News-Record.com

After an overnight blizzard of spam, comments are being moderated once more.

One of the things that distinguishes good journalists from ... well, from other types of journalists in particular and other types of people in general is that they tend to rely on evidence, standards, definitions -- discernible reality, in other words.

In the context of the whole world, the fact that other people might not is fine: We'd be a sadder and grumpier group without faith and imagination, and without the visionaries who find a way to make the best of our imaginations real and the earthly saints who manifest that faith and spread it.

Sometimes faith becomes the functional equivalent of reality. That can make the world a much better place, or a much worse one. And the greater the gap between faith (or imagination) and reality when there are real-life consequences either way, the greater the likelihood for trouble.

At least as far back as the Marx Brothers movie "Duck Soup," and possibly as far back as ancient Greece, those caught red-handed doing something they oughtn't have been reduced to a defense along the lines of, "Well, who you gonna believe -- me or your lyin' eyes?" (I think "lyin'" was not in early versions but was added later. To my Southern ears, it works better; your mileage may vary.)

One probably apocryphal story I've heard has the line coming from a man caught in the act of adultery. Another, more plausible though no more supported by evidence, has it coming from a New Orleans politician. (But not, so far as I can tell, Rep. William Jefferson, who might have amended the phrase to read, "Who ya gonna believe, me or my money-stuffed freezer?" But I digress.)

At its base, in this defense a transgressor calls upon a victim/witness/associate to take the transgressor's word over whatever tangible evidence or definition might call the transgressor's word into question, no matter how irrefutable that evidence might be.

It is a plea, in other words, to deny reality, to understand the nature of the people and institutions involved as if that reality does not exist and to act -- or decline to act -- as if that reality does not exist.

Some people are receptive to such pleas. But will I be, if you and I are standing out on the sidewalk and water is puddling in my shoes? If I observe, "It's raining," and my friend says, "No, it's not! Who you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes?" I'm gonna believe my soakin'-wet feet and, thus, my lyin' eyes, Every. Single. Time.

Especially when my reporter ID is hanging around my neck.

If you're tired of reading about buxom dead celebrities, and I certainly am, go read this.

And reflect, please, not only on its substance but on the ways and means in which it is coming to the attention of at least a small fraction of the American public.

We're scheduled to upgrade our blogging system on Wednesday; while that's going on, our blogs will be unavailable for a while. We've gotten more details, but they're along the lines of "this might happen" or "that might happen" so I'll spare you. The important thing is that the blog URLs shouldn't change.

I've got another story today on veterans' problems in dealing wth the government. This one focuses on problems primarily created by government -- lack of money for health care. The executive branch (the Department of Veterans Affairs, which auditors say is marching to the White House beat) doesn't ask for enough money, and while Congress gives it more than it asks for, it still doesn't give the VA enough.

The U.S. has long praised its war veterans but failed to care for them. The history goes from World War I veterans, whose 1932 march on Washington was put down by future war heroes Douglas MacArthur and George Patton, to Operation Iraqi Freedom veterans who wait weeks or months for services.

Unfortunately for both Congress and the president, a perfect storm of issues and the power of the Internet threaten to lay bare the collapse of care and make information about it available to Americans as never before. A few examples:

• The commander of Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the secretary of the Army lost their jobs this past week after The Washington Post reported on poor conditions there.


• Veterans Affairs' backlog of disability claims approaches 400,000 despite repeated warnings dating back years.


• Inadequate VA health care spending means long waits for service even as growing numbers of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans return with wounds. That number is almost 24,000 as of this past week. Many of the returning wounded are hurt severely enough to require long-term or permanent care.


• Up to a third of the servicemen and women who have fought in Iraq, particularly from National Guard and Reserve units, will develop post-traumatic stress disorder.

I've got a short roundup of info sources and other coverage on just how bad the system that cares for our current and former service people has gotten -- and, in the Internet age, how widely that information can be spread and shared: For some reason, it didn't make it online, but I'll see if I can post it here later this morning

• Links to the Washington Post's coverage of problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
• A Newsweek overview of systemic problems.
• The Independent Budget, a detailed annual recommendation to Congress of funding for veterans needs prepared by a coalition of veterans service organizations.
• Data on pending benefits claims, in spreadsheet form and updated weekly.
• ABC News' report on the VA’s ability to care for patients with traumatic brain injuries.
• An award winning McClatchy (formerly Knight Ridder) series on problems in the VA.

One other thing. Regarding the recently uncovered problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and in particular to a question from Chris Wallace about the firing of the Walter Reed commander and the Secretary of the Army, Fox News anchor Brit Hume said this on Sunday (and if you don't believe me, by all means follow the link and watch for yourself). My comments are in italics.

I think it tells you a lot about the effect of the last election and the political atmosphere in Washington. This is an administration which is known or had been known for sticking by people even when they were embattled.

Well, yes, the administration had been known for sticking with people even when they'd made major mistakes ... and Hume seems to be implying that letting our injured returning service people and their families live, and try to recover, in such squalor is a POLITICAL problem that would not have arisen had the Democrats not taken over Congress in the 2006 elections, and not a substantive problem of neglect documented as having gone back years.

The idea that conditions at Walter Reed hospital, a hospital that is on its way out of business, had deteriorated, that’s probably one of the reasons they wanted to put it out of business.

Conditions "had deteriorated." Note the phrasing; it implies that the deterioration just happened, that, despite documented complaints and warnings going back years, no one is responsible and that, if anything, this was why the administration was trying to close the place -- and, Hume implies, bore NO responsibility for the quality of conditions in the meantime.

This is unfortunate. It looks terrible, which is the problem. The problem is that it looks as if this administration, which has sent troops into harm's way, is now neglecting them when they're injured and need care and help.

No, the fact that it LOOKS TERRIBLE isn't the problem. The fact that it IS terrible is the problem. The administration HAS neglected wounded personnel and veterans (although in many cases the neglect of older veterans goes back decades and is not exclusive to this administration). Various aspects of that fact have been reported here in the N&R and by other news organizations in Washington and around the country. This is not a debate with a range of opinions. This is a set of facts that journalists and politicians alike can address honestly or not.

But make no mistake about it, this was a -- there was a potential political firestorm on Capitol Hill began to brew about this. The administration did what it did to try to get it over with, and it may well have succeeded.

Again with the "political" argument. This isn't political; it's a demonstrable breach of the country's duty to its active-duty, Reserve and National Guard service people and its veterans, and the burden of proof is on anyone who wants to claim otherwise.

UPDATE, March 6: As some of you know, I have a nephew who is a Marine. I learned this weekend that in a couple of months his unit will be deployed to the Middle East for one year. Not having spoken directly with him, I know no more than what I've told you.

I've informed the editors above me up through JR, and I'm informing you, not because I think my writing about veterans' issues will create an actual conflict of interest but more in the interest of full disclosure, transparency and following the no-surprises rule. So far, my bosses have agreed with me. Should that change, they and/or I will let you know.

UPDATE, March 6: This doesn't apply directly to the VA's funding problems, but it's an issue with respect to the Walter Reed case that I don't think has gotten a lot of attention.

In early 2006, many of the services at Reed were outsourced to a private contractor. The CEO, when he was with Halliburton, had to testify before Congress in 2004 about overcharges for fuel and troop support in the Middle East. The company poorly in ice delivery and other services after Hurricane Katrina.

If these claims are borne out, and the early evidence suggests they will be, then we have a couple of market failures here.

Certainly, cases exist in which privatizing government services makes sense in market terms, and many already exist on the micro level -- getting office supplies, to use a mundane example. Caring for wounded soldiers and providing support for care they receive, however, is almost certainly not one of them: It's not as if many hospitals are competing for the soldiers' business or as if soldiers are in any shape to make competent, informed decisions about from whom they will get their care and the support that care requires.

Moreover, because providing those services is, realistically, the almost exclusive purview of the government, it's a little hard to imagine a real-world scenario in which corporations could compete for the government's business in any meaningful fashion. Accordingly, despite calling it "privatization," what we got here wasn't the market at work, but monopoly -- stemming, it would seem, from political patronage.

Looked at from that point of view, the stacking of the Walter Reed story and the Katrina story on the front page of today's paper makes a little more sense: They have more in common than meets the eye.

My friend David Allen, who spent a number of years working on network security for banking clients and whose computer-security expertise led to changes in N.C. law regarding voting machines, raises an alarm about the offshoring of bank-industry IT.

Anyone want to try to explain how and why he might be wrong?

Just askin'.

I'm not the first to say this because I'm not the first to hear about it from veterans, but Americans wouldn't have to be getting a crash course on governmental care for service members and veterans, particularly for those with disabilities, if that care had been provided all along.

I started writing about problems in the system six months ago, which makes me a rank newcomer on this subject. The problems go back years. We're just one newspaper, not based in the media capitals of New York and Washington. Although our Web site reaches a lot of nonlocal people, the VA has been content to ignore our questions up 'til now. So it took a series by The Washington Post to get people, including other journalists, off their feet. At least the problem is now the flavor of the week for journalists, and perhaps that will lead to real oversight by Congress and, in turn, the true care for service members and veterans that their country has promised them since Lincoln, if not since Washington.

I've got another story up today, focusing on some of the most recent information about problems with the VA's benefits system. I'm trying to follow up for Friday's paper with an article about possible solutions (some coming from the same people who testified about problems.)

Here's the thing about the suggestions so far: Not one of them is new. All of them have been suggested, in more or less the same form, by the Government Accountability Office, veterans service organizations and other advocates, including unaffiliated veterans themselves. Moreover, the VA, according to some of these same reports, has given some of these suggestions only lip service or, in the case of seeking more money from Congress, actually has been rebuffed for political reasons.

But now we get a chance to see what happens when ignorance is no longer an excuse.

Former Ku Klux Klan leader and police informant E.H. Hennis has e-mailed me with a message regarding the truth-and-reconciliation process. With his permission, I'm publishing his e-mail verbatim.

I, E. H Hennis, am an 84 year old disabled Veteran. The FBI asked me to join the Klan which was very strong in the Groometown area. My job was to monitor extremist groups under what was known as comtempro intelligence. I became Exalted Cyclop of the local Klavern #7.

The taxpayers, through the FBI, made the payments on my new Cadillac, paid mileage and upkeep and even paid for repairs when it was shot up and bent up in Richmond, Virginia. My territory was inside of an imaginary line, i.e., Richmond, Virginia, Montgomery, Alabama and Atlanta, Georgia.

The 1979 shooting came well within the scope of my assignment. While the FBI paid me well, I did much work for Captain Bill Jackson of the police department at no charge.

Eddie (Yank) Dawson and I spent much time together before and after the shooting. I probably have much knowledge of what actually happened that people may think that Eddie took to his grave.

I have somewhat overcome a little from a bad stroke that left me so I couldn't even whisper. I am very much crippled but can now talk. I do not drive. However, if someone will furnish me transportation, I will be glad to speak at one of the T & R meetings and maybe set some records straight about what actually happened at the shooting. I haven't read the report but can talk without notes. I will respect anyone's difference of opinion.

If you care to make it some kind of “Bring it on” program, I will answer any questions and I am sure you will hear something different from anything you have previously heard.

You may call me @ 854-8467. Please understand that I suffer from a hearing loss so you must talk really loud when you call for me to understand.

Truth Detector,

E. H. Hennis

UPDATE (3/17/07): Apparently, the blog hasn't been accepting comments for some time, even refusing to let people leave them in moderation. I've changed the appropriate settings, so you should be OK now. If you try to comment and run into a problem, please e-mail me.

Is this thing on? I've heard from a couple of people who say they tried to comment on the post about E.H. Hennis, but I've neither seen the comments nor gotten the e-mail notification I'd normally have gotten if everything were working correctly.

South by Southwest (SxSW hereafter), in Austin, Texas, is going on through Sunday. This huge event focuses on music, film and interactive productions. It features concerts and other performances, panel discussions and a number of other events related, at least nominally, to independent (and therefore, by definition, obscure -- at least pre-Web 2.0) recording artists, filmmakers and what I'll call, for lack of a better term, multimedia artists.

It began as an effort to get local (i.e., Austin-area) bands signed to major record labels. That's the kind of indie/DIY ethic in which I came of age as a musician and deejay, so it resonates with me.

SxSW has been kind of a model for Greensboro's own ConvergeSouth, which focuses more on multimedia than music or film (although it has featured such performances/screenings). Two of the people most responsible for the birthing of ConvergeSouth, Jay Ovittore and Ben Hwang, have suggested that ConvergeSouth might grow into an event like SxSW, an annual appointment for people in these particular areas of creativity.

But at least one SxSW veteran is telling us to be careful what we wish for.

One of my oldest friends, Liz DeBord, grew up in Texas and has largely lived there (and lived large there) since. Pre-parenthood, she attended SxSW regularly. I e-mailed her today about yesterday's Davidson loss in the NCAAs (she also went to Davidson) and said something along the lines of, "Well, maybe I shoulda gone to SxSW," which prompted her to respond at some length. With her permission, I'm posting her e-mail below:

What's Wrong With SXSW

Every year, people spend more and more time bitching and moaning about SXSW. Are we right? Let's look at the evidence:

• SXSW was created to showcase new bands and help them get signed to record labels.
• The panels were geared towards helping bands figure out marketing, contract negotiation, songwriting, touring, etc.
• Bands performing at showcases were, typically, unsigned with a few big shows featuring special perfomances by bands such as Sonic Youth or Patti Smith. Rarely were there performances by big industry bands. Patti Smith may have been inducted into the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame this week, but she's never been mainstream, so her relevance and that of someone like Sonic Youth to SXSW is showing young bands that, yes, you can make a living off of music without being a top 10 artist.
• SXSW featured bands from all over the world, but also really supported Texas bands.
• Showcases could really make a band and bands would scrimp and save to be able to get a badge to send one of their members to SXSW panels.
• Wristbands could be purchased at a reasonable price ($50 to $75) and you could get into shows without a badge. You could walk down Sixth Street and stop in two or three places to see different showcases.

But that was then.

Pete Townshend is the keynote speaker this year. And he's relevant to new music exactly how? Sure, he's a Rock God. I'm not disputing his place in the pantheon of rock royalty. It's great that SXSW is big enough to attract Pete Townshend, but it's also indicative of exactly what is wrong with SXSW.

There are still tons of how-to panels. But a panel called "Nick Drake Remembered"?!@$*&? Please. He's a guy who had a posthumous hit in that VW commercial from a few years ago.

The showcases feature more and more bands who are already signed and who are edging out homegrown talent.

Getting a wristband is nigh on impossible, particularly if you don't live in Austin. Even if you do live in Austin, you'd better be on your toes. If you have a 512 area code (which they double check), you have to sign up for a special text message to be sent to you. At which point you had better be prepared to drop everything to run over to Waterloo Records to purchase your limited to two wristbands at $150 each in person, cash only.

If you have a friend in town who can get you wristbands but who can't house you, you'd better have booked a hotel room a year in advance if you want to be anywhere near the city.

And, even with a wristband, badgers are given priority (rightly so, but they aren't the ones who buy records), so there are an increasing number of venues where you'll get shut out. And forget about trying to go to more than one venue a night. You're better off abandoning the wristband and picking a venue that also has a cash door option, and parking there for the night.Get there early.

I used to come back from SXSW with a huge pile of CDs, purchased from the bands themselves. Now, it's a huge traffic jam and you have to wait hours to eat, hours to get in anywhere, etc. Five years ago, you could already see the signs that it was getting too big to be really fun. And it's just grown exponentially from there.

I'm not sure you want an event to aspire to be SXSW. Because SXSW is more about the music industry than the music.

You really want to know what's wrong with SXSW? This year's big free concert in Waterloo Park is Jefferson Starship.

Now, don't get me wrong. I wish only the best for ConvergeSouth. I've been a presenter or moderator in the '05 and '06 editions. I'm glad my employer is sponsoring it. Although I'm probably not going to take part this year, I'm glad to promote the event on my blog (and that was my choice, not my employer's). I think the people behind it want the best for Greensboro and are working hard to create some of that.

But Liz raises an excellent point: Is SxSW II really the best model for Greensboro?

That's not a rhetorical question, and I'd like to see some wrestling with it, here or elsewhere, sooner rather than later. Because the event will continue to succeed. That success will attract the attention of entities whose visions won't necessarily align with what's best for Greensboro. And it's worth remembering that the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he did not exist.

The Devil might take the form of an oh-my-God-sized corporate sponsorship, or broadcast worldwide on a cable or satellite channel (I subscribe to XM, whose Channel 43 is broadcasting SxSW live as I type this). And any of these things, or all of them, wouldn't necessarily be bad.

But it's better to have that talk now than to have to make hurried and perhaps unwise decisions later. "Creativity on the Web for all people" is an exciting vision and a noble mission. But it needs the most clear-eyed and unromantic protection possible.

Naturally, just as I was posting the other day about former Klansman E.H. Hennis's e-mail saying he'd like to join the truth-and-reconciliation discussion, the commenting went out on our blogging system.

Now that it's back up, I'd like to put this subject back at the top of the blog in hopes more people will join the discussion here (or start their own elsewhere but leave links here).

I'm trying to write a story, but our main publishing system is down. While I try to write a draft in Word and also try to get some reporting done on other stories, I'm also taking note of what's going on around me. Well, except for looking over the shoulder of Taft Wireback in the next cube. He's a former Golden Gloves boxer, and I do not want to rile him.

First, the Braves' starting rotation appears to be in good shape. I have not heard as much about the team's bullpen. This concerns me.

Then, two pieces of news related to big efforts in what open-source journalism:

• NewAssignment.net, the Jay Rosen-led experiment, has launched. You'll find information there about the overall mission and goals, as well as a way to receive an info newsletter and, if you want to participate, a place where you can go to get an assignment. Other links include one where you can contribute story ideas. It's having some minor tech problems related to start-up, but go anyway.
• When the House Judiciary Committee released something on the order of 3,000 documents related to the firings of several U.S. attorneys last night, I'm not sure how long it thought people would take to go through them for the "good parts." Bloggers Josh Marshall and Paul Kiel, who run TPMMuckraker.com, have a history of open-source journalism by pinning down, early in 2005, most congresscritters' public positions on Social Security privatization. Around 1 a.m. today, Kiel wrote, "Josh and I were just discussing how in the world we are ever going to make our way through 3,000 pages when it hit us: we don't have to. Our readers can help." The comments show how quickly 1) they set up a mechanism for readers to contribute with a maximum of verifiability and a minimum of duplicated effort -- and how quickly readers started getting past the filler to the substance.''

Finally, as to House investigations of the firings themselves, this bit from the U.S. News & World Report blog The News Desk:

The Justice Department now says the document dump will contain closer to 2000 documents. [That figure predates the actual, larger dump.]

"You have no idea," said one Justice official, "how bad it is here."

The fear that virtually any piece of communication will have to be turned over has paralyzed department officials' ability to communicate effectively and respond in unison to the crisis, as has the fact that senior Justice officials themselves say they still don't know the entire story about what happened that led to the crisis. So they are afraid that anything they put down on paper could be viewed as lies or obfuscation, when in fact, the story is changing daily as new documents are found and as the Office of Legal Counsel conducts its own internal probe into the matter.

That high-pitched squeak you hear is me playing the world's smallest violin.

Open government, folks. It works from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill right on down to 16 W. Jones St. in Raleigh and 300 W. Washington St. in Greensboro.

Just a minute ago I got a piece of spam aimed at subprime lenders, a subdivision of mortgage lenders who appear to be about to take what looks like a very serious hit.

It started:

Hi,

Are your files threatened by the collapse of the Sub-Prime Market? Do you have disappointed 100% Clients?

WE MAY HAVE THE SOLUTION!

The URL followed, as did a whole bunch of tedious stuff that wouldn't have helped me even if I were a subprime lender.

It's sort of like watching Florida play Florida State -- you want them both to lose.

Except, of course, for the part where the outcome of Florida-Florida State doesn't take significant chunks out of the U.S. housing market. Griffin or Doak stadiums, maybe.

(Disclosure: My current editor's a Florida alum and a good half or so of my late father's family went to FSU, so it's even money whether numbers or propinquity decides this battle.)

Earlier this month, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jim Nicholson ordered the more than 1,400 VA hospitals and other facilities to report back by March 14 on the conditions of their facilities. The order came in the wake of reporting in The Washington Post, starting in February, on horrendous conditions in some portions of Walter Reed Army Hospital. Walter Reed is run by the Department of Defense, not the VA, but Nicholson said he wanted to be proactive.

Well, on Wednesday, the VA released its findings. More than 1,000 problems were reported. That's roughly 1.4 per facility, a figure that probably is meaningless in that it doesn't distinguish between hospitals and clinics, between old facilities and new, and so forth.

Some of the problems were serious: infestations of vermin; bacteria from urine and/or feces; fixtures such as certain types of shower heads in mental-health facilities, including one in Fayetteville, that would make suicide easier. But the department found that 90 percent or more of the problems found were minor, were simply a matter of buildings outliving the codes under which they had been built, or represented long-term wear-and-tear issues rather than more serious problems or outright neglect.

(I visited the Greensboro Vet Center, a mental-health facility, this past week. I was there to conduct an interview for an upcoming story on post-traumatic stress disorder, not an inspection. But as I recall, the facilities appeared neat, clean and organized.)

The problems and conditions reported by the VA were, in turn, self-reported by the facilities, so it's not clear how reliable the numbers and characterizations are. But whether they're reliable or understated, I suspect that some serious problems are now getting attention they previously weren't getting.

In researching the aforementioned article, I came across a paper published in 2004 in the New England Journal of Medicine that analyzed rates of possible mental disorders for returning servicemembers. (I would hotlink except that the URL is about eight lines long, so go here, type in the search term "stigma" and the precise date of July 1, 2004. You'll get more than one response, but the one you're looking for will be obvious from the headline.)

Rates for major depression, generalized anxiety, or PTSD were significantly higher after duty in Iraq (15.6 to 17.1 percent) than in Afghanistan (11.2 percent). As a control, I guess, the researchers also assessed an Army unit before its deployment to Iraq; 9.3 percent met the criteria. Without spending a heck of a lot of time searching, I found one paper online suggesting that the incidence of PTSD in the general population is around 9 percent to start with and another paper that, citing a 1987 source, suggested the general incidence is about 1 percent overall and about 5 percent in a given year. Both sources predate 9/11, which might well have boosted the incidence at least temporarily.

I talked a little bit here about why there might be some PTSD in the general population of people who haven't been deployed to Iraq (or even served in the military). I suspect the severe and ongoing nature of what one experiences and witnesses in combat probably makes the effects on servicemembers who go through that experience more severe and longer-lasting, although I haven' t reviewed research literature. That's the impression of several veterans with whom I've talked.

But even assuming that the general incidence of PTSD in Americans is as high as 9 percent (could be; I'm skeptical), then service in Iraq appears to be doubling the rate right off the plane. Follow-up research will be required because PTSD often doesn't show up for months or years.

Is the country ready? Are its hospitals, outpatient clinics and mental-health facilities ready? Are we ready?

And if we're not, how do we get that way? If Abraham Lincoln is to be believed, we owe our returning servicemembers an answer.

Long and technical story short, Sen. John McCain's presidential-campaign page at the online community MySpace was pulling in copies of a photo from a different server, which it shouldn't have been doing because that was incurring additional expenses from the guy, Mike Davidson, whose account it was. (His version of the story is here.) What McCain's online folks should have done instead was "locally host" the photo -- that is, download a copy, which Mike apparently wouldn't have minded, and posted it on their own server so that their own Web pages could include the photo without drawing from anyone else's Web resources.

Mike decided that if they were going to do that, he was going to replace the photo being pulled with one the senator perhaps wouldn't enjoy being associated with as much.

Meanwhile, as of 10:51 a.m. today, that photo is gone, but an editorial cartoon and an uncomplimentary (and NSFW) excerpt from the cartoon strip "Get Your War On" remain on the site.

I guess the candidates and their online folks still have a bit to learn. The Edwards campaign made what turned out to be a bad personnel choice in bloggers. The McCain campaign hired what turned out to be either inept or crooked Web designers.

The '08 presidential campaign was supposed to be the one where the 'Net and blogging firmly established themselves as campaign tools. And they might well turn out to be. But right now, the campaigns are still firmly stuck in 2005.

You asked, you get: A one-stop page for all our coverage of veterans' issues since we began examining the disability-compensation this past September and concluding with this morning's article about an undersecretary's clash with reality.

The real URL is awful, but this one works just as well AND is easier to remember: www.news-record.com/veterans

I have to update it by hand (which is fine as long as the computer does what I ask it to do the first time rather than the sixth or eighth time), but I'll try to keep it current.