‘Bio-Engineering Humans To Stop Climate Change’
In this newsletter:
1) Climate-Eugenics: ‘Bioengineering Humans To Stop Climate Change’
Tony Thomas, Quadrant, 28 July 2017
2) Michael Crichton: Why Politicized Science is Dangerous
Michael Crichton, State of Fear
3) Britain’s First Commercial Fracking Well Set To Be Drilled
Financial Times, 27 July 2017
4) Global Warming Reality Check: Largest Maize Harvest In The History Of South Africa
CNBC Africa, 27 July 2017
5) U.S. Coal Exports Soar, In Boost To Trump Energy Agenda; EU Blames Cold Winter
Reuters, 28 July 2017
6) China’s Electric Car Sales Slow As Beijing Cuts Subsidies (To $10.000 Per Car)
Daniel Ren, South China Morning Post, 27 July 2017
Tony Thomas, Quadrant, 28 July 2017
2) Michael Crichton: Why Politicized Science is Dangerous
Michael Crichton, State of Fear
3) Britain’s First Commercial Fracking Well Set To Be Drilled
Financial Times, 27 July 2017
4) Global Warming Reality Check: Largest Maize Harvest In The History Of South Africa
CNBC Africa, 27 July 2017
5) U.S. Coal Exports Soar, In Boost To Trump Energy Agenda; EU Blames Cold Winter
Reuters, 28 July 2017
6) China’s Electric Car Sales Slow As Beijing Cuts Subsidies (To $10.000 Per Car)
Daniel Ren, South China Morning Post, 27 July 2017
Full details:
1) Climate-Eugenics: ‘Bioengineering Humans To Stop Climate Change’
Tony Thomas, Quadrant, 28 July 2017
People unwilling to act on the climate-crisis narrative should be assisted with drugs that improve and promote conformity, according to eminent bio-ethicist Professor Matthew Liao, of New York University, who also wants to see parents dosing their children with hormones and diets to keep them shorter and less of a burden on the planet.
He wants such people to be given the ‘love drug/cuddle chemical’ oxytocin. This would increase their trust and empathy and make them more ready to change to emission-saving lifestyles.
As his peer-reviewed study puts it, “Pharmacologically induced altruism and empathy could increase the likelihood that we adopt the necessary behavioral and market solutions for curbing climate change.” He emphasises there would be no coercion. The drugs would merely help those who want to be climate-friendly behaviour but lack the willpower
Once sufficiently drugged, parents would be less likely to reject notions of “human engineering” techniques that will be needed to create Humans 2.0. These amended species will be 15cm shorter than now, hence more energy efficient and less resource-demanding. His study, Human Engineering and Climate Change, is in Ethics, Policy and the Environment.[1]
Some US reaction to Liao has been adverse. Investor’s Business Daily used the headline, “Global Warming Fever Drove This Professor Completely Mad”.[2] It said that warmists are “bummed they can’t find enough naive people to buy into their story”. The looniest tune yet played is Liao’s, it said.
Liao’s study theorises that shorter humans could be achieved through embryo selection during IVF, plus drug and nutrient treatments to reduce birth weights. (High birth weight correlates with future height; low weights obviously correlate with risk to the baby).[3] Anti-growth hormones could be fed to toddlers by climate-caring parents to create earlier closing of their bubs’ epiphyseal (growth) plates. Oh, and he also wants ecocidal meat eaters bio-altered to induce unpleasant reactions if they put pleasure ahead of planet and tuck into a T-bone.[4]
His paper, although now five years old and sometimes mistaken for a sceptic hoax, features today on his personal website. It merited him a gig at a recent Leftist-stacked Festival of Dangerous Ideas at Sydney Opera House, where he spoke in front of a banner, “Engineering humans to stop climate change”. His compere was the respectful Simon Longstaff, boss of Sydney’s Ethics Centre , who introduced his guest as a “really great speaker…He is on the up, this guy. He is on the up!”
Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Moral Philosophy, Liao is chair of bioethics and director of the Center for Bioethics at New York University’s philosophy department — ranked world No 1 for philosophy, Longstaff said. Liao was earlier deputy director in the Program on the Ethics of the New Biosciences in the philosophy faculty at Oxford University. Longstaff said it was ranked world No 2. The mind boggles at what must go on those university philosophy/bioethics units ranked from third to 100?
Liao began his Opera House talk with a visiting speaker’s typical home-town warm-up, in this instance about Sydney being such a beautiful city. After that, warming to his topic, he fretted that the city “might go underwater” because of rising seas.
Many environmental problems, such as climate change, need collective action, he continued, but humans remain stubbornly individualistic, which is why drugs that increase empathy and altruism might bestow the benefits of societal cooperation and engagement. Test subjects given oxytocin hormones were more willing to share money with strangers, behave in more trustworthy ways, and better read other people’s emotions, he said.
He continued, “Making children smaller may be unappealing, but so is the prospect of having our children grow up in a world blighted by the environmental consequences of our choices and lifestyles…
“To combat climate change we can either change the environment or change ourselves. Given the enormous risks associated with changing the environment, we should take seriously that we need to change ourselves.”
Full post
2) Michael Crichton: Why Politicized Science is Dangerous
Michael Crichton, State of Fear
3) Britain’s First Commercial Shale Well Set To Be Drilled
Financial Times, 27 July 2017
The first commercial fracking well in the UK is set to be drilled within weeks in spite of strong opposition from protesters at the site near Blackpool.
Lorries brought a drilling rig to the Lancashire site of shale gas explorer Cuadrilla during the early hours of Thursday under police escort, before anti-fracking activists could block the company’s main gate.
But in an indication of how protesters are determined to try to disrupt Cuadrilla’s operations, later in the day four activists from environmental group Reclaim the Power locked themselves inside cars at the site entrance and placed their arms in concrete so they could not be moved without being injured.
Cuadrilla has had to wait six years to frack again after causing a minor earthquake near Blackpool during a test in 2011.
After securing planning permission from the government last year to frack at a different site in Lancashire, Cuadrilla now hopes to start a long-awaited shale gas revolution in the UK similar to that witnessed in the US.
Britain has an estimated 1,300tn cubic feet of shale gas reserves, mainly in the north of England and the Midlands, according to the British Geological Survey. If 10 per cent could be extracted, it could satisfy the UK’s total gas needs for 50 years, based on current consumption levels, the government has calculated.
Full story
4) Global Warming Reality Check: Largest Maize Harvest In The History Of South Africa
CNBC Africa, 27 July 2017
South Africa will harvest 15,969 million tonnes of maize this season, the biggest crop on record after improved weather conditions across the maize belt boosted yields, the government’s Crop Estimates Committee (CEC) said on Wednesday.
The estimate is up 2 percent compared to the CEC’s June forecast of 15.6 million tonnes. The previous record harvest of 14.656 million tonnes was set in 1981.
The CEC estimate came in just above a forecast by analysts and traders who pegged this year’s crop at 15.77 million tonnes.
The harvest will comprise 9.507 million tonnes of white maize, the regional staple used for human consumption, and 6.462 million tonnes of yellow, the bulk of which is used in animal feed, the CEC’s sixth production forecast of the season said.
The 2017 harvest will also be more than double the previous season, which was only 7.78 million tonnes following an El Nino-triggered drought that impacted yields, pushed up food prices and fuelled inflation.
Full story
5) U.S. Coal Exports Soar, In Boost To Trump Energy Agenda; EU Blames Cold Winter
Reuters, 28 July 2017
WASHINGTON/LONDON (Reuters) – U.S. coal exports have jumped more than 60 percent this year due to soaring demand from Europe and Asia, according to a Reuters review of government data, allowing President Donald Trump’s administration to claim that efforts to revive the battered industry are working.
The increased shipments came as the European Union and other U.S. allies heaped criticism on the Trump administration for its rejection of the Paris Climate Accord, a deal agreed by nearly 200 countries to cut carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels like coal.
The previously unpublished figures provided to Reuters by the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed exports of the fuel from January through May totaled 36.79 million tons, up 60.3 percent from 22.94 million tons in the same period in 2016. While reflecting a bounce from 2016, the shipments remained well-below volumes recorded in equivalent periods the previous five years.
They included a surge to several European countries during the 2017 period, including a 175 percent increase in shipments to the United Kingdom, and a doubling to France – which had suffered a series of nuclear power plant outages that required it and regional neighbors to rely more heavily on coal.
“If Europe wants to lecture Trump on climate then EU member states need transition plans to phase out polluting coal,” said Laurence Watson, a data scientist working on coal at independent think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative in London.
Nicole Bockstaller, a spokeswoman at the EU Commission’s Energy and Climate Action department, said that the EU’s coal imports have generally been on a downward trend since 2006, albeit with seasonable variations like high demand during cold snaps in the winter.
Overall exports to European nations totaled 16 million tons in the first five months of this year, up from 10.5 million in the same period last year, according to the figures. Exports to Asia meanwhile, totaled 12.3 million tons, compared to 6.2 million tons in the year-earlier period.
Trump had campaigned on a promise to “cancel” the Paris deal and sweep away Obama-era environmental regulations to help coal miners, whose output last year sank to the lowest level since 1978. The industry has been battered for years by surging supplies of cheaper natural gas, brought on by better drilling technologies, and increased use of natural gas to fuel power plants.
His administration has since sought to kill scores of pending regulations he said threatened industries like coal mining, and reversed a ban on new coal leasing on federal lands.
Taking Credit
Both the coal industry and the Trump administration said the rising exports of both steam coal, used to generate electricity, and metallurgical coal, used in heavy industry, were evidence that Trump’s agenda was having a positive impact.
“Simply to know that coal no longer has to fight the government – that has to have some effect on investment decisions and in the outlook by companies, producers and utilities that use coal,” said Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association.
Shaylyn Hynes, a spokeswoman at the U.S. Energy Department, said: “These numbers clearly show that the Trump Administration’s policies are helping to revive an industry that was the target of costly and job killing overregulation from Washington for far too long.”
Full post
6) China’s Electric Car Sales Slow As Beijing Cuts Subsidies (To $10.000 Per Car)
Daniel Ren, South China Morning Post, 27 July 2017
After three in the fast lane China’s electric car market has hit a speed bump this year as reduced government subsidies dent drivers’ buying interest.
According to UBS, sales growth of new-energy vehicles including pure electric cars and plug-in hybrid automobiles, are expected to slow to 20 per cent for the whole year in 2017, compared to the 63 per cent year-on-year increase recorded in 2016.
“In China, policies always have a huge impact on the auto market,” said UBS analyst Hou Yankun. “As government subsidies drop, the market is losing a major driving force to spur the growth [of the electric-car segment].”
UBS predicts sales of 403,000 new-energy vehicles on the mainland this year, up from 336,000 in 2016.
Despite the slowing sales, China will retain its title of world front-runner in electric-car adoption, with annual sales more than double the United States where an estimated 191,000 units are forecast to be sold this year.
The Chinese mainland has seen buoyant sales growth of new-energy vehicles since 2014. That’s when the central government started offering billions of yuan in subsidies to encourage the purchase of electric and hybrid vehicles amid a push to clean up the environment.
Beijing has set a target of 5 million new-energy vehicles to be on the road by 2020.
But a 20 per cent reduction in the subsidies this year and the government’s plan to phase out the incentive altogether by 2020 have deterred drivers from buying electric cars this year.
During the first six months of the year sales of new-energy vehicles were up 14.4 per cent year on year to 195,000 units. That compares to a 127 per cent jump in year on year sales in the first half of 2016.
Buyers of electric vehicles can receive up to 66,000 yuan (US$9,700) worth of subsidies this year, which is only half of what was offered three years ago when the government generously distributed money to drive sales growth.
Full story
Tony Thomas, Quadrant, 28 July 2017
People unwilling to act on the climate-crisis narrative should be assisted with drugs that improve and promote conformity, according to eminent bio-ethicist Professor Matthew Liao, of New York University, who also wants to see parents dosing their children with hormones and diets to keep them shorter and less of a burden on the planet.
He wants such people to be given the ‘love drug/cuddle chemical’ oxytocin. This would increase their trust and empathy and make them more ready to change to emission-saving lifestyles.
As his peer-reviewed study puts it, “Pharmacologically induced altruism and empathy could increase the likelihood that we adopt the necessary behavioral and market solutions for curbing climate change.” He emphasises there would be no coercion. The drugs would merely help those who want to be climate-friendly behaviour but lack the willpower
Once sufficiently drugged, parents would be less likely to reject notions of “human engineering” techniques that will be needed to create Humans 2.0. These amended species will be 15cm shorter than now, hence more energy efficient and less resource-demanding. His study, Human Engineering and Climate Change, is in Ethics, Policy and the Environment.[1]
Some US reaction to Liao has been adverse. Investor’s Business Daily used the headline, “Global Warming Fever Drove This Professor Completely Mad”.[2] It said that warmists are “bummed they can’t find enough naive people to buy into their story”. The looniest tune yet played is Liao’s, it said.
Liao’s study theorises that shorter humans could be achieved through embryo selection during IVF, plus drug and nutrient treatments to reduce birth weights. (High birth weight correlates with future height; low weights obviously correlate with risk to the baby).[3] Anti-growth hormones could be fed to toddlers by climate-caring parents to create earlier closing of their bubs’ epiphyseal (growth) plates. Oh, and he also wants ecocidal meat eaters bio-altered to induce unpleasant reactions if they put pleasure ahead of planet and tuck into a T-bone.[4]
His paper, although now five years old and sometimes mistaken for a sceptic hoax, features today on his personal website. It merited him a gig at a recent Leftist-stacked Festival of Dangerous Ideas at Sydney Opera House, where he spoke in front of a banner, “Engineering humans to stop climate change”. His compere was the respectful Simon Longstaff, boss of Sydney’s Ethics Centre , who introduced his guest as a “really great speaker…He is on the up, this guy. He is on the up!”
Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Moral Philosophy, Liao is chair of bioethics and director of the Center for Bioethics at New York University’s philosophy department — ranked world No 1 for philosophy, Longstaff said. Liao was earlier deputy director in the Program on the Ethics of the New Biosciences in the philosophy faculty at Oxford University. Longstaff said it was ranked world No 2. The mind boggles at what must go on those university philosophy/bioethics units ranked from third to 100?
Liao began his Opera House talk with a visiting speaker’s typical home-town warm-up, in this instance about Sydney being such a beautiful city. After that, warming to his topic, he fretted that the city “might go underwater” because of rising seas.
Many environmental problems, such as climate change, need collective action, he continued, but humans remain stubbornly individualistic, which is why drugs that increase empathy and altruism might bestow the benefits of societal cooperation and engagement. Test subjects given oxytocin hormones were more willing to share money with strangers, behave in more trustworthy ways, and better read other people’s emotions, he said.
He continued, “Making children smaller may be unappealing, but so is the prospect of having our children grow up in a world blighted by the environmental consequences of our choices and lifestyles…
“To combat climate change we can either change the environment or change ourselves. Given the enormous risks associated with changing the environment, we should take seriously that we need to change ourselves.”
Full post
2) Michael Crichton: Why Politicized Science is Dangerous
Michael Crichton, State of Fear
Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out.
This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.
I don’t mean global warming. I’m talking about another theory, which rose to prominence a century ago.
Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.
These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.
All in all, the research, legislation and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected. Today, we know that this famous theory that gained so much support was actually pseudoscience. The crisis it claimed was nonexistent. And the actions taken in the name of theory were morally and criminally wrong. Ultimately, they led to the deaths of millions of people. [...]
I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed. Leading scientific journals have taken strong editorial positions of the side of global warming, which, I argue, they have no business doing. Under the circumstances, any scientist who has doubts understands clearly that they will be wise to mute their expression.
One proof of this suppression is the fact that so many of the outspoken critics of global warming are retired professors. These individuals are not longer seeking grants, and no longer have to face colleagues whose grant applications and career advancement may be jeopardized by their criticisms.
In science, the old men are usually wrong. But in politics, the old men are wise, counsel caution, and in the end are often right.
The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale. We have killed thousands of our fellow human beings because we believed they had signed a contract with the devil, and had become witches. We still kill more than a thousand people each year for witchcraft. In my view, there is only one hope for humankind to emerge from what Carl Sagan called “the demon-haunted world” of our past. That hope is science.
But as Alston Chase put it, “when the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.”
That is the danger we now face. And this is why the intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, with a bad history. We must remember the history, and be certain that what we present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest.
Full essay3) Britain’s First Commercial Shale Well Set To Be Drilled
Financial Times, 27 July 2017
The first commercial fracking well in the UK is set to be drilled within weeks in spite of strong opposition from protesters at the site near Blackpool.
Lorries brought a drilling rig to the Lancashire site of shale gas explorer Cuadrilla during the early hours of Thursday under police escort, before anti-fracking activists could block the company’s main gate.
But in an indication of how protesters are determined to try to disrupt Cuadrilla’s operations, later in the day four activists from environmental group Reclaim the Power locked themselves inside cars at the site entrance and placed their arms in concrete so they could not be moved without being injured.
Cuadrilla has had to wait six years to frack again after causing a minor earthquake near Blackpool during a test in 2011.
After securing planning permission from the government last year to frack at a different site in Lancashire, Cuadrilla now hopes to start a long-awaited shale gas revolution in the UK similar to that witnessed in the US.
Britain has an estimated 1,300tn cubic feet of shale gas reserves, mainly in the north of England and the Midlands, according to the British Geological Survey. If 10 per cent could be extracted, it could satisfy the UK’s total gas needs for 50 years, based on current consumption levels, the government has calculated.
Full story
4) Global Warming Reality Check: Largest Maize Harvest In The History Of South Africa
CNBC Africa, 27 July 2017
South Africa will harvest 15,969 million tonnes of maize this season, the biggest crop on record after improved weather conditions across the maize belt boosted yields, the government’s Crop Estimates Committee (CEC) said on Wednesday.
The estimate is up 2 percent compared to the CEC’s June forecast of 15.6 million tonnes. The previous record harvest of 14.656 million tonnes was set in 1981.
The CEC estimate came in just above a forecast by analysts and traders who pegged this year’s crop at 15.77 million tonnes.
The harvest will comprise 9.507 million tonnes of white maize, the regional staple used for human consumption, and 6.462 million tonnes of yellow, the bulk of which is used in animal feed, the CEC’s sixth production forecast of the season said.
The 2017 harvest will also be more than double the previous season, which was only 7.78 million tonnes following an El Nino-triggered drought that impacted yields, pushed up food prices and fuelled inflation.
Full story
5) U.S. Coal Exports Soar, In Boost To Trump Energy Agenda; EU Blames Cold Winter
Reuters, 28 July 2017
WASHINGTON/LONDON (Reuters) – U.S. coal exports have jumped more than 60 percent this year due to soaring demand from Europe and Asia, according to a Reuters review of government data, allowing President Donald Trump’s administration to claim that efforts to revive the battered industry are working.
The increased shipments came as the European Union and other U.S. allies heaped criticism on the Trump administration for its rejection of the Paris Climate Accord, a deal agreed by nearly 200 countries to cut carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels like coal.
The previously unpublished figures provided to Reuters by the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed exports of the fuel from January through May totaled 36.79 million tons, up 60.3 percent from 22.94 million tons in the same period in 2016. While reflecting a bounce from 2016, the shipments remained well-below volumes recorded in equivalent periods the previous five years.
They included a surge to several European countries during the 2017 period, including a 175 percent increase in shipments to the United Kingdom, and a doubling to France – which had suffered a series of nuclear power plant outages that required it and regional neighbors to rely more heavily on coal.
“If Europe wants to lecture Trump on climate then EU member states need transition plans to phase out polluting coal,” said Laurence Watson, a data scientist working on coal at independent think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative in London.
Nicole Bockstaller, a spokeswoman at the EU Commission’s Energy and Climate Action department, said that the EU’s coal imports have generally been on a downward trend since 2006, albeit with seasonable variations like high demand during cold snaps in the winter.
Overall exports to European nations totaled 16 million tons in the first five months of this year, up from 10.5 million in the same period last year, according to the figures. Exports to Asia meanwhile, totaled 12.3 million tons, compared to 6.2 million tons in the year-earlier period.
Trump had campaigned on a promise to “cancel” the Paris deal and sweep away Obama-era environmental regulations to help coal miners, whose output last year sank to the lowest level since 1978. The industry has been battered for years by surging supplies of cheaper natural gas, brought on by better drilling technologies, and increased use of natural gas to fuel power plants.
His administration has since sought to kill scores of pending regulations he said threatened industries like coal mining, and reversed a ban on new coal leasing on federal lands.
Taking Credit
Both the coal industry and the Trump administration said the rising exports of both steam coal, used to generate electricity, and metallurgical coal, used in heavy industry, were evidence that Trump’s agenda was having a positive impact.
“Simply to know that coal no longer has to fight the government – that has to have some effect on investment decisions and in the outlook by companies, producers and utilities that use coal,” said Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association.
Shaylyn Hynes, a spokeswoman at the U.S. Energy Department, said: “These numbers clearly show that the Trump Administration’s policies are helping to revive an industry that was the target of costly and job killing overregulation from Washington for far too long.”
Full post
6) China’s Electric Car Sales Slow As Beijing Cuts Subsidies (To $10.000 Per Car)
Daniel Ren, South China Morning Post, 27 July 2017
After three in the fast lane China’s electric car market has hit a speed bump this year as reduced government subsidies dent drivers’ buying interest.
According to UBS, sales growth of new-energy vehicles including pure electric cars and plug-in hybrid automobiles, are expected to slow to 20 per cent for the whole year in 2017, compared to the 63 per cent year-on-year increase recorded in 2016.
“In China, policies always have a huge impact on the auto market,” said UBS analyst Hou Yankun. “As government subsidies drop, the market is losing a major driving force to spur the growth [of the electric-car segment].”
UBS predicts sales of 403,000 new-energy vehicles on the mainland this year, up from 336,000 in 2016.
Despite the slowing sales, China will retain its title of world front-runner in electric-car adoption, with annual sales more than double the United States where an estimated 191,000 units are forecast to be sold this year.
The Chinese mainland has seen buoyant sales growth of new-energy vehicles since 2014. That’s when the central government started offering billions of yuan in subsidies to encourage the purchase of electric and hybrid vehicles amid a push to clean up the environment.
Beijing has set a target of 5 million new-energy vehicles to be on the road by 2020.
But a 20 per cent reduction in the subsidies this year and the government’s plan to phase out the incentive altogether by 2020 have deterred drivers from buying electric cars this year.
During the first six months of the year sales of new-energy vehicles were up 14.4 per cent year on year to 195,000 units. That compares to a 127 per cent jump in year on year sales in the first half of 2016.
Buyers of electric vehicles can receive up to 66,000 yuan (US$9,700) worth of subsidies this year, which is only half of what was offered three years ago when the government generously distributed money to drive sales growth.
Full story
The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment