Good Trouble Oakland

 

Folks in northern California aren't submitting to the Trump regime quietly.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson shares the philosophy which animated the deceased civil rights leader, Representative John Lewis of Georgia. 

Before Representative Lewis died, reporter Jonathan Capehart asked him “what he would say to people who feel as though they have already been giving it their all but nothing seems to change.” Lewis answered: “You must be able and prepared to give until you cannot give any more. We must use our time and our space on this little planet that we call Earth to make a lasting contribution, to leave it a little better than we found it, and now that need is greater than ever before.”

“Do not get lost in a sea of despair,” Lewis tweeted almost exactly a year before his death. “Do not become bitter or hostile. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. We will find a way to make a way out of no way.”

The Congressman has plenty of local disciples.

Some with some artistic talent.

 

Many offer good words.

 

Some chat with acquaintances.

 

We are not going easily.

Who's that masked man? Frightened bullies fear shaming

With apologies to the Lone Ranger; yes, Donald and his ghoul Miller are inflicting the country with a made-for-TV movie of their violent fantasies. 

At the CalMatters news site, Michael Lozano has provided a useable guide to which agencies some of these masked thugs snatching up random brown people from the streets come from. This is what we are supposed to get used to.

 

 

Criminal justice journalist Radley Balko calls foul on the masking fetish.

The administration says the masks are to prevent “doxing,” and has cited a “700 percent” increase in assaults on ICE agents.

Both the defense and the statistic are nonsense.

First, unless they’re operating undercover, it is not illegal to publish or publicize the names of federal agents — nor should it be. They are state employees who have the power to arrest, detain, and kill. Of course their names and identities ought to be public information. Of course the people they stop, detain, arrest, or abuse should have names and badges to seek redress in court.

Second, the 700 percent figure is absurd. ... Don’t forget that the administration claimed that New York City comptroller Brad had Lander “assaulted” agents when video showed nothing of the kind. So there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical ...

I will not be surprised if, when ICE hires on its new army of thugs made possible by Trump's Big Ugly Bill, they don't even bother with this much identification. 

These big bullies should be ashamed of themselves. They hide their faces because whatever shred of decency they have left within them shames them as they carry out vicious, marginally legal orders.

• • •

Where government overreaches, not surprisingly Americans fight back. Hence the ICEBlock app which enables citizen sharing of ICE movements. Shades of the opening skirmishes of the historic national colonial revolt: "The British are coming..."

At the Intercept, Natasha Leonard explains: 

ICE watch groups and rapid-response networks have proliferated as a necessary response to Trump’s supercharged deportation agenda. Such efforts are not new but sit in the honorable tradition of the sanctuary movement of the 1980s to protect and shelter refugees, as well as local Copwatch networks, which have existed for over three decades as community efforts against law enforcement violence and impunity.

The agency’s response is itself in line with a storied tradition in U.S. law enforcement and broader efforts to shore up a white supremacist order. Namely, painting the oppressor as the victim and the real victim as the dangerous threat. ...

• • •

And now even ICE lawyers are refusing to admit their names in open court. Again from the Intercept: 

Inside a federal immigration courtroom in New York City last month, a judge took an exceedingly unusual step: declining to state the name of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney pressing to deport asylum seekers. 

“We’re not really doing names publicly,” said Judge ShaSha Xu — after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers. ... It is unclear how many immigration judges are failing to say ICE lawyers’ names...

For shame!

Recurrent panics fuel mobs. Everything old is new again...

Watching MAGA panic about the existence of trans and gender variant youth and by extension their elders, I realized I'd seen something very like this before. This is a country all too easily led into periodic hysteria about sex and gender, especially when it comes to actual children. Trump and the Republican Party are fanning the flames of fear for political gain.

Does this seem familiar? It certainly could. I remember when our culture in the 1980s was obsessed with the McMartin Preschool abuse trial. Something terrible must have happened ... or not. From a New York Times retrospective [gift] by Clyde Haberman: 

... Starting in 1983, with accusations from a mother whose mental instability later became an issue in the case, the operators of a day care center near Los Angeles were charged with raping and sodomizing dozens of small children. The trial dragged on for years, one of the longest and costliest in American history. In the end ... lives were undone. But no one was ever convicted of a single act of wrongdoing. 

Indeed, some of the early allegations were so fantastic as to make many people wonder later how anyone could have believed them in the first place. Really now, teachers chopped up animals, clubbed a horse to death with a baseball bat, sacrificed a baby in a church and made children drink the blood, dressed up as witches and flew in the air — and all this had been going on unnoticed for a good long while until a disturbed mother spoke up?

Still, McMartin unleashed nationwide hysteria about child abuse and Satanism in schools. One report after another told of horrific practices, with the Devil often literally in the details. ...

... Inevitably, perhaps, the mass frenzy over supposed Satanism and sexual predation invited comparisons to the Salem witch trials and to McCarthy-era excesses. Americans do seem prone episodically to this kind of fever. ...

Witness the widespread panic a few decades ago when people around the country convinced themselves that evil neighbors were handing children poisoned Halloween candy and apples embedded with razor blades. Arthur Miller highlighted this phenomenon in his 1953 play, “The Crucible,” which invoked the Salem trials to comment on a contemporary abuse, the scattershot McCarthy hunt for Communists ...

It seems to me obvious that Trump and MAGA are playing a very tired, very American, tune ...

So what's the other political party doing in response to MAGA's fantasies and bigotry? Far too often, cowering in closets. Most Democratic politicians are too timid to take on the assault on emerging medical science and anthropological understanding that the experience of many contemporary Americans is forcing into the light.

Parker Molloy, a Chicago media journalist, has some advice for timid Democrats:

There's a glaring omission in all the Democratic hand-wringing about trans issues: actual trans people. ... 

The disability rights movement has a motto: "Nothing about us without us." It's a simple principle that Democrats have completely abandoned when it comes to trans issues. Instead of talking to us about our lives and needs, Democratic strategists talk about us as an abstract political problem to be solved. ...

If Democrats actually bothered to have these conversations, they'd discover something ... we're not asking for much. We're not demanding special privileges or radical restructuring of society. We mostly just want to exist in public without harassment and access the same healthcare everyone else takes for granted. 

By and large, trans people are not demanding (who even asked for this?) that people announce their own pronouns or whatever corporate/HR nonsense Democratic politicians think trans people want...

Talk to trans kids and their parents, and you'll hear the same themes repeatedly: They want to use the bathroom in peace. They want to play sports with their friends. They want their teachers to use their names. They want to go to school without being bullied. They want to see a doctor when they need to. 

These aren't radical demands. They're the baseline expectations of any child in America.

Talk to trans adults like me, and the asks are similarly modest: Keep our jobs without discrimination. Update our driver's licenses to match our appearance. Access medical care our doctors recommend. Walk down the street without fear. Again, these aren't special rights. They're basic dignity.

But Democrats can't make these arguments because they don't know our stories. They've treated us as a constituency to be managed rather than human beings to be heard. They've let Republicans define who we are and what we want because they've never bothered to ask us ourselves.

This is more than just morally wrong; it's politically stupid. When you don't know the people you're supposedly defending, you can't defend them effectively. When you treat someone's existence as a political liability rather than a human reality, you've already lost the argument.

... they need to reframe the debate. Republicans aren't protecting children; they're weaponizing government to bully kids. They're the ones obsessed with bathrooms, genitals, and controlling people's bodies. Democrats should make them own that weirdness. ...

Democrats need to connect trans rights to broader freedoms. This isn't about special privileges or ideology. It's about the government staying out of personal medical decisions. It's about families, not politicians, making choices about their children's health. It's about the freedom to live your life without constant government surveillance of your gender.

These are winning arguments if Democrats would bother to make them.

... they need to tell human stories. Trans people aren't abstractions or political footballs. They're people's children, siblings, friends, and neighbors. When Republicans attack trans people, they're attacking real families in every community. Democrats need to make that real for voters.

.. Democrats need to show some backbone. Voters respect politicians who stand for something, even if they disagree. What they don't respect is cowardice. Running away from every fight Republicans pick doesn't make Democrats look reasonable. It makes them look weak.

Democrats have been down this road before. It leads nowhere good. You can't build a political coalition by constantly throwing people out of it. You can't inspire voters by standing for nothing. You can't protect some children by agreeing that others are disposable. ...

Get over yourselves, Dem politicians. If you can learn just enough to be real, people will respect you. Most of us aren't on the side of witch burners, soiling our pants and fleeing phantom dangers. You won't win the QAnons, but there are plenty of other people who might be willing to stop panicking, if you modeled some guts. 

Would you want Donald Trump deciding what your doctor can do for you?

 

Young trans and non-binary folk and their friends rallied yesterday outside Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto where institutional cowardice is retreating when faced with the Trump administration's bigotry. 

By way of the San Francisco Chronicle: 

The Trump administration has pushed to limit access to gender-affirming care for youths. In January, the president signed an executive order that directs federal agencies to prohibit hospitals and medical schools that receive some federal grants from providing gender-affirming care to children.

... Some Stanford patients received notifications this month that surgical procedures were being canceled, according to one parent of a child undergoing care for gender dysphoria at the gender clinic. ... The child had been receiving care at the clinic for more than a year, and the abrupt cancellation of the procedure is leaving the family scrambling to figure out how to get the care elsewhere. ...

... “The fear is we were totally blindsided by this and it has no legal basis, so I have no confidence or trust,” the parent said. “How do I know the other care will continue? That’s the biggest impact for us. The trust has been kind of taken away.” 

 

For all the fear in the moment, communities which have been rejected often remember they are FABULOUS!

Once again -- to remain human means to say NO!

Once upon a time -- when the New York Times revealed America's Vietnamese "allies" were torturing their enemies in "tiger cages," when photos revealed what US soldiers in Iraq were doing to prisoners at Abu Ghraib -- Erudite Partner and I would mutter to each other, when are they going to bring it home?

Yes, we knew that torture was all too prevalent in US prisons and jails, for example by Chicago police in this century. 

But local police malpractice and terror seemed a different thing than torture practiced on people who had been declared "the other" by the powers that be. 

But now we have that. 

My Erudite Partner Rebecca Gordon returns to the topic of her academic research in a current article for TomDispatch.

Everything Old Is New Again: The Trump Administration Revives Institutionalized Torture 

... in the age of Donald Trump, we face a government which is indeed willing to directly terrorize people in this country with the threat of torture (even if in a distant land). 

Every torture regime will identify a group or groups of people as “legitimate” targets. In the United States today, immigrants form just such a group, characterized by the Trump administration as either superhuman (“terrorists,” “monsters”) or subhuman (“vermin”). Super- or sub-, they are deemed unworthy of ordinary human rights.

But the fear generated by such threats of torture penetrates beyond those most immediately threatened, encouraging everyone else to comply with and bow down before the regime. Trump has indeed claimed that “the homegrowns are next.”

 

We face a test. How do we choose to respond to the barbarism of our authorities rooted in the fears of our neighbor citizens? We are not helpless.

... Those of us living in the United States of 2025 are already being called on to resist the centrifugal forces of isolation and mistreatment in the age of Trump. In this time of torture redux, small efforts to maintain social connections become real acts of resistance. We have already seen whole neighborhoods spontaneously resist ICE raids by pouring into the streets. That is one crucial kind of solidarity.  

I’d argue that anything we do today to maintain human connections — that smile at a grocery cashier, that phone call to an old friend, that little gathering with fellow knitters – is also an act of solidarity in such grim times. We will need them all in the days to come. 

Go read it all. 

Now what? After the spring rallies ...

After serving as an MC at Baltimore's version of 2025 spring resistance rallies, Johns Hopkins University political scientist Lester Spence has tried to figure out: where do we go from here?  His edited reflections seem important to share.

Folks used the rallies to lash local efforts to national ones and to provide proof-of-concept and to present political opportunities for people who weren’t connected on the other.  ... If the May Day rally represented coalition proof-of-concept, No Kings represented proof that there were thousands of people looking to join something bigger than themselves.     

... However, both skewed older and white. ...

Baltimore has been and remains segregated, even though it is increasingly multi-cultural and multi-racial.  ... There aren’t that many of us connected to both worlds. Which makes political organizing between them difficult.    

Alongside local segregation there’s the political dynamic generated by the Trump administration. Its secret police attacks on Latinx populations ... have politically and socially demobilized them to the point where many find it difficult to conduct normal day-to-day activity much less engage in political activism. The level of courage required for Latinx public participation cannot be overstated. Nor can the viciousness of state attacks against them.  And then [there's the] “let’s sit this one out” rhetoric unique to black Baltimore communities ...

... I’d suggest that for the average No King’s Day attendee in particular, what they’re experiencing now—with cuts to USAID and other federal government bodies—may be the first time they’ve experienced the underside of the American state. ... This isn’t quite the case for Latinx populations although perhaps it hasn’t been as vicious as this. And this isn’t quite the case for black populations in Baltimore, particularly working class ones. ...

Neither rallies really spoke to this as effectively as they could have (and as I was one of the MCs, I bear responsibility). Going forward we have to bring together three populations—the white populations bearing government cuts (but not experiencing police violence), the black populations (experiencing local police violence), and the Latino populations (experiencing national police violence). At the very least that means showing up for rallies. 

But it also means generating popular education programs that can generate understanding about the shared (yet unique) nature of these struggles. And then lashing them up to political projects that combine electoral strategies—putting people in office at the local, state, and national level—with referenda strategies.  

What those of us connected to the efforts that skew white and old have to do is work within those spaces to get people within them to commit to broader action. That broader action has to first involve getting people within these groups to see that the fascist turn didn’t start with Trump and didn’t move from Germany to here.

In developing this new understanding people have to get that these dynamics affect all of us, no matter where we are. The ally point of view would have us believe that there are certain populations who are affected and certain populations who aren’t. The role of the ally is to recognize how certain populations are affected and then aid them in their struggles.

This is wrong. It quite simply isn’t the case that there are people who aren’t affected and people who are. It is true that there are populations who are the victims of discriminate indiscriminate police violence and populations who don’t tend to be. ... [but] everyone loses materially and psychically.

This dynamic has to then translate into action. And working on the idea that it’s just a bit at a time, it isn’t about generating the equivalent of a May Day march among people who haven’t ever marched. It is, though, about getting people to commit to actions designed to change local conditions. Knowing that changing those local conditions end up building the community we need to change national conditions.    

That last point is important. We need local actions. Some of this from Spence seems peculiarly Baltimore-oriented. Baltimore is not California. In California, Latinos and various Asian-origin groups and individuals are more easily central to the resistance mix and can lead the way. 

I don't know whether I agree with his implication that the time for big marches is past. There are plenty of people who still need to experience the high that goes with seeing our numbers. And our numbers are increasing according to all public polling. People don't like the incompetence and cruelty on display in the Trump regime. So long as we are able to come together at scale, it's good that we should.

When people ask what they can do to fight the BUMP,  the Big Ugly MAGA Power, my first answer these days is to talk with and bring in more of your neighbors. We need to grow. That increases the value of the little local actions blossoming everywhere. One such outpouring, the TeslaTakedown, went national and helped crash Trump's brother-in-destruction. 

Support all the little campaigns cropping up, as you are able. Support immigrants, individually and collectively. Support trans people, on whom the assault is life-threatening. Support teachers. Support union workers. Get the communities you belong to engaged. This is a time for creativity and boldness. The Trump project is vicious, but it is also phony, a house of cards. Let's blow their house down with our numbers. 

Questions for us all

Why do I read Matt Yglesias? He's routinely something of a know-it-all twit. But skimming through his broad range of topics does broaden my own thinking -- so yes, I do read him.

Today he answered an interesting reader question:

Vasav Swaminathan: In honor of the fourth of July, what was America's greatest moment? Of all time? Of your lifetime? Of the last decade?

Of all time, I would say World War II and the Marshall Plan. Of my lifetime, probably PEPFAR. And of the last decade, either the rapid development of Covid vaccines or the rapid deployment of emergency military aid to Ukraine. 

I can take a swing at that question. It's interesting.

Click to enlarge.

America's greatest moment of all time? Unequivocally, the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. By the middle of the 1860s, the Union army had obliterated the Confederate rebellion in a bloody war which ended slavery. At the conclusion of that war, the President -- Abraham Lincoln -- who had cautiously and bravely led the North through that terrible trial of the nation's values, was assassinated by a sympathizer of the losing South. His Vice-President, the south-sympathizing Andrew Johnson, was quite prepared make peace with the defeated states on terms that allowed continuation of white oligarchic rule over the freed slaves. 

Republican majorities in Congress (the GOP was a different animal then!) stumbled their way through complicated legislative maneuvers, including a failed impeachment of Johnson, to enacting the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution which were meant to ensure we'd be a democratically organized country observing citizens' rights. No more chattel slavery, the rule of law must be recognized by the various states, and no denial of the right to vote on the basis of race -- roughly speaking. 

Yes -- the current Supreme Court is trying to gut these accomplishments. But those 19th century Americans were right to enact their "rebirth of freedom" then and we are right now, to hell with John Roberts and his posse of black-robed crooks.

Of my lifetime? That's easy. The Black civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s which forced the reaffirmation and re-invigoration of Reconstruction amendment principles, including forcing one-person, one-vote districts, integration of public schools and public facilities, and, by extension, full citizenship for women and LGBT people.

The current MAGA party doesn't recognize any of that either. We're being subjected to the ascendancy of aggrieved ignorant white men. I guess we have to rise up against cruelty and bigotry again ...

Of the last decade?  On this I find myself agreeing with Yglesias: the development and deployment of the COVID vaccine pointed the way to species-survival in the world humans have made. We can make a livable world if we can overcome the fraction of us who are too dumb or too self-centered to understand the project.

Thanks Matt! How would you answer those questions?

Friday cat blogging

 

Who's that cat in the window? Janeway doesn't care. She has caught the evening sunbeam and stretches happily.

 

Here's the view from outside, Janeway looking far more alert.

A righteous rant ...

I reproduce here a righteous rant from Simon Rosenberg. His Hopium Chronicles project may be a little too Democratic Party-oriented for the taste of most of my friends. But you got to love that he activates people, in the style of, and in homage to, FDR and Harry Truman.

I've made this a little easier to read:

In these first six terrible months of Trump they have told us who they are and what they want - they want our country to be poorer, weaker, less safe, less healthy and less free. 

The agenda is clear. There is no American greatness or a better tomorrow. Their way is a diminished country, with fewer opportunities for our people, an end to our democracy, and a nation less able to chart our course in a competitive world. They want for more them and less for all of us. They cannot run away from who they are and what they are doing. There isn’t any way to put lipstick on this Trumpian pig. 

And unlike 2024 we cannot shirk from our responsibility to tell this part of the story. 

For the first step in defeating Trumpism is to make sure every voter available to us understands exactly who they are and what they mean for our nation’s future. 

The passage of the Big Ugly [Budget Bill] gives us an opportunity to go tell this bigger story about this rancid agenda of sabotage, plunder and betrayal. We are no longer limited in our comms and story telling to the elements of the big ugly. We must now in fact integrate the elements of the big ugly into their broader agenda and attack it on all fronts. They have betrayed us and we can and must find a better way, together. 

• The tragedy in Texas has started a national debate about their “more for me, less for all of you” agenda. 

• The return of measles has given us an opportunity to talk about their assault on our health care. 

•Trump’s ongoing tariff fiasco allows us to talk about his core betrayal of working people by raising prices not lowering them. 

• His attempt to create a secret police gives us an opportunity to talk about his authoritarian fantasies and abandonment of the Constitutional order here in American. 

The upcoming debate over Congress’ Fiscal Year 2026 budget gives us an extended opportunity to explain the harms of their agenda to the American people. 

Democrats in state and localities across the country can start to immediately organize town halls, hearings and other community conversations to talk to their constituents about what the Big Ugly and the broader GOP agenda means for them (and we need to help them do this). 

For it is no longer notional or a promise. It is here. 

And people are dying. The economy is slowing. Prices are rising. Our debt is exploding. 

Masked men are disappearing people into foreign and domestic gulags. Measles has returned. 

The world is laughing at us. 

They’ve given themselves huge tax cuts while levying one of the largest tax increases in history on working people. 

Our leader is a fucking painted clown, a joke, an impulsive and out of control fool, being enabled by unprecedented cowardice in what was once the Party of Lincoln and Reagan. ...

What else, Simon? Unfortunately, there's always more when a conman is dependent on hyping up a base of the vengeful and deluded.

The blame game attracts, but can wait

Not long after I heard about the Texas floods, social media was buzzing. A friend from the Austin area posted a devastating video which helped convey the force of the waters. 

And then, some commenters started suggesting that the Trump regime had fired the requisite storm modelers and weather forecasters in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS) and therefore should be blamed for the loss of life.

And that rang true, because we know Trump hates NOAA for contradicting him. In 2018, he falsely redrew a hurricane's path with a sharpie to include Alabama -- even though the official map didn't show that trajectory.

Trump has had trouble with the weather scientists. And pretty much all scientists.

But the haste to blame someone for the awful loss of life, including all those girl campers, felt suspect to me from the get-go. I can wait for whatever investigators discover about forecasts and warnings -- and also about likely buck passing and grift in the disaster recovery process. 

Stephanie Bai in The Atlantic also urged caution:

It didn’t take long for the finger-pointing to begin. While search-and-rescue operations were getting under way (at least 161 people remain missing in Kerr County alone), false claims circulated on social media that Texans received no warnings about the impending flash flood. 

Some state officials suggested that the National Weather Service—a federal agency responsible for issuing weather-related warnings—hadn’t accurately forecast the severity of the rain. Experts questioned whether the Trump administration’s staffing cuts to the NWS and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had affected emergency response. The speculation prompted the weather service to release a timeline of their flood alerts. 

Congressional Democrats are demanding an inquiry into whether NWS staffing shortages have affected the death toll, and President Donald Trump took a swipe at Joe Biden for setting up “that water situation,” before conceding that he couldn’t blame Biden, either: “This is a hundred-year catastrophe.”

Those of us who are Trump critics should be cautious about assigning blame to the MAGA governments (Texas too) without evidence. That's what they do: make stuff up about their opponents. We are daily drowning in their convenient lies and conspiracy theories. If we all start choosing our own facts, we lose touch with realities we need to know and understand.

Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit calls out our temptation to add to a cacophony of tendentious misinformation. 

The desire to have an explanation, and the desire for that explanation to be tidy and aligned with one’s politics, easily becomes a willingness to accept what fits. 

But knowing we don’t know, knowing the answers are not yet in, or there are multiple causes, being careful even with the sources that tell us what we want to hear: all this equipment to survive the information onslaughts of this moment. 

We all need to be careful about how we get information and reach conclusions – both the practical information about climate catastrophes and weather disasters and the journalism that reports on it. Both the weather and the news require vigilance.

Over one hundred people have been confirmed dead in the floods. Some diligent journalist will write a more considered version of their deaths, of the floods, and of state and federal systems which might have protected some of them. While taking in the horror, we can wait for that story. We need to practice practicing information discernment. The times demand this.

Might the warming world be a boon to women?

That's probably overstating it, but apparently women need to be warmer than men to feel comfortable. 

According to the BBC,  there's a measurable reason why women tend to think air conditioning is set too high while men want the temperature lowered. Or so a new study suggests.

... women feel the cold more readily - one small sample test the researchers carried out suggests that women are comfortable at a temperature 2.5C warmer than men - between 24-25C.

According to Prof Paul Thornalley, of Warwick Medical School, variation in average metabolic rate and body heat production between men and women "may explain why there is a difference in environmental temperature required for comfort between males and females".

The body's metabolism is responsible for growth and the production of energy, including heat. Resting metabolic rate is the minimal rate of energy expenditure per unit of time while we are at rest, calculated through a standard set of equations. On average women have a lower metabolic rate than men.

"A great determinant of resting metabolic rates is the fat free body mass in people's bodies," says Thornalley - accounting for around 60% of the individual difference in men and women's resting metabolic rates. Because men have more fat free body mass - all the components of the body like skin, bones and muscle, but excluding fat - than women, they have a higher resting metabolic rate.

... This higher proportion of body mass which is able to produce heat involuntarily means that on average men don't feel the cold as easily as women - and, in sultry summer months, means they have a lower tolerance for hot weather because their bodies produce more heat at a resting metabolic rate, getting warmer quicker.

Well maybe. Obviously people are different; individuals of both sexes may experience temperatures quite differently. And, the BBC points out, convention dictates to some women that we wear less clothes ...