This year's theme is "Water Cooperation."World Water Day is an international day of observance and action to draw attention to the plight of the more than 1 billion people world wide that lack access to clean, safe drinking water. Clean, fresh drinking water is essential to human and other lifeforms. World Water Day aims to increase people's awareness of the water's importance in all aspects of life.
I guess I still believe it: political desire and collective action amount to imagining a better future into being. Of course this is like sex.Humanity sets itself only such tasks, we could say modifying Marx’s words, for which it already desires and imagines the solution. Desire and imagination are part of the material conditions necessary to constitute a new reality. We can’t simply wish away climate change, of course; merely imagining world peace will not put an end to war; and just repeatedly expressing our deepest hopes, like the incantations of would-be magicians, will not make them real. But the more of us imagine and desire politically, and the more intensely we do so, the more power we have to create a new world because in that desire and imagination are born collective political action.
A sequence that emerges from the current social movements and points toward a new democratic future: experimentation opens imagination and desire that have the potential through political action to make a new reality. Perhaps a century from now they will look back and see in our era the time when that political desire took root.
- More than 70 percent of those who died of direct war violence in Iraq have been civilians — an estimated 134,000. This number does not account for indirect deaths due to increased vulnerability to disease or injury as a result of war-degraded conditions. That number is estimated to be several times higher. (As I heard an Iraqi explain last night, the U.S. government has a better estimate of the number of rats in the New York City sewers than of Iraqis dead because of our war.)
- The Iraq War will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers at least $2.2 trillion. Because the Iraq war appropriations were funded by borrowing, cumulative interest through 2053 could amount to more than $3.9 trillion. (The officials who made the choice to go to war didn't want us to be able to find out that figure any more than they wanted to count dead Iraqis.)
- The $2.2 trillion figure includes care for veterans who were injured in the war in Iraq, which will cost the United States almost $500 billion through 2053. (Aaron Glantz, writing for the Center for Investigative Reporting, recently revealed that the Veterans Administration currently has a backlog of 900,000 claims for disability benefits -- and expects the number of ex-soldiers waiting for a determination of their cases to rise to one million by the end of the year.)
- The total of U.S. service members killed in Iraq is 4,488. At least 3,400 U.S. contractors have died as well, a number often under-reported. (This does not include suicides among veterans, recently estimated by the Department of Veterans Affairs to number 22 a day.)
- Terrorism in Iraq increased dramatically as a result of the invasion and tactics and fighters were exported to Syria and other neighboring countries.
- Iraq’s health care infrastructure remains devastated from sanctions and war. More than half of Iraq’s medical doctors left the country during the 2000s, and tens of thousands of Iraqi patients are forced to seek health care outside the country. (If they can afford it. At least 15 percent of Iraqis are unemployed and near a quarter live below the local poverty line, despite sitting on all that oil.)
- The $60 billion spent on reconstruction for Iraq has not gone to rebuilding infrastructure such as roads, health care, and water treatment systems, but primarily to the military and police. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has found massive fraud, waste, and abuse of reconstruction funds. (Dick Cheney's buddies grabbed their bit of taxpaper loot and waltzed away.)
People have been known to go mad with rage when they experience broken promises on this scale. The promise that their vote and their well-being matter is being exposed as a fraud. If we don't want to find ourselves in this fix someday, we need to make sure our democracy has the capacity to impose limits on capitalist greed. The many have to rein in the few, ultimately in the interest of all of us, even the plutocrats.What we’re seeing here is the Cypriot government being forced to break one of its most important promises — the promise that if you put your money in the bank, and your deposits total less than 100,000 Euro, then they will be safe. What’s more, there’s no good reason for insured deposits to be hit in this manner: the same amount of money could be raised just by taxing the uninsured deposits at a slightly higher rate. The insured depositors are being hit, it seems, just so that the uninsured depositors can be taxed at single-digit rather than at a double-digit rate.
Meanwhile, people who deserve to lose money here, won’t. If you lent money to Cyprus’s banks by buying their debt rather than by depositing money, you will suffer no losses at all. And if you lent money to the insolvent Cypriot government, then you too will be paid off at 100 cents on the euro. ...
The big winner here is the ECB, which has extended a lot of credit to dubiously-solvent Cypriot banks and which is taking no losses at all. … of course, there are all the hedge funds who have been betting that the Cypriot government won’t default: they’re all popping Champagne right now.
The big loser are working-class Cypriots, whose elected government has proved powerless in the face of decisions driven by Germany, and who are now edging towards fury. The Eurozone has always had a democratic deficit: monetary union was imposed by the elite on unthankful and unwilling citizens. … Across the continent, they’ve lost their democratic right to determine their own fate at the ballot box, and instead they’re being instructed what to do by Germans. Now, in Cyprus, they’re simply and directly losing their money.
Someone with 8,000 Euro of life savings in the bank can ill afford to lose an arbitrary 540 Euro, but that’s exactly what is going to happen. … This decision is important not only because of the precedent it sets with regard to bank depositors, but also because of the way in which it points up just how powerless all the Mediterranean countries (plus Ireland) have become. More than ever before, it’s Germany’s Europe. That’s bad for Cyprus — and it’s not even particularly good for Germany.
That last charge goes to heart of the fears this accreditation process has unleashed. Is City College required to lose its soul in order to stay open? There certainly are hints that is what the ACCJC wants. Under its pressure, the school's mission statement has been changed. Past objectives that included “civic engagement, cultural enrichment and lifelong learning” are gone from a new mission statement.“People without academic expertise, who don’t know the field, will lead the departments,” said Kristina Whalen, the director of the speech department at CCSF. “Academic reorganization will have automotive and child development under the same dean -- those fields aren’t related.”
… “I’ve worked at other schools where you reported to a dean,” art teacher Andrew Leone told us ... He’s worked at San Francisco State University, and USF, among other schools, he said. “The dean has so many responsibilities, there’s no way they can deal with them all.”
The chairpersons at City College were more efficient at taking care of teachers’ needs, he said. Now, “they’re giving us a top down corporate model. They’re turning us into Wal-mart.”
This set of objectives -- with their grudging addendum -- emphasizes what very likely the majority of the students most hope to get from the institution: academic and vocational credentials. But the new emphasis begins take the "community" out of community college.Our primary mission is to provide programs and services leading to
*Transfer to baccalaureate institutions;
*Achievement of Associate Degrees in Arts and Sciences;
*Acquisition of certificates and career skills needed for success in the workplace;
*Basic Skills, including learning English as a Second Language and Transitional Studies.
In addition, the college offers other programs and services consistent with our primary mission, only as resources allow and whenever possible in collaboration with partnering agencies and community-based organizations.
Apparently, according to our spooks, he is dangerous enough to harass, but they have no charges against Saadiq Long. So he can't fly to, within, or over the United States. But he can travel if he can find a way around these restrictions.… he took a bus from Oklahoma City to Mexico, then boarded flights in three different countries to return to Qatar.
We can hope and pray that occupying the role of Bishop of Rome will broaden this man's perspective.This is not a mere legislative proposal (that's just it's form), but a move by the father of lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God…
If the Japanese can't build and run these things safely, don't ask me to think U.S. companies can do it. I'm just not that credulous. This is too bad. Nuclear does look like a better alternative than coal -- but at the price of occasionally making large swathes of land uninhabitable for generations? Not to mention, nobody seems to have figured out what to do with the nuclear waste they generate except to make bombs out of it.The disaster at Fukushima was triggered by a natural catastrophe, a tsunami, but it was allowed to happen, because Tepco, the plant’s operator, and subsequent Japanese governments ignored ample warnings, an earthquake or a tsunami of this magnitude might knock out the emergency back-up systems.
Tepco systematically violated safety rules. In more than 200 instances between 1977 and 2002, the utility submitted false data to the authorities, as stated by a commission of the Japanese parliament, the Diet. The nation’s nuclear safety authorities and government were complicit in Tepco’s blunders.
… Japan sees herself at the pinnacle of technology, a major exporter of nuclear power. Despite the fact Japan’s nuclear industry has suffered a substantial number of accidents before, the country did not have any contingency plans to deal with a nuclear accident as it happened in Fukushima. Six days into the catastrophe, Japan had no idea how to get the plant under control. In a desperate attempt, seawater was dumped from a helicopter to cool spent nuclear fuel. Despite warnings, Tepco failed to prevent hydrogen-explosions.
… Japan, a nation proud of her safety standards and disaster preparedness, was totally unprepared for an accident that had been predicted by experts. The nation of the industrial robot did not have a single machine to mitigate the crisis.
Well that is straightforward: when the criminals in the boardrooms make a mess, hand it over to a mafia to clear it up. The hell with the workers ... This episode is only one of many instances of untrained and underpaid workers unwittingly carrying the risks of the clean-up.Two years after the triple calamities of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster ravaged Japan's northeastern Pacific coast, debris containing asbestos, lead, PCBs — and perhaps most worrying — radioactive waste due to the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant looms as a threat for the region.
So far, disposal of debris from the disasters is turning out to have been anything but clean. Workers often lacking property oversight, training or proper equipment have dumped contaminated waste with scant regard for regulations or safety, as organized crime has infiltrated the cleanup process.
To clear, sort and process the rubble — and a vastly larger amount of radiation-contaminated soil and other debris near the nuclear plant in Fukushima, the government is relying on big construction companies whose multi-layer subcontracting systems are infiltrated by criminal gangs, or yakuza.
In January, police arrested a senior member of Japan's second-largest yakuza group, Sumiyoshi Kai, on suspicion of illegally dispatching three contract workers to Date, a city in Fukushima struggling with relatively high radioactive contamination, through another construction company and pocketing one-third of their pay.
He told interrogators he came up with the plot to "make money out of clean-up projects" because the daily pay for such government projects, at 15,000-17,000 yen ($160-$180), was far higher than for other construction jobs, said police spokesman Hiraku Hasumi.
Chávez’s most enduring and positive legacy is his shattering of Venezuela’s peaceful coexistence with poverty, inequality, and social exclusion. He was not the first political leader who placed the poor at the center of the national conversation. Nor was he the first to use a spike in oil revenue to help the poor. But none of his predecessors did it so aggressively and with such a passionate sense of urgency as Chávez did. And no one was more successful in planting this priority into the nation’s psyche and even exporting it to neighboring countries and beyond. Moreover, his ability to make the poor feel that one of them was in charge has no precedent.
Another positive aspect of his legacy is that he ended the widespread political indifference and apathy nurtured over decades by a system dominated by decaying and out-of-touch political parties. The political awakening of the nation sparked by Chávez has engulfed people in the barrios, workers, university students, the middle class, and, unfortunately, even the military.
But Grandin still assesses Hugo Chavez as a uniquely inspiring figure for all his faults. Millions of Venezuelans and their friends around the world agree. This is not something to quarrel with or to discount.Chávez was a strongman. He packed the courts, hounded the corporate media, legislated by decree and pretty much did away with any effective system of institutional checks or balances.
Having reported how lying became the norm, Marlantes has thought hard about why this happened:The teenage adrenaline-drained patrol leader has to call in the score so analysts, newspaper reporters, and politicians back in Washington have something to do. Never mind that Smithers and his squad may have stopped a developing attack planned to hit the company that night, saving scores olives and maintaining :control over a piece of ground. All they'll be judged on, and all their superiors have to be judged on, is the kill ratio.
Smithers's best friend has just been killed. Two other friends are missing pieces of their bodies and are going into shock. No one in the squad knows if the enemy is 15 meters away waiting to open up again or running. Smithers is tired and has. a lot of other things on his mind. With scorekeepers often 25 kilometers away, no one is going to check on the score. In short, Smithers has a great incentive to lie.
He also has a great need to lie. His best friend is dead. "Why?" he asks himself. This is where the lying in Vietnam all began. It had to fill the long silence following Smithers's anguished "Why?"
So it starts. "Nelson, how many did you get?" Smithers asks.
PFC Nelson looks up from crying over the body of his friend Katz and says, "How the fuck do I know?"
His friend Smithers says, "Well, did you get that bastard that came around the dogleg after Katz threw the Mike-26?"
Nelson looks down at Katz's face, hardening and turning yellow like tallow. "You're goddamn right I got him," he almost whispers. It's all he can offer his dead friend.
"There's no body."
"They drug the fucker away. I tell you I got him!" Nelson is no longer whispering.
… The patrol leader doesn't have a body, but what are the odds that he's going to call his friend a liar or, even more difficult, make Katz's death meaningless, given that the only meaning now lies in this one statistic? No one is congratulating him for exposing the enemy, keeping them screened from the main body, which is the purpose of security patrols.
He calls in one confirmed kill. ...
Just then PFC Schroeder comes crawling over with Kool-Aid stains all around his mouth and says, "I think I got one, right by the dogleg of the trail after Katz threw the grenade."
"Yeah, we called that one in."
"No, it ain't the one Nelson got. I tell you I got another one."
Smithers thinks it was the same one but he's not about to have PFC Schroeder feeling bad, particularly after they've all seen their squad mate die. … the last thing on Smithers's mind is the integrity of meaningless numbers.
The message gets relayed to the battalion commander. He's just taken two wounded and one dead. All he has to report is one confirmed, one probable. This won't look good. Bad ratio. He knows all sorts of bullets were flying all over the place. It was a point-to-point contact, so no ambush, so the stinkin' thinking' goes round and round, so the probable had to be a kill. But really if we got two confirmed kills, there was probably a probable. I mean, what's the definition of probable if it isn't probable to get one? What the hell, two kills, two probables.
Our side is now ahead. Victory is just around the corner. … [then the artillery has to claim their own additional kills…] By the time all this shit piles up at the briefing in Saigon, we've won the war.
Rick's book looks at Vietnam from the top, from the angle of the generals. He locates the ongoing adoption of lying in the particular weakness of the man who was the longest serving commander in that adventure. He's scathing:This nonsense went on in Vietnam for several reasons. Probably the most important was that the president and a group of advisers insisted on running things from Washington with no clear military objectives to pursue. So they had to have something upon which to make decisions, because, after all, if they didn't make decisions, what the hell were they doing in charge? The second factor was military careerism, in both competing with statistics and not blowing the whistle on their stupidity. This happened all the way up the line. And finally the lying took place because the kill ratio statistics were so totally out of line with the ordinary grunt's psychology that lying about it was a trivial and meaningless act for him.
Lies, lies and more lies ...William Westmoreland himself was a new thing in the Army, an organization man more educated in corporate management than in military affairs. He was an odd combination of traits: energetic and ambitious, yet strikingly incurious, and prone to fabrication even as he considered himself a Boy Scout in his ethics… He did well in World War II as a battalion commander… Yet in his subsequent career, he would embody the empty approach of looking good rather than being good … For example, in his memoirs he depicted himself as a student of military history, someone who always kept a few classics at his bedside. This was untrue. "He simply doesn't have any interests," Charles MacDonald, the military historian who helped Westy write his memoirs, told [his biographer Lewis] Sorley. "I would venture to guess that the man has not read a book from cover to cover in a hell of a long time." … Westmoreland told people he had no idea that he had been invited to address a joint session of Congress while in Washington in April 1967, yet in fact he had been notified of this before leaving Saigon and had prepared for it for weeks.
Such minor instances of mendacity probably were harmless, but the habit carried over into his conduct of the war and his defense of it for decades afterward. He provided false evidence in 1967 that his attrition strategy was working, telling the president during his April trip that "the crossover point" had been reached and claiming on Meet the Press that November that North Vietnamese "manpower cannot be replaced." As Sorley notes, this was "in no way accurate." As Army chief of staff, he oversaw the preparation of a history of the Vietnam War that was laden with omissions and evasions, yet he would assert to the editor of Readers Digest that "the fact remains that this is the only authentic publication on the war." … Ultimately, the habit of saying whatever sounded good at the moment would catch up with him when he sued CBS News for libel, only to have the network's defense lawyer read to him passages from his memoirs that undercut his testimony.
If the masses of draftees were to continue to believe in the fight, they needed confidence that their leaders were accountable.political act, making a statement to both insiders and outsiders about the nature and responsibilities of the U.S. military. It was, as FDR once remarked, "a New Deal war." To Marshall's eye, being willing to remove an officer signaled to the American people that the Army's leaders cared more about the hordes of enlisted soldiers than about the relatively small officer corps. …Looking out for the common soldier was not an insignificant consideration in a war being fought for democracy …
Yes, Alexander Haig and Wesley Clark took a beating. I was worried for awhile that we were seeing a politically ambitious general in David Petraeus -- who Ricks has largely approved of -- but that one seems to have blown his chance.… Marshall's insistence on grooming a certain type of general might have had a less direct political effect: that of encouraging the decline in American life of the caudillo, the "man on a white horse" tendency of military leaders to move from the armed forces into political life. There was a strong tradition of elevating a general to the presidency in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, beginning with George Washington. … But since Benjamin Harrison, who for a few months at the end of the Civil War was a brigadier in the Army of the Cumberland and who won the White House in 1888, only one general has been elected to the presidency, and that last general to become president was the least coup-prone of officers: Eisenhower, Marshall's protege. The Marshall template, with its studied distance from politics, may have put a stake through the heart of the general as politician. Since Eisenhower, generals who have toyed with running for president have been humiliated in the primaries, emerging from the experience somehow diminished in the public eye. …
Not surprisingly, when Asians proved fierce opponents (to the surprise of many of these unprepared and racist officers,) U.S. citizens at home lost interest in providing cannon fodder to under-formed commanders.In reading histories of the Korean War, when new regimental and division commanders are discussed, it is striking how often they are introduced with phrases such as "had not previously led troops in combat." Instead they had spent World War II in the Pentagon war-planning division, or had trained troops, or had been a staff planner in the Mediterranean Theater, or had been a corps chief of staff. … Trying to be fair to officers can be lethal to the soldiers they lead on the battlefield. The Army was using the Korean War to give the staff officers of the earlier war "their chance" to command in combat -- with disastrous results.
Democratic nations hold their military officers accountable; in decaying empires, the officers think the military exists from their benefit -- in the language of a post Vietnam report the author cites, for "Me, my ass and my career." If we expect to have better generals, we'll have to avoid dumb, illegitimate wars. We, the civilians, are responsible for that very difficult project.… the American military, as of mid-20l2, has not steeled itself and launched a soul-searching review of its performance in Iraq and Afghanistan. Without such a no-holds-barred examination, akin to the Army review of the state of its officer corps conducted as the Vietnam War wound down, it might not do much better the next time it goes to war. But as long as it cares more about not embarrassing generals than it does about taking care of soldiers, it is unlikely to undertake such a review.
So is Wills still a Christian? Sure. He finds no contradiction between throwing out much of the medieval superstructure of church and continuing to experience the tradition. He affirms the Nicene Creed and other elements of church life he finds enhance his encounter with God, in particular faith that the blessed "body" and "blood" that Christians share in worship recall Jesus' radical practice of eating alongside everyone, even the "impure." And some parts of Church tradition seem to Wills very much worth cleaving to:There were no priests in Peter’s time, and no popes. Paul never called himself or any of his co-workers priests. He did not offer sacrifice. Those ideas came in later, through weird arguments contained in the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews. The claim of priests and popes to be the sole conduits of grace is a remnant of the era of papal monarchy. We are watching that era fade. But some refuse to recognize its senescence.
Not surprisingly, reviewers have asked Wills whether he is still a Roman Catholic. Though he affirms that all people who name themselves Christians and also whoever seeks God through whatever portal have some window on the divine, he's sticking with the particular tribe of his personal history whether its rulers want him or not:“I do not want to get along without the head of Augustine or the heart of Francis of Assisi to help me.”
… “If we need fellowship in belief — and we do — we have each other…"
“No believing Christians should be read out of the Mystical Body of Christ, not even papists. It will hardly advance the desirable union of all believers if I begin by excluding those closest to me.”
Yes indeed -- daring to state that Al Qaeda is done for would be the most truthful, hopeful thing a U.S. chief executive could possibly do for the country. I'm not holding my breath, but count me in for the citizen's movement to demand such an admission.…[this] dark anniversary offers a reminder, if one is required, that in any conflict where a President claims war powers the Chief Executive’s analytical precision in describing the enemy is a grave responsibility. A franchise is a business that typically operates under strict rules laid down by a parent corporation; to apply that label to Al Qaeda’s derivative groups today is false. If Al Qaeda is not coherent enough to justify a formal state of war, the war should end; if the Administration wishes to argue that some derivative groups justify emergency measures, it should identify that enemy accurately.
Jihadist violence presents an enduring danger. Its proponents will rise and ebb; the amorphous threats that they pose will require adaptive security policies and, occasionally, military action. Yet the empirical case for a worldwide state of war against a corporeal thing called Al Qaeda looks increasingly threadbare. A war against a name is a war in name only.
Stopping lurching about driven by fear is the prerequisite for moving this country away from its post 9/11 rogue behavior. It's a worthy goal. We need not forever allow our institutions to be deformed by barely rational and often inflated fears. We needn't live like a bunch of rabbits, scared stupid!a "blowback" [causing] the warping or degradation of [our] institutions, comity and laws caused by fear…
Maybe it takes someone whose country has already lost an empire to have the clarity to ask what many of us DFHs (dirty fucking hippies) have been wanting to know for years. We long ago repudiated the idea that unconstrained empire was anything we wanted. Nice to see someone in the military coming up with the right questions. The soldiers need a "truth and reconciliation commission" if they are to avoid just doing this again when some U.S. administration dares to flex its muscles.Do we really want to be doing this? COIN, or whatever it is that we have been doing over the last decade, is tremendously difficult. The direction of some of these questions suggests that it might be a little bit more than that though. If what we are doing is fundamentally imperial, then it raises two extra questions. First, can we do this without using imperial methods? Second, do we want to use those methods?
… What is required, if we are not to make the same mistakes that we made this time, is a comprehensive examination of what it is we were trying to achieve, what we needed to do to achieve it, and whether we really wanted to travel down this path, or want to now or in the future. A place to advocate some truth and reconciliation rather than escalating the intellectual holy war within our profession might help too.
Gov. Pat McCrory says he signed off on the controversial “pink licenses” that will be issued to some young illegal immigrants who were granted protection from deportation for two years. The new North Carolina governor said he thought it was important that the driver’s licenses for immigrants clearly distinguish “between legal presence versus legal status.”
…Critics of the new license design, such as Armando Bellmas of the Latin American Coalition in Charlotte, charged that the proposed license design was “discriminatory” and created a class of “inferior citizens.”
“The way these licenses have been issued is a direct attack on the immigrant community in North Carolina,” he said in a statement.
Uh oh ...The snowpack, dubbed California's "frozen reservoir" by water officials, normally provides about a third of the water for California's farms and communities. But only 2.2 inches of rain has fallen since December in the mountainous regions from Shasta Lake to the American River, just 13 percent of average. The next driest first two months of the year occurred in 1991, when 4 inches of precipitation fell, water department officials said.
There would have to be several big, icy storms over the next month to get the state close to normal precipitation this year, but no precipitation is currently forecast.
Oops. These guys may be treated as high priced beef, but they do have some rights. How many is a little bit unclear.Kasa said the question came as part of a series of queries about whether he was married or had a girlfriend. On Wednesday, he said in another radio appearance that he did not think the question was serious, although he said it was asked after he said he was not married and did not have a girlfriend.
Questions about family relationships are not unusual during the scouting process, but the N.F.L. has had to deal with inappropriate questions before, as teams try to uncover anything they can about players before the draft. During a predraft visit in 2010, Dolphins General Manager Jeff Ireland asked receiver Dez Bryant if his mother was a prostitute. Ireland later apologized.
For this spectator and football fan, it's kind of a hoot to learn that what is probably just unconsidered boilerplate from hundreds of union contracts slipped into this one. Nobody really thought the issue would come up. Not in the NFL! But the world is learning gays might be anywhere.... the NFL does have safeguards against this kind of scrutiny, it just appears that teams aren’t following them. Buried deep within the NFL’s most recent collective bargaining agreement is a non-discrimination clause that reads: “There will be no discrimination in any form against any player by the NFL, the Management Council, any Club or by the [National Football League Player’s Association] because of the race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or activity or lack of activity on behalf of the NFLPA.”
I'm not sure what this says about the trust between labor and teams in the football league. Not something good I think. Interesting to watch the issue of a gay player become one of the many tension points in the employee/employer relationship. I enjoy watching football but between the growing awareness of the health risks and the ongoing sense of exploitation among the beef, I suspect the game has trouble ahead.He said if an NFL prospect doesn't like girls, the best thing for that player to do when asked about it is lie to improve their draft stock.
"Selfishly, I think players need to say that they're straight right now," Ayanbadejo said. "You need to get drafted as high as you can get drafted, get the money while you can, your career's only going to last 3.5 years."
