Too Big to Fail

Remember the huge, corrupt, rapacious banks that were deemed too big to fail despite the spectacular damage they wrought during the last market crash? That drama may have been just a dress rehearsal for something much bigger, which is now lurching under the weight of exponential growth and colossal corruption: China. And just as we were told in 2008 that it was essential the banks survived, so we are now being told the same about China. This concern stems from no particular fondness for the Chinese – any more than our support of Middle Eastern sheiks, whose kingdoms sat on top of our oil, belied affection for Arabs. It is because American economic well-being is entwined with China’s stability, which is now threatened by the side-effects of unrestrained growth and a mind-boggling corruption that has brought huge disparities in wealth to a country that still mouths the platitudes of socialist solidarity. As a net energy exporter – and a net exporter of oil for the first time since 1949 – America is no longer dependent on energy imports, despite what the drilling zealots insist. Now we are dependent on Chinese money and manufacturing, and once again our foreign policies are dictated by our domestic addictions. China has become the Walmart of the world, promising cheap goods while hollowing out our communities and the local economies that sustain them. I wish no ill to the Chinese, but we have got to redefine the good life in terms other than never-ending growth and more cheap stuff.

Double Oh Oh

“This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.”                   T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

As Edward Snowden reenacts OJ’s 1994 Bronco chase in airplanes, with Sen. Lindsey Graham squawking that “we’ll chase him to the ends of the Earth” and civil libertarians issuing apocalyptic warnings about “1984,” I am simply baffled by this theater of the absurd. The road to Armageddon turns out to be, not tragedy, but farce.

With college graduates suffocating under $1.1 trillion of student debt, a high-school dropout gets a job with a high-powered consulting firm, at a salary (he says) of $200,000, and subsequently hands over the U.S. espionage capability to a British newspaper. For his sins against the world’s largest spy network, our hero is charged with . . . espionage. And so, in search of a haven of transparency, he sets off for China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, where criticizing the government is not for the faint of heart. Carrying four computers of data, the man who condemned the NSA’s invasion of privacy seems bent on sharing its files with every other spy agency in the world. Since they are all engaged in the same activities, they presumably already have the information. Still, this is not the kind of transparency that reassures my sense of privacy. Meanwhile, we wait for the Chinese version of Edward Snowden, whom we will hail as a hero.

When Secretary of State Henry Stimson closed America’s code-breaking agency in 1929, he did so because “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail.” Naïve, yes, but how refreshing.

A Different Path

“In a striking repudiation of the ultraconservatives who wield power in Iran,” wrote Thomas Erdbrink of The New York Times, “voters here overwhelmingly elected a mild-mannered [president] who advocates greater personal freedoms and a more conciliatory approach to the world.” We did the same thing in 2008. Yet here we sit, almost five years later, with a massive hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay, an imploding Iraq and exploding Afghanistan, getting ready to enter the Syrian minefield. Syria, we are told, is a humanitarian disaster whose dictator clings to power with atrocities and chemical weapons. Therefore, to level the playing field, we must give the rebels more destructive weaponry. The increasingly collateral damage must be very grateful.

Meanwhile, next door in Iran, a majority of the people, in something called an election, expressed their demand for change. How did a vile theocracy that builds bombs, supports terrorism and rigs votes, let that happen? America’s default reaction is that any expression of democracy in the Middle East is a vote for America’s values. But maybe the Iranians decided they wanted a different, more moderate and less belligerent approach to the world based on their own values – just as we did in 2008. And maybe, instead of arming dissident groups we don’t understand, so they can fight their way to the kind of elections that don’t work in Iraq, we could look at a different way, one that goes back to Gandhi and Havel and Mandela and that just might be emerging in Iran.

The Nameless Ones

The byline caught my eye. Beneath an incomprehensible headline about an increasingly complicated and bloody war (“In Besieged Area of Syria, Bitterness of Sunnis Points to Rending of Sects”), I read “By an Employee of The New York Times and Anne Barnard.” Anne Barnard is an experienced foreign correspondent for the Times. But who is the unnamed employee, and why is he or she nameless? Even the dateline is vague” “Near Qusayr, Syria.” Clearly Barnard is outside Syria, but the lead reporter is traveling with a rebel group in an area of the most intense fighting. Yesterday, as the Syrian army was recapturing the town of Qusayr, the nameless reporter described a people in misery and a landscape laid waste.

The reporter gives us, when he can, the names of the fighters and the victims. To humanize an inhuman existence, he has put his own life in peril, for in this war, as in so many like it around the world, there is no sanctuary for correspondents. Nor is there for others who work anonymously in the midst of carnage to ease the suffering. Red Crescent (The Islamic Red Cross) workers care for victims without regard to their status or politics. Doctors treat all the wounded, operating in makeshift basements without anesthetics or drugs. In a war in which the combatants have become unbendingly sectarian, killing those who are different because they are different, these medical workers, volunteers  and reporters risk their lives on behalf of our common humanity.

Bully Boys

Kim Jong-un’s creepy behavior has now been traced to his brief stint on the Rutgers Basketball Team under Coach Mick Rice, who was fired yesterday, after a video showed him kicking his players, throwing balls in their faces, and screaming homophobic slurs. One of his regular targets, it turns out, was the 5-foot, ¼-inch dictator, whom Rice derisively dubbed “Little Queen.” Kim demanded to play power forward, but Rice told him to “get your G**ky ass over with the point guards,” suggesting he run through the forwards’ legs. Kim couldn’t dribble, and he only passed the ball to his bodyguard. But his threats to shoot were taken so seriously that the other point guards quit the team. Rice rode him mercilessly. “Kim,” he sneered. “That’s a girl’s name. Is it short for Kimberly?” And from then on, his name was “Kimberly,” even though he has a long list of official nicknames that include Outstanding Leader, Great Successor, Brilliant Comrade, Young General, Young Master and Lil Kim (!).

North Korean propaganda insists that Kim went to Rutgers, not to play basketball, but to “learn bullying at one of the best places for that,” and it’s no coincidence that he is threatening nuclear war on the eve of the Final Four, college basketball’s biggest weekend, nor that he has hired Denis Rodman to coach his 2016 Olympic team.

Breaking News: American rapper Lil’ Kim (“Hard Core,” “The Naked Truth”) is suing Kim Jong-un for identity theft.

America and the World

Those of us who grew up following Major League baseball love lists, and the latest to catch my eye was “Ten Countries that Hate America Most.” They are, in reverse order: (10) Serbia; (9) Greece; (8) Yemen; (7) Iraq; (6) Iran; (5) Egypt; (4) Lebanon; (3) Algeria; (2) Palestine; (1) Pakistan Note who isn’t on the list. Not a single country from Latin America, where resentments once ran high. But it’s been a while since United Fruit overthrew a government, and Obama’s presidency has burnished our image with Latino peoples. Nor are any of our Cold War enemies, from Russia to Vietnam. Finally, countries with mafias apparently find it more profitable to deal directly in our economy than to waste time hating us.

The presence of erstwhile allies in the war on terror (Egypt, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq) brought to mind a passage from Peter Olszewski’s Land of a Thousand Eyes, in which he asks a group of Burmese if they want to be liberated by the Americans: “The answer was a vigorous no because, they said, an American invasion would simply be exchanging terror for horror. . . . Terror was living with the regime, and horror was being saved from it by the Americans.” And drones do not appear to enhance our popularity.

Yet, I find that, while many people I meet dislike America’s actions in the world, they hold America in great esteem. It still shines, as it did for Hugh Maguire, who told me that when his ship sailed into New York Harbor 65 years ago, he refused to believe that New York City lay before him. “Back home,” he said, “we thought the streets were paved with gold.”

Stumble of the Week

Bullying is not only for young males, as 76-year-old John McCain demonstrated when he went after Chuck Hagel during nomination hearings for Secretary of Defense. Still infuriated over Hagel’s opposition to the Iraq war (not to mention to McCain’s 2008 presidential candidacy), McCain attacked his former friend for opposing the 2007 “surge,” which has become the last straw of Republican honor in Iraq. But Hagel was right. The costs were enormous and the gains short-lived, as the current situation in Iraq makes clear. It’s time for those who insist on resurrecting in Iraq the American honor that was buried in Vietnam to recognize the parallels: two ill-conceived and badly executed wars, marked by “collateral damage” and fought in the end primarily to extricate our own troops. If the purpose of war is to extricate our troops from the mess we created, umm . . . Hearts and Minds. We have read far too much about the tragic brain damage suffered by professional football players. San Francisco 49er cornerback Chris Culliver is only 24, but his pre-Super Bowl comments show that muddled brains can come young. “I don’t do the gay guys, man,” he said in an interview. “Can’t be with that sweet stuff.” His damage control? “The derogatory comments I made yesterday were a reflection of thoughts in my head, but they are not how I feel.”

Liberal Hollywood’s image was jolted by a recent study that reported that two of the 10 highest-grossing film actors, Tom Cruise and John Travolta, are Scientologists, and a third, Clint Eastwood, talks to empty chairs.

Hagel

The nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense illustrates again what so many politicians and pundits keep missing – and that is how fundamentally centrist the Obama administration has been. That may change in the next four years, but I would be surprised. My sense is that Obama has generous instincts on human rights and dignity issues, which drive, for example, his health-care initiative. The communitarian philosophy that his right-wing antagonists denounce as socialism, seems more an effort to build an inclusive consensus than to impose a big-government solution. And his foreign policy seems intent on building a similar consensus internationally by returning to the principles Thomas Jefferson set forth in his first inaugural: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." Nowhere is this rethinking more necessary than with Israel, and the time seems propitious: last week’s elections showed that Israelis themselves are tired of the intransigent politics of their leaders. Chuck Hagel is well qualified to lead the effort to reconsider our defense policies there and elsewhere. His experiences under fire in Vietnam gave him a skepticism about war, whose glories are so often touted by those who avoided its carnage. And it’s worth remembering that the department he will lead changed is name from War to Defense in 1947. But that hasn’t penetrated to the people now mounting an unprecedented public and well-financed attack on Hagel’s nomination. Leftovers from last fall’s SuperPACs, they embody big money's continuing and insidious determination to have its way.

History Lesson

In his wonderful book, The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan asks us to consider evolution, not just from our own perspective, but from that of the things we grow. He gives four examples of how a plant’s appeal to a particular human desire enables it to gain an advantage in its fight to survive and propagate, which it then ruthlessly exploits. We should suspend, suggests Pollan, our conventional – and certainly Biblical – view of ourselves as gardeners in control of the earth and try to see creation from other creatures’ points of view. Having arisen this morning to day four of the vicious flu, I see his point. And while it’s hard to work up much empathy for the germs, it’s instructive to think of the process as Pollan does. After a sneak attack made more devious by the flu shot I had had two weeks before, the germs are now clearly in control of my body, having come out of nowhere, like Genghis Khan’s hordes, to crush a more advanced civilization. My germs, though, seem more like the Europeans in Africa, who appropriated the land, superimposed their own institutions on a weakened culture, and forced the natives to do their bidding. I wonder if my settlers believe, as the British did, that they are doing me a favor by cleansing me of the evils of my primitive practices. But Pollan – and history – have shown that they are there solely for their self-seeking purposes, and I must quietly marshal my strength to drive the invaders out.

Israel 56 Palestine 2

“There is no nation on earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders,” said Barack Obama in response to Israel’s retaliation against Hamas last week, and that is certainly true (although many countries have had to). “The tactic is deterrence. Our strategy is survival,” wrote Michael Oren Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. “Bound by its genocidal theology and crude anti-Semitism, Hamas cannot be induced to make peace. But it can be deterred from war.”

Whether Israel is acting within the legal and moral parameters of war and self-defense is a matter of opinion. What is a fact, however, is that Israeli firepower is killing non-combatants at 28 times the rate of Hamas rockets. Israeli and U.S. diplomats assert that this is a price that must be paid for a short-term cease-fire and an unsustainable peace.

No “Just War” theory justifies the killing of non-combatants in such a lopsided ratio. In a fascinating series last week, philosopher Jeff McMahon discussed current efforts to modernize the theory, which dates to Saint Augustine, “in ways that will bring it into closer congruence with the morality of war.” But the more we try to do so, the more we see that moral war is an oxymoron – 75 million people were killed in World War II, two-thirds of them non-combatants. That was “the good war.”

It seems inadequate simply to give thanks that I who write this and you who read it have not been innocent casualties in the insanity of war, so let's pledge to work to stop the carnage.

Cutting the Grass

The inevitable happened again again last week: Hamas began launching missiles into southern Israel; and the Israelis unleashed a furious response that produced hundreds of Palestinian casualties for that of each Israeli. Images of dead children, wounded non-combatants, and physical carnage filled the world’s newspapers, as the great powers called for a ceasefire and the proxy fighters dug in for more. One reason the almost-seven-decade war in the Middle East seems so insoluble, at least to me, is that the combatants are in so many respects mirror images of each other. Israelis and Palestinians are fighting for their survival and for what each insists is its homeland. Each carries deep wounds from their histories of unspeakable mistreatment, including genocide and forced Diasporas. Each has a collective story, forged over time, that insists on a right of return. Yet that story insists that the legitimacy of one negates the legitimacy of the other.

Each insists it is fighting a just war, which vindicates the use of horrendous practices in its pursuit. The Palestinians fire rockets indiscriminately into Israel. The Israelis respond with a disproportionate ferocity that, despite their sophisticated weaponry, kills hundreds of non-combatants. They call their tactic of periodically decapitating the Hamas infrastructure “cutting the grass.”

This is a war of missiles and bullets, blood and death. But it is also a war of the language of justification, which goes back at least to St. Augustine and which has rendered creative thinking impossible. Tomorrow I want to ask if it is logically possible for both sides to be fighting a “just war?”

A Modest Proposal (Updated)

With tonight’s final presidential debate focused on foreign policy, here are two issues we haven’t heard much about: climate change and the world’s poor. As it happens, they are not not unconnected. Half the world’s poorest people live in India and China, while another quarter live in Pakistan, Nigeria and Indonesia. Coincidentally, perhaps, the five countries where climate change kills the most people are China, India, Nigeria, Pakistan and Indonesia: three million die annually, and another 420 million are negatively affected. Not one of the five is among the world’s poorest countries. In fact, all are growing rapidly, and at least three have nuclear weapons. But their most distressed people are increasingly the victims of both poverty and environmental devastation.

What will happen, I pondered, if the world does nothing, as the world seems bent on doing? And then it hit me . . . Laissez-faire! . . . or “Laissez les eaux furieux rouler” as they used to say in New Orleans, “Let the wild waters roll.” If we continue to deny the reality of climate change and ignore the plight of the poor, the bottom billion will disappear. There will be no need for the birth-control programs that so irritate Republicans, nor for huge transfer payments to the developing world. Global purchasing power will be little affected, while thousands of miles of new beachfront will open up. Not since Jonathan Swift’s modest proposal that the destitute Irish sell their children for food to the English gentry has a solution presented itself that so benefits rich and poor alike.

Oh, Canada

So far, no pundit has commented on a simple word change uttered more than once on Tuesday evening by Mitt Romney, who talked not about “American” energy independence, but about “North American” energy independence. This was no meaningless slip of the tongue. North America includes Canada and Mexico, and if I were Canada, I’d sit up and pay attention. Canada has the second highest proven oil reserves in the world. It is the world’s third-largest producer of natural gas and second-largest wheat exporter. It has large coal resources and is known as “the Saudi Arabia of fresh water.” Its tar sands, which Romney wants to connect forthwith to the Keystone pipeline, produce some of the world’s dirtiest fossil fuels. Canada has, in short, just about everything we need in terms of natural resources, and Mexico has long been a source of cheap labor . . . including in the Romneys' front yard.

I am not suggesting that Romney plans to invade Canada, as he will clearly have his hands full with Iran and China. But the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which Romney supports, suggests the possibility that a signatory nation cannot restrict the extraction and exploitation of its natural resources of natural resources. This has become a huge issue with regard to water, as Canadian and U.S. political and corporate interests have developed wild schemes to divert Canada’s water flow from Hudson Bay to the Mississippi River.

Like junkies everywhere, we need a better way to address our addiction than getting our hands on more dirty needles.

Sharing the Pie

For me the world’s beacon of hope over the last 20 years has not been the United States, which has dissipated its leadership role in a series of wars and sought to impose its agenda in the name of freedom, but South Africa, which came out of the long ugly era of apartheid intent on facing both its past and its future with candor. South Africans have tried to grapple with their divisions of race and economic inequality through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (despite it Orwellian name), while we have spent much of the last 40 years sweeping those issues under the rug. Because of the amazing figure of Nelson Mandela, who emerged from years of solitary confinement with a smile and an embrace, rather than a grimace and a gun, South Africa held out hope that people could move beyond their awful history and live together peacefully.

So I was saddened to read of the crisis that grips South Africa, as much as anything because it is a crisis that grips so much of the world. Launched with a combination of hope and pragmatism from a past of oppression and violence, South Africa raised expectations – among its own people and a watching world – which it could not satisfy. It is a nation of great natural wealth and enormous human poverty, and in an era of global recession and environmental limits, the response of the political and corporate leaders has not been to share the pie more equitably but to take bigger pieces for themselves.

Conversion and Conversation

“Working with the private sector, the program will identify the barriers to investment and trade and entrepreneurialism in developing nations. In exchange for removing those barriers and opening their markets to U.S. investment and trade, developing nations will receive U.S. assistance packages focused on developing the institutions of liberty, the rule of law, and property rights.”             Mitt Romney, Clinton Global Initiative, Sept. 25, 2012 “I would like to begin today by telling you about an American named Chris Stevens. . . . .As a diplomat, he was known for walking the streets of the cities where he worked, tasting the local food, meeting as many people as he could, speaking Arabic, listening with a broad smile."            Barack Obama, United Nations, Sept. 25, 2012

Each excerpt represents an approach to foreign policy. Mitt Romney lays out the traditional American position of opening markets and removing obstacles to private investment in developing countries. This approach, which has been used by administrations of both parties, rewards compliant nations with aid packages meant to strengthen the institutions that capitalism requires. One new wrinkle is the emphasis on microfinance and entrepreneurship, which has a large following across the political spectrum and is also the policy of the World Bank.

The policy epitomized by the late Chris Stevens starts from a place of respect for the culture of others – walking their streets, tasting their food, speaking their language and, above all, listening to them.

Perhaps it is the difference between a Peace Corps volunteer and a missionary, but imposing our values hasn’t worked. It is time to understand theirs.

Beyond Benghazi

Mitt Romney’s responses to the fatal attacks in Benghazi were predictably appalling in both their timing and their content. In his desperation to be president he has become a two-dimensional man: one dimension toadies to the Republican Party’s major donors and immoderate base; the other attacks President Obama with unfiltered ferocity. After being pummeled by the neo-conservatives for not mentioning Afghanistan, Iraq or our troops in his convention speech, Romney was quick to get his saber out yesterday, and his first target was the president:

“It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

The accusation is untrue, its timing disgraceful, coming before the facts were clear and on the heels of the deaths of four American diplomats. That was a time to come together.

In his effort to extricate himself, Romney dug deeper: "It's a terrible course for America to stand in apology for our values. It’s never too early for the U.S. government to condemn attacks on Americans and defend our values.” Which is what the administration did.

And what are those values? This is a question few address lest they be accused of disloyalty. But for me this election is about values, about what kind of a country we want America to be. I believe our values of compassion and community, of standing up to bullies and for human rights, of protecting the earth and looking out for each other, are in greater danger of being derailed by what is happening here than what is happening elsewhere.

2,000

With our national debt at $16 trillion (and our combined public and private debt at $56 trillion); with the world’s population in excess of 7 billion; with the current presidential campaign estimated to cost $6 billion, 2,000 seems like a very small number. It is the number of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan in what has become America’s longest war. You wouldn’t have known that from the Republican convention last week, nor from the party’s platform, which mentions the conflict only once – in a paragraph almost at the end, criticizing the Obama administration for making military decisions based on political calculations but saying nothing about what a Romney administration would do. The platform also firmly opposes the reinstatement of any form of draft, including universal service, which means that a small minority of Americans will continue to fight in our conflicts . . . which is why we do not have the protests we had when everybody’s children were eligible.

I have little hope the Democratic convention will do better. Like much else that he has faced over the last four years, Obama inherited two off-the-books military quagmires from the Bush administration. But he early on made Afghanistan his war – the 2008 party platform promised to “win in Afghanistan,” by sending in “at least two additional combat brigades.”

That was then. Now the United States is again in a war whose objective has become to bring the troops home without losing too much face. For the families we have sacrificed to that end, 2,000 is not a small number at all.

Bombs Away

“The United States dropped more bombs on Laos than on Germany and Japan in World War II.” The BBC newsman uttered that sentence yesterday as I was driving along thinking of nothing in particular. He had one of those professional British voices that lull you into a half-listening sense of a world in order – “I say, Jeeves, will you pack the soup-and-fish, and we’ll jump into the two-seater and toodle on down to Blandings.”

Then it sunk in: more bombs on Laos than on Germany and Japan. We dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and over just three days in 1945, waves of US and RAF bombers made 15 square miles of downtown Dresden disappear.

We weren’t even at war with Laos. Yet an average of one B-52 bombed the country every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. When we were finished, we had delivered 260 million bombs – a ton for each Laotian – making them the most heavily bombed people, per capita, in the history of the world.

About a third of the bombs failed to explode, and they have killed an estimated 20,000 people since. Hilary Clinton returned to Laos yesterday, the first official American visit since we left Southeast Asia in 1975, and one of those who greeted her was a young man who had lost both hands and his eyesight on his 16^th birthday.

He is what we now call collateral damage. If it happened here, we’d undoubtedly find another name for it.

The Good Drone

Sixty-eight years ago this morning, allied forces landed on the Normandy beaches and began the push through France that would end the war in Europe within a year. World War II, known as “the Good War,” was the deadliest war in history. Over 60 million people were killed, more than 2.5% of the world’s population. Yesterday, a CIA drone strike in Pakistan killed Abu Yahya al-Libi, Al Qaeda’s deputy leader, in what we are told is a major blow against terrorism.

Why does the world not seem safer this morning?

Because the war on terrorism is the current century’s equivalent of “the good war,” we justify the use of unmanned drones to seek out and kill people thousands of miles away. But the program seems at least morally uncertain and, in the long run, strategically counterproductive.

Exactly a week after D-Day, the Germans unleashed a barrage of unmanned V-1 rockets that did far more damage to Britain than had the entire Blitz. Three months later came the V-2, which, according to Lynne Olson’s Citizens of London, “traveled faster than sound and approached their targets in total silence.”

There is a huge distinction between Hitler’s rockets, which were weapons of indiscriminate destruction, and the drones, which are infinitely more precise. And yet, the latter are clearly descendents of the former, which, wrote Evelyn Waugh, were “as impersonal as the plague,” bringing death suddenly from the sky.

Both weapons killed; neither brought victory to those who used them; and in Germany’s case, the rockets led to Nuremburg.

Is More Better?

After determining that China has been “dumping” its heavily subsidized solar panels on the U.S. market, the Commerce Department recently imposed duties of 31 percent on imported Chinese panels. This set off the predictable debate about free trade and protectionism, trade wars and global capitalism, the economics of alternative energy and Chinese currency manipulations.

It’s way too complicated for me, but a debate on NPR yesterday pitted US panel manufacturers against panel distributors and an environmentalist from the Rocky Mountain Institute. The manufacturers pushed for the tariff because of what they claim is China’s drive to create an international monopoly. By unfairly subsidizing its manufacturers, they argued, China has undermined the U.S. domestic industry – and ensured the transfer of thousands of jobs overseas.

The others raised concerns about the impact of substantially higher panel prices on the still-fledgling efforts to shift America from fossil fuels to alternative energy, and they forecast continue dependence on “foreign oil” and increased contributions to global warming.

Despite the variety of their views, they were united on the need to produce more of what all accepted as an unmitigated good: sustainable energy. In the last depression Americans were promised a chicken in every pot; in this one it is a solar panel on every roof.

But one reason we are in this mess is because of our insistence that more is better, that we can have our cake and eat it too. In a finite world, maybe we can’t – and maybe it’s time to talk, not just about alternative sources of energy, but about alternative ways to live.