Berkin Elvan, then 14, got caught up in street battles in Istanbul between police and protesters on June 16 while going to buy bread for his family. He slipped into a coma and became a rallying point for government opponents, who held regular vigils at the hospital where he lay in intensive care.
. . . Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the main target of last year’s demonstrations, has so far declined to apologise for any of the protesters’ deaths. He has riled opponents, however, by praising the police response to what he and his allies depict as a foreign-backed coup attempt as “heroic”.
Between the Islamic Small Wars and its pack of malignant narcissists and renewed Russian imperialism driven by the vertical of the hour Putin and his coterie, I think we’re going to see a lot of breathtakingly callous violence perpetrated by the same and lied about in similar ways.
The recent revolution in Ukraine cannot be Yanukovych’s fault, except perhaps for being weak in the face of western-backed nationalist fascist aggression, or so he might say; ditto for whatever Russians may be thinking about Putin tonight while he most certainly intends to annex Crimea, regardless of the true fealty, or lack thereof, on the part of Crimean Ukrainians: and so it goes for Assad and Khamenei and too many others around the world.
Put it in common punk talk: “They wasn’t doin’ nothin’.”
On one hand, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani continues to engage the international community in a diplomatic process over Tehran’s nuclear program. He has achieved many successes in a charm offensive designed to rebrand his country as a reasonable and more moderate international player.
Simultaneously, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and its overseas special operation unit, the Quds Force, are strengthening, financing, and arming terrorist organizations all over the Middle East.
Iran, at a glance, has been sewing conflict around the middle east, building its own energy industry, establishing itself as a nuclear power — well, no one has yet stalled that ambition or dampened the regime’s enthusiasm for achieving it — and it illustrates its efforts in blood, or else why release Hezbollah to defend and sustain the brutality of the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad? Against that sweeping influence in regional payola and arms shipments, Israel’s recent interdiction of arms intended for Gaza provides but a glimpse of Ayatollah Khamenei’s greater ambitions as the middle east’s greatest Lord of War.
At 21:15 local time Iraq, on December 26, 2013, Camp Liberty was targeted by dozens of missiles of different types. In the early hours 3 members of the Iranian resistance were slain and more than 50 were reported injured, some in critical condition.
This is the fourth missile attack on Iranian dissidents in Camp Liberty (Iraq) in 2013, while the Iraqi government has not yet delivered the bodies of those massacred during the September 1, 2013 attack on Camp Ashraf, to Liberty residents for burial.
While American President Barrak Obama gives diplomacy and peace a chance over Iran’s developing nuclear weapons building potential, Ayatollah Khamenei’s efforts to produce influence and obtain it throughout the region has been also developing unobstructed. With that in mind, Israel’s interception of a lone arms shipment doubtless intended to arm Hamas for the destruction of the Jewish-majority state represents but a small interruption in the Ayatollah’s efforts to turn a large wheel, a wheel that, in fact, has turned.
In light of unfolding events in Ukraine, the question now arises whether anyone in the Kremlin is thinking of how Russia’s own kleptocratic regime will fare once the population begins to question the right of their rulers to loot their country in the way that Viktor Yanukovych and his cronies have been doing.
It appears the thugs want to remain thugs, crashing peaceful demonstrations, vandalizing cars, beating unarmed innocents.
Perhaps Putin’s oligarchs wish to remain responsible for paying thugs to do thuggish things for political ends a while longer.
Yo ho ho!
One more hour.
However, it would not surprise me to see, say, Gary Kasparov and Mikhail Khodorkovsky running for office in Russia some (intentionally vague) years from now, but realpolitik today has it that Vladimir Putin controls the wealth of a vast and uncertain Russian Federation, and he’s not only sustaining his own self-aggrandizement but that of a host of interests who may fear that when he’s gone, if ever, their own channels wealth and power will vanish as well.
* * *
As the erstwhile British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli once sourly remarked, “What we anticipate seldom occurs, and what we least expect generally happens.” Russia watchers in the West expected the Russian economy to prosper, as did the Chinese economy, once Boris Yeltsin, the first freely elected Russian president, cast off the communist mantle in 1991. Instead, he fostered the growth of crony capitalism, deliberately enriching a handful of men in return for their political support. Since Yeltsin’s resignation in 1999, journalists and scholars have begun to analyze his regime more frankly.
According to US diplomats, his main motivation for carrying on is to guarantee the safety of his own assets and those of his inner circle. No one quite knows how much Putin and his friends are worth. (Several of them feature prominently on the Forbes annual list.) But the sums involved allegedly total many billions of dollars.
Although Putin’s escapades — or rackets — may have him intent on remaining in power for life, he has with Ukraine and his bid to hold Crimea come up against a hard border: the Ukrainians who launched and succeeded with their “Euromaidan” are not having back their deposed arch-kleptocrat Viktor Yanukovich, and what got to Viktor in mid-stride may now through Ukraine-launched spoken Russian — for not all of Ukraine’s Russian speakers are with Putin — zing through the air and Internet back to Vladimir.
With or inspiring “consequences”.
The political imbroglio over Crimea isn’t about the fate of Crimea, which is secure if it does not become the centerpiece in a Syrian-style civil war, but rather about the limits to Putin’s projection of power and, perhaps too, his time in power as the oligarchs and the Russian people en masse and outside of the tightly knit power circles in Moscow find their way to standing on their own feet.
* * *
As I have said for years, it is a waste of time to attempt to discern deep strategy in Mr. Putin’s actions. There are no complex national interests in a dictator’s calculations. There are only personal interests, the interests of those close to him who keep him in power, and how best to consolidate that power. Without real elections or a free media, the only way a dictator can communicate with his subjects is through propaganda, and the only way he can validate his power is with regular shows of force.
“This is our land,” Arseniy Yatsenyuk told a crowd gathered at the Kiev statue to writer and nationalist Taras Shevchenko. “Our fathers and grandfathers have spilled their blood for this land. And we won’t budge a single centimeter from Ukrainian land. Let Russia and its president know this.”
Khodorkovsky’s voice shook and his lips at one stage quivered as he told the receptive crowd he was deeply shocked by the violence that has gripped the ex-Soviet state.
“I want you to know — there is a different Russia. There are people who despite the arrests, despite the long years they have spent in prison, go to anti-war demonstrations in Moscow,” Khodorkovsky said in reference to the dozens arrested last week near the Kremlin during a protest against Russia’s de facto seisure of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula.
Putin may bellow about anti-Semitic nationalist Ukrainians seizing power in Kiev and his Russian army standing in to defend Slavs in Crimea — and oh how that bullshit rolls through the old propaganda press — but, for the record, an IDF-experienced Jew named “Delta” helped defend the “Blue Helmets of Euromaidan” — he seems to feel anti-Semitism is barely there — and Ukrainians have made plans to stay away from an illegal referendum on Crimea, rendering voting fixed from that perspective alone.
Sochi may have been Putin’s zenith, a fine $52 billion hour, but the planting of Russian troops in Crimea seems a step down for the statesman and a big step backward in time for Russia. In Crimea, Putin may be expected to lose his balance, to tumble off his landing while the atrocities spinning off Assad’s brutality in Syria fly into the past beside him along with the many other dark phantoms of a suddenly long ago Soviet ignominy.
On Ukraine and Crimea, on democracy and human rights in Russia, forget about Ketchum and company and what they do for money: go with the girls, Femen and Pussy Riot, for integrity.
Obama said Thursday that the referendum would violate both the Ukrainian constitution and international law. He called on Russia to help reduce tensions on the Crimean Peninsula, as he ordered sanctions on Russians involved in Russia’s military intervention and Ukrainians who have jeopardized democracy and looted national assets. Obama later spoke by phone with Putin for more than hour.
Putin also claims that “there is every reason to believe” chemical weapons were “used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists,” despite a forthcoming U.N. report that will reportedly finger the Assad regime as the culprit.
I’m going with Femen — those gals put their boots on the ground and boobies in the air every time out, never mind catching cold.
One might wish one could say as much of Russians standing off to the side of Russian nationalists whom Putin means to portray as majority Russians, the only Russians, the Russians who are represented, at least by himself, not by the pestered Alexy Navalny (three hours ago: “Navalny Fined for Participation in Unsanctioned Public Gathering,” RFE — it’s got to be back in business big time with Russia’s rush backwards to despotism) or the now absent-from-Russia-until-Putin-leaves Gary Kasparov:
Mr. Putin belongs to an exclusive club, along with Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Miloševic, as one of the very few leaders to invade a neighboring nation in the nuclear age. Such raw expansionist aggression has been out of fashion since the time of Adolf Hitler, who eventually failed, and Joseph Stalin, who succeeded. Stalin’s Red Army had its share of battlefield glory, but his real triumph came at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, three months before the end of the war in Europe. There Stalin bullied a feeble Franklin Roosevelt and a powerless Winston Churchill, redrawing the Polish borders and promising elections in Poland when he knew that the Communist government the Soviets were installing was there to stay.
In Washington, D.C., Ketchum represents Vladimir Putin and Putin’s Russia. One may trust it was well paid for the September placement denying Assad’s use, well investigated, of chemical warheads in the Syria’s civil war.
At least one might consider Ketchum in the best of like company:
In May 2009, Waldman filed paperwork with the DOJ indicating he would be working with Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska to provide “legal advice on issues involving his U.S. visa as well as commercial transactions.”
Deripaska had his U.S. visa revoked in 2006 due to longstanding concerns about his links to organized crime and because the State Department was concerned he lied to American investigators who were looking into his business.
American Executives Working For Putin – Business Insider – 3/5/2014, on Adam Waldman representing Oleg Deripaska. Others included in the Business Insider story by Hunter Walker include Ketchum Inc.; Robert C. Jones, an attorney “ultimately responsible to Ketchum, Inc. (the money involved: about $535,000 in contracts devoted to working for Russia); William Nordwind, partner in a consultancy serving both Gazprom and Ketchum (I don’t want to relay the earnings — the story is larger than this paragraph and the curious reader may click to it.
Caption: “On the mourning of March 6 2014 Pussy Riot members Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina, along with Peter Verzilov and members of their prisoners rights NGO “Zone of the Rights” arrived in the city of Nizhny Novgorod to inspect a local prison. At 7.20 am an organized group barged into the McDonalds where members of Pussy Riot with their crew were having breakfast and attacked them with pepper spray, green antiseptic and other weapons.”
So sad to see these two so less wild after gulag time, but they were peacefully doing their new NGO thing, and by that I mean doing what human rights NGOs do, i.e., looking into matters involving the victimization of others.
On Ukraine and Crimea, on democracy and human rights in Russia, forget about Ketchum and company and what they do for money: go with the girls, Femen and Pussy Riot, for integrity.
Putin’s “vertical of power” brand has well established the arc that is Putin-Assad-Khamenei, without which Syria’s initial revolution may have taken a turn toward the moderate.
Of course, it may be as useless second-guessing yesterday as trying to outwit tomorrow.
Nonetheless, one tries.
🙂
Along The Bear’s southern flank in eastern Europe, the potential arc “Putin-Orbán-Yanukovych” would seem to be enjoying significantly less success. Suddenly stateless Viktor Yanukovych appears to have leaped into Mother Bear’s arms (or off a roof somewhere — who knows? He’s missing in action); Viktor Orbán appears to have chosen an energy-based stance founded on a nuclear power development agreement with Russia (that may in time transform Hungary into an energy exporting state) while nonetheless hewing to NATO and European interests and values, clearly rebuffing interest Putin may have in recovering or retaining Soviet-era buffer and client states in eastern Europe.
Simply put, Orban has successfully noted the difference between doing business with a Great Power and kissing its ass at the same time.
Not everyone sees Orban as standing strong for European democratic and open society values:
According to LMP politician Katalin Ertsey, who also serves as a deputy chairman of the committee, the Hungarian position in the Ukraine-Russian conflict is “as invisible as Vladimir Putin would like it to be”.
However, Orban’s national security arrangement with NATO and his greater constituency’s pro-European stance better fit a cool-tough trade relationship with Moscow than a warm fuzzy between autocrats with the “vertical of power” at its center.
If the rightness doesn’t make the argument, the wrongness most certainly does: along with the rest of the world, Orban saw what has happened to Yanukovych (and his estates, which have been seized as “frozen assets”).
Putin $14 Billion Nuclear Deal Wins Orban Alliance – Bloomberg – 1/15/2014: “For Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who as opposition leader in 2007 railed against turning his country into the “happiest barrack of Gazprom,” the persuasion took the shape of an offer to lend the country as much as $14 billion. Orban trekked to Moscow yesterday to hand Rosatom Corp., Russia’s state nuclear holding company, a deal to expand Hungary’s lone nuclear power plant using that loan.”
Related: The Putin-Orbán nuclear deal: a short assessment | Heinrich Böll Foundation – 1/27/2014: “A resource-poor country with shaky economic fundaments would make major investments in order to become an energy exporter, and subsidies provided by Hungarian taxpayers would be redistributed among foreign consumers. Around 55-65% of the country’s electricity production would be based on Russian technology, operating at a single location (Paks). This is a project with an obscure past and a murky future.”
Wikipedia Section: Viktor Orbán – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – “At the age of 14 and 15, he was a secretary of the communist youth organisation (KISZ) of his secondary grammar school.[8][9] In 1988, Orbán was one of the founding members of Fidesz (an acronym for Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége, English: Alliance of Young Democrats). The first members were mostly students who opposed the Communist regime.”;
BackChannels Section: Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation | BackChannels – I’ve include this reference to concept predicting that Putin will accuse Ukrainian nationalists of fomenting conflict over Crimea while enjoying the services of Russian nationalist militia in Crimea to help him wrest it from Ukraine. Moreover, the manner in which Putin has presented to Russians (via RT and other state media) the Syrian Civil War may not be so easily repeated in eastern Europe. Word on Crimea gets around in English, Ukrainian, and Russian, and Russians in Crimea and Russia may demand and expect a complete, accurate, and clear explanation for a separatism devolving back to Putin’s own penchant for inexhaustible self-aggrandizement, rather well illustrated by that $52 billion price tag for Sochi (while in the same period Russia pledged $10 million to ease the suffering of Syria’s displaced population).
Empathy with an emphasis on compassion, and here with that as related to casualties and displaced from Syria’s agonizing civil war, signals something good in the general humanity, but it’s not going to be enough to promote band-aids when the war is sustained on the absence of an armed force of a middle and perhaps now modern temperament.
It’s notable also that Russia pledged $10 million to refugee relief in Syria while spending $52 billion, the largest amount ever, for the winter Olympics at Sochi.
___
My partner in the short conversation then said, “Humanity in the true sense has lost all its values.”
___
Not really although it sometimes seems to. We’re a wild species suspended in about, oh, 6,900 living languages, each of which represents a cultural invention and technology and conveys from one generation to the next a behavioral program fit to the character of the language community in a given circumstance in place and time.
I believe the variance in that language-driven and language-derived behavior shapes consciousness and conscience and with regard to empathy, may emphasize the cultivation of that ability to meld emotion and imagination on behalf of someone else, or it may harden the heart against the same.
Other qualities may obtain similar support and the tapestry of whole cultures, whether that of, say, a living sun king or that of a god remote and separate from the mortal, becomes made of such threads. With the aforementioned 6,900 differences in cultural cognitive style wrapped in language, it’s amazing we don’t have more conflict on our plates than we do, but, ever optimistic here, if we drift toward a moderate middle together, we can clean up and forestall a lot of this kind of mess.
The modern dictator’s values — any side (one chessboard – same player on both sides, lol) — build on heroic myth to develop power over others for the purpose of obtaining continuous and inexhaustible “narcissistic supply” — the adoration and adulation of the realm: and they often sail themselves and their own to disaster on the wings of a grandiose messianic delusion.
______
The inspiration for the above portion of threaded conversation appears to be a contrivance but quite pointed:
The best way to save the children is, alas, to save the adults, get enough on to about the same page in their attitudes, ethics, ideals, and values with regard to others, and then get them to challenge, eject, or evolve the kind of deeply narcissistic and lost personalities who have attempted to paint reality for others through what they do in the pursuit of war.
Of the Assad regime and the al-Nusra et al. counterpoints, I’ve remarked “different talk: same walk”: each will use the lives of noncombatants for political chips. Perhaps nowhere in the whole sorry tragedy has that been made more clear than in the approach of each side to the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp, where one side laid siege as part became a rebel base, and the rebels, true to form, used the helpless and unarmed residents as their own human shields.
Is there anyone reading this post that might want to see that obscenity again?
Attitudes and beliefs, including beliefs about Jews, about loyalty, about the west, about the Baath Party and the Soviet Union (or its ghost from 22 years ago) play a role in impeding the development of an effective and true Syrian people’s army. Moreover, but along similar lines, the three sides — Assad; more secular revolutionary forces; and, of course, the al-Qaeda types — have found themselves trapped in the immense shadows cast by the glorious wars of yesteryear, which for each is different: Bashar al-Assad has been trying to fight his father’s war, an armed insurrection against the state; the battles in mind, perhaps literally, for the al-Qaeda affiliates need little introduction and would seem to be expressed in battlefield and political behavior; and the moderates who seem to be carrying around the load of combined internationalist and Islamist hate for Israel, Jews, and “The West” just haven’t found their way to daylight.
I don’t know where to change that “Jew hate” that signals so much else about the three parties sewing Syria with destruction, and I’m not sure it’s my job alone to locate those cognitive switches in the languages alive on the fields of battle, but finding that would be a good place to start.
Syrians needs Syria — I know of no culture free of a relationship with its land and landscape — and they need to own it for themselves in peace.
To obtain that ownership and peace, the defense Syrians may need most of all, the defense most absent in the three years of continuous and brutal fighting, is not defense from Israel, which is treating Syrian wounded today, but defense from those among themselves who would seek their own excessive aggrandizement at the costs now well displayed in death, displacement, and suffering.
Related (updated 3/18/2014) from The Torah, Exodus 31-32:
31The LORD did as Moses asked, and removed the swarms of insects from Pharaoh, from his servants and from his people; not one remained. 32But Pharaoh hardened his heart this time also, and he did not let the people go.
Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians know that the first day or so of establishment is huge as regards the potential defenses of a new state. State leaders, provisional, interim, or old hands know they have got to get on their feet fast; at the same time on this one: where’s the war?
The Ukrainian revolution, what little I’ve seen of it, just hasn’t been about Ukrainian or Russian culture or nationalism — this goes way beyond “hardly” — as much as about kleptocratic and piratical Moscow — Putin’s Moscow –leaning on Ukraine, Russian and Ukrainian Ukraine, for favor and loot, and then promoting a dependency-creating energy-based trade policy to chain Ukraine back to The Bear.
Putin-Assad-Khamenei: okay. It’s good to see them in the same arc, the three amigos of dictatorship (with just one capable of reversing his tracks).
Putin-Yanukovych?
It just wasn’t meant to last.
There are only two main themes for the whole wide world and for Ukraine as regards the recent boot given the government of Viktor Yanukovych: integrity in government; autonomy in self-governance.
It’s a big F-U alright, but not to Russia. Or Russians. Or people who speak Russian.
Putin isn’t Russia.
Putin is what he can command and control of Russia with the levers and methods he has at hand — start with his ability neutralize political rivals like Gary Kasparov and, perhaps, one day, Navalny — and to which he may have become accustomed (while we in the U.S. are counting on him to contain and destroy Assad’s chemical weapons, it’s, gosh, hard griping about his irresponsibility as regards the rest of the war . . . oh, that Arab-borne jihadi thing to close to Saudi ambitions gets in the way too.
Ukraine’s different.
Ukrainian Russians aligning with Russia and not on the take, as it were, may want to revisit what they may doing for Putin to keep themselves in Russian money. I would suggest that if arrangements and contracts are commercial or industrial outside of defense or involve shipping and trade, the will be there no matter what.
The state relationships that seem to be at stake are off to the side of these other two central themes: again, integrity vs. kleptocracy; Ukrainian and Russian self-determination within Ukraine.
Ukraine may turn out a long-term neutral buffer between NATO and Russia, but that’s a peaceful position — pretty good one, actually — where the character of leadership on both sides wakes up in good health.
I cannot suggest that good health might also characterize, say, Bashar al-Assad’s mentality as regards his position in Syria. That one left common sense (if children ask you a few questions, do you wipe them out?), prudent statecraft, and sanity behind years ago.
As regards the best possible Bond villain ever — and he doesn’t even have to live in fiction — Putin suffers as I do: we love the charms of 19th Century aristocracy, but mine is like an architect’s model of a life, a spec of an old apartment box lined with books; Putin has the whole estate, carriages with wings and palaces and all.
I can’t wait to see what he does with Marbella!
In the meantime, Ukraine seems to be breathing on its own again and getting on to its feet, nicely graced with Faberge eggs left behind by the former boss.
FATA has been in the eye of the storm for the past 10 years and other than drones, bombs and shells, what pacification measures have the government taken, other than to be scared witless of the terror merchants and their cronies?
On that horrific and too familiar a kind of story, one of my friends in Islamabad, Asad Khan, who states on his Facebook page, “every human has the right to communicate with the creator, in the manner s/he thinks best . . . “, provided me permission to relay his thoughts here.
As an editor in this process, I’ve added paragraph breaks to help ease the reading, question marks to the interrogative statements, and applied rote grammatical corrections (“has” to “have” for example) where needed.
“MPAs” refers to members of the Provincial Assembly; “MNAs” to members of the National Assembly. There are a few other acronyms sprinkled about (“FC” refers to “Frontier Corps”), but the reader is online too and look-up works fast.
Guest Post by Asad Khan
The Police Service is the most vilified, most underfunded, most politically manipulated, probably most demoralized, and most undertrained of all government services.
With this background of our own home grown “keystone cops”, should we be surprised that the terrorists came calling to the courts and turned it into a shooting gallery, shooting innocent people as if they were sitting ducks.
I think what has happened in Islamabad should not come as a surprise to anyone, least of all to the current political leadership. I have always expounded the view that we should have job descriptions and selection criteria for ministers and other leaders and policy makers. For example what are the qualifications of the interior minister, other than the fact that a whole bunch of nincompoops have voted him to the national assembly on false promises?
The same holds true for the rest of that galaxy of greats and near greats that adorn the corridors of power in Islamabad.
First of all I would like to ask the interior minister to define the roles of the police departments/service, the FC and various other “law enforcement” agencies that he lords over?
Probably he will not know the answers to this/these question(s).
Next what is the internal security policy for the nation as whole, not just Raiwind, Lahore, and Punjab in that order, and not just security for the star spangled generals, judges, ministers and MPAS or MNAS?
Does the interior minister know the shelf life of a cartridge in the bandolier of a Police Constable, or when it was purchased, and to how many rain falls and sun shines that cartridge has been exposed to?
Probably it is beneath the dignity of that snotty, arrogant minister to know such trivia.
Why must the Police Constable die in the line of duty protecting a judge who does not value his (police constable’s) life?
What has the government done for Malakand, post 2009 conflict other than some nicely written fraudulent reports?
FATA has been in the eye of the storm for the past 10 years and other than drones, bombs and shells, what pacification measures have the government taken, other than to be scared witless of the terror merchants and their cronies?
We are adopting the line of appeasement not because of our love for the Taliban, but because we are scared blue of them.
Has the Interior Minister, or the PM or the CM ever been to the funeral of a police constable or an FC jawan killed in the line of duty in KPK?
I don’t think so.
Has a survey ever been conducted to know the views of the police or the FC?
I don’t think so.
If I were a Police constable or an FC jawan I would not throw my life away for the protection of some judge or politician.
Have the powers that be ever stood in the shoes of a police constable and thought of these things?
The post-event inquiries ordered by the Head Judge, the PM, CM and what not make me laugh.
It is a joke on the nation.
Pakistan can only get out of the morass it is in if we have honest, decent men and women at the helm of affairs, but unfortunately this will never be. The West is rooting for parliamentary democracy because they know that this sham “democracy” is our nemesis and will be the cause of our eventual downfall. Robber barons will keep on replacing one another and this game of musical chairs will keep on going, and we will keep on sinking deeper and deeper until the sands of time will cover us and there will be no trace left, and the freebooters will take their loot and head West, to out their miserable lives there.
For the present, this country is being run by mafias and unless their hold is broken, and they are made accountable for their actions, we can bid sayonara to any hope for the better.
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