Geoff's Miscellany

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Archives for January 2019

Dallas Willard on the Beatitudes

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Dallas Willard‘s understanding of the Beatitudes:

It will help us know what to do—and what not to do—with the Beatitudes if we can discover what Jesus himself was doing with them. That should be the key to understanding them, for after all they are his Beatitudes, not ours to make of them what we will. And since great teachers and leaders always have a coherent message that they develop in an orderly way, we should assume that his teaching in the Beatitudes is a clarification or development of his primary theme in this talk and in his life: the availability of the kingdom of the heavens. How, then, do they develop that theme?

In chapter 4 of Matthew we see Jesus proclaiming his basic message (v. 17) and demonstrating it by acting with God’s rule from the heavens, meeting the desperate needs of the people around him. As a result, “Sick folk were soon coming to be healed from as far away as Syria. And whatever their illness or pain, or if they were possessed by demons, or were insane, or paralyzed—he healed them all. Enormous crowds followed him wherever he went” (4:23–25 LB).

Having ministered to the needs of the people crowding around him, he desired to teach them and moved to a higher position in the landscape—“up on the hill” (Matt. 5:1 BV)—where they could see and hear him well. But he does not, as is so often suggested, withdraw from the crowd to give an esoteric discourse of sublime irrelevance to the crying need of those pressing upon him. Rather, in the midst of this mass of raw humanity, and with them hanging on every word—note that it is they who respond at the end of the discourse—Jesus teaches his students or apprentices, along with all who hear, about the meaning of the availability of the heavens.

I believe he used the method of “show and tell” to make clear the extent to which the kingdom is “on hand” to us. There were directly before him those who had just received from the heavens through him. The context makes this clear. He could point out in the crowd now this individual, who was “blessed” because The Kingdom Among Us had just reached out and touched them with Jesus’ heart and voice and hands. Perhaps this is why in the Gospels we only find him giving Beatitudes from the midst of a crowd of people he had touched.

And so he said, “Blessed are the spiritual zeros—the spiritually bankrupt, deprived and deficient, the spiritual beggars, those without a wisp of ‘religion’—when the kingdom of the heavens comes upon them.”

Or, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens.” This, of course, is the more traditional and literally correct translation of Matt. 5:3. The poor in spirit are blessed as a result of the kingdom of God being available to them in their spiritual poverty. But today the words “poor in spirit” no longer convey the sense of spiritual destitution that they were originally meant to bear. Amazingly, they have come to refer to a praiseworthy condition. So, as a corrective, I have paraphrased the verse as above. No doubt Jesus had many exhibits from this category in the crowd around him. Most, if not all, of the Twelve Apostles were of this type, as are many now reading these words.

(Willard 99-101)

This is a fairly persuasive interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount. It is certainly a Biblical teaching, in the sense that in 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, Paul makes it clear that the gospel is for lowest of the low. But is it what Jesus/Matthew means to say? I’m not as sure as I used to be. Since the Sermon on the Mount is a presented as Jesus’ moral system, it makes sense that it would start with Jesus’ description of happiness. If I were Lutheran, I would take the “blessings” of the beatitudes as promises for believers. But the problem is that that genre of saying and the Greek word it begins with is almost always used to speak of virtues that naturally lead to specific consequences. The major counter-example is Luke’s version of the SoM in Luke 6, where the traits of the blessed are negative traits.

Works Cited:

Willard, Dallas The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering our Hidden Life in God(Harper Collins, 1997)

What is a virtue?

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Understanding virtue is so crucial for true happiness and success that you should probably read this page even if you don’t intend to read anything else at Virtus et Potentia. Essentially a virtue is a good habit. But what is a habit and what does it mean for a habit to be good?

Introduction: Virtues are Good Habits

Virtue, without reference to morality, is a good habit.[1]

A habit is a stable or persistent way of acting in the world, habits are like emotional base lines. They are not easily altered. The difference between a virtue and an emotional baseline is that one might be natural to who you are due to genetics (emotional baseline), but your habits are based on repetitive choices (conscious or unconsciously made).

What makes a habit good is whether or not it is fit for purpose.

Examples of habits fit for purpose:

If you want money, but have a habit of sleeping in and missing work that is very difficult not to do, then you have a bad habit on your hands.

If you want to make friends and have a tendency to listen carefully, tease effectively, give generously, and offer helpful advice, then you have good habits of friendship.

The result of possessing virtues/good habits is that with practice they give their possessor the ability to act in that fashion easily and well[2]. So a man with the virtue of justice has no problem making restitution when he has wronged him by mistake. Similarly, a man with courage will act in spite of fear for noble causes as a matter of course, not merely because circumstances have become so dire than action is the only alternative to death.

This is why you want to develop virtue. In the lives of many people, success does not come easy so they resign to mediocrity. But according to a virtue theory of human development, you cannot have “easy success” unless you first imprint yourself with several virtuous habits.

Be The Oak

My favorite metaphor for virtue is the oak tree.

In your life you already have a will, a set of emotions, and rational powers. These are like an acorn.

Every good choice you make is like choosing to water this acorn and give it fertilizer. Every choice you make at odds with your goals or your purpose in life (more on that another time), is like pouring poison on the seed or depriving it of water and soil. Eventually, as you train your desires with your reason, the tree grows so much that external impediments to success, power, or virtue simply become stimulus to further growth. This is similar to trees which need to be pruned or coastal trees which only grow stronger in the face of the harsh wind from the sea.

In classical thought there are several categories of virtues, some are moral and some are amoral. The two categories I’ll deal with are the intellectual and the moral virtues.

The Intellectual Virtues

The five intellectual virtues are listed and described below (btw, intellectual virtues are not necessarily possessed by intellectuals):

  1. Understanding/Sanity – This virtue is the power to understand first principles (cause and effect, number, non-contradiction, etc.).
  2. Science/Knowledge – This is the ability and habit of making inferences and drawing conclusions from principles and sensory data.
  3. Wisdom – While the word wisdom is often used as a synonym for prudence, in this case it is the ability to see things in context and relationship to one another with reference to values, consequences, and so-on.
  4. Prudence/Deliberation – Prudence in classical virtue theory is the habit of right choice. Prudence relies upon and builds upon the foundation of understanding, science, and wisdom for the purpose of making good decisions (decisions which move the man of action toward his goals). My own definition of prudence (because it builds upon the previous virtues) is “understanding the world, discerning good from bad, and acting accordingly.”
  5. Art/Know-How – Art is the virtue of “right reason about things to be made.[3]” This is the virtue of the engineer, the chef, the gardener and the painter. Observe how little modern art is actually created under the guidance of reason.

Moral Virtue: The Cardinals

The next category of virtues are the moral virtues. What makes them moral is that they tend toward governing the customs of society for the purpose of the perfection of individuals and their increased happiness. A moral virtue is a habit that is fit for the purpose of human excellence and happiness:

  1. Fortitude – This is the virtue of action and endurance in the face of fear of great danger or death. In one sense it is presupposed by the other virtues, because one must pursue prudence, justice, and temperance in the face of many difficult obstacles. In another sense it is its own virtue in that pursuing the other virtues rarely puts us in the gravest of dangers.[4]
  2. Prudence – Understanding the world, discerning good from bad (not just in moral, but especially in morals), and acting accordingly.
  3. Justice – This is the virtue of habitually giving others their due. It has to do with your relationships with others in regard to money, honor, duty, and friendship. Just men pay their debts, protect the weak, and ensure the well-being of their families.
  4. Temperance – This is the virtue of rightly using the external goods such as food, drink, sleep, shelter, clothes, etc. It is the virtue of enough. A temperate man doesn’t sleep too much, avoids obsessing over being liked or loved, enjoys food but eats the right amount, and so-on.

Conclusion

Many people feel that they cannot be successful because they would have to become bad, be inauthentic (by going against their natural habits), or that their efforts are often thwarted. But if you shift your mindset toward making happiness your goal (it already is) and you begin to seek happiness by gaining the virtues then I submit to you that you’ll become happier and more successful. The problem is that you must pursue the virtues until they become virtues (hard to alter habits) and not mere occasional heroic actions. Here, I’ll try to give you tips from experience, modern literature, and the classics on how to do that.

[1] R. C Mortimer, The Elements of Moral Theology. (London: A. and C. Black, 1947), 100

[2] Ibid.

[3] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, n.d.), “Art is nothing else but the right reason about things to be made. And yet the good of these things depends, not on man’s appetitive faculty being affected in this or that way, but on the goodness of the work done. For a crafts-man, as such, is commendable, not for the will with which he does a work, but for the quality of the work.”

[4] Mortimer, 156.

Is Venting a Good Strategy for Overcoming Anger?

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Everybody gets mad and everybody likes to vent their anger.

It just feels great to yell, say something awful, or even break something. Some people might read that sentence and make fun of the whole thing. But, there is a great deal of music of various genres dedicated to lashing out in anger. Even country songs exist about destroying people’s trucks, etc. Legal literature goes into great detail about the relationship of anger to intent. And a great deal of people approve of angry outbursts as a form of positive expression.

Anger may start as a sudden shock of personal offense and instantly move to the deep desire to be avenged, to return insult for insult, or to visit destruction upon a whole tribe for the injury of one personal friend or confidant. Dallas Willard defines anger as a “response towards those who have interfered with us, it includes a will to harm them, or the beginnings thereof.” 

Of course, not all anger is bad. In fact, anger can be a very good thing. Richard Baxter wrote in his Christian Directory, “It [anger] is given us by God for good, to stir us up to a vigorous resistance of those things, which, within us or without us do oppose his glory or our salvation, or our own or our neighbour’s real good (Baxter, 290).” There are times when it is morally wrong not to be angery because the goods of human existence are being misappropriated for evil ends, people are being abused, the truth is being impugned, or God’s honor is being obscured by idolatry.

The problem with the cluster of coping practices called venting is that there exists a long and apparently clinically honored pedigree in their favor. Freud rather stupidly thought that practicing self-control led to pent up anger. Lorh et al argue in, The Psychology of Anger Venting and Empirically Supported Alternatives that Do No Harm,** that the common practice of giving psychological patients venting practices like punching pillows, yelling, tearing magazines, etc is actually normalizing the negative anger response. Then, “the good feeling that accompanies venting anger is likely to reinforce the venting and violence. People often mistake their enjoyment of these aggressive acts as a beneficial or therapeutic outcome (Lorh 2007, 56).”

This makes sense. Aristotle basically described the human person as a collection of habits. Freud preferred the notion that we’re really bundles of neuroses and that any good habit is you develop is really a repression of some deviant behavior that is actually better for you.

Aristotle’s way of describing human beings makes more sense to me, and it anticipated better research thousands of years in advance. Lorh, again,

“When people are highly aroused, they may not think much about their behavior and its consequences. Instead they revert to what they have learned to do (or what is permissible) in similar situations. If a person has learned to react to frustrating events by venting (e.g., hitting something), it may make little difference whether the object is animate or inanimate.”

(Lohr, 62)

The observable reality was not lost on Richard Baxter (who lived prior to Freud, statistical analysis, or Baumeister) when he wrote:

Direct. V. ‘Command your tongue, and hand, and countenance, if you cannot presently command your passion.’ And so you will avoid the greatest of the sin, and the passion itself will quickly be stifled for want of vent. You cannot say that it is not in your power to hold your tongue or hands if you will. Do not only avoid that swearing and cursing which are the marks of the profane, but avoid many words till you are more fit to use them, and avoid expostulations, and contending, and bitter, opprobrious, cutting speeches, which tend to stir up the wrath of others. And use a mild and gentle speech, which savoureth of love, and tendeth to assuage the heat that is kindled. “A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.” And that which mollifieth and appeaseth another, will much conduce to the appeasing of yourselves.

Richard Baxter, William Orme, The Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter, vol. 3 (London: James Duncan, 1830), 296.

If you learn to control your tongue and your body when you cannot turn off your feelings, then eventually your passions will follow the habits of your body. This is not necessarily true without the context of a broader system of life with time for contemplation of the Scriptures, prayer, service to the poor, trust in Jesus Christ to forgive those who wrong you, etc. But, it is true and replicable enough that a study of several populations of people who practiced venting or different versions of reflection upon frustrating circumstances (either alone or with a group) has shown that without religious context, a reflective approach to anger is much better than a venting one. If you wish to read the rest of Baxter’s chapter on anger it is available here (its a pdf, so scroll down to page 284).

Conclusion: Anger is a problem-solving reflex and should be treated as such. Venting by punching, yelling, or being morose simply trains us in bad habits, but looking for specific problems to solve turns anger into an energizing force for good.

*I have no idea if this kind of thing is common knowledge. I learned about it helping somebody write a research paper about corporate liability in cases of poorly tested medical equipment. Is there a guilty mind when shortcuts are taken with knowledge of the potential effects of those short cuts (the common sense answer is yes, but the legal answer might not be so clear)? But to determine that I had to read about intent in several other sorts of cases.

**Lohr, Jeffrey M., Bunmi O. Olatunji, Roy F. Baumeister, and Brad J. Bushman. 2007. “THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ANGER VENTING AND EMPIRICALLY SUPPORTED ALTERNATIVES THAT DO NO HARM.” Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice 5

My GERD Experiment

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I’ve mentioned before that I have a genetic bone disorder and have utilized my interpretation of scientific publications to self-experiment.

This self-experimentation has had positive health results. Other times I have merely yielded knowledge about what does not help. For instance, I’ve had pretty bad acid reflux for the past few years. I recently discovered from my mother that I also had terrible reflux as a baby. I might even have a weak LES muscle. I don’t know, I haven’t been to the doctor for it for years because they just prescribe proton pump inhibitors or histamine blockers. I can buy those and as far as I can tell, they have long term deleterious effects on the human body. 

  1. Gregory L Austin et al., “A Very Low-Carbohydrate Diet Improves Gastroesophageal Reflux and Its Symptoms,” Digestive Diseases and Sciences 51, no. 8 (August 2006): 1307–12, doi:10.1007/s10620-005-9027-7. In this study, a very low carbohydrate diet (consuming less than 20 grams a day) led to improved symptoms in all eight participants. The metric was a probe utilized to determine acid exposure time in the esophagus. There was no blind in this particular study, but the objective measurement is interesting. The measurements were taken before the diet was initiated and then six days later.
  2. WS Yancy Jr., D Provenzale, and Ec Westman, “Case Reports. Improvement of Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease after Initiation of a Low-Carbohydrate Diet: Five Brief Case Reports,” Alternative Therapies in Health & Medicine 7, no. 6 (November 2001): 120.

In this article records the case of five individuals who self-initiated a low-carb diet found themselves without frequent symptoms of heart-burn and indigestion. It is published in an alternative therapy journal, but it’s still peer-reviewed.

The Pay Off

So, I started an extremely low carbohydrate diet about two weeks ago. The main purpose was precisely to decrease symptoms of heartburn that had become more frequent that non-heartburn. My existence had become somewhat miserable because if I happened to even eat a small snack, within minutes I would feel very full and bloated. I would have heartburn (even if I took medicine prior to eating) and the full feeling would last for several hours. If I ate lunch at work, I usually was not able to eat dinner or go to the gym at night. The only way to get food in prior to the gym was to eat around 10 am, then just be full and miserable all day at work. This started around March, but the heart burn goes back to my early twenties.

Anyhow, I started the diet, eschewing the conventional wisdom that fatty foods lead to heartburn. For the first two days, I ate less than 20 grams of carbohydrates, continued drinking coffee, and obtained most of my carbohydrates from sauerkraut, spinach, and mushrooms. My protein and fat came from butter and meat. I expected my digestion to remain slow, but to at least experience less heartburn. Within two days, I had my first day with no heartburn and no medication. Upon increasing my carbs to about 50 grams per day, and allowing myself one “cheat day a week,” I have had only one serious experience of heartburn and 7 light flare-ups that went away as soon as I took an antacid or dissipated by the time I walked to the medicine cabinet. My digestion has sped up as well. Just Tuesday I ate a rather large lunch and was able to hit the gym by 3:45 without losing my food after deadlift.

So, despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, a high-fat, low-carb diet may assist with the relief of symptoms related to GERD and indigestion.

Update: Carnivorous Diet

I tried the carnivorous diet to contribute data for N Equals Many. During it I had no heartburn at all. This makes sense.

Update: More Research on the Same Topic

  1. The effect of dietary carbohydrate on gastroesophageal reflux disease “More acid reflux symptoms are found after high carbohydrate diet. High carbohydrate diet could induce more acid reflux in low esophagus and more reflux symptoms in patients with gastroesophageal reflux disease.”
  2. Dietary carbohydrate intake, insulin resistance and gastro‐oesophageal reflux disease: a pilot study in European‐ and African‐American obese women “GERD symptoms and medication usage was more prevalent in European‐American women, for whom the relationships between dietary carbohydrate intake, insulin resistance and GERD were most significant. Nevertheless, high‐fat/low‐carbohydrate diet benefited all women with regard to reducing GERD symptoms and frequency of medication use.”

Knee Tendinitis and Squatting Every Day

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TLDR

I did an experiment based on some new data I discovered about tendons. My 8-year knee tendinitis is gone as of 2014. It had to do with exercising more frequently. I got a lot stronger in just 3 weeks. After 6 weeks, I hit my then all-time squat max of 365 for an easy single rep.

Training Efficiently

In my own life experience, perhaps the safest and least time-consuming way to pursue total body fitness is to train with somewhere between 6 and 12 exercises and train with perfect form, taking each exercise to a state of complete positive muscular failure, briefly resting and then moving to the next exercise. Your muscles are getting an intense workout, your hardest reps happen when the muscles are producing the least force (because they are tired) and none of the movements are “explosive” thus accelerating the weight to very high velocities and risking injury. During workouts of this nature, your heart feels like it might explode out of your chest, you breath very hard, and your veins pump lava or pieces of broken glass. The problem with training this way, at least for me, is psychological. Every workout must be all out if you wish to make steady progress. Other problems are related to trying to plan for enough rest and when you train this way the metabolic demands are high. Research shows that muscle protein adaptations last for up to 21 days after the most recent bout of training. Energy system adaptations can begin to regress within 4-7 days. I wish I could remember where I found that data, but I remember everything but the name of the study and it’s authors…which means nothing. Nevertheless, training like every workout is a zero-sum game can be psychologically defeating. Also, the training is seldom enough that other types of adaptations apparently cannot happen (more on that later, as it is the point of the article).

Personal Story: Knee and Back Pain

When I was 20 I woke up one morning with very bad knee pain. This came right around the same time I seriously injured my back. I went to a doctor and received an x-ray on both offending pieces of my body. The knee pain was determined to be very serious tendinitis (probably from a knee collision in a jiujitsu match a while before). The back injury, which was missed in the x-ray but was confirmed by another doctor, was a torn ligament between a rib and one of my vertebrae (don’t remember which). Anyhow, I was told to lay off exercise for 6 weeks. If my knee still hurt, it was recommended that I start walking more than just at work and home to facilitate recovery for 6 more weeks. It was especially important that I do no squats or dead lift. If it still hurt, I was told to go back (maybe to get recommended for physical therapy). A weird series of events involving a car accident occurred which lead me to hit the weights again despite the pain about 3 months later. I was weak, fatter than I’d ever been, and my first set of squats did two things: left me gasping for breath and trying my hardest not to puke and when the muscle soreness my knee and back hurt less. TMy knee never stopped hurting, it just hurt less.

Research on Tendon Adaptation

Anyhow, fast forward to now and I started using Ebsco to do research through the public library (out of grad school so I don’t get my own key code anymore). I discovered that there have been several advancements in the knowledge of connective tissue adaptation since my time as an exercise science major. For instance, in 2007 a study was published (though with no control group) observing the effects of leg extension training on subjects doing heavyweight with one leg and light-weight with the other. There were several interesting observations, but what was most pleasing to discover was that the patellar tendon actually experienced hypertrophy as well as increased stiffness (a good thing for joint health) in the leg trained with heavier weight:

In summary, the present study is to the best of our knowledge the first human study to report tendon hypertrophy following heavy resistance training. Further, the data show that tendon hypertrophy to heavy-resistance training in the patellar tendon was related to the proximal and distal region, but not to the mid-region of the tendon.

Kongsgaard, M., S. Reitelseder, T. G. Pedersen, L. Holm, P. Aagaard, M. Kjaer, and S. P. Magnusson. 2007. “Region Specific Patellar Tendon Hypertrophy in Humans Following Resistance Training.” Acta Physiologica 191 (2): 111–21. doi:10.1111/j.1748-1716.2007.01714.x.

In the abstract of a literature review from 2006, I found that

For tendons, metabolic activity (e.g.detected by positron emission tomography scanning), circulatory responses (e.g. as measured by near-infrared spectroscopy and dye dilution) and collagen turnover are markedly increased after exercise. Tendon blood flow is regulated by cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2)-mediated pathways, and glucose uptake is regulated by specific pathways in tendons that differ from those in skeletal muscle. Chronic loading in the form of physical training leads both to increased collagen turnover as well as to some degree of net collagen synthesis. These changes modify the mechanical properties and the viscoelastic characteristics of the tissue, decrease its stress-susceptibility and probably make it more load-resistant.

Kjær, Michael, Peter Magnusson, Michael Krogsgaard, Jens Boysen Møller, Jens Olesen, Katja Heinemeier, Mette Hansen, et al. 2006. “Extracellular Matrix Adaptation of Tendon and Skeletal Muscle to Exercise.” Journal of Anatomy 208 (4): 445–50. doi:10.1111/j.1469-7580.2006.00549.x

Several other studies report the same sort of results. The most interesting things to me are A) The increase in protein synthesis B) The increase in blood flow (which can provide nutrients for recovery) C) That actual hypertrophy can be stimulated in tendons D) that even body weight squats increase tendon stiffness in elderly and untrained populations. But what was most interesting to me on a personal level was that “collagen synthesis in human tendon rises by around 100% with just one bout (60 min) of acute exercise, and the elevated collagen synthesis is still present 3 days after exercise (Fig. 3; Miller et al. 2005). In skeletal muscle, the rate of collagen synthesis also increases with exercise, in a time-dependent manner that follows the increase in myofibrillar protein synthesis with exercise (Miller et al. 2005).” What this means for people who have had chronic tendinopathy, is hard to say. But what inferred that it could mean is that training with more frequency than I’m used to could increase the protein turnover rate in my knee and promote recovery. Given my own hypothesis that overuse injuries often come from explosive exercise and sudden acceleration of a limb which puts tremendous force on connective tissue despite low resistance, I decided that squatting more frequently with heavy enough weight to induce protein synthesis could help my knee.

Method:
I thus decreased my weight on squats, began using a high-bar Olympic depth, squat and hit the gym 3 days in a row during week one. Then week two I did the same thing and the weights that were very heavy using that style of squat went up very easily. I ended up squatting a personal best (345 pounds with no belt, no spotter, and no struggle) even compared to my wider power-lifting stance. This week I did heavy high-bar squats for five days in a row.

Results:
Starting Thursday morning I woke up with no knee pain. Today I still have no knee pain. Now, any number of things could have contributed to my apparent recovery after eight years of tendinitis. I could have just finally eaten enough protein, I could have finally slept enough, maybe I ate a magic vegetable like in a video game, it could be placebo though I imagine that would have fixed it years ago, or perhaps a wizard did it. But, the only variable I changed in my one subject sample group was exercise frequency. Now, my shoulders feel a bit beat up from squatting heavy for 5 days in a row. My lower back is pretty sore too. I certainly read less this week because the trips to the gym eat up evening time after work, but my knee feels better. I did chores around the house all morning and hardly noticed. Normally my knee remains in the fore on my consciousness when I’m picking things up, fixing things, or bumping it into stuff. It was unnoticeable today. I’ll tell you what happens in the future.

Laugh Tracks

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I don’t watch the Big Bang Theory and I intentionally don’t watch shows with laugh tracks. BBT has a laugh track and I just decided to watch a bit of it without the laugh track:

Very little to none of that is funny. But why are there laugh tracks? Well, they work. People laugh out loud more, even when they rate material just as funny as the group that has no laugh track and does not laugh out loud. But I think more work needs to be done on longer exposure to laugh tracks. Even brief interventions can change views, which is upstream from behavior. Also, parody works wonders at promoting negative viewpoints about the target of the parody, which can ultimately change behavior.

In a post on beauty and wisdom, I quoted Dallas Willard’s concern that endless, pointless sitcoms made the cute and mildly funny the standard of truth and beauty. Who and or what is the subject of the parody that constantly comes before us on television?