time once again for community form and we're very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning sean mc fassel sean mcpherson is author of two books suppled how it gosh a north american anarchist in the balkans and in his to talk about his latest book which we aired a talk based on last sunday during the drive nonviolence and what it used to be an armed insurrection and the rhetoric of resistance sean thank you very much for coming in and spending time with us this morning thanks so much for having me on like it's not our so start out tell us what was the motivation in writing nonviolence and what it used to be well i found myself in graduate school and i was studying rhetoric which is kind of how meanings are made both within language and also kind of just within what we do and at the same time i was really active in occupy seattle i was actually in occupy wall street in new york for the first week i was there for some other reasons and just decided to drop by this crazy busters protest was happening and i had no idea what it was going to become so is around for new york and then i came out and was pretty present from near the start of occupy seattle through the whole thing there in the camp almost every day and i was also going down i originally from sacramento california so i was going down to visit family and friends in the meantime and i was spent a lot of time in the occupy oakland camp as well and for one thing i noticed even at the time and certainly afterwards a lot of the representations of the movement and the moment we're focusing a lot on the kind of more new york approach and we're leaving out the differences there is a really marked difference in character between you know i mean i think between every camp reflecting the conditions of their cities and also between particularly the kind of west coast move and the east coast ones and i found you know the west coast tend to have a lot sort of more thoroughgoing critique where new york was i mean everything was happening but i think the focus it being a lot of you know banking policy lost eagle regulations that kind of thing on the east coast which is obviously important but in the west coast it was kind of prefigured of a block of matter i think especially in oakland and also the means of the protest ended up kind of scrappier on the west coast in some ways so i was disappointed that that wasn't being really recognize that the differences i was already kind of thinking that but then really what made it a motive for me to kind of dive into it's been several years trying to come to understand was when we lost the camp sort of mid december i think summer tenth or something in seattle within hours this coalition of people who you know we've gone through hell together we gone through this really crazy prolonged experience all these kind of shared risks shared a lot of pepper spray a lot of scary moments at the hands of police baton and you know all night talking sessions in the camp and you know we had this really intimate shared space and then as soon as we lost that camp within hours we were just tearing each other apart mostly online which is notable around this issue of nonviolence and but the end of the conversation i think within about twelve hours you know the acrimony was so intense that most of those people kind of never talked to each other again and so i was just trying to figure out you know what is it about this topic that has such there's so charge so bitter that within hours it can just kind of turn people who you know have all these maybe longer term shared concerns with the way things are going right now it can turn them against each other so much that they can't even speak and so so i made it the topic of my doctoral research and spent the next two or three years actively interviewing people and you know reading as everything that i could find on the topic to kind of try to tease out where that tension was coming from yeah it definitely seems that the kinds of nonviolence is the holy grail along among the left and you go through in your work numerous key people and their surprising definitions and or thoughts on nonviolence yeah well i mean i'm not sure this is the holy grail of the entire left is sort of a section of the kind of progressive liberal left i think for example maoists are hardly enamored of of nonviolence mao is actually to the contrary  think you know talk a lot about guns in the fashion columns and and peasants in the third world rising up and overthrowing couples in from the periphery and actually what i found interesting kind of got into was that that there the prevalence of that idea particularly in the moment of sort of in the shadow of che guevara and cuba and you know obviously the the conflict of vietnam and people kind of coming to simply i think a lot of people as they as they came to be critical of the u s role in vietnam also sort of came to admire the the armed struggle of the of the vietnamese against american presence in the in the sort of more radical left or whatever and so people kind of i think a lot of the images of left struggle were were model based on those things and of course you had this wave of anti colonial revolutions happening throughout africa at about you know at that time as well as some in east asia and so i think actually so you have part of the left that was primarily inspired by you know  en luther king jr and gandhi and that in the civil rights moment and then you had a different part of the left at that time that was inspired by more this kind of  struggle vision and that was the economy that was kind of set at that time that's not even saying that everybody at that time fit into that dichotomy but that's kind of what made it into our public memory and a lot of what i write about is that that we still have that language we still have that we saw those categories that we're thinking in but the present moment that we're in has fundamentally shifted in a lot of ways that doesn't really match that so either in the way that  nonviolence kind of plays out and also in the in the in the ways that it's opposite whatever you're going to think of as violence kind of occurs now neither of those really fit the categories from previous generation but we're still using those concepts in those terms as if that's where we're out still one of the things you touched on in your talk that aired last week was to keep people who have been on this show before in one form or another off the cuff make this distinction between there's a distinction i learned from a lot of nonviolence scholars between what people term kind of principled nonviolence and strategic nonviolence and the principle nonviolence people a lot of the time it's kind of like an article a sort of more like a like a religious expression or spiritual practice and doesn't actually there's a lot of people who espouse nonviolence where they're not actually claiming to kind of make it change in the do as a sort of act out of your sense of duty what feels right and kind of hope for the best and so there's a lot of people kind of from that sort of perspective who are looking at the effects of their actions what they're doing it just because they don't want to be kind of enacting the violence that they see in the world i'm not going to address that part as much as i think the in terms of political strategy the problems with that are obvious you should be looking at the effects of your actions so i'm much more interested in people who claim that nonviolence is you know what they're calling on violence is is the only really most effective exclusive way to actually make the changes in the world that we want to see and they generally kind of like to call themselves contributions i think that all activists these days should be reading their work gene sharp for example has this list of one hundred ninety eight methods of nonviolent action i think those are mostly that really insightful great tactics that i agree have kind of been behind a lot of the social changes what i what i question about those people is usually why they would call what they're talking about nonviolent because for example gene sharp says that basically most of his methods of nonviolence  kind of group together under protest like demonstration occupation and strike work stoppage and it's only very abstractly that you can turn those things nonviolent in effect when you're actually in conflictual situations and there's high stakes and those aren't simply sort of symbolic inevitably involve some kind of at least implied threat of violence and i think that's what's left out all of the time so and then then it spread in the numbers got huge and there were a few more street fights but for the most part once there are millions of people out in the streets and of course you know there are workers and people across the site it came out after the initial struggles then it was non violent but the silly thing about that of course is that the open conflict the sort of break with the every day that happened through the students fighting with police was exactly the thing that brought everybody else out in the streets right so it was incidental that that involves you know direct conflict it was a very necessary first part of a much larger process so that's one of the things i  criticize is the sort of opportunistic definition erica chenowith you know again i have my work i think there's a lot of insights in it that are valuable but i think what i pick on for her is i can actually  make sure a quarter correctly she's chalis work is famous and she's you know she's still getting like front page a lot of time talking about how the right way to do this stuff and what works what doesn't and so and she did this quantitative study looking at something like twenty thousand social conflicts and sort of see which conflicts got what they wanted and which which didn't and she said that you know clearly the the data shows that nonviolence works works much better i'm always just interested because these definitions slide all over the place what does she mean by nonviolence and by violence and i said i'm going to open up here let's see on page thirteen of her book she gives her definition of violence she says well in tactics include bombings shootings kidnappings physical sabotage such as the destruction of infrastructure and other types of physical harm of people and property so she's not harming any harm to people which is pretty wide and including any and also any harm to property she's defining as violence and then her operational definition she gives  sixteen of her book where she's actually says the way that the dataset that she's using defines you know the difference between violence and violence she says it's a word that is that requires all combatant groups to be armed and to have sustained a thousand battle deaths during the course of the conflict so she's saying that violence means harming property among other things but the definition she is using for this data says that she uses proof talks about a thousand people getting killed guns those are two really different things and i think we have to distinguish between kinds between you know more subtle meetings that happen within these words violence and violence so yeah that's that's a lot of my critique i really admire where they're coming from i just don't know if they're talking if i think it's when they think they are intriguing another example you touch on is the poll tax in britain when margaret thatcher was in power and the public response to that yes so this is this is a really key definition that i think you know that we need to kind of proliferate distinctions and i think it's a good habit that we could benefit more from i think we lump things together too much there's different kinds of violence and those different differences matter a lot so i mentioned before this kind of life model that we inherited especially from the early seventy's when for example you know you have the weather underground and you had when black panthers faced repression and a lot of them ended up murdered by the state or imprisoned and some of the some of the ones who continued went into the black liberation army which was more this kind of guerrilla rilla struggle model that's a lot of what especially people who were in living memory of that time that's what people think of when they think violence but for younger people i'm actually i'm like mid forty's and so i found that people older than me who were kind of living memory of that that's what's called to mind for them that's why so many people are like i don't want that anymore that was crazy i'm nonviolent they mean not that people younger than me who are a little more distant from that they think of a lot of the sort of passivity the kind of institution of dissent i read about this in the first half of my book the way that a lot of our means of kind of messing with stuff which is ultimately were power comes from have been co opted in the you know the eight ninety's thousands in this decade and so a lot of younger people are trying to find their way out of that who up patient and find a way to actually dispy disruptive again and i think that's why occupy in black lives matter have been in a lot of ways spectacularly successful at pushing raising consciousness opening space for the acknowledgment of other issues just because they've kind of rediscovered disruption so coming back a bit what tax riots the the sort of violence that we see in movements like occupy black lives matter now some of the anti trump protests is has nothing to do with that  that idea of violence quote unquote from the kind of arms struggle thing in fact everybody i was talking to out of the dozens of people i interviewed for my research nobody was really really had any kind of warm notions about guns as a way to sort of run out and change the world right we're still kind of talking about some people power but not necessarily the kind of conflict diverse nice nice people power that nonviolence has come to often mean so the poll tax riots were really good example of that they of course a bit of background you know margaret thatcher after ten years of austerity had kind of smashed the labor movement in britain you know really enraged a lot of people but there had been you know people kind of struggled on how to respond and then finally they passed the sort of tax on the poor and what happened was it brought out like you know hundred thousand to two thousand people in the streets of london and those people were so enraged that they all there's a huge amount of kind of low level violence there's a lot of people who just they walk past it past a police officer and elbow them with a tip or a trash can or kick in a window when they walk past and there what there was nothing like kind of you know cells of militants who were going with a plan and and carrying out something it was just this really d rage and it ended up kind of turning london upside down and that you know what was clear from that everybody knew when they saw that it wasn't some like marginal group that was out you know turned you know turn of the country or something that was really this general ray judge because of the nature of the violence because it was sort of fused of a large number of people doing a small amount of violence it clearly kind of expressed sort of the the will of a lot of people and it ended up being so humiliating for margaret thatcher she finally had to resign and so drove her out of office so just like we're making distinctions sort of within nonviolence we should be making distinctions within what we talk about is violence between you know the sort of between guns and not between concentrated kind of militant violence and a more diffuse kind of insurrectionary violence and i think obviously you can tell the second is what i think we're seeing a lot more of right so how have things changed or transformed with what we are seeing now we have an extreme far right that is becoming very prominent early covered in theirs and a  sort of when you have this moment of social crisis in the left gets the left to get stomped i'm not sure those were his words then people turn to the right because they're still sort of still answers and i think that's what we're seeing now  after the repression that that effectually brought to an end of the mass mobilizations around occupy and at least as contained black lives matter in some sense for now a lot of people are kind of looking for answers those in the i think a lot of us still on the left are still there and thinking about stuff that we've been kind of broken apart and demobilized for now and the right far right has really been mobilized by trump's strange victory so yeah we're in a bad situation i could talk a whole nother hours and hours about this one i think this talk is really interesting i first want to point out that i kind of was writing about a different sort of left left political violence in my book i was looking at this moment of kind of anti capitalist uprising and i think it's that it's different in some ways that into fascism anti capitalism anti capitalist protest violence i think you know the sort of riots in the sort that we're talking about my claim is that  capitalism the problem of capitalism is that it just respects life destroys the earth and all these things and it treats life as sort of disposable while it respects you know protect property and anti capitalists protests violence sort of does the opposite it it performs a disrespect for stuff while actually if you look at it generally performs a respect for bodies even in these really crazy huge uprisings with tons of property destruction like you saw at the end of two thousand and eight in greece there's actually very little violence kind of an acted on bodies so that's something i write about a lot and he fascism is a different because because fascist have bodies and you have to sort of if you're going to you have to sort of target them in some ways but i think people misunderstand certainly when people equate anti fascist violence with fascism the really really missing the point the nature of anti fascist violence i think is to the logic of it is to d mobilize the power of of fascist movements and leaders and you know unlike us on the left unlike liberals and you know all sorts of leftists like we sometimes kind of like having that deter all we kind of feel like feel bad for ourselves people only join up with fascism because they want to feel strong you know it's usually aimed at people who who feel humiliated who feel vulnerable and you know the very idea of a fashion behind fascism it's a bundle of sticks and it's like one stick alone can be broken but together we are and breakable and so to perform this sort of if you can like like the richard spencer getting punched video is a perfect example of this if you can show vulnerability if you can show that these people who are claiming to be the master race or you know that you know this new iron force in the world or something if you can if you can show their weak and show that they have you know vulnerabilities also it's not attractive and people don't want to join up at the same time i'm always saying you know if the if the richard spencer video had been him getting hit in the head with a baseball bat it probably wouldn't have been such a hit people wouldn't have been remakes into whitney houston you know a new order if it been like bloody and if it looked like he had been like maimed right so left so anti fas aims at the sort of sweet spot where word the mobilizing and kind of embarrassing the image of invulnerability that is the very core of fascism right it can't work without that and at the same time we're we're still not you know i think in in good moments right we're still we're still not in the acting injury or meaning or murder right now you know already in you know we're almost october twenty seventeen we have a laundry list of people who've been murdered by the far right the since the trump alexion right there's a lot of people it's not just how they're here locally you know ben kate's high school still suspects down the line we're going to find out that that was not a suicide the young the eighteen year old black muslim youth who was found hanging from a tree like thirty feet up there's a lot happening and so we see you know when people talk about ethno state like richard spencer says when people talk about apologizing for you know slavery wasn't so bad or people talk about building a wall and driving out  immigrants when people talk about this kind of violent language it ends up in violence against bodies which is why i think we have to prevent it into fascist violence isn't you know we don't have a laundry list of people who've been killed by anti fascist or m point it gets that bad right world war two you got that for example i was in czech republic for a time when there was a back and forth of violence between fascists anti fascist and people were basically shooting each other right left and the activists were basically just spending all their time fundraising for medical and legal bills so that's that can happen when things get very bad i really really hope it doesn't go that way but it's really important our moment things are nothing like that  mobilize these very dangerous far right networks that are starting and you know trying to disrupt their organizing efforts figure out what they're up to and disrupt their public image so they so they don't have the appeal that brings new people in and make them not a problem and i think for that reason like we all should be active anti fascists and whatever capacities we have all right tough to do in just a minute  speach the constitutional law says congress shall not prevent free speech so if you know we show up and we're like i don't want to person preaching genocide on my campus or in my neighborhood and we don't let them talk that's not against a first memory because i'm not congress law doesn't say anything about that who is dumb of you say something offensive something a bar like they might not let you get into the conversation that's how it works right so free speech doesn't mean we have to let anybody say whatever dumb stuff they want to say that is never so that  but also even you know i'm a i'm a college teacher and even like state institutions they prevent speech all the time for maybe for good reasons and brought a silly reasons i think if you look at the green scare that happened  you know ten fifteen years ago in the northwest around ecological activists enter his in this region i mean people were locked up in a people who were sentenced to ten twenty years for things that they said that didn't and there wasn't threatening to harm people at all so there's a real inconsistency that's going on i urge people to look at you know there's things like harassment incitement to violence anything that disrupts the material function of say universities none of those things are actually protected speech under the law so i think people are just kind of out a loss in this moment and don't know how to respond but we have a lot of tools on all levels that we can be acting with to not accept the stuff that's happening and i think when people shrug throw up their shoulders and say well do have the right to free speech they're just saying like they don't want to they don't want to deal with it the other thing is i think people are really into a lot of liberals are really into kind of showing how tolerant they are and being really proud like look how tolerant i am i'm so over minded i can even let a nazi like threaten my neighbor life but their tolerance is not the only thing that happened we should really take seriously what words do and we probably shouldn't call pop or said if we tolerate intolerance if we tolerate people saying people should be driven out and some people don't belong here because of their race or their sexuality or something we're actually in a building intolerance in a way that can kind of undermine the whole deal all right well with that we are unfortunately out of time i want to thank you very much for coming it's been a time with us this morning  thank you again mike so much for having me time once again for community form and we are very lucky to have with us live in the studios morning mario mora villa pando my room our villa pando is with tino advocacy and also with the n w d c northwest detention center resistance mario thank you very much for coming in and spending time with us this morning thank you so much good morning so you start out to tell us about the  c resistance and how you became involved well i was back in october september october of two thousand and thirteen where we saw young people and their parents and other adults on documented response to the leadership of people detained and that's why we've been doing since march of two thousand and fourteen so you talk about the facility itself it's considered an ice prisons and here de actually bought the building from another company and now they owned a being building and they managed to build in so the building was constructed during day obviously the bush administration we know that the company that actually build that it was a subsidiary of halliburton and so it all ties back to the bush administration and the government of that time  now it operates on their day guidance of immigration customs enforcement which belongs to the parliament of homeland security so it is a private entities a private enterprise is readily there i mean we've been  started with like about five hundred people capacity now he has five hundred fifty one thousand five hundred seventy five people capacity obviously opens the door to other corporations because everything is private as of today september you have already this year had numerous hunger strikes and hunger strikes appear to be what it is one of the few things that gains any traction in corporate media can you talk about the current situation there yes i think we have counted so far five hunger strikes since april tenth these year is really surprising because you would expect that on their these fascist regime that we are now people would be even more afraid to go hunger strike to do any kind of demonstration in such a terrible conditions but actually is the most active good we have had since twenty fourteen so the conditions have not improved  ice has always use and there was attention sent there are some model facility when people get transfer to other facilities do say that things are worse in other places but if people have done so many hunger strikes here you can imagine just border and during that time of their traveling when obama was still in office and decided to get rid of the policy that allow for any cuban that landed or put a footing in this territory to actually receive immediate transferred all the way here to washington state and as they arrived there told all you're going to be free on parole don't worry because they'll send us up them they're not deportable and then it happens that one month goes by two months go by it's almost four months now for some they're not release some of them have not even being granted an interview with ice vast majority of them passed something that is called credible fear interview which  there was a hearing where these guys are still hunger strike at the end of and we were there the judge was battle she didn't know why this guy was not granted parole she didn't know what to do she basically said i'm confused i don't know what homeland security doesn't lead you go and he said well you know if you're not going to let me free why don't you just the poor me and he said i'm going to i rather die that continue being here you lie to me the when they were doing were doing hunger strike force feeding thread this always there they always do you use that some people do end up eating again because they're afraid of the just in my unit idea of having a plastic tube through your  nose going through your throat all the way to your stomach and the way they describe as this very graphic saw people decide to start eating again now it's not that difficult to start a hunger strike in the center because the food is terrible the quality is horrible they make a lot of money by not providing real food and the quantities are also really bad really small people always report losing weight and so the conditions are just there to make it impossible for people to fight back to fight their cases to try to stay a lot of hunger strike or stall is that i told them if you continue the hunger strike is going to affect your case you could be released if you start eating so some people did and they did not released so that's the most common thing that we see would i see these agency was created to destroy us created to damage our society it was created to separate families but he was created to to create a private attention system to sustain it the reason why ice goes around in a star's rounding up is because there's a local quota that i that's how the government sees us if you have any sort of criminal record now days you could be placed in the partition proceedings so this is really an attack on all immigrants regardless really of where you were happy they were released but then we find out other creamy other people of color that had very few offenses in comparison to these other guys they were not given a bond to be released and in accountability there's no real oversight and they really get away with everything i mean the last we heard before these latest news that i'll talk about in a second is that they've been trying to homeland security has been trying to  permission to destroy records for the past years about sexual abuse about suicides and attempted so cites of people that have been under custody of ice in the past year so that tells you the level of corruption that we're facing so again this agency needs to be dismantled and we need to make sure that these can't and these sweet these war against immigrants to stop never get the right amount even to get that information even to get the contract the latest contract that was signing twenty fifteen for another ten years of operation we haven't been able to get the whole information but you do the math you know hundred let's say one hundred sixty five times one thousand five hundred seventy five people that's a lot of money so geo has a really big interest in keeping these places running in also expanding it  a superfund site in the flats in an industrial zone very next isobel every time we've done actions people told us we have no idea this was here even people that work around areas where really surprised when they feared th ere were people there there's not a real plan for ever creation in case of a tsunami for example when he was build there was some sort of assessment on environment impact but not on human impact we have seen people complaining about their water quality water bay packers you name it when we're outside is just terrible we we feel not only the smell but the terrible quality of the air so we started  revoke their business license for geale so we're saying what are you waiting for these days five hunger strikes this year should be enough for you to revoke the business license i believe some of those public health issues were some of the demands when this last april there was at least half the people there were on hunger strike and they presented a demand list and if i remember correctly items like that prisoners there are forced to wear the the clothing of previous prisoners that has gone gone on washed so you're basically transferring you know potential disease on from one person to the next th will there were some complaints to this year when they he waved started of not having their conditioning working they have always been complaints about the lack of access to medical about the overcrowding of the facility i mean you name it every every time we have a hunger strike the head least of the months keep growing for one is the conditions but in the other one on the other hand we also have the immigration system itself people don't get courts on time sometimes they are delayed for months the courts here and so only happen for an hour and a half so you only have an hour and have to actually build your case and so if there time south then you probably have to wait for another two three months to have another hearing people have very little access to the law library which is not up to date allow people to make copies that they were acquired to build their cases we know that over ninety where he was detained in the mines he made the news and everybody was really happy when he was released and i you know as you see most example it took sixteen lawyers sixteen lawyers to get him out after about five weeks of the tension and at ten thousand dollars bond if i'm correct if he was a poster child of the perfect amy grant that he had sixteen lawyers he still had to pay ten thousand dollars bond is there hope for the rest of us saw the system again is against the law is built against us there's no real guarantees that having a lawyer is going to work for all of us especially for low income communities and so if you see all the system built against you and then that tension conditions that are horrible that are made to break you we should be so thankful and we should be so proud of the people that are still gone congress strike because under the worst condition that anybody can imagine in this country they're still decided to take a step and to say i'm going to speak up and i'm going to do something and we hear these again and again when people go humanity and it seems that a lot of people get bigger and their humanity gross even more when they're under these horrible conditions what mechanisms if any are there for transparency for what's going on there how do you even find out the names of people that are being held in the tacoma facility well i think everything has started with that direct action when we decided to put our bodies on the line and people saw that and they trusted us so since then there's been a process for us to continue bad communication which really requires a lot of things we have a lot of different ways to get in touch with people and that then their main one is to continue having  go in we tell them hey tell your loved ones that we're here we're fighting we don't want anybody detain anymore and then when they come out then we chat with them and then we learn about what's going on inside and so the family says they going they tell them they tell people that they hate you  bunch of people out there doing this and doing that we all saw every time there's bosses bring in people we ran to the back of the building where they're being brought in and we chant you're not alone both in english and spanish  it catches some signals so we sometimes use dead radio station so we try to get all media coverage right because they do have some access to some communications so yeah we try different things and so the e mails when we work in collaboration with people that then we always tell them we don't provide services we're not here to save you we're here to war with you and so i guess that all these years that trust that we develop  number and they say that you guys are probably me grounds well what do you guys do and so we start talking to them and explain how we work and how we collaborate with people that i didn't some point in this struggle you come out and say that you are also undocumented that's right so that's the reason why we did the first action in twenty fourte in you know i could be in there and i want to make sure that you understand where our commitment we could be in there as well and we want people out site paying attention to where we're going through inside so does that recent why why we can't i came and aren't you originally from from mexico can you compare the average citizen in mexico's participation in the political process not a sure way like voting but i mean out in the streets  process versus those of us who grew up here in the states yeah i'm from mexico city i got very lucky i grew up seeing not a lot of political movements i mean when i remember when to help you go through when people gone to strikes on five factories we would go and support them you would always see people bring them brave in blankets and you know cash and s change people's participation here in the u s since the current administration the white house white house came in oh it's been huge i'm really glad to see more people participating i would like to see more people participating and not questioning our leadership we always have people come in and say you know this is great but have you thought about doing these have you cold saw and so why don't you guys try this and so i think that sometimes the problem that people think that we are not smart enough and we don't know how we knew that massive national immigration raid operation will be happening starting september sixteenth to september twenty first to detain about a thousand eight thousand people i'm sorry eight thousand people throughout the  in my coming to and so they didn't deny the fact that the probation exists they're just saying they're going to delay it obviously we don't believe anything that i says so we actually are going to file a freedom of information act right there in then these tuesday at eleven thirty in the morning we're going to have an action is starting from eleven to one so if people could are right about eleven that would be great to have you all there basically what we're asking is everybody says th wheedles they want to support us this is your chance we're asking people to be there but also to necessary and like we did back in twenty fourteen if we need to take the streets and shut down streets we'll do it so we hope people time with us this morning thanks so much