Construction drawings released: Flight 93 crescent now

Alec Rawls exposes continued Park Service posturing about the design of the Flight 93 monument. Our federal government continues to suffer from a severe truth defecit.

 If they truly intended to memorialize the heroic passengers who tried to preserve their lives against certain death and prevent an exacerbated national disaster in our nation's capitol, it could be done simply and less expensively. 

 A retired 757 or similar fusilage, parked at the crash site, oriented along the flight path could serve as a theatre for showing the Flight 93 movie. I can not imagine a better monument. Let's roll! 

From Error Theory: The original Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 faced less than 2° from Mecca. That made it a mihrab, the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. (Some mihrabs are pointed-arch shaped, but the classic mihrab is crescent shaped.) The Park Service dismissed concern about the Mecca-oriented crescent on grounds that the construction drawings had not yet been finalized. “Those trees could move fifty feet, or three hundred feet,” said Project Manager Jeff Reinbold in the Spring of 2006, as if this kind of "tweaking" would make any difference (Crescent of Betrayal Ch.8 p.145-6). The construction drawings have now been released, and yes, they moved the lower tip of the half-mile wide crescent about 300 feet, enough to change the orientation of the crescent by about 4.5°. Instead of pointing less than 2° north of Mecca, the giant Islamic-shaped crescent now points less than 3° south of Mecca. Here is the original Crescent of Embrace: "Qibla" is the direction to Mecca, which you can verify using any online Mecca-direction calculator (just type in Somerset PA). A person standing between the tips of the giant crescent and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow) would be facing 1.8° north of Mecca, ± 0.1°. Here is one of the new construction drawings: Instead of facing a titch north of Mecca, the giant crescent now faces a titch south of Mecca (2.7° south ± 0.1°). As with the original Crescent design, the upper crescent tip is the end of the 50’ tall Entry Portal Wall and the lower crescent tip is the last of the 50’ tall Maple trees on the bottom. The landscape overlays make the details hard to see in the thumbnail image above, but at full resolution they are fully legible. (Copy of source PDF, without the superimposed orientations lines here. Large file warning. Graphic is on p. 30 of 233.) The Park Service was SUPPOSED to remove the Islamic symbol shapes When architect Paul Murdoch’s winning Crescent of Embrace design was announced in September 2005, it appeared to show a bare naked Islamic crescent and star-flag planted atop the crash site: Burned by the resulting firestorm of protest, the Park Service to agreed to get rid of the Islamic symbol shapes, but they never did. They added an extra arc of trees, and they call it a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent. This is explained on the Park Service's own website. The extra arc of trees is explicitly described as a broken off part of the circle:

In summary, the memorial is shaped in a circular fashion, and the circle is symbolically "broken" or missing trees in two places, depicting the flight path of the plane, and the crash site.

Those two breaks are the two ends of the extra arc of trees: The extra arc of trees extends from blue circle to blue circle, marking the two “breaks” in the circle referred to in the Park Service’s official explanation of the broken-circle design. One is where the flight path breaks the circle (left), the other is near the crash site (center). What is symbolically left standing (the unbroken part of the circle) is just this: Remove the symbolically broken off parts, and you get the original Crescent of Embrace design. The only change is that the crescent has now been rotated clockwise a few degrees. In the construction plans it faces slightly south of Mecca instead of slightly north of Mecca. For a parallel, imagine airline security discovering a terror bomber, then playing with the fit his suicide vest before escorting him to his plane. They said they were going to remove the giant crescent. They claim they HAVE removed it, but they haven't. Symbolically, the design remains completely unchanged. The terrorists are still depicted as smashing our peaceful circle and turning it into a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca. The giant crescent is actually a mihrab Here is the mihrab at the Great Mosque in Cordoba Spain. Face into the crescent to face Mecca, just like the crescent memorial to Flight 93: Confronted with evidence that the Crescent of Embrace is actually designed to be the world's largest mosque, the Park Service sought advice from a pair of Muslim scholars. Both acknowledged the almost exact Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent and both offered overtly dishonest excuses for it. One said not to worry about the likeness to an Islamic mihrab because no one has ever seen a mihrab this BIG before:

...most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience.

Right. That's why everybody scratches their head at Mt. Rushmore. No one has ever seen Abraham Lincoln so BIG before. They just can't figure it out. To be fooled by this excuse, you have to really really want to be fooled. The other Muslim scholar said not to worry, the crescent cannot be seen as mihrab unless it points exactly at the Kaaba:

Mihrab orientation is either correct or not. It cannot be off by some degrees.

In fact, a mihrab does NOT have to point exactly at Mecca, for the simple reason that, throughout most of Islamic history, Muslims in far-flung parts of the world had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca. As a result, it was established as a matter of religious principle that what matters is intent to face Mecca. This was recently affirmed by Saudi religious authorities, after Meccans realized that even most of their local mosques do not face directly towards the Kaaba. “It does not affect the prayers” assured the Islamic Affairs Ministry. Faced with evidence of an Islamic plot, why would the Park Service send this evidence exclusively to Muslims for appraisal? Have they forgotten who attacked us on 9/11? The Service has long since been apprised of the patent dishonesties retailed by its two Muslim advisors but they don't care. They wanted to be lied to, they knew where to go to be lied to, and they got what they wanted.

Michelle Malkin and Ed Morrissey

So where are the patriotic stalwarts like Michelle Malkin whose objections were instrumental in getting the Park Service to agree to remove the Islamic symbol shapes in the first place? If they knew in 2005 that the symbolic outcome of 9/11 should not be a giant Islamic shaped crescent why are they silent about this exact same symbolism today, after THEY were promised that this perversion would be removed? Ed Morrissey urged his readers "to tell the National Parks Service and the Secretary of the Interior to rethink their plans," promising for his own part that "as long as that crescent remains in the design, I’m not donating a red cent to the memorial." Well Ed, the crescent does remain in the design, so please rejoin the fight. The desertion of Malkin et. al. makes a difficult gap to fill, but we had better fill it, or the Flight 93 crash-site will soon be home to the world’s largest mosque. To join our blogbursts, just send your blog's url.

Crescent of Embrace ---> Mecca

This article exposes an exemplar of assidiocy seldom equaled if ever excelled. "Oh, what a tangled web we weave...:.

"The only thing that orients the memorial is the crash site,"

As a noun, orient means East. As a verb, it means to align someone or something to the East. Could it occur to any of those idiot savants that Mecca is in a generally Easterly direction from the crash site?  What natural structure or element of the crash site "orients" it toward Mecca? Was there a prominent sign or directional arrow etched into the earth? was Flight 93 flying toward Mecca when it crashed? Is the crash site "oriented" by anything other than the design of the monument? The liars perceive themselves as so clever and us as so dull that we will never perceive the obvious truth.

 The design of the memorial is a gross insult to the heroes who diverted the hijacked flight from its mission of murder and mayhem.  Instead of honoring them, it honors the damnable, demonic cult which inspired the murderous hijackers.

 It would be better to have no memorial but the scarred earth and the little bits of shattered aircraft, bone and teeth that will gradually work their way to the surface as the freeze-thaw cycles sort them from the soil.  Are you a lover of life, liberty and truth? If so, then join us in endorsing the petition linked in the graphic below.




http://errortheory.blogspot.com/2009/07/everyone-involved-with-flight-93.htm

Everyone involved with the Flight 93 Memorial knows that the Crescent of Embrace points to Mecca In 2007, Flight 93 Advisory Commission member Tim Baird told Alec Rawls (the author of these blogburst posts) that everyone at the meetings he attended is fully aware that the giant crescent, originally named the Crescent of Embrace, really does point almost exactly at Mecca. Professor Baird says they all just assume (himself included) that the Mecca orientation must be an innocent coincidence. Pretty crazy, when they have also been told the meaning of a crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca. Every mosque is built around a Mecca-direction indicator called a mihrab, and the classic mihrab is crescent shaped. Geometrically, the Crescent of Embrace is the world’s largest mihrab. However honestly Project Partners believe that the Mecca orientation of the crescent must be a coincidence, this is not what they tell the public. When reporters asked Memorial Project Superintendent Joanne Hanley about the Mecca orientation, she denied it:

"The only thing that orients the memorial is the crash site," she said.

Thinking that the Mecca orientation of the crescent must be a coincidence in no way justifies lying to the public about this explosive information. If Baird’s account is accurate—that the dozens of Memorial Project Partners all know that the giant crescent actually does point to Mecca—then the Memorial Project has a lot of explaining to do. Now an overlooked article from 2007 corroborates Professor Baird’s information. Dr. Glenn KashurbaIt turns out that a Pennsylvania psychiatrist who has been intimately involved with the memorialization of Flight 93 (writing two books on the subject) argued to a reporter before the July 2007 Memorial Project meeting that the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent (which he took as a given) should be seen as coincidental:

“When you calculate angles to Mecca - I'm going to be in Washington, D.C., this week, and I'm sure if I calculate angles of the monuments, at least one points to Mecca,” Kashurba said. “I don't know if it will be the White House or the Lincoln Memorial, but at least one will. People looking for a way to support their way of looking at things will look at this in this way for ever and ever.”

If Dr. Kashurba was getting his information from the Memorial Project’s public statements, he would have denied that the crescent points to Mecca. Here is what Memorial Project Partner Patrick White told the press 9 days before the Kashurba story:

Rawls, of Palo Alto, Calif., contends that the centerpiece of the design points toward Mecca. Rawls’ claims are untrue and “preposterous,” according to Patrick White, Families of Flight 93 vice president. “We went through in detail all his original claims and came away with nothing.”

Kashurba knew better, as did Patrick White himself. The week after his public denial, a local woman asked White how he could be okay with the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. This time White did not deny the Mecca orientation, but argued that it cannot be seen as honoring Islam because the inexactness of the Mecca orientation would be "disrespectful" to Islam. Mecca orientation takes literally 2 minutes to verify, starting from source documents It is not surprising that these Memorial Project insiders would know that the giant crescent does in fact point almost exactly at Mecca (1.8° north of Mecca to be precise, ± 0.1°). After all, they had by the summer of 2007 been examining Rawls’ report, and answering questions from the press about it, for over a year, and the near Mecca orientation of the Crescent of Embrace is trivially easy to verify. Just use any of the online Islamic prayer-direction calculators to print out the direction to Mecca from Somerset PA. Place this graphic over the Crescent site-plan on your computer screen, and you will see that the Mecca-direction line (which Muslims call “qibla”) almost exactly bisects the crescent: The green circle in this image is from the qibla calculator at Islam.com (down at the moment, but you can use the one at Qibla.com, or QiblaLocator.com). A person standing between the tips of the giant crescent and facing into the center of the crescent will be facing almost exactly at Mecca. Patrick White knows this and deceives the press and the public about it. Dr. Kashurba knows it and stands by as White and others deceive the press and the public about it. These deceptions have been blatant. Everything points to Mecca?The Project even went to far as to dig up an academic fraud from Texas, willing to deny that there is any such thing as the direction to Mecca:

Daniel Griffith, a geospatial information sciences professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said anything can point toward Mecca, because the earth is round.

Was the reporter embarrassed to ask Muslims if they can really face any direction to face Mecca? Hard to blame her. Just to ask such a stupid question is to answer it, but the obviousness of the fraud is no excuse for letting it stand. According to Professor Baird, every Memorial Project member who saw these denials knew that they were fraudulent, yet not one of them has tried to tell the public about the Project’s dishonest cover-up. When the truth does get out to the broader public, Project members are going to have a lot to answer for, which is presumably why they are keeping their mouths shut now. They have done a very bad thing and they don’t want it exposed. What proves Islamic intent is the architect’s elaborate repetition of the Mecca orientationNo one ever claimed that the almost exact Mecca orientation of the Crescent of Embrace proves Islamic intent. Architect Paul Murdoch proves intent in a different way: by elaborate repetition of his Mecca orientations. His first confirmation of intent is to include an exact Mecca orientation. In Murdoch’s explanation, the flight path breaks the circle, turning it into the giant crescent. To find this thematically defined crescent, remove those parts of the full Crescent of Embrace that extend out past the point where the flight path breaks the circle. The resulting true or thematic crescent points EXACTLY at Mecca: At the upper tip of the crescent, the flight path comes down from the NNE and symbolically breaks the circle. What symbolically remains standing is the true or thematic Crescent of Embrace, pointing exactly at Mecca. Murdoch’s next confirmation of intent is to exactly repeat this entire multi-Mecca oriented geometry in the vast array of crescents of trees that surround the Tower of Voices part of the memorial. Setting aside the chance that an architect could in the first place design a memorial to Flight 93 out of nothing but crescents just by innocent coincidence (which must be close to zero), the odds that these crescents would by random chance manifest Murdoch’s repeated Mecca orientations are 1 in 131 billion: The only change was to include an explicitly broken off part of the circleThe original Crescent of Embrace design included the symbolically broken off parts at the upper crescent tip. When the bare naked Islamic-crescent shape caused a public uproar, the Memorial Project added another broken off part of the circle, floating out in front of the mouth of the original crescent. They call it a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, the symbolic result of 9/11, is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing EXACTLY at Mecca. That makes it a mihrab, the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. The planned memorial is actually a terrorist memorial mosque. To join our blogbursts, just send your blog's url.

Flight 93 Terrorist Memorial

Moral Muslims don't want a memorial to the terrorists on the Flight 93 crash site Thanks to Khalim Massoud, president of Muslims against Sharia--Islamic Reform Movement, for his press release in support of Tom Burnett Sr.'s efforts to stop the Park Service from planting a giant Mecca-oriented crescent atop his son's grave. Islamic Reform Movement is clear eyed on the problem:

We all know who the enemy is. It's Islamic radicals who are guided by the ideology of Islamic supremacy¹. Just as Nazis were guided by the ideology of Aryan supremacy. The only difference is that Gihadis consider it their religious duty to impose Islam all over the world and many of them yearn to die (and kill) for Allah. They use lines from the Koran such as "kill them [infidels] wherever you find them" or "slay the idolaters wherever you find them" as their guiding principles.²

Islam needs to be reformed so that it rejects supremacism and violent conquest, but trying reform Islam is a difficult and dangerous business³:

Islamic radicals murder more Muslims than Christians, Jews, Hindus and everybody else combined. Gihadis may hate you for being infidels. But they really hate us for not following their demented dogma.

In this struggle for the soul of Islam, the last thing that moral Muslims⁴ want is any kind of victory for the supremacists, never mind a mind-boggling symbolic victory over the heroes of Flight 93:

What possible reason could be there for including anything Islamic or anything even resembling an Islamic symbol into Flight 93 Memorial? Inclusion of Islamic symbols memorializes murderers who brought down the plane and is tantamount to spitting in the faces of victims and their families. United Airlines Flight 93 was hijacked in 2001. Let's not allow hijacking of Flight 93 Memorial in 2008.

Muslims know all about facing Mecca for prayer One of the difficulties in getting people to understand the significance of the Mecca-orientation of the Crescent of Embrace is that it all seems so esoteric, and if it is esoteric, how important can it be? Witness Allahpundit, who as Michelle Malkin's pointman on this issue ought to be one of our strongest allies. Instead, he dismi sses all concern about Islamic symbolism (effectively dismissing Michelle's original concern about the giant crescent, which remains comp letely intact in the "broken circle" redesign), on the grounds that: "if you need a protractor to properly express your outrage, you've probably gone too far." We don't need a protractor to express our outrage. We need a protractor to explain what architect Paul Murdoch did. He built the world's largest mihrab: the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. The planned memorial will be the world's largest mosque by a factor of a hundred. The gigantic Sacred Mosque in Mecca would fit four times over inside Murdoch's 3000 foot wide crescent, which is just the centerpiece of Murdoch's mosque. Orientation on Mecca is THE central symbol of Islam, together with the crescent shape. Unlike Allahpundit, Khalim knows these things:

The shape of the "broken circle" resembles a crescent moon. So does the shape of the tower. Crescent moon is the most recognizable Islamic symbol. When we pray, we face Mecca and Mosques are traditionally built to face Mecca. The case could be made that the proposed design is aligned in North-Easterly direction, which corresponds with Qiblah, a direction to Mecca. Conventional wisdom would dictate that since Mecca is located to the South-East of Somerset, Qiblah cannot possibly have a North-Easterly direction. This assumption would be correct if you're using a flat map. However, if you take a globe, place pins on locations of Somerset and Mecca, and connect those pins with a string, you'll see that the string at the base of the Somerset pin points North-East. This symbolism may not be noticeable to a non-Muslim, and it is also possible, but likely improbable that the designer is ignorant of its significance. The proposed design would be perfect for EgyptAir 990 memorial. But for United 93 memorial, it is simply unacceptable.

Allahpundit is just being careless, but the willful blindness of the Park Service is foundational The Memorial Project is committed to the idea that Islam was also hijacked on 9/11. To them, blaming Islam would be as bad as blaming the hijacked passengers and crew. Thus the possibility of hostile Islamic intent cannot be contemplated, no matter how high the "coincidences" pile. According to Flight 93 Advisory Commission member Tim Baird, the Memorial Project participants all know that the Crescent of Embrace does in fact point almost exactly at Mecca (despite the Memorial Project's many public denials). They just assume it has to be a coincidence, just as they assume it is a coincidence that the Sacred Ground Plaza sits almost exactly in the position of the star on an Islamic crescent-and-star flag. (Both of these almost-exact Islamic symbol shapes also contain exact Islamic symbol shapes. Remove the symbolically broken-off parts of the giant crescent and what is symbolically left standing in the wake of 9/11 is a giant Islamic-shaped crescent pointing EXACTLY at Mecca. In the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag is a separate upper section of Memorial Wall, centered on the centerline of the giant crescent, that will be inscribed with the 9/11 date.) Backers of the crescent design chose it specifically as a symbol of healing and outreach, implicitly to the Islamic world. Having been so generous to Islam, they just can't believe that a hidden al Qaeda sympathizer could be so ungenerous as to take advantage of their outreach by sneaking a memorial to the terrorists past their noses. They just can't believe that anyone could actually want to hijack Flight 93! This refusal to acknowledge evidence of hostile Islamic intent stabs at the heart of what Islamic reformers like Khalim are trying to accomplish. How to distinguish a moral Muslim from an Islamic supremacist Being knowledgeable about Islam, moral Muslims recognize (as bin Laden's followers do) that Osama bin Laden is a perfectly orthodox Wahabbist, using traditional means of violence and deception to pursue the traditional Islamic objective of world domination. The difference is that moral Muslims⁴ reject the totalitarian methods and objectives of established Islam. Moral Muslims recognize that traditional Islamic orthodoxy needs to be reformed. Textually, the opportunities for reform are very propitious. The Koran contains both sweeping calls to violence (9.05, 9.29) , and sweeping calls for tolerance (2.256, 109). To turn these diverse commands into a religion of violent conquest⁵, every major school of Islamic interpretation, both Sunni and Shiite, considers the peaceful verses of the Koran to be expunged via the doctrine of "abrogation." Where different verses can be seen to contradict each other, the doctrine of abrogation holds the earlier verses to be abrogated and replaced by the later verses. The peaceful verses are all early verses, so as far as traditional Islam is concerned, they don't even exist, except as a device for deceiving infidels into believing that Islam is a "religion of peace." This doctrine of abrogation flies in the face of the Koran's own insistence that it contains no contradictions (4.82), and that nothing is abrogated (2.106)⁶. Textually, traditional Islam does not have a leg to stand on, but anyone who points it out is subject to the traditional Sharia death penalty for blasphemy. Alternatively, in a Wahabbist specialty called "taking takfir," such heretical interpretations constitute apostasy, another death penalty crime in every major school of Islamic interpretation. The Koran repeats dozens of times over that those who forget the words of Moses will burn in Hell forever (e.g. 2.75, 3.187, 5.13, 13.25, 15.90, 16.63). This is repeated so many times because it is Muhammad's accusation against the Jews: that they twist the "allegorical parts" of the Torah (3.07). But the LEAST allegorical part of the Torah is the Ten Commandments. Thus according to the Koran, the 6th Commandment--Thou shalt not murder--is binding on Muslims. Murder is any killing that is not in defense against either a violent attack or a conspiracy to violent attack, and there is no clearer case of murder than the traditional Islamic death penalty for apostates, who only want to go their own way. The same goes for blasphemy. To kill someone for challenging doctrine is MURDER. If the Koran really is the word of God, then every traditional Muslim in the entire world who supports established Sharia law is "wood for the fire." Whether Islamic reformers are out to save the lives of those who would be murdered, or out to save the souls of the murderers, they are engaged in a great contest with perhaps the greatest evil the world has ever known: a RELIGION of evil. All they need to do to win is expose the truth: that traditional Islam⁷ is in systematic violation of the Koran's own most fundamental commandments, yet to expose this truth they must break through the teeth of traditional Islam's strength: its totalitarian repression of dissent. In short, all they have to do is bring truth to the most psychologically brutalized people in the history of the planet. What could be worse, in a battle like this, than to see the land of liberty--the great haven from which truth can be spoken--build a gigantic terrorist-memorial mosque on the Flight 93 crash site? No helping hand from the land of the free If this willful blindness prevails, it will be a clear signal that in the battle to wrest Islam from the grasp of evil, America will not help. By following the morally blind idea that goodwill to Islam means having a see-no-evil attitude toward Islam, America is refusing to witness what moral Muslims are trying to expose: that the worst evils--condemned to the fire many times over by the Koran itself--thrive at the heart of Islamic institutions. That evil heart is what throbs, a half-mile across, in the crescent memorial to Flight 93, and the refusal of our own Park Service, fully alert to all the facts, to witness this evil is the worst possible betrayal, not just of America, but of the good people in the Islamic world as well. A see-no-evil attitude towards Islam is NOT goodwill. It emboldens the worst in Islam at the expense of the best. To help the good against the bad, we have to distinguish the good from the bad. The good are those who are trying to reform Islam. The bad are those who pretend that traditional Islam orthodoxy is already peaceful, and deny that reform is necessary. Muslims against Sharia has a facebook group, if anyone wants to join. Check out the Islamic Reform Movement website here. To join our blogbursts, just send your blog's url.

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The text above the horizontal line originated at errortheory, without the superscripts, which I added. The superscripts are linked to my comments in the following enumerated list.

1. Islamic supremacy is intrinsic to Islam, established by the Qur'an: 9:33 and Sunna: Bukhari 4.52.65 . Offensive Jihad, genocide and terrorism are intrinsic sacraments of Islam: standard, off the shelf, Islam, not some imagined radicalism. The Banu Qurayzah knew who the enemy was: "Muhammad and his army".
2. The Qur'an is given as a guide to mankind. In it, Allah issued clear commands, which are to be believed and implemented. 8:39 says "Fight them until..." ; 9:29 says:"Fight those who...until:. Why did Moe say "I have been ordered to fight the people till..."?
3. Islam can not be reformed because the Qur'an is Allah's perfected word which can not be changed. Supremacism and conquest are intrinsic to Islam, permanent parts of it.
4. Oxymoron: "moral Muslims". A moral man who adheres to Islam suffers from the most severe cognitive dissonance. He worships a blood thirsty demon as the Almighty Creator. Allah set making "great slaughter" as Moe's price of admission to Paradise. He worships a genocidal war lord as the greatest and best of men.
5. No such conversion occurred. Moe's preaching evolved as he accrued an army and gained strength. In Mekkah, vastly out numbered, he preached forbearance and tolerance. In Medina, after building an army, he preached conquest.
6. 2:106. Whatever a Verse (revelation) do We abrogate or cause to be forgotten, We bring a better one or similar to it. Know you not that Allâh is able to do all things? For confirmation, see The Meaning of Naskh. Surah At-Taubah, which contains the commands to fight Jews & Christians, was among the last to be revealed, it abrogates the earlier, more tolerant verses.
7. Traditional Islam is what Moe said, speaking for Allah, and what he did, in obedience to Allah's word. Traditional Islam is authentic Islam, the real thing. The "reformers" seek to create a new religion and call it Islam.