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November 08, 2008 04:30 PM UTC

Weekend Open Thread

  • 88 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.”

–Sun Tzu

Comments

88 thoughts on “Weekend Open Thread

  1. 2012 will never come too soon for a few pundits.В In particular Novak .В With great conservative/traditional thinking that has brought along “those whose time has past”, such as Bob Dole, John McCain.В Reading his arguments for Newt as the next GOP prez candidate gets me thinking about a newsroom with clacking typewriters and rumourmongers getting late night phone calls with information for the morning edition. Just as there is a move towards using the internet for politics, a real “new” idea – yet fresh for the GOP , recycling the next blast from the past to run fits the thinking of being very conservative in starting any change.

    Newt, Romney, Palin (she is almost 50), McConnell, Crist.В Whomever.

    The Repubs really need to go further right to make sure there is no mistake like letting McCain get the nomination.

    For the poster asking in the GOP future diary about whether the full list of Repubs in Colorado was listed.В Yes, that is the full bench now.В Look for more purges of those only on the right side of center.В The goal is to have only certified far right candidates running for office.В I think it was Mike May who said on Tuesday night that the voters did not reject conservatism, only that the voters rejected Bushism.В Well, next election we will see if Mike is right (hehe) on that.  

    1. The future belongs to those that embrace the future, not those that embrace the past. Even Reagan won with a vision of where he wanted to take us to, not return to.

      Newt, Colorado GOP moving more right, all these are the signs of a party that does not have a vision of where they want to go, and so retreat to a security blanket that will put them in permanent minority status.

      I worry because I see the Colorado GOP going down the road the Hawaii GOP went down where they will be relegated to a permanent minority status.

      Attention Republicans, finding a new road forward to success is much harder than just retreating into your small little areas of safety – but it’s the only route to staying competitive at a state level.

      1. Just embracing the future without worrying too much about through which political party we do so? Neither party has ever gotten it quite right, all things considered. “Reason,” and the ends to which people of good will would direct it, are still hanging from a laden bough waiting to be picked. So, instead of worrying about how to ensure that this or that party finds more successful political strategies, how about worrying about how to utilize our parties to pick that fruit that is rotting on the tree?

        Please see my recent diary for a more complete discussion of this notion.

          1. Claiming that we have to continue to think within the same partisan framework in order to transcend it in favor of “reason,” wherever reason may lead, is not really what I had in mind.

          1. it is very hard to put the demon back in the circle.

            Jindal is very appealing, but creationist exorcists don’t play well out outside of the areas that GOP is retreating to.

              1. He is further right than Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin.  This plays well in Looser-ana, but not so much nationally.

                Jindal is a bright, accomplished person. It’s too bad he, he, chose The Dark Side.

                His ethnicity doesn’t matter. Hell, he won in frickin’ red neck LA.  

              2. After Bush the mood of the electorate is a desire for clear competence. Political leanings come second and things like the occasional exorcism aren’t going to get much traction.

                I also think for the same reasons Huckabee is a very strong candidate. A Huckabee/Jindal ticket could be very strong. And even better, such a ticket would freak out the powers that be in the GOP more than it would us Dems.

                One thing for sure, we are not going to see a national ticket of 2 white males again for quite some time.

                1. Leaving aside ideology for a moment: what a breath of fresh air as far as race and creed is concerned.

                  Louisianans deserve great credit for electing an Indian-American as their governor. North Carolinians had a Senatorial race featuring two women. Our President is an African-American, who defeated a ticket with a woman Vice-President only after narrowly beating the front-runner Democratic candidate: another woman.

                  George W. Bush actually deserves credit in this area. He had two Secretaries of State: a black man, followed by a black woman.

                  We Americans can be proud of all this.

              3. Jindal’s a loon on reproductive rights, abortion, and right to privacy issues.

                Between the failure of 48 and Obama’s likely Supreme Court appointments, Jindal would turn off the moderates the same way Palin did.

                So please, nominate him. Women voters will re-elect Obama in a landslide Part II.

    2. And who is it that Novak believes Gingrich would appeal to?  The Libertarian wing of the R party?  Nope, the Libertarians say that Gingrich’s “Contract on America” was a failure, with the 95 programs the “contract” promised to eliminate, instead, increasing by 13 percent under Gingrich’s leadership.

      Is it the Christian Coalition which Novak believes will carry Newt to the nomination?  Nope, those Gingrich “deep character flaws” which Novak alludes to, like being married 3 times and serving divorce papers to his wife while she was receiving cancer treatment in a hospital and multiple extra-marital affairs may not revive “that old time religion” with Focus on the Family.

      He might appeal to the hate wing of his party with his proposed new Contract on America, highlighting his desire to attack Iran, but then he loses the 90 percent of America who are tired of endless war.  Plus, he’ll be 68 in 2012 and we saw how attractive that is with the youth vote. Then there are those 84 ethics violation charges filed against him while serving in Congress.  Mr. Clean, he is not.

      Nope, I believe, Newt has been forever exiled to the nether world of sniping and self-promoting punditry for the remainder of eternity.  But hey, he can keep Novak company.

      “Beatniks and politics, nothing is new

      A yardstick for lunatics, one point of view”
       -strawberry alarm clock

    3. I know the Repubs have lost quite a bit of their election groove lately, but surely they wouldn’t hand the Dems such a gift as Newt. I mean, to know him is to hate him.

    1. The place is medium in size.  I will reserve the Marley Table (Bob holds court there) and lounge area. Saturday afternoons are pretty slow.  

    2. Special thanks to Laughing Boy for the idea, and to Wanda for gracious hospitality–I’ll be back bringing friends.

      It was fun to put faces on some of the other Polsters–we should do this again.

    1. .

      I can remember when he ran as the “End-the-Iraq-War” candidate.  

      Now his Chief of Staff is the biggest booster of that war.  

      That’s some change that you can believe in, depending on your level of gullibility.

      A vote for either major party was a vote for status quo.

      .

      1. Yeah, we’re both exactly the same. Status quo, I’ll give you, because I don’t want everything changed. Life is pretty good in America despite my own job problems and I don’t want anyone overturning the apple cart.

      2. His chief of staff is just that: the chief of staff. He’s an effective SOB.

        Obama has pledged to end the war soon, and RESPONSIBLY. He’ll keep that promise.

        A vote for a third party was a vote for a potential Sarah Palin presidency. Which would probably have been the last presidency this republic would ever have had.

  2. http://www.denverpost.com/spor

    When a Jefferson County deputy unleashed pepper spray at unruly protesters on the first night of the Democratic National Convention, he did not know that his targets were undercover Denver police officers…

    According to a use-of-force police report obtained by the ACLU, undercover Denver detectives staged a struggle with a police commander to get pulled out of the crowd without blowing their cover. The commander knew they were working undercover, and the plan was to pull them out of the crowd and pretend they were under arrest so protesters would be none the wiser.

    A Jefferson County deputy, unaware of the presence of undercover police, thought that the commander was being attacked and used pepper spray on the undercover officers.

  3. Henry Waxman is challenging John Dingell for Chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Nancy Pelosi is quietly backing Waxman.  Diana DeGette has always been close to Dingell even though he is more conservative than Waxman.

    Who will DeGette support? If she guesses right she could be in a very strong position in the next Congress.  

    1. seems like a great big “duh”. No bias required to reach such an obvious conclusion. Who needs to consult articles? Especially on DailyKos?  Why not just consult common sense? The love affair with extreme social conservatism and incompetent government by extreme government haters is over. Check the interior numbers of the election results.

      All those warning us about how Palin is  going to come roaring back like Nixon or ought to be compared to Teddy Roosevelt (for crying out loud, as if there is any equivalence in stature on any level between  Wasilla Barbie and either one of those two historic figures) ), are getting all hysterical over nothing.

      Sorry, Middle, but as per our discussion in Friday thread you are just not seeing clearly on this one.

  4. particularly in one poster’s response to my admittedly verbose diary entry, is that among contributers on sites such as this, the notion of what it means to “say something” and “say nothing” is usually flipped on its head: As long as you are talking about individuals (e.g., Dick Wadhams), and about other political superficialities (e.g., the distribution of legislative seats among the two parties), you are talking about “something,” but the moment you start talking about substance, such as legal and economic analyses of policy issues, you are talking about “nothing.”

    As a former transaction cost economist, now turned lawyer, I am very oriented toward substance, and see the personalities and distributions as, at most, means to an end (though more often as displaced focuses of attention, with the end being completely lost to an obsession on the means).

    It is really fairly obvious how to use analysis to create more useful policies: Use government to reduce transaction costs, to internalize externalities into market pricing, and to invest in both tangible and intanglible forms of infrastructure. This is neither Republican nor Democratic, neither conservative nor liberal; it’s just plain reasonable.

    Yet the discussion barely exists. Public discourse is devoid of any analytical basis. And to try to introduce one only invites the rancor of those who cannot see or think past form.

    This open thread is about the art of war. Maybe we need to pay more attention to the art of peace. By that I mean, maybe we need to focus more on what to do with government and less on how to capture it. Clearly, the latter provokes the former: Once you have a notion of what to do with it, you strategize about how to implement that plan, which requires capturing government, or wielding power within it. But those means have almost entirely displaced the ends. In all of this vast popular obsession with politics, both local and national, hardly anyone ever gets into policy analyses!

    It’s enough to drive me back to the ivory tower. And that, after leaving it because I felt there was too great a rift between the subtle, esoteric ideas produced in the halls of academe, and the popular understandings driving political processes. But every time someone like me tries to build a bridge between the two, the intellectual petty-terrorists that thrive on the internet are already poised to blow it up.

    Isn’t anyone here interested in “politics,” as in how best to run the polis?

    1. But a key point in the real world (and not in the ivory tower) is that politics is the art of the possible, not the art of the optimal.

      In addition, there is very little that can be determined on pur analytical grounds. Take global warming – an analytical view says it is an issue, but how big is it and how time critical – well the science is all over the map on that. And with the economy in the toilet, people dying daily from lack of healthcare, and Iran about to get an atomic bomb – it becomes a very political question as to how much effort and resources to put into addressing global warming.

      The problem is that with limited time & resources we are forced to make trade-offs. And those trade-offs can be made more intelligently via analysis, but they are at root a political decision.

      1. Politics is the art of the optimal possible, not just WHATEVER happens to be possible (after all, it’s possible to blow things up, but that isn’t always a good idea). So, of course, we do not live under the rule of philosopher kings, nor should we. But the genius of the many is not tapped when the many are content with a highly combative competition between highly reductionist ideologies. I think we can do better. One way to do better is to stop accepting the status quo as inevitable.

        There is a formidable human bias in favor of believing that what is will persist, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. When I lived in West Germany in the mid-80s, all of my German friends were sure of two things: That the Berlin Wall would be there forever, and that Germany would be divided forever. A few short years later, they were proven wrong. In 1987, a brilliant Yale historian named Paul Kennedy wrote “The Rise and Decline of the Great Powers,” sketching out the transformations in the (European/world) political landscape over the past five centuries. He ended with a chapter that included a very accurate analysis of all of the internal weaknesses in the Soviet Union, but predicted that it would persist indefinately due to the autocratic hold of the government. A few short years later, he was proven wrong.

        Clearly, the more superficial the reality, the more malleable it is. The disintegration and integration of political entities is a historical constant, and yet the people in any such entity never believe any such change is imminent. But small changes add up to large ones, new forms gradually replace old ones, and, though Precinct, whose brilliance I can never hope to match, might resent my use of the word, paradigms do indeed shift. Sometimes dramatically, having reached a threshold.

        Not only can the names, alignments, and platforms of our political parties shift, but the framework within which they operate can as well. Sure, factions will always exist and compete, and some will probably always represent organized ignorance. But that underlying reality can take lots of forms, and can be channeled and harnassed in lots of ways.

        I don’t begrudge people making choices regarding how to spend their precious time: Not everyone wants to be a social analyst. But don’t assume that a taste for it can’t be cultivated, and that there might not be benefits to focusing more on social analysis and less on political score keeping.

        Otherwise, we spend far too much time and energy spinning our wheels, and far too little applying our genius to the problems and opportunities we face.

        1. that’s not election related.  I’m guessing not.  A good share of what’s on this site is related to policy, not partisanship.  Leading up to the primaries there were discussions in each party about what can/should happen and which candidate would be most likely to succeed in making it happen.  During the session there are conversations about bills, if they are good or bad, what could be changed to make them better, and what the consequences would be if they are signed into law.  Most of these conversations, much like the bills they are about, are not partisan.

          Frankly if you don’t feel like we can provide the kind of deep thoughts you require, go somewhere else.  Seriously, I do appreciate you lowering yourself to post and re-post on our lack social analysis.  LB’s post was missing something, (_*_).

          1. that you couldn’t provide “the kind of deep thoughts (I) require,” I wouldn’t be here trying to initiate a conversation of that nature.

            But I think you may be right that I came knocking on the wrong door. Apparently, this site serves a different purpose, or purposes, from what I am looking for. Too bad: A Colorado political site would have been a great place for political-economic discussions, if it were so offensive to some of its members.

        2. You talk about how people believed the Berlin wall would be up forever – yet it did come down. Good point that people’s assumptions were off.

          But there is no way an analysis beforehand could say that the wall would come down, when it would, or why. In fact most analysis said it was going to be up for a long time – and that Reagan’s approach was the wrong way to win the cold war.

          Most people here are in favor of trying to figure out what would work best for each problem – and we talk about that a lot here. But you need to give us an example of how analysis can lead to a clear solution before anyone is going to buy off on that.

          1. .

            is the tendency to avoid exploring, or even admitting, core assumptions.  

            I’m right up front about my assumptions, which are occasionally disrespected here as “magical thinking.”  

            But everyone has fundamental assumptions, core beliefs, whether they are discussed openly or not.  

            For some of the “rationalists” or “brights” here, your assumptions, if exposed, would make y’all look almost as silly as me.  And if you’re not as willing to poke fun at your own incredible assumptions, but prefer to stay in your comfort zone, then that limits what you can aspire to intellectually.  

            The reflex response has to be to deny it, but some folks here who feel they have grown spiritually beyond organized religion have taken up a sophisticated form of self-aware Buddhism as the core of their belief system.  (That is the only major religion developed without any claims of divine intervention or revelation.)  

            I support your right to choose your own belief system,

            but am amused that you think that the religion you came to is superior to mine because it was wholly created by the human mind.  Don’t you consider that to be a fault in mine ?

            .

                  1. In “godless” religions, there is usually a concept analogous to “godhead,” meaning the font of the divine aspect of nature. Even in our anthropomorphic monotheistic religions, there are clearly conceptualizations of god that cannot be quite anthropormophic, such as “God is everywhere.” Is the divine aspect interwoven into nature a concept that has no overlap with the Judeo-christian concept of “god,” some overlap, or complete correlation? A legitimate argument could be made for any of those positions. I think debating whether there is or is not a concept analogous to “god” in Buddhism (and Taoism) is a bit like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole…, or vice versa. It is what it is, and probably best understood from the inside, in its own terms, rather than debated from the outside, in “ours.”

              1. Believing in a negative as intensely as atheists do requires as much faith as does believing intensely in the unprovable existence of God.  If the point is to reject faith in the unprovable, agnosticism seems the more rational way to go.

                1. I’m always amazed when I see yet another case of “my shit doesn’t smell” coming from agnostics or atheists. Yes, atheism is yet another belief system without absolute proof. So is agnosticism. Saying that one or the other is more rational is like the fight between different sects of christianity.  

                  1. “Yes, atheism is yet another belief system without absolute proof. So is agnosticism”

                     In fact, agnosticism is the belief we revert to when we conclude that no system can be established with absolute proof.

                     “No generalization is worth a damn, including this one.” — Mark Twain.

                    1. Isn’t just “no belief”, it is the positive belief that no proof can be made. It is just as much a positive belief system as any other. Not only that it is about as logical as “Oh well since the two sides on human caused global warming cannot agree I can’t decide”. Stuff and nonsense as much as any other human belief.

                    2. Nobody has or can prove the non-existence of god, good luck proving the negative and getting by Descartes deceiving demon.

                      But nobody has proven the existence of a deity either, despite 4,000 years of trying. Given that, agnostics like myself assign the unprovable to those exercises like trying to trisect the angle and square the circle and , like candide, go and tend our garden.

                      As long as you Christians and missionary atheists don’t respond by burning us at the stake, it makes for a much saner existence.

                    3. that the sublime is not reducible to our words and concepts. You can call it agnostic, or almost any other religious orientation that uses religion more literarily than literally. It is a coherent, but inherently non-dogmatic, position, except to maintain, somewhat dogmatically, that dogma is dysfunctional. You sort it out.

          2. involves another false dichotomy, though a very subtle one. I pointed to examples of both widely and expertly held predictions that almost immediately were proven false, as evidence of the fact that assumptions that what is will continue to be are not highly reliable. However, there are many examples of analyses which were quite prescient in their precision: There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that John Maynard Keynes, who attended the Versailles Treaty conferences after WWI in an advisory capacity, walked out in disgust because his prediction that the reparations imposed on Germany would inevitably lead to a resumption of hostilities in the wake of the ensuing German economic collapse the reparations would impose were ignored. Many claimed that the 9/11 attack was a big surprise, but I would imagine that many here know that the only surprise to people who followed international relations was that it took so long to happen.

            Speaking of Keynes, although it is fashionable these days to say that Keynsian economics is dead, the basic premise of using government deficit spending to stoke the economic engine has indeed been proven right, if in no other instance than the in the coup-de-grace our arms build-up during WWII had on the Depression. Clearly, since the Great Depression, using Keynesian economics (and latter additions to it), we have reduced the severity of business cycles: Having gone nearly 70 years without a major Depression is dramatic a break from the prior norm. I think it’s clear that the application of analyses had an effect on that, and probably a decisive one.

            But there are, of course, simpler and more obvious examples: The use of modern technologies. They all owe a great debt to the analytical process in research and development. Sometimes, the truth is too obvious to notice, but, clearly, the application of analysis affects our lives dramatically.

            Social institutions are really quite similar to technologies: Both are sets of cognitions employed in service to human needs and desires. Both are innovations that grow through gradual accretions usually as the result of casual trial and error. Both are subject to processes of cultural diffusion and synthesis, spreading and growing by combining with other ideas, leavened with a bit of human ingenuity and imagination on the margins. Both undergo accelerating evolutions as a result of the accumulation and evolution of communications and computational technologies and social institutions. And, of course, both can and do benefit from the intentional application of the analytical process.

            And that has really been my whole point here: How do we improve the efficiency of that process, even given the obstacles to doing so?

    2. This thread has no subject.  It is for any discussion.  To limit to a discussion of The Art of War would leave a couple of the lawyers who hang around here a very lonely discussion.

      However, it was while contemplating the quote I began thinking about the difference between Progressives and conservatives and wrote the above post.

      I have never considered politics to be substantive.  It is more like buckets of fruit chunky Jello in which everybody puts a hand and a foot in an effort to create a wedding cake.

      1. …kidding!  but….”fruit chunky Jello” plus “hand and foot” does not equal “wedding cake”.  Unless you play banjos on your front porch.

        🙂

    3. you are not discusing substance, but rather philosophy about substance.

      There are plenty of substantive discussions on this site, though they are often overwhelmed by the horserace elements.

      1. since we are still wrapping up a nearly two year historic election season and there are still some loose ends. Naturally the site has been dominated by the horse race elements.  Also natural to be speculating on cabinet choices, etc.  

        When the new administration and legislature are in place in DC and our state legislature is meeting again the conversation will reflect that. It IS called ColoradoPols and what’s been bigger in politics than the elections?

    4. Danny’s right: I am talking about talking about substance, rather than about substance itself. I tend toward the abstract, and feel certain that it has a place even in forums that tend toward the concrete. One friend many years ago said that she respects people who “do” more than people who merely theorize, because one has value and the other doesn’t. But many doers owe great debts to others who were notorious do-nothings. The best example is the debt owed to Thoreau by Gandhi and King.

      I think discourse, even a single discourse in a single forum, benefits from layered degrees of abstraction in a single conversation. In fact, somewhat analogously, and a bit less abstractly, I once wrote a paper on political markets, and how conflating as many issues and as many parties as managable into a single negotiation had the benefit of simulating a market mechanism in political exchange, freeing the parties from the limitation of having to find concessions of equal value in bilateral exchanges (political bartering). It makes one consider the development of “political currency” more actual than metaphorical sometime in the future, creating a fully elaborated political market place.

      As one final thought, I’m going to repost here something that I posted in response to Precinct’s and, to a lesser degree, David’s response to my diary entry. I am particularly interested in elaborating the optimal balance between cultivating reason, and acknowledging folly as a fixed parameter, in social policy formation.

      (the slightly modified posting from my diary follows):

      The thing that amazes and dismays me is that such an inoccuous essay should provoke such rabid belligerence. There is the intriguing question of to what, exactly, you are reacting: Some here who have leapt like jackals to carrion have heaped high praise on a different Oz projected by the same man-behind-the-curtain in the past. And yet, it is not merely a response to substance detached from personality: Certainly in Precinct’s case, there is no reference whatsoever to the substance, but only chest-thumpingly antagonistic criticism of its form.

      Obviously, this site has a value, regardless of how it is expanded or contracted by the separate decisions, and ensuing collective local culture, of the habitual contributers. But, somewhat in line with the substance of my original entry, isn’t there good reason to try to make choices that expand rather than contract its value? Don’t we have some responsibility for making individual choices that contribute to the emergence of more functional rather than less functional local (and global) cultures?

      Is this a forum which wishes to discourage discourse in favor of dubiously qualified literary criticism? Or, more precisely, Precinct, are you an individual whose purpose is to stifle all discourse that you find aesthetically displeasing? Can your chastisement of my ineloquence add anything of value to this forum, even what might be supposed to be its intended purpose: An improved aesthetic standard?

      But I have gained something of real value by this exchange: I have been reminded of what may well be the most intractable of all challenges to increasing the rationality of social policy and political discourse: The affirmative commitment to irrationality that possesses so many of its most engaged participants. Politics is religion for some here. It is a set of rituals, and incantations, and dogmas. There are prescribed norms, a familiar idiom, combined with a certain hostility to that which does not conform. It is a sacred culture, challenges to which are met with indignation and disdain.

      My writing is not elegant enough for Precinct to deign to consider, and yet its inelegance is offensive enough to warrant a response that carries no other message.

      How bizarre! And how fascinating! I have spent too much time thinking too abstractly: I think I will focus on the salience of human folly more, and on the potential of human rationality less, with hopefully more chance of diminishing the former and augmenting the latter by doing so.

      Lunging jackals can sometimes wonderfully sharpen the senses.

  5. From the column titled “Obama, be progressive!”:

    http://www.salon.com/opinion/f

    To meet the challenge, Democrats have to abandon their worst habits.

    They must, for instance, acknowledge their progressive mandate, rather than denying it as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did on Tuesday. “This is not a mandate for a political party or an ideology,” he fearfully told reporters.

    They should also retire the Innocent Bystander fable about being powerless onlookers. Democrats first cited this myth as reason the Iraq war continued during their congressional majority — expecting the country to forget that Congress can halt war funding. Today, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said that “there’s not much we can do” to amend the sputtering bank bailout. In 2009, such mendacity will metastasize from banal dishonesty into grist for scathing comedy-show punch lines.

    Democrats need to discard other lies, too — especially those about Bill Clinton. To hear the pundits tell it, Clinton’s first-term pitfalls underscore why the next administration should avoid “governing in a way that is, or seems, skewed to the left,” as the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus most recently asserted. History, of course, proves the opposite. Recounting Clinton’s early years to Politico, a lobbyist correctly noted that the new president didn’t move left — he pushed conservative policies like NAFTA, thereby demoralizing his base and helping Republicans take Congress.

    1. .

      yeah.  How does that work, when your party controls both houses of Congress, plus that other House on Pennsylvania Ave, but still you protest that “there’s not much that we can do ?”

      I think we’ll get to judge whether or not that works with true believers in the next election.  

      I predict it will be trotted out in 2 years to explain why we’re still in Iraq.  

      .  

            1. He was elected in 1994, and his widow replaced him (and is still there). But he and she were both conservatives.

              Besides, ever since Ronald Reagan, there’s obviously nobody Californians won’t elect. If Palin moved to San Francisco, I’m sure she could become Governor.

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