The oil band-aid by Zakir Hall

G7 decided to release up to 100 million barrels of oil and petroleum products from emergency reserves and it is presented as coordinated leadership, market stabilisation and energy security. In reality, it looks increasingly like the political equivalent of putting a plaster over a gunshot wound.

Yes, strategic reserves exist precisely for moments of extraordinary disruption. Nobody should pretend that governments can simply sit and watch fuel prices explode while industries, transport systems and households absorb the shock. But there is a crucial difference between using an emergency reserve to bridge a sudden crisis and repeatedly treating the reserve as a discount warehouse whenever geopolitics becomes inconvenient.

The G7 is beginning to blur that line. The problem is not the 100 million barrels themselves. The problem is the political psychology behind them. Governments want to reassure voters that the petrol station will remain open, diesel will remain affordable and the economy will keep moving. That is understandable. But energy security is not achieved by making the symptoms temporarily less painful. It is achieved by making the patient less vulnerable.

And the patient remains dangerously vulnerable. The Middle East is unstable. Shipping routes can be disrupted. Refineries can be attacked. Sanctions can rearrange global flows overnight. Governments can threaten export restrictions. A war thousands of kilometres away can suddenly become a price shock at a European filling station. This is not a temporary accident in an otherwise healthy system. It is a structural vulnerability built into an energy economy that still depends heavily on fossil fuels moving through a handful of strategically exposed corridors.

Yet instead of confronting that vulnerability with the urgency it deserves, politicians keep reaching for the same emergency cupboard. There is an almost absurd contradiction here. Governments spend years telling citizens that energy independence is a strategic priority, while simultaneously designing emergency policies that make the old dependency easier to tolerate.

Strategic reserves are supposed to buy time. They are not supposed to buy political comfort. Every barrel released today is a barrel that cannot be released tomorrow. Every emergency buffer reduced by political necessity leaves governments with fewer options when the next crisis arrives. And there will be another crisis. That is not pessimism; it is the elementary reality of geopolitics, climate disruption, ageing infrastructure and increasingly militarised energy markets.

The particularly uncomfortable question is what happens if the current crisis lasts much longer than politicians hope. You cannot refill a strategic reserve with a speech. You cannot manufacture crude oil by presidential decree. You cannot restore damaged refineries with a press conference. And you certainly cannot negotiate with geography. The Strait of Hormuz does not care about election calendars, inflation targets or political popularity.

This is where the G7's language about “resilience” becomes almost cynical. Real resilience means reducing dependence, diversifying supply, accelerating renewable generation, electrifying transport, modernising grids, improving storage and reducing the amount of oil required to keep societies functioning. It also means telling citizens an uncomfortable truth: energy security costs money.

The alternative is the politics of the emergency pump, wait for the crisis, empty the reserves, celebrate the fall in prices and postpone the difficult decisions until the next crisis arrives. That is not strategy. It is procrastination with barrels.

The G7 may successfully cool the market for a while. It may even prevent a painful economic shock. Good. Do it if necessary. But then replenish the reserves, publish a credible timetable and, more importantly, use the breathing space to make sure the next emergency requires fewer barrels. Otherwise the strategic reserve becomes something much more dangerous than an insurance policy. It becomes a political sedative. And eventually, like every sedative, it wears off.

The voice of power by Flo Schofield

Political sovereignty used to be a remarkably physical concept. It meant borders, armies, flags, passports and the ability of a state to control what happened inside its territory. In the age of generative artificial intelligence, sovereignty is becoming considerably stranger. It may now include the right to prove that a voice is actually yours.

Giorgia Meloni’s reported attempt to protect her voice through intellectual-property law may sound like an eccentric legal footnote. It is nothing of the sort. It points towards a future in which the most politically consequential battles may be fought not over territory but over identity. A synthetic recording of a prime minister ordering troops to mobilise, announcing a financial emergency or making a provocative statement about another country could travel around the world before any government has time to establish that it is fake.

The old doctrine of deterrence assumed that everyone knew who had issued an order. Deepfakes attack that assumption. This is where intellectual-property offices acquire an unexpectedly strategic importance. They were designed for a world of books, logos, inventions, recordings and commercial brands. Their job was largely to decide who owned what. Generative AI has turned ownership into something closer to authentication. The question is no longer simply whether someone has copied a voice. It is whether citizens, markets, diplomats and soldiers can distinguish an authentic political voice from an algorithm wearing its skin.

That is a profound change. A leader's voice is not merely an artistic asset. It is part of the machinery of government. Presidents and prime ministers govern through speeches, televised statements, interviews and emergency announcements. Their voices carry authority because millions of people recognise them. If that recognisability becomes exploitable, the voice itself becomes a potential attack surface.

Governments have spent years treating cyberattacks as threats to databases, power grids and communications networks. They are now confronting a more intimate vulnerability: the human being who appears to be speaking.

The obvious danger is misinformation. The less obvious danger is hesitation. Imagine a fabricated emergency statement appearing during a military crisis. The recording is convincing. Social media amplifies it. Financial markets react. Foreign governments demand clarification. Citizens panic. Officials eventually prove it false. But the damage has already occurred.

Truth, in such circumstances, becomes slower than fiction. That is why Meloni’s initiative matters beyond Italy. It suggests that legal protection of personal identity may become part of national resilience. Governments may eventually need systems combining trademarks, copyright, authentication technology, cryptographic signatures and rapid public verification. The objective would not be to prevent people from imitating politicians. Satire, parody and political criticism must remain protected. The objective would be to establish a legally and technically defensible distinction between political expression and fabricated governmental communication.

There is an irony here. The internet once promised to weaken concentrated authority by giving everyone a voice. AI may produce the opposite problem: everyone can manufacture everybody else’s voice.

The state therefore faces a peculiar task. It must defend sovereignty without turning identity protection into censorship. It must protect citizens from synthetic deception without giving politicians a legal weapon against criticism. And it must learn that national security is no longer confined to borders, buildings or military hardware.

The battlefield increasingly includes the microphone. The future may therefore belong to governments capable of answering one deceptively simple question at machine speed: Did the leader actually say that? In the age of synthetic reality, proving the answer may become as important as controlling the territory behind the flag.

Worming #138 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

A family of worms and all their worm friends worming in new adventures.

For more Worming, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The children are angry by Nadine Moreau

France is now watching its lycées become battlegrounds. What began with complaints about overcrowded classrooms, missing teachers, deteriorating buildings and an education system increasingly incapable of delivering what it promises has spread across the country. Hundreds of schools have been disrupted or closed, thousands arrested, and the confrontation between students and police has become increasingly violent.

The violence is unacceptable. Burning schools, attacking teachers or police, destroying public property and turning anger into collective stupidity does not make a political argument stronger. It makes it easier for governments to avoid answering the political argument altogether.

And that is precisely the danger. Because beneath the fires, barricades and tear gas is a much more uncomfortable reality: these teenagers are not protesting because they suddenly discovered rebellion. They are protesting because they have discovered that the adults running the country have stopped listening.

For years, Western governments have perfected the language of educational modernisation. There are platforms, reforms, digital strategies, performance indicators, consultations, assessments, restructuring programmes and beautifully designed PowerPoint presentations about the school of tomorrow. What there is increasingly less of is the school of today.

A teenager does not care about the government's vocabulary of optimisation when there is no teacher in the classroom. A student does not care about administrative reform when thirty or forty pupils are squeezed into a room that should accommodate half that number.

And a young person certainly does not care about another ministerial promise about the future when the ceiling leaks, the equipment does not work and the teacher who was supposed to prepare them for an examination has been absent for months.

This is where educational technocracy collapses. Governments have become extraordinarily good at measuring education while becoming increasingly bad at providing it. They measure attendance, performance, inclusion, digitalisation and competitiveness. They produce statistics about social mobility while children themselves experience immobility. They speak about preparing young people for tomorrow while failing to provide them with a functional classroom today.

That contradiction eventually produces anger. And teenagers have one political advantage over adults: they have not yet learned the respectable vocabulary of resignation. Trade unions negotiate. Professionals issue statements. Parents complain politely. Teachers write letters. Opposition parties hold conferences. Teenagers blockade the school gate.

It is crude, inconvenient and sometimes dangerous. But it is also brutally direct. The French state should therefore be careful about treating this exclusively as a policing problem. Once a government starts seeing students primarily through the lens of public order, it has already lost the educational argument.

The real question is not why teenagers are angry. The real question is why the state needed teenagers to become angry before it noticed that something was broken. France is not alone in this. Across Europe, public services are being squeezed between fiscal discipline, demographic pressure, political theatre and the fantasy that technology can compensate for missing human beings. Teachers become numbers on spreadsheets. Nurses become staffing ratios. Schools become buildings to be managed rather than institutions to be protected.

Then politicians act surprised when citizens stop believing them. The French lycée crisis is therefore bigger than France and bigger than education. It is a warning about what happens when a generation concludes that the social contract is written for everyone except them.

These teenagers are supposed to become tomorrow's citizens. Instead, they are learning today's lesson: when institutions stop listening, people start shouting. And when even the children have to shout loud enough to be heard, the problem is no longer with the children. It is with the state.

Mirror, Mirror #Poem by Strider Marcus Jones

 

mirror, mirror,
in the hall
age comes to us all,
and looks wither
through the play
of years slipped away,
away
in the lapsed lingo of street
and road,
where tangents meet
and move with innocence
up summits of experience
told,
whose fruits we eat
then weep
when they implode.
these reflections
in this autumn of adventurous directions,
mean more
standing in the door
of ebb and flow
watching people come and go
wearing introspections
of what they know
after listening to a stranger's small confessions
on midnight radio.

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Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/. A member of The Poetry Society, nominated for the Pushcart Prize x4 and Best of the Net x3, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.

The price of silence by Wiryo Huojin

There is something deceptively modern about authoritarianism. It no longer always needs the prison door, the midnight knock or the policeman standing beside the journalist’s desk. Sometimes it needs only a bank account, a court order and a number large enough to make silence look like the sensible option.

Tunisia has just offered a particularly revealing example. The country has amended its controversial cybercrime law, replacing prison sentences for a first offence involving so-called “false news” with fines of 10,000 to 20,000 Tunisian dinars. Repeat offences can still bring six months in prison and a 50,000-dinar fine, while penalties can be doubled when a public official is targeted.

On paper, this can be presented as reform. Fewer journalists behind bars. Fewer prison sentences. A softer punishment. But freedom of expression is not measured by the number of prison cells occupied. It is measured by whether people can speak without fearing that the state will destroy their ability to live.

That is the uncomfortable part of the Tunisian experiment. A prison sentence is brutal, visible and politically dangerous for an authoritarian government. A journalist sent to prison becomes a name. A photograph circulates. Colleagues protest. Family members speak. International organisations react. The prisoner becomes a symbol.

A crushing fine can be much quieter. The journalist remains technically free. He can walk home. She can sit in a café. Nobody has disappeared behind bars. There is no dramatic photograph of a prison gate closing. There is simply the bill. And perhaps that is precisely the point.

A fine large enough to threaten a journalist's home, savings, livelihood or ability to continue publishing can achieve what imprisonment achieves without producing the same political spectacle. It turns economic survival into a mechanism of censorship.

This is why the language surrounding “false news” matters enormously. Nobody seriously argues that fabricated information designed to incite violence, destroy reputations or endanger people should have no legal consequences. Democracies need laws against genuine fraud, threats and incitement.

But authoritarianism begins to creep in when governments transform political disagreement into misinformation and criticism into a public-order offence. The problem is not merely the punishment. It is who gets to define the crime. Tunisia's original Decree-Law 54, introduced in 2022, allowed severe prison sentences for online “fake news” and rumours. Human-rights organisations have documented its use against journalists, activists and political opponents. The amendment therefore changes the weapon without necessarily removing the weapon.

And this is where the Tunisian lesson becomes larger than Tunisia. Across the digital world, governments are discovering that censorship does not necessarily require banning newspapers or shutting down television stations. It can involve licensing, taxation, surveillance, lawsuits, regulatory pressure and financial penalties. The modern censor does not always say, “You cannot speak.”

He says, “Speak if you can afford it.” That is a profoundly different form of intimidation. It also creates a chilling inequality in public debate. A wealthy media corporation may survive a devastating fine. An independent reporter, blogger, activist or small publication may not. The law consequently becomes most frightening precisely for those who have the fewest resources.

Free speech was never supposed to be a luxury product. Tunisia may have removed one prison sentence from one provision of one law. That deserves recognition as a change. But replacing imprisonment with potentially crippling financial punishment does not automatically create freedom. Sometimes the prison is made of concrete. Sometimes it is made of debt. And sometimes the most sophisticated authoritarian system is the one that leaves the door open, smiles politely and sends you the bill.

Ghostin’ #137 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

They are like neighbours we are aware of,
except we are NOT aware of and
they have absolutely nothing to do with Halloween.

For more Ghostin’, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The Balkans are running dry by Thanos Kalamidas

Brussels likes its Balkans in chapters. Chapter 23: judiciary. Chapter 24: justice, freedom, and security. Chapter 27: environment. Chapter 35: other issues. Tick the boxes, reform the institutions, pass the laws, appoint the committees, produce the paperwork and Europe will eventually open the door.

Meanwhile, the water is disappearing. That is the absurdity at the heart of the European Union’s enlargement conversation in 2026. Ursula von der Leyen is touring the Western Balkans again, talking about accession, reforms, integration and the €6 billion Growth Plan. The language is familiar: momentum, movement, membership. And yes, democratic institutions, functioning courts, and accountable governments matter. But there is something rather more primitive that tends to escape bureaucratic Brussels: people need water to live.

Look at Lake Koroneia in northern Greece. Once a major wetland, a refuge for migratory birds, and a source of livelihoods, it has collapsed to less than a tenth of its former size after years of declining rainfall, rising temperatures, and excessive irrigation. The lake is not presenting Brussels with a legal problem; it is presenting Europe with a warning.

And that warning is screaming. The Balkans are one of Europe’s climate pressure points. Droughts, wildfires, floods, soil degradation, water scarcity, and agricultural disruption do not respect borders, accession chapters, or the Schengen timetable. A river does not stop at a customs post because one country is an EU member and the other is waiting outside. A wildfire does not ask whether a government has completed its judicial reforms.

Yet European policy still too often treats the environment as another technical chapter to be closed rather than as the infrastructure of political survival. That is dangerously backward. What happens when farmers cannot reliably irrigate their fields? When hydropower becomes unpredictable? When forests burn repeatedly? When drinking-water systems become inadequate? When villages lose agricultural income and young people leave? When people begin moving because the land can no longer support them?

That is not some distant climate scenario. It is the beginning of political instability. The EU cannot seriously discuss enlargement while treating green infrastructure as a decorative attachment to accession. If Brussels wants a stable Western Balkans, it must invest in reservoirs, modern irrigation, wastewater treatment, cross-border river management, drought-resistant agriculture, renewable energy, forest restoration, and resilient cities. It must finance adaptation with the same political urgency it applies to roads, railways, and border systems.

Otherwise, Europe will build excellent transport corridors through increasingly uninhabitable landscapes.

There is also an uncomfortable hypocrisy here. Brussels demands that Balkan governments strengthen institutions, fight corruption, and improve governance. Fine. But environmental collapse itself exposes the weakness of governance. When water becomes scarce, every broken institution becomes more dangerous. Illegal extraction, political patronage, uncontrolled construction, agricultural overuse, and environmental corruption can turn a drought into a social crisis.

Climate policy, therefore, is not separate from enlargement policy. It is enlargement policy. The EU should stop imagining the Western Balkans as a collection of candidates waiting patiently outside Europe's bureaucratic door. These countries are already part of Europe's ecological system. Their rivers, forests, mountains, farms, and coastlines are European assets and European vulnerabilities.

If the European project means anything beyond moving paperwork from one desk to another, it must understand that security begins with water, food, functioning ecosystems, and communities capable of surviving the next summer.

Brussels can count accession chapters until the paperwork catches fire. The Balkans cannot afford to wait. The lake is disappearing. The question is whether Europe will notice before the people start disappearing with it.

The populist ceiling by Robert Perez

Brazil has done something rather extraordinary with its 2026 presidential election: it has turned political polarization into political repetition. Flávio Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are heading for a runoff, with Bolsonaro narrowly ahead after the first round. The numbers are close enough to make the country look divided, but perhaps they reveal something more interesting: Brazil may not be becoming more ideological. It may simply be becoming exhausted.

For years, the fashionable explanation for Latin American politics has been the pendulum. The left disappoints, the right wins. The right disappoints, the left returns. Populism feeds on the failures of the establishment, promises salvation, then produces another round of disappointment. The electorate supposedly swings from one extreme to another because voters are angry.

That explanation is now becoming lazy. Brazil's problem is not that its voters are running enthusiastically towards the extremes. It is that the political system keeps presenting them with the same extremes wearing different shirts. Lula versus Bolsonaro's political dynasty is not a revolution. It is a rerun. And reruns are rarely signs of political health.

The first-round result is particularly revealing because the two leading candidates captured an overwhelming share of the vote, leaving the electorate with remarkably little room for a genuine alternative. Millions of Brazilians did not choose a new political project; they chose between two established political identities.

That is where the idea of defensive voting becomes more useful than the old language of polarization. Defensive voters do not necessarily love their candidate. They fear the other one more. They vote Lula because Bolsonaro terrifies them. They vote Bolsonaro because Lula represents everything they believe has gone wrong. They are not necessarily voting for a future. They are voting against a nightmare.

This is a dangerous evolution because democracy cannot survive indefinitely on fear alone. A functioning political system should give citizens reasons to imagine something better. Instead, Brazil is increasingly being asked to decide which familiar political monster it would rather have sitting in the presidential palace.

And both camps benefit from this misery. The left can point at Bolsonaro and scream authoritarianism. The right can point at Lula and scream corruption, incompetence and political stagnation. Each side needs the other side to remain frightening because fear is politically profitable. The more terrifying the opponent becomes, the less anyone has to explain what they will actually build.

That is the real poverty of contemporary populism. It does not need to win hearts anymore. It only needs to frighten people sufficiently to win their ballots. The Bolsonaro dynasty understands this perfectly. Jair Bolsonaro's political legacy has become bigger than Jair Bolsonaro himself, with his son now carrying the family name into a presidential runoff. Lula, meanwhile, remains the indispensable figure of the Brazilian left even at eighty, a political giant whose continued dominance says as much about the weakness of his political alternatives as it does about his own extraordinary durability.

This should worry Brazil. When political movements become dependent on personalities rather than institutions, democracy becomes a hostage to political inheritance. The son replaces the father. The veteran replaces the alternative. The electorate is told that history is happening when, in reality, history is being recycled.

And this is not uniquely Brazilian. Across democracies, voters are increasingly being trapped between leaders they distrust and alternatives they fear. Politics becomes an emergency room where the patient is repeatedly asked to choose which disease should be treated first.

That is not ideological passion. That is institutional fatigue. Brazil's October 25 runoff will still matter enormously. It will decide who governs. But perhaps the deeper question is what happens after the winner celebrates.

If Lula wins, Bolsonaroism will not disappear. If Bolsonaro wins, Lulaism will not disappear. And if both sides continue defining democracy simply as defeating the other side, Brazil will remain trapped inside the same political cage.

The real death of polarization will not come when left and right stop fighting. It will come when voters finally demand something beyond the fight. Until then, the ballot box offers choice, but increasingly the choice feels like this: Which past do you want back?

Perspectives Of A Cold Eye #Poem by Jan Sand

 

We sail the seas of inclinations
Wherein some odd disease
That happily, in history, brought destructions
Only to jellyfish, and some random seaweed,
Decides to lunch on fishermen and giraffes
Or schoolchildren, just for laughs.
Thus humanity faces huge miseries
That arise in surprise that nature’s ways
Do not conform to hubristic expectations.
Thus leave, in wreckage, entire civilizations.

Our blue-green particle against the black whereupon we arose
To suppose some mythical brilliant blunderer fingered us
For ultimate domination in destinations to command
With mathematics and technologies to utilize all ecologies,
Create symphonies of coordination to sing
Wonders to leaf, foot and wing, that they coordinate to demonstrate
That everything complies to sensibilities that are wise.

Clearly, the necromancy of one plus one, the delights of the simple wheel,
Skewed the optimistic prospects towards other possibilities.
Einstein gifted us with shaped space and time but since the deadly stone hammer
And the arrowed bow still maintains their disciplines on human society and
No Zweistein nor Dreistein appeared to sensibilize obvious nuclear self-destruction,
We are left to drift into current insanities, inanities of butchery and seduction.
.
The querulous most perilous pursuit of the square root of minus one
That violates our logic and deep acception with perceptions quite undone
Into complexities. Simplicities of place, in quantum disarray with fuzzy puzzles that display
Our logic dissolved, decides to run away, to vanish in its sprout of agile strangenesses
That no one can easily accept, disentangle, or figure out, yet are undeniably real.

Nevertheless this weird distress is quickly gobbled up within our technologies
That swings an axe that manufactures acts where yes and no can persist into equal reality.
Our universe now enjoys the freedom to disagree with itself, where here and there just melts away.
Where night and day have become the fairy tales of shadows chasing starlight to chop time
Into useful building blocks of yesterdays and tomorrows, into years and centuries that gaze in horror
At eternity.

The chime of Donne’s bell is become a thunder that now menaces us all in its rapid approach,
Peculiarly of small consequence to where ear buds sing of fanciful nonsense to tickle deafness
Into a reality set to spring in salivation to gobble up whatever world we have left.

Aid with a gun by Virginia Robertson

There was a time when foreign aid came with a moral vocabulary. Development, schools, hospitals, roads, food security, democracy, poverty reduction. It was never entirely innocent, of course. Donors have always expected something in return, even when that something was simply influence. But at least the language suggested partnership.

Now the language is changing. The argument emerging from the Sierra Leone affair is much darker: development money can become a weapon of enforcement. The immediate dispute concerns a European demand for the extradition of a convicted Dutch drug trafficker and the suspension of European financial support. Whatever the precise legal and administrative explanation for the delayed payments, the political message surrounding the affair is unmistakable. European governments increasingly want their development budgets to serve European interests far beyond development.

That should worry everybody. There is nothing controversial about demanding that governments cooperate against organised crime. A state that protects international criminals, obstructs justice or turns its territory into a safe haven for traffickers cannot expect the rest of the world to shrug politely. International cooperation on crime is essential.

But development aid is not a police warrant. That distinction matters. The moment money intended for farmers, schools, infrastructure, healthcare or climate resilience becomes a bargaining chip for extradition, migration control or European border management, aid changes character. It stops being principally development policy and becomes foreign-policy leverage.

And once that door opens, there is no obvious reason to close it. Today it is an extradition. Tomorrow it could be migration. The day after, deportations. Then perhaps military cooperation, recognition of diplomatic positions, access to minerals, voting at international institutions or some other European priority. The recipient government is told, politely or otherwise: cooperate, or your people pay the price.

This is the old language of power wearing the new suit of conditionality. There is also an uncomfortable colonial shadow here. Africa has heard generations of European promises about partnership, sovereignty and equal cooperation. Yet the relationship becomes remarkably unequal when one side controls the money and the other side controls the territory.

A European government may consider a particular criminal case a matter of national security. Sierra Leone may have its own legal procedures, constitutional limitations and political calculations. Those differences do not automatically make one side right and the other side corrupt. Sovereignty is inconvenient precisely because it means other countries do not exist merely to execute our demands. More importantly, punishment rarely lands where policymakers imagine.

Governments negotiate. Ministers issue statements. Officials wait. Poor communities wait too, but they wait for electricity, agricultural investment, jobs, schools and functioning infrastructure. When development funding is delayed or withdrawn, it is usually ordinary people who discover that geopolitics has arrived at their doorstep.

This is the great hypocrisy of conditional aid: the government is threatened, but the vulnerable are often punished. Europe needs cooperation against organised crime. It also needs development partnerships that Africans can trust. These objectives are not mutually exclusive. But they require different instruments.

Extradition belongs to law enforcement and judicial cooperation. Development belongs to development. Diplomacy can connect the two, but money intended to fight poverty should not quietly become a European police baton.

Otherwise the West will discover something uncomfortable. Aid can buy compliance for a while. It cannot buy legitimacy. And if development assistance becomes simply another weapon in the foreign-policy arsenal, the world will stop seeing it as solidarity and start seeing it for what it increasingly resembles: aid with a gun behind it.