with intentions of imposing stability on the script. This viewpoint is based on studies of anognostic patients who have suffered damage to the right cerebral hemisphere. These patients vehemently deny the paralysis of the left arm following a stroke, often giveng reasons such as “I have arthritis in that shoulder” or “I’m not very ambidextrous.” It was concluded that damage to the right hemisphere significantly weights information from the left hemisphere, resulting in extremes of self-deception. With damage to the right hemisphere, the patients could no longer maintain an accurate description of reality and thus engaged in excessive confabulatory statements and committed an increased number of reality-monitoring errors. [1]

Sounds like a pretty good description of  winger psychology to me.

____________________________

[1] Stevens, Sean T., et al, “Deception, Evolution, and the Brain” from Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience, MIT Press. 2007, edited by Platek, Steven M., et al.)

(drawing by Rene Spijkerman based on photos by Otto Adang)

Are we “One” yet?  Click and see.

Friend Quaker Dave writes, “We have become what it is we claim to fear.”

Rather:  We have always been and still are what we claim we hate.

And that is a people that continue to justify the torture and murder of other human beings in the name of— whatever.

If America really is a “Christian Nation” as the traditional conservative voice of religion keeps insisting, then why can’t it recognize that the United States has not— does not— uphold even the basic traditions of the truth of Jesus Christ, their founding father?  Nor does it practice his values, still so simply stated that even simpletons should be able to grok it:  “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  And, “Love your enemies.”

Do Christians pretend that “Who Would Jesus Waterboard?” is just a snarky bumpersticker? or do they recognize it is the total moral indictment of our nation’s claimed Judeo-Christian heritage. It goes to the very heart of the issue—  of God’s children, which are “okay” to torture and kill?  And which are not? [Read more →]

The “Zero” sculpture— what became known as the “Boner Memorial”— is a depiction of the fatal political intransigence and self-serving obstructionism of the now defunct Republican Party.

WASHINGTON — April 3rd, 2069  The infamous “Boner Memorial,” a controversial sculpture eulogizing the demise of the Republican Party of the late twentieth century,  will be moved next week to a private museum dedicated to significant political anachronisms. Carved in 2020, the sculpture depicts the de facto leader of the Republican party in it’s death throes, Congressman John Boehner of Ohio.

The party became universally regarded as “the party of zero,” after their collective failure to tally a single supporting vote during the twenty-seven historically significant policies which historians laud as having salvaged America’s future and thereby rescuing the nation from financial and cultural disaster.

Boehner (pronounced BAY-ner, but widely satirized as “Boner,” a crass euphemism for an erect penis) served as the House Minority Leader in the 111th Congress through the course of the crash-and-burn stage of the party’s spectacular collapse early in the presidency of Barack Obama.  Boehner is depicted slinking off in shock and depression,  leaving behind an enormous column of petrified feces, which the artist claimed was their only legacy.  Boehner, more than any number of deserving Republican figures, came to represent the discredited principles associated with the virulent fascistic conservatism of America in the late twentieth century.

In addition to the amazing world-changing achievements of the Obama presidency, historians also point to the habitual and characteristically childish whining, public weeping, and blind partisanship of Representative Boehner as a major factor in the general public’s complete revulsion towards the party, which  finally came to be understood as a corrupt cabal of stooges for the wealthiest 1% of Americans after the turn of the century.

Critics of the statue’s removal from public display say it is far too soon to think we don’t need a constant reminder of our gullibility as a people to believe the lies of self-serving politicians.

Buried under a foot and a half of snow will get you wishing and hoping for the warm sunny days of the future.  Especially a future with Sarah Palin and some other wingnut candidate of what’s left of the GOP, running against Barack Obama.

Not only will it ensure his second term, but the full exploration of her support of things like, oh, say, creationism, will put her right smack on teh back of an imaginary T-Rex as it gallops into the sunset of her political oblivion, and if we’re really lucky, the vast majority of the remaining wingnutter-dumb pundicks, politicians, and base with go over the cliff with her.

Stranger and more necessary things have happened— but not too often.  We’re due.

Kirlian image provides indisputable proof of President Obama’s use of the teleprompter to subjugate dickish reporters.

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s second press conference in as many months have left antagonistic reporters who are “not in love with him” with a new-found respect for, no— not him, or his ability to answer questions with deft skill— but for his awesome terrorist teleprompter.

Bob Cesca.

In politics and the media, teleprompters are about as commonplace as microphones and people named “O’Donnell.” Some use a teleprompter, some use paper, some use cue cards, some use both. Really, what difference does it make whether prepared remarks are read from paper or Perspex? Either way, we’re talking about prepared text printed on a readable medium. The teleprompter isn’t some space-age interdimensional portal that automatically injects your audience with nitrous oxide and mild doses of heroin, drugging them into an involuntary state of euphoric torpor. It simply allows the reader to deliver a speech without looking down at the podium. That’s all.

Lefty liberal blogger Bob Cesca’s comments above are just what you might expect from any supposedly intelligent human being who remains ignorant of the real reasons Barack Obama always uses the teleprompter at news conferences, public speeches, even casual lunch conversation. But now there’s absolute proof that not only does Obama use the teleprompter to sound more intelligent than he actually is, but also to inflict the semblance of mind-numbing and eye bruising truthiness upon any reporters who act like dicks.

Take the case of dickish CNN reporter Ed Henry. Known as “Mister Ed” to his peers, Henry’s questioning of the president pressed the reporter’s notion that president Obama had taken too much time in making his outrage at the AIG bonuses public.  When Henry clumsily reiterated his question ( he wasn’t using a teleprompter), the president explained he liked  to know what he was talking about before he spoke publicly— and at that moment— beams shot from Obama’s eyes through his teleprompter, seriously bruising Mr. Ed’s eyes:

CNN’s “Mr. Ed” Henry shows the horrible bruising that resulted from his brief but dickish questioning of President Obama, who stared ominously at Mr. Ed through the teleprompter while supposedly answering the question spontaneously, his vision being amplified in some mysterious Muslimish Marxist way that inflicted severe bruising on the impertinent reporter.

Once the Glen Becks of the fringe get a hold of this information you can bet the teleprompter issue will finally get the attention the Republicans think it deserves.  Until then, remember not to look the president in the eye, even when he’s on television.

The menacing Bloviator shed its moorings in a mighty lurch, and careened loquaciously toward the nation’s unsuspecting Capital, where it imagined the “magic negroe” president was praying to “himself”. . . click to see The BLOVIATOR up close and unhinged.

EARLY IN THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, Republicans began to mock Barack Obama as a “Savior,” Messiah, and “the ONE.”  They physically recoiled as other apparently white folks rushed forward, gushing inexplicably with fevered, almost religious enthusiasm for what was clearly a member of another race; it was almost as if race meant nothing at all.  To them.

Conservative pundicks, shaken to their fearful little microbial souls, began ejaculating vociferous assaults on The ONE, resolving to their deepest, darkest, basest instincts that no mongrel mutt of a nigg black man would ever have the right to. . . plant a watermelon patch on the grounds of their. White. House. . .  let alone rule our nation.

Chief among this mess of low-information hoi polloi is a man that “we who know him” call The BLOVIATOR— as slovenly a lump of putrid bigotry-in-denial protoplasm as you will ever encounter as a temporarily self-conscious, bipedal creature. A man so egomaniacally bombastic, even conservative politicians at the very pinnacle of the party must gird their loins with ditto-diapers when they are permitted in his presence, to avoid spontaneous embarrassment should they be called out on his radio-active carpet;  yes. he’s that powerful.  To them.

Curiously, that sacrosanct authoritaih is being timidly questioned by a variety of sentient conservatives, (See David fucking Brooks, nihilism) many of them torn by their own internal sense of survival, others by a queer, if sensible devotion to actual factual reality;  even casual observers knew the smack-down was imminent:

Alright. Settle.  Let’s revisit some of that gargle.

The BLOVIATOR.

Very few people think they’re it. Obama is one.  I think when Obama prays, it’s to himself.  Those of us who know him, know this.

[Surprised?  Back in the day, before Barack became the Messiah, The BLOVIATOR imagined he had access to Obama's soul, and learned all its secrets; kind of the same way one of the "very few people" who think they're "it"  might imagine such things. . .

. . . So where are we? We as conservatives are in the wilderness;  and many of you are hopeless.

[Yes;  indeed.  Approximately every fucking one of your 17 to 20 million ditto heads are, in fact hopeless;  maybe it's . . . wait. . . your fault?

So we have a guy— Bobby Jindal— thirty-seven years old— First time on the national stage— shows up last night to make a response to the Messiah. . .

[Right.  Teh national stage was under water during that Katrina thing.  (BTW:  Messiahs are said to be able to walk on water.  Just. Saying.)

. . . All he did was articulate what we believe;

[That. . . you're in the wilderness and hopeless?

. . . All he did was articulate opposition to what Obama's doing;  with the obligatory, "when he's right we'll work with'im". . . these things happen. . .

. . .They [The Democrats] are mean-spirited. . . heartless. . . horrible. . . winners. . .

[Thus: The Republican'ts are mean-spirited. . . heartless. . . horrible. . . losers.

Folks, “style” is not gonna take our country back.  . . Solid, conservative articulit (sic) in a way that’s inspiring and understanding (sic) is what’s gonna take the country back. . .

[Well. Certainly not that “style.”   Rinse. . .  and,  spit.

Rush Gets Religion

What happened next is not a matter of public record;  it is but the somber speculation of endless variations on a theme of morbid hope and brutal satire.  After Rush’s gigantic golden metallic phallus falls silent for the night, and he is once again pelted with the “obligatory” “Wow boss, that was absolutely inspiring and understanding”. . .(sic. . .)  he goes home;  alone.

With deliberate habitual pretense, he unleashes from its silo an enormous wad of rolled tobacco in the shape of a porn star pole, and, getting the tip of it hot, he begins to suckle it with repetitive, unintelligible drawls.  He waddles his evermore corpulent hulk into a just as corpulent Escalade that waits for him without so much as a single adulatory bit of style.

There’s no point in running through the dinner hour festivities. Animal parts that were dead were injested.  And utterly consumed.  Suffice it to say The BLOVIATOR’s corpulence was not only served but expanded, and his self-loathing took a temporary back-seat to some seriously noisy digestion.

Sleep comes fitfully and with prescription medication. The bloviation from earlier in the day has been bloviating just outside the door of the BLOVIATOR’s subconscious, waiting for sleep to open the booby hatch and let the dark stuff roll.

It’s the same dream again;  yawn.  Rush sees that the mean-spirited, heartless, horrible Democrat winners have stolen teh country;  instantly, his jello-like flesh begins to surge with an overwhelming narcissistic urge to bloviate.  Several thin young Jamacian boys appear in stylish tennis clothes; they all have the face of thirty-seven year old, Bobby Jindal;  they are convulsing in a slow motion back stroke across the national stage . . . one by one they slowly sink beneath the fast rising murky Katrina flood water, which, as luck would have it, contains dangerously high levels of toxic human waste.

No matter; all Rush needs to successfully direct the urge to bloviate is a large golden metallic phallus. And there’s always one under his pillow.  Suddenly, one of the thin young Jamacian boys begins to surface; his strong sinewy body is now the color of the turgid brown water, but it makes him glisten in the early light of a new day;  the morning sun warms the winsome young man’s muscular body, as he begins a methodical, disciplined, and arousing, stretching routine.

The BLOVIATOR is drawn to him like a giant ‘frig magnate is drawn to one of Rush’s thirteen mammoth refrigerator doors.  Rush feels himself effortly rise over the receding waters and gently glide up behind the virile Jamacian. . .  no, make that… a Dominican Repub— wait . . .

The young man turns around, he has a. . . basketball in his hands. . . he says, “Hey, catch!”
But his face is not that of thirty-seven year old “BJ” Bobby Jindal;  it’s the face of  the Messiah;  the Savior;  The ONE.

“I’m gonna work some of that bloviator gravy off that big fat ass of yours!” he says, and pushes a wicked-quick pass to the slack-jawed BLOVIATOR, suddenly at a loss for words.  Amazingly he manages to catch the ball.  The Messiah’s BALL.  The Savior passed him the BALL.  Stranger things have happened;  just not to Rush Hudson Limbaugh.

A warm sense of erotic pleasure spreads through the massive groin fat of the BLOVIATOR, and he…
wakes up;  in a little man-made pool.  He doesn’t care. His mind is racing faster than the  17 million dittoheads for their daily dose of good ol’ fashioned radio dung.  Only Rush’s head is cartwheeling into the headwaters of a spiritual baptism that shows no signs of siphoning off any brains cells with it.  The Radio is on, but it’s playing beautiful music.   Rush Limbaugh has had his first religious experience.

Next time on ADVENTURES of The ONE:  The BLOVIATOR: Reconcile THIS.

The Bushies settle into private life with an innocent lil’ barbecue.

James Moore.

[N]one of this is our fault. America is not to blame. There are just some bad actors in high profile positions. Really? Our sports heroes are gone, exposed as liars and cheaters. The people we trust with our money turn out to be thieves of a magnitude not known to history. Our president lies us into war, ruins damned near every institution of our government with political folly, and then retires safe from the law in the western sun. You can’t even ask the question “What the hell’s wrong with us?” because the answer requires decades of explanation. An increasing number of Americans wonder if our country will even survive and a scary proportion of those have asked the troubling follow up question as to whether we deserve to survive and have entered our final decline.

Do we deserve to survive?
It’s an intricate question, even if a blunt one.  The people of America, taken as a whole, certainly want to survive, but to qualify that want with “deserve” questions whether or not we are entitled to survive, and that inquiry must take into account our national and personal values, and how we live them.

At least some of the outrage that courses through the American psyche today derives from recognition of our shredded values of justice, and whether we can still claim we are a nation of law when our leaders suffer no consequences for their crimes.

The Republicans can feign shock at such suggestions, and the Democrats can attempt to ignore the anger of the people, even as Obama skirts the issue with his remark that “No one is above the law,” which becomes a hollow platitude when divested from the will to prosecute War Crimes committed by the Bush-Cheney regime.  At the end of our days as a nation, should this sorry state of affairs be our undoing, history will certainly condemn our lack of will to live the truth of our professed values;  the dream that was America will have become a nightmare.

But it may also be worse than that.  At the end of our days as individuals, there will only be one judge whom will be deciding our fate as continuing self-conscious, personal beings. Pleas of “It wasn’t my fault” will fall on the ear of infallible Deity;  not the bored and callow critics of the failings of a faint-hearted people.  The personal cost for the failure to live the values we say we profess in our hearts will be far more dear than the mere degradation of a failed nation.

•

But look you well to the goal of destiny! Pleasures are indeed suicidal if they succeed in destroying property, which has become the institution of self-maintenance; and self-gratifications have indeed cost a fatal price if they bring about the collapse of marriage, the decadence of family life, and the destruction of the home— man’s supreme evolutionary acquirement and civilization’s only hope of survival.

—The Urantia Book

•

(Click it)

•

Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe.
• • • • • • • • • • • •—H. G. WELLS

A giddy menagerie of Republicans trod down Constitution Avenue following the spirit of the GOP and surrounded by their little blue dogs and assorted vermin, after gutting the Senate stimulus package with a butcher knife. Wrong to really wrong: “Big John” Cornyn,  “Little John” McCain, “Two-Holer John” Ensign, “Teh Stoopid John” Boehner, “Jimmy John” DeMint, and “Douchebag Dave” Vitter with “Mitch the Bitch” McConnell.

. . .and Rat-Fucker Blue Dogs

•

I’m still working on the numbers, but I’ve gotten a fair number of requests for comment on the Senate version of the stimulus.

The short answer: to appease the centrists, a plan that was already too small and too focused on ineffective tax cuts has been made significantly smaller, and even more focused on tax cuts.

According to the CBO’s estimates, we’re facing an output shortfall of almost 14% of GDP over the next two years, or around $2 trillion. Others, such as Goldman Sachs, are even more pessimistic. So the original $800 billion plan was too small, especially because a substantial share consisted of tax cuts that probably would have added little to demand. The plan should have been at least 50% larger.

Now the centrists have shaved off $86 billion in spending — much of it among the most effective and most needed parts of the plan. In particular, aid to state governments, which are in desperate straits, is both fast — because it prevents spending cuts rather than having to start up new projects — and effective, because it would in fact be spent; plus state and local governments are cutting back on essentials, so the social value of this spending would be high. But in the name of mighty centrism, $40 billion of that aid has been cut out.

My first cut says that the changes to the Senate bill will ensure that we have at least 600,000 fewer Americans employed over the next two years.

The real question now is whether Obama will be able to come back for more once it’s clear that the plan is way inadequate. My guess is no. This is really, really bad.

—Paul Krugman

So—  What part of this speech did those “centrist” douchebags not understand??

WASHINGTON — Everything was going swimmingly.  Joe the Biden had been sworn in, and then the lovely Dianne Feinstein introduced Chief Justice of the United Staes, John D. Roberts.  Now, you’d think a guy like Roberts, who’s had a couple a whacky seizures would realize the serviceability of a back-up plan— at all times.  Especially when you were going to speak the oath for the swearing in of America’s president.

But no.   “Notes?  I doan need no stinkin’ notes!  I’m da cheef justeece!”

And so, in a fit of chief justicey hubris, he swaggered up to the task relying on just his braincells to pull the words out right. But this little hairball of hubris got stuck in Roberts’ throat.

I Barack Hussein Obama,” began Roberts, and his slight pause greenlighted Obama—

“I Barack“— said Obama, but Roberts was still going:  “do solemnly swear—”

Obama: “I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear”

Roberts: “That I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully…

WTF.  No.

Try this:   That I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States. . .

Obama repeated: “that I will execute…” and stopped. . . giving Roberts a reboot to get it right.

Roberts: “Er. . . faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States...”

But then Obama repeated the first structure: “The office of president of the United States faithfully…”

At that point, Roberts had collected himself, leading as Obama followed with, “And will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

“So help you God?”

“So help me God.”

Well.. No one can accuse them of rehearsing it to death, huh.

We should cherish it just the same.

But now it begins.  The most awesome four years of America’s life.  Better get a good grip on your gluteus maximus.