I got an email forward the other day from a family member that really rubbed me the wrong way. Every time I think back to it, it just pisses me off more and more. I wrote a long response but thought better of sending it. I’m sure it wasn’t meant to offend and replying wouldn’t change their minds. So, in the interests of not having a tense relationship with family members, I let the reply sit in my drafts folder.

That said, this email was a xenophobic and dishonest pile of garbage. Even worse, it’s been getting forwarded around and getting subtly edited enough that it hasn’t gotten the Snopes treatment. In the interests of making sure this junk doesn’t go completely unchallenged, I’m reprinting the full email below, followed by my response in the hopes that Google gives this equal time.

This is worth remembering, because it is true. It’s familiar territory, but those of you that graduated from school after the early 60′s were probably never taught this. Our courts have seen to that!

Did you know that 52 of the 55 signers of “The Declaration of Independence” were orthodox, deeply committed, Christians? That they all believed in the Bible as the divine truth, the God of scripture, and His personal intervention. It is the same Congress that formed the American Bible Society, immediately after creating the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress voted to purchase and import 20,000 copies of Scripture for the people of this nation.

Patrick Henry, who is called the firebrand of the American Revolution, is still remembered for his words, “Give me liberty or give me death”; but in current textbooks, the context of these words is omitted. Here is what he actually said: “An appeal to arms and the God of hosts is all that is left us. But we shall not fight our battle alone. There is a just God that presides over the destinies of nations. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone. Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death.”

These sentences have been erased from our textbooks. Was Patrick Henry a Christian? The following year, 1776, he wrote this: “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great Nation was founded not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For that reason alone, people of other faiths have been afforded freedom of worship here.”

Consider these words that Thomas Jefferson wrote in the front of his well-worn Bible: “I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus. I have little doubt that our whole country will soon be rallied to the unity of our creator.” He was also the chairman of the American Bible Society, which he considered his highest and most important role.

On July 4, 1821, President Adams said, “The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: “It connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.”

Calvin Coolidge, our 30th President of the United States reaffirmed this truth when he wrote, “The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if faith in these teachings would cease to be practically universal in our country.”

In 1782, the United States Congress voted this resolution: “The Congress of the United States recommends and approves the Holy Bible for use in all schools.”

William Holmes McGuffey is the author of the McGuffey Reader, which was used for over 100 years in our public schools with over 125 million copies sold until it was stopped in 1963. President Lincoln called him the “Schoolmaster of the Nation.” Listen to these words of Mr. McGuffey: “The Christian religion is the religion of our country. From it are derived our nation, on the character of God, on the great moral Governor of the universe. On its doctrines are founded the peculiarities of our free Institutions. From no source has the author drawn more conspicuously than from the sacred Scriptures. From all these extracts from the Bible, I make no apology.”

Of the first 108 universities founded in America, 106 were distinctly Christian, including the first, Harvard University, chartered in 1636. In the original Harvard Student Handbook, rule number 1 was that students seeking entrance must know Latin and Greek so that they could study the Scriptures: “Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies, is, to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, John 17:3; and therefore to lay Jesus Christ as the only foundation for our children to follow the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.”

James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution of the United States, said this: “We have staked the whole future of all our political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.”

Today, we are asking God to bless America. But, how can He bless a Nation that has departed so far from Him? Prior to September 11, He was not welcome in America. Most of what you read in this article has been erased from our textbooks. Revisionists have rewritten history to remove the truth about our country’s Christian roots.

You are encouraged to share with others, so that the truth of our nation’s history will be told. John 3:16. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life!

This information shared is only a drop of cement to help secure a foundation that is crumbling daily in a losing war that most of the country doesn’t even know is raging on, in, and around them…

See? I told you it was a bunch of crap. Here’s my reply :

I hate to be the guy who points to Snopes, but here’s what they had to say about that second Patrick Henry quote :

“These words appear nowhere in the writings or recorded utterances of Patrick Henry”

Further down on the same Snopes page, the James Madison quote is also mentioned :

[T]his statement appears nowhere in the writings or recorded utterances of James Madison and is completely contradictory to his character as a strong proponent of the separation of church and state.

For a good example of this, peruse the University of Chicago’s constitutional archive, in which Madison (who was the primary author of the Constitution) writes of “the danger of a direct mixture of Religion & civil Government”.

The most glaring distortion in this, however, is the views of Thomas Jefferson. Like most of the quotes in this email, Jefferson’s “real Christian” quote is unsourced (unlike all of the quotes in this email), though the first half is ripped from an 1816 letter he wrote :

“I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus”

But I guarantee you that Jefferson’s definition of “real Christian” is different than anyone’s on this email. Here’s what that quote looked like in context :

“I, too, have made a wee-little book from the same materials, which I call the Philosophy of Jesus; it is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book, and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw.”

He’s referring to what is now called “The Jefferson Bible”, a little tome in which he chopped up the sayings of Jesus from the gospels, put them in chronological order, and tossed the rest (miracles, virgin birth, resurrection, etc). It’s an interesting read, but most modern Christians would find it incredibly blasphemous. That’s what Jefferson is referring to when he calls himself a “true Christian”.

My reading of history is that the founders insisted upon the separation between church and state because one poisons the other. When religion is mixed with politics, we have a system in which kings claim God’s authority and democracy takes a back seat to divine rule. This is what prompted the Puritans to leave England in the first place and what Americans rebelled against in the Revolution. Have you ever noticed that America is one of the few democracies that has a President instead of a Prime Minister?

But separating church and state works the other way as well. The founders were largely Enlightenment-style freethinkers who took great interest in religion. As such, the were well aware of the way political power had corrupted the Anglican and Catholic Churches. As Jefferson wrote :

“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purposes.”

Which brings me back to one of the initial claims in the email :

Did you know that 52 of the 55 signers of “The Declaration of Independence” were orthodox, deeply committed, Christians? That they all believed in the Bible as the divine truth, the God of scripture, and His personal intervention.

Where does this information come from? Who are these mysterious three signers who weren’t “orthodox, deeply committed, Christians”? Despite the fact the he wrote the oft-quoted words “endowed by their Creator”, can we assume that Jefferson isn’t one of the 52? Or did the writer of the email below have a very lax definition of the word “orthodox”?

I can understand why these sorts of half-truths get forwarded around the internet, but what’s the point here? To imply that non-Christians are somehow less American? Or that certain religious traditions deserve “credit” for America’s greatness? Every other aspect of our society has completely changed in the 230 years since the Declaration of Independence, why would religious traditions be any different? The notion that the religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers are identical to those of modern fundamentalists Christians is silly.

By projecting modern interpretations of Christianity onto the founding of this country, emails like this do little more than reinforce falsehoods and further divide people. The fact that it does so through specious quotes and outright lies only further adds insult to injury. Are America and/or Christianity somehow lacking if the myth of America being founded as a “Christian nation” isn’t upheld? Considering how often Jefferson is (mis)quoted, I wish more people would take to heart what he wrote in Notes on Virginia :

But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

-Greg

P.S. According to the American Bible Society‘s website, they were “founded in 1816 by a group of New York philanthropists”…forty years after the creation of the Declaration of Independence. Maybe it’s a good thing that the “courts” aren’t allowing this stuff in schools.

Of course, there’s plenty of lies and distortion left untouched from the original email. Have fun with them in comments.

I’m not much of a sports fan, but my brother-in-law made a good point the other day about the Barry Bonds controversy. A lot of Bonds’ detractors are pointing to his alleged steroid use and insisting that the record books should put an asterisk next to his name. Yeah, Bonds may be a cheater, but is that any worse than keeping every African-American player out of the game until the mid-40s? If MLB is going to put footnotes in the history books, they should start there.

Josh Marshall makes an interesting find regarding campaign spending :

Turns out there’s one place GOP prez candidates spent a lot more than their Dem rivals last quarter: direct mail. Don’t want to read too much into one factoid or imply that direct mail is an outmoded campaign money technology. But it was very much a key pillar of what the late 20th century GOP machine was built on. And I would imagine the political future belongs to the digital equivalents of direct mail.

I completely disagree that this is a sign that the Republican party is “slower to make the switch” to more technologically advanced methods of voter outreach. Have you seen direct mail campaign literature? At first glance they look like nonpartisan “voter guides” that give a rundown on the various measures and candidates that will appear on the ballot. It’s only upon closer inspection that people see that they’re carefully constructed bits of Republican propaganda that give the illusion of being impartial. This is where Fox News got their “fair and balanced” trick.

Moreover, despite the higher costs, direct mail has a distinct advantage over other forms of communication. Voters may tune out political ads and instinctively delete mass emails, but they hold on to these flyers until election day. For a week or more before election day, many of the recipients of the GOP direct mail efforts see the same advertisement over and over again, whether it sits in the mail pile, used as a bookmark, or tacked to the refrigerator, these ads make a much more lasting impression than any other type of political communication.

When election day arrives, these voters pull out their “voter guide” to do some research and then march to the polls to vote the way the Republicans told them to. It’s a brilliant move, I just wish our side did it more often.

If I had a nickel for every time CNN aired a story about Evangelical voters under the banner of “Faith and Politics”, I could probably afford to be a Republican.

Hey everybody, see that ad on the right? Well, the book release party is in Los Angeles tomorrow night.

Friday July 20th Secret Headquarters will proudly host an evening with:

Tom Neely and his new book: The Blot.

Painter and cartoonist Tom Neely’s first graphic novel, “The Blot,” is like a sad song that breaks your heart while reminding you of life’s beauty. “The Blot” follows a nameless everyman who, while dealing with the fallout from a doomed relationship, is stalked by a mysterious black splotch. As the story unfolds, this shape-shifting blot appears as a harmless cloud of ink, a faceless demon, a source of strength and an inescapable darkness, testing our character in a new way with each metamorphosis.

With a drawing style resembling the 1930s newspaper comic strips of E.C. Segar and Floyd Gottfredson, and a surrealistic sensibility inspired by painter René Magritte, Neely eschews traditional, representational comic storytelling and finds innovative new ways to tell an ultimately human story about love and loss.

Accompanying The Blot will be a selection of original art work as well as the introduction of 3 new limited giclée prints of Neely’s paintings. These prints will first be available at SHQ Friday, July 20th.

Tom will be signing copies of The Blot at SHQ from 8pm – 10pm.

My guess is he’ll be drinking beer at SHQ from 10pm – until we decide to close the gates and even then we may lock him in the store. He’ll share some beer with you I’m pretty sure.

For those of you who have been reading this site for a while, you might remember Tom as the guy who did all the art and animation on “Brother, Can You Spare A Job?”. His new book is fantastic, so even if you aren’t able to make it to the opening, you should pick up a copy of the book. I’ll be there too, so don’t miss this opportunity to say “Oh…so that’s what that one guy with the website looks like. I thought he’d be thinner. Is there any beer left?”

Quick question : What the hell is this doing in a movie in 2007?

Was there nobody on the set of “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry” who stopped to say “Hey guys, this is racist”?

Kudos to Harry Reid for the dramatic “all night debate” move he’s got planned for the Senate tonight. My hope is that Reid hold the floor open to 24 hours of continuous debate and then presses the Republicans to mount their filibuster. That would certainly beat their usual plan of making a bold public stand before an inevitable defeat and then sending out a fundraising letter patting themselves on the back for doing their best. If my inbox is to be believed, the only thing stopping the Democrats from ending this war is a $50, $100, or $250 check from me. Sorry I let you down again, America.

By the way, considering that we’ve got cable news channels with 24 hours of programming to fill, what are the odds that they’ll be cashing in on this 24 hour news event? If they aren’t going to have people on hand to cover it live, at least have a split screen with a countdown and whatever reruns they show overnight. Maybe it would help if we could convince them that a Senate debate on ending the war is as important as grainy helicopter footage of a building on fire in the Midwest or whatever overblown local junk passes for “breaking news” these days.

It looks like the GOP primary has a front-runner :

In a new AP/Ipsos Poll, 25% of Republican respondents say they are either undecided or would prefer someone other than the current field — more than the vote share of any actual candidates listed in the poll. Compare this to the Democratic side, where only 13% of respondents are undecided or prefer none of the above. In the horse-race numbers, Rudy Giuliani leads the GOP side with 21%, followed by Fred Thompson at 19%, John McCain at 15%, and Mitt Romney at 11%.

Here’s a photo from Mr. None of the Above’s press conference :

Finally, a Republican candidate that’s intentionally funny.

I love Apple products as much as the next guy, but the iPhone is lame. It’s lacking basic features that are available in every other cell phone on the market, it’s ridiculously expensive, and you’re tied into a contract with AT&T, an awful company. I’ll admit that the UI is really cool, but it’s hardly the revolutionary leap forward for the mobile phone industry that people are making it out to be. If Apple really wanted to be forward-thinking with the iPhone, they should have just sold the iPhone as-is and let anyone, anywhere stick a SIM card in it.

In CNN’s hit piece on Sicko (in which they congratulate themselves for “keeping them honest”), they claim Moore “fudged the facts” because Moore’s numbers don’t match match theirs. When Moore got a chance to confront Sanjay Gupta with his own “fudging”, the Michael Moore double standard made itself clear.

With all of the cross-talk and interruptions in last night’s mini-debate, the exchanges aren’t exactly transcript friendly, so forgive me for editing these for clarity. Here’s a link to the full transcript and you can find a video of the segment here.

MOORE: This year Health and Human Services says that we’re going to spend about $7,400 per person in this country, not 6,000, as Dr. Gupta said. He’s using 2004 statistics.

Now, here’s the sad thing about this, Larry, is that this is now the third time this report ran. It first ran on “ANDERSON COOPER” right after I was on your show on June 29.

The day before, on June 28th, we spoke to Dr. Gupta’s senior producer, Chris Gajilan, and we gave her in — writing — all the facts and all the evidence and the backup for those facts. So they’ve known now since June 28th that all their facts are wrong –
. . .
GUPTA: Well, you know, look, we try and look for some of the best sources that we can possibly find, because we think we owe that to our viewers.

You know, Michael has a lot of different numbers here and he’s pulling them from different places.
. . .
MOORE: I posted this e-mail that we had with your producer a day before this report ran so that you had all the facts. You ran the story knowing that the facts were wrong and I posted this five minutes ago –
. . .
GUPTA: Just because you say they’re wrong, I mean it doesn’t make it so, Michael. I mean we try and do what you do. We try and get the best available data

It’s okay if CNN’s numbers are questionable because they’re trying to get “the best available data”, but if Moore’s numbers don’t line up with theirs, he’s a liar. This is ridiculous. There are so many different healthcare studies being done around the world that there is no definitive set of data. If you choose to quote the numbers from Health and Human Services over the World Health Organization, it doesn’t mean you’re trying to deceive people. You just made a different judgment call. CNN’s failure to understand that is what’s most infuriating about their “fact check” segment they used to trash Sicko (and avoid getting angry phone calls from wingnuts).

This other bit from Gupta, attempting to trash France’s heathcare system, is laughably bad :

GUPTA: I also think the whole idea, Michael, of just calling it a free system I think is a little bit nebulous to people who don’t fully understand what you mean by that. Yes, you’ve got to raise taxes significantly. I mean France is drowning in taxes. They’re running a $15.6 billion debt.

$15.6 billion! That would be scary if we weren’t spending that much money every month in Iraq. In France, they’re willing to go into debt to keep their citizens from dying of preventable diseases and injuries. Here in America, we save our debt for wars and tax cuts.

Wow. As a guy who grew up playing with Transformers toys but wasn’t enough of a fanboy to get offended by some big budget revisionism, you’d think I’d be the perfect audience for The Transformers, but it sucked. At times like this, I wish this was a podcast* so you could hear the revulsion in my voice. When I say “sucked”, I’m doing so in a multi-syllabic manner, like “su-u-u-u-u-ucked”, groaning the last syllable to further emphasize how much I hated this movie.

Michael Bay movies are shit. The man has never known a cinematic cliche that he hasn’t beaten to death. There hasn’t been a single moment in any of his films that hasn’t felt like an slick, contrived exercise in audience manipulation. His apologists may play the “his movies are great for what they are” card, but what’s the point in defending something that tries and succeeds at being unwatchable garbage?

That said, I went into this movie knowing it was gonna suck and it was still a disappointment. All I wanted out of this movie was to see cars turn into robots and destroy stuff, but Michael Bay’s obnoxiously flashy direction pretty much ruined that too. Why would a major studio spend tens of millions of dollars on cool effects of cars turning into giant robots and then hide all of their hard work with fast cutting and extreme closeups? You know it’s gonna look cool, so why not stop moving the damn camera so much and just focus on the action? In a movie like this, the audience shouldn’t have to mentally replay what they just saw just to try to figure out what just happened.

And while I’m talking about the action, what’s up with having the robots jumping through the air in slow-motion like The Killer? Or ripping off the “boy tries to hide giant robots from his parents” scene from The Iron Giant? Or having one of the robots piss on a guy? It would be nice if Hollywood spent some of their enormous budget to hire somebody who has an original thought or two.

* Probably for the best. My voice sounds like if Ray Romano was a Muppet.

I’m not so sure the Bush Administration’s “run out the clock” strategy with the subpoenas is going to work out so well. Compare with what happened during Watergate :

In April 1974, the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the tapes of 42 White House conversations. At the end of that month, Nixon released edited transcripts of the White House tapes. The transcripts revealed conversations concerning the punishing of political opponents and the halting of the Watergate investigation. The Judiciary Committee, however, rejected Nixon’s edited transcripts, saying that he did not comply with their subpoena.

Sirica, acting on a request from Jaworski, issued a subpoena for the tapes of 64 presidential conversations to use as evidence in the criminal cases against the indicted officials. Nixon refused, and Jaworski appealed to the Supreme Court to force Nixon to turn over the tapes. On July 24, the Supreme Court voted 8-0 in United States v. Nixon that Nixon must turn over the tapes.

In late July 1974, the White House released the subpoenaed tapes. One of those tapes was the so-called “smoking gun” tape, from June 23, 1972, six days after the Watergate break-in. In that tape, Nixon agrees that administration officials should approach the Director of the CIA and ask him to request that the Director of the FBI halt the Bureau’s investigation into the Watergate break-in on the grounds that the Watergate break-in was a National Security matter. In so agreeing, Nixon had entered into a Criminal Conspiracy whose goal was the Obstruction of Justice — a felony, and an impeachable offense.

Once the “smoking gun” tape was released, Nixon’s political support evaporated. Every single Republican on the House Impeachment Committee who had voted against impeachment in committee announced that he would now vote for impeachment once the matter reached the House floor. In the Senate, it was said that Nixon had at most a half dozen votes.

Facing impeachment in the House of Representatives and a probable conviction in the Senate, Nixon announced his resignation, to take effect at 12 noon on Friday, August 9, 1974.

From April to early August 1974. That’s barely four months between the subpoena and resignation.

Then again, this isn’t the 70′s anymore. People aren’t dumb enough to bug themselves the way Nixon and his gang were and the Bush gang have perfected the art of destroying incriminating evidence. The President may have screwed up everything else he’s tried to achieve, but he has been successful in packing the courts with judges who buy his “unitary executive” theories. Democrats are now a slow-paced, cowardly lot still trying to find their next JFK. And the modern Republican party doesn’t care about obstruction of justice anymore. So while I think the President’s plans to run out the clock aren’t going to work, the prospect of an inevitable impeachment is virtually nil.

Well damn it, I am TOTALLY opposed to this, but for once, Bush actually makes a good point and, I think, has found a positively Solomonic solution to this a tricky situation. Sometimes, despite the amount of ire we may have for him, Bush reminds us all, even his detractors, of the Leader Americans elected in those Halycon days before 9/11, before Everything Changed, and I think this might be the beginning of his long delayed comeback.

Shit, I’m impressed, and I’m a liberal! Bush has somehow managed to simultaneously appease those who clamor for Scooter’s heads and his defenders! After all, Scooter’s reputation will be fucked, and he can’t practice law anymore but he won’t be imprisoned for longer than such a decent man deserves.

I suppose at the end of the day, Liberals can at least comfort themselves that, while Bush magically managed to deflate both sides, Scooter will still suffer somewhat significantly. American Justice, though imperfect, is still the best the world has to offer, and thank god for thahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahaahahahahHAHAHHAHAHhhHAHAHAHAHhah… (cough cough cough.)

Whew.

No, sorry, that was actually Richard Cohen and David Broder’s next 15 op-eds, predicted here for your amusement. In fact, this is a 100% slam dunk ass kicking for the conservative POV. The so-called liberal elites in Washington and the conservative, ahem, I mean, independent commenters, both of whom have been slathering Libby’s reputation-cock with their salivating paeans to his good and decent decency, will be hotter than I, at age 14, when my friend Neil and I discovered his grandfather’s 4 box collection of hard core pornography. It’s going to be a sticky and musky night in Washington, D.C., let me tells you.

For those of you wondering how this breaks down, rest assured that the commutation not only provided credible cover to the Bushies – Libby, having been sentenced, cannot be coerced to say anything further since the case is still on appeal. Thus, he still gets to plead the 5th if called before Congress. Also, his commutation guarantees that he won’t publish a damaging book about the administration – it also gave the fascist sympathizers in the press their long delayed catharsis, granting the next best thing to the pardon they’ve craved for Such a Decent Man!

Now they can literally have their cake and eat it too, just like real republicans – I predict a thousand variations of “what are you complaining about? It isn’t like Libby was pardoned – Justice was done commiserate to the crime, and still, he wasn’t unduly punished for something he didn’t technically do except he did. And don’t forget, B-b-b-b-b-b-but Clinton!!!!!”

And let’s not forget this little gem:

“”That’s fantastic. It’s a great relief,” said former Ambassador Richard Carlson, who helped raise millions for Libby’s defense fund. “Scooter Libby did not deserve to go to prison and I’m glad the president had the courage to do this.”"

Millions, aye? Gee, I wonder, what can Scooter do with that money now that he’s not going to jail. Damn, I guess the money’s going to go to WAIIT A MINUTE! Could those millions be applied to the 250,000 Scooter has to pay? EUREKA! Sounds like someone’s going to be cutting a check and then it’s time for vacation. Taking a bullet for the Bushies is hard work.

Jesus, it’s really good to be republican. Even when they lose, they win.

It’s the perfect solution, unless, of course, Democrats wake up and finally realize that there’s no winning with republicans. You have to punish the shit out of them. Eking out minor little victories is worthless. You have to go for the throat. Fortunately, we can guarantee they won’t.

Meanwhile, sure, Libby took one, a big one, for the team, but let’s not forget how super sweet wingnut welfare is. Shit, G. Gordon Liddy did real jail time for being the lead Plumber in the Watergate break in and now he’s a prominent talk show host and a go-to right wing fascist. Ollie North’s military career was ruined. Fortunately, he’s got that million dollar fascism career to fall back on.

I’m fairly confident all of this horrible damage to Libby’s reputation will be good for him. He won’t be able to practice law again, I mean, until Bush pardons him on January 22, 2009, but he’ll be a Lobbyist or a consultant for a conservative think* tank faster than you can say “Duhhh!”

*I use “think” in the loosest definition of the term.