Just in time for St. Patrick’s day, CNN explores the myths and realities of hangover remedies.
A hangover is really the symptoms of acute withdrawal, in which your body reacts to not having a drug in its system anymore, said Krista Medina, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Cincinnati.
Contrary to popular belief, drinking more while hung over is not going to make you feel better, doctors say. In fact, the other home remedies you may turn to, such as greasy food, probably won’t work, either.
Part of the reason there’s no good hangover remedy is that, although the phenomenon has probably been around since humans discovered alcohol, there’s no single scientifically proven reason for a hangover, although there are correlations with the various symptoms of the “Irish flu.” “There probably won’t be a known effective treatment until we understand the physiology better,” said Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist, assistant professor in the department of medicine at Emory University.
What is a hangover?
One theory blames chemicals in some alcoholic drinks called congeners, said Dr. Samir Zakhari, director of the division of metabolism and health effects at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. These congeners, which could be toxic, contribute to alcohol’s unique taste, but they can also interfere with cell function and leave some lasting physical marks. A 2009 study from Brown University found that the darker the liquor, the more congeners it has, which could exacerbate headaches and other hangover symptoms.
A different theory contends that drinking causes dehydration because alcohol increases urine output. Alcohol inhibits the release of an antidiuretic hormone, meaning the kidneys don’t conserve water as well, and you urinate more, Bergquist said.
[...]
[E]ating greasy foods after a night of drinking probably won’t make you feel better, Zakhari said. “If a person wants to eat, that’s fine,” he said. “They should do that during drinking or before drinking, not after. Because if people eat after drinking, it might be too late.” By the time you have a hangover, eating greasy fare won’t have much of an effect in alleviating the symptoms, he said. Bland foods, on the other hand, elevate your blood sugar and settle your stomach, according to the Mayo Clinic. Stick to toast and crackers.
[...]
This belief that drinking more alcohol will alleviate the symptoms of too much drinking “doesn’t make sense,” Zakhari said. “You already probably have done enough damage to the different parts of the body like the liver and heart,” he said. “You don’t want to go back and put more alcohol on top of that.”
[...]
Small studies have shown that, if taken in very large amounts, vitamin B6 may reduce the symptoms of a hangover, Bergquist said. Still, this research did not include many participants and is not definitive. “There are anecdotes about these things without any evidence,” said Dr. James C. Garbutt, a professor of psychiatry in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, who specializes in alcoholism treatment and research. “Medical science doesn’t spend a lot of time treating hangovers. We want to try to prevent them.”
Other supposed remedies include activated charcoal, which is supposed to absorb alcohol from the stomach but actually wouldn’t work because the hangover occurs hours after drinking, Swift said. “The most outlandish thing is that people who feel badly obviously want to feel better, so they’re willing to try untested remedies,” he said.
There, however, are some natural remedies that some doctors think merit further research, including prickly pear cactus extract and yeast-based preparations, according to the Mayo Clinic. Some also believe that the borage plant yields a supplement that may help with headache, laziness and tiredness.
Doctors do agree that water will help somewhat with hangover symptoms because, as noted above, dehydration is often a symptom.
Zakhari also recommends getting rest. Medina noted that ibuprofen may help with headaches, and caffeine may help boost energy, but no treatments get at the underlying condition of hangover; they only ease symptoms, she said.
My practice has been to avoid getting hangovers in the first place, through a combination of moderating alcohol intake, increasing intake of non-alcoholic fluids, and mixing drinking with eating. In the rare instances where I’ve miscalculated on this score, I do find that a combination of drinking large quantities of electrolyte replacement beverages (sports drinks such as Gatorade) and caffeine help speed recovery.
The piece also mentions the Bloody Mary, easily the most popular hangover “cure.” What it doesn’t say is that, while consuming vodka while hung over is likely a bad idea, the tomato juice and capsaicin-rich pepper sauce are both good for you. The more healthful concoction — a “virgin” Bloody Mary — is jokingly known as a “Bloody Shame” but nonetheless the wiser choice if you’ve overindulged.
Thom Shanker reports on a minor bureaucratic move at DoD:
An executive order published without fanfare this month does away with a system for Pentagon succession instituted by former President George W. Bush, which played down the service secretaries and elevated positions held at the time by trusted aides to Donald H. Rumsfeld, who as defense secretary wanted it that way.
These plans governing Pentagon succession are intended to guarantee civilian control of the military during a doomsday situation, like a nuclear strike or a terrorist attack, when the defense secretary could be taken out of action at the moment when war-fighting decisions must be made. The Bush order, issued in December 2005, continued the traditional sequence of the deputy defense secretary as next in line. But it booted the Army secretary out of the No. 3 slot in the order of succession, in favor of the under secretary of defense for intelligence.
[...]
President Obama’s executive order, published March 1, re-establishes the Army to its former place.
If the defense secretary, his deputy and the Army secretary were all hors de combat, authority would then pass to the Navy secretary, then to the Air Force secretary, in the historic order of establishment of the services. Next in line after them would be the under secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics; the under secretary for policy; the comptroller, who is the Pentagon’s chief budget officer; and the under secretary for personnel and readiness. Only after all of them would the line lead to the Pentagon’s senior intelligence official.
White House and Defense Department officials said the new executive order was intended to restore Pentagon succession to its traditional pattern and to render a sequence based on the office, not on the personality in that position at any given time. (The succession plan would also take effect should the defense secretary become incapacitated by health problems, but that could be handled in a calm, deliberate manner across the government.)
John Cole observes that the Bush team “basically changed the protocol in order to make sure cronies were in charge no matter what happened. Every time you can’t think you will be surprised by these guys, they go out and one-up themselves.”
It’s true that Rumsfeld preferred to have Stephen Cambone, with whom he had a long relationship, be senior to the Service secretaries, with whom he had no such trust. But so what? These people were all political appointees. If the administration wants to put “cronies” in the line of succession, reshuffling the succession just means they need to ensure a “crony” is the Secretary of the Army.
Second, the problem with Paul Wolfowitz, Cambone, and others in the Rumsfeld posse wasn’t that they were cronies or loyalists. There wasn’t a Michael “Brownie” Brown among them: They were all extraordinarily bright, credentialed, and experienced. The problem was one of groupthink: They all shared a vision of America’s role in the world and the best means of using the instruments of power to achieve it. That’s great for continuity but not so great for vetting policy decisions.
Beyond that, the explanation given at the time for the Bush succession strikes me as eminently plausible: It makes sense to have folks working on DoD-wide issues on a daily basis take over if one’s goal is continuity. The Service secretaries are there to fight for the needs of the Army, Navy, and Air Force and spend their days dealing with narrower issues.
I was a bit startled to see the headline “If bin Laden is found, he’ll be killed, Holder says” appearing at the Washington Post (via Memeorandum). It appears to be sensationalistic, however:
Osama bin Laden “will never appear in an American courtroom,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told House members at a hearing Tuesday. “Let’s deal with the reality here,” Holder said in response to questions from Rep. John Culberson (R-Tex.). “The reality is, we will be reading Miranda rights to a corpse.”
Members of an Appropriations subcommittee pressed Holder about the Justice Department’s response to the failed Christmas Day bombing plot and the abortive decision to try in Lower Manhattan the alleged masterminds of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
He grew most heated, however, amid GOP attacks over the hypothetical capture of bin Laden. No law enforcement response would be necessary, he said, because “he will be killed by us or by his own people.”
It seems to me that Holder is merely making a prediction, not stating the public policy of the Obama administration. That is, we presume that Osama would rather be a martyr than be taken prisoner. Further, we presume that Osama’s cronies have the same preference.
Conversely, while I’m sure the members of the special forces or intelligence team with the opportunity to shoot or capture Osama would very much enjoy pulling the trigger, that they’d much rather have the intelligence and propaganda value of dragging the Big Cheese in.
UPDATE (Dave Schuler): I have corrected a typographical error in the final sentence.
UPDATE (James Joyner): Oops. I actually made the Obama/Osama typo twice in the post and caught the first instance. Nothing nefarious intended: While I typed “Osama” very frequently in the early years of the blog, I now type “Obama” several times and day, so my brain’s just rewired to do it automatically.
An otherwise very good piece by CSM’s Christa Case Bryant detailing Lindsey Vonn’s impressive third straight World Cup victory drifts into one of my pet peeves:
This is Vonn’s third straight overall title, a feat unmatched since Austria’s Petra Kronberger won her trio from 1990-92. Vonn’s 11 World Cup wins this season make her second only to Austria’s Annemarie Moser-Proell, who won 14 in 1988-89 and 62 in her career. While Vonn is only at 33 so far, that’s a new US record, beating out five-time Olympic medalist Bode Miller of Franconia, N.H.
Vonn is a terrific skier and her accomplishments deserve celebrating. But her career is in no way comparable to that of Bode Miller or any other male skier. As a wise man once said on an only tangentially related matter, they’re not in the same league — they’re not even the same sport.
We have no way of knowing, save conjecture, how Vonn would do in competition against men. But, presumably, there’s a reason that downhill skiing is, like most other sports, gender segregated.
The same is true of coaching. For example, Tennessee women’s basketball coach Pat Summit’s career has been quite impressive. But taking it to the next step — comparing it to John Wooden’s or Bob Knight’s or Dean Smith’s — is silly. Summit may or may not have been wildly successful coaching the men’s game. But she hasn’t done it. And the women’s game, where two schools have dominated since time immemorial, simply isn’t comparable to the men’s game.
Via Margaret Soltan, I see that UT San Antonio is starting up a football team and that the faculty are predictably concerned about the potential drain on resources.
Next fall, UTSA will spend millions to field a football team it hopes will someday compete with cross-state rivals like the University of Texas, Texas Tech and Texas A&M. But the plan goes far beyond athletics. As the college makes a push to become one of the next tier-one research universities in Texas, campus leaders say the school’s academic and athletic goals are closely linked.
Students and administrators, led by UTSA President Ricardo Romo, hope the team will foster school pride and capture the attention of alumni, who they believe will be more likely to support university financially. They also hope a team will transform the university from a commuter school to one where students live and play. “The whole campus is kind of buzzing about it,” says Travis Goodrich, a UTSA sophomore. “We need school spirit. We don’t really have that right now.”
But there are skeptics. While many faculty have enthusiastically supported the creation of the football program, others have wondered whether the university has its priorities straight. Mansour El-Kikhia, president of UTSA’s faculty senate, says faculty support is mixed for the project. The major fear, he says, is that the team will distract from the university’s academic mission or divert dollars from the institutional budget. The university has pledged “that no funds will be taken away from the institution to finance this football team,” El-Kikhia says. “Of course, there’s always the fear that UTSA will become a diploma mill for athletes and so forth.”
[...]
Steven Kellman, a professor of English at UTSA, said he would rather have had the school’s most generous alumni contribute to academics, not a football team. He worries that if the team isn’t profitable quickly, the school will be footing the bill. A 2009 NCAA study found that only 18 athletic programs reported positive revenue for all five years surveyed. “I can’t imagine that a new program just getting off the ground would have positive revenue, even with outside donations,” Kellman says. “UTSA is a young institution that cannot count on a large corps of alumni, particularly wealthy alumni.”
Romo says the boosters who donate to football are not necessarily the same people who would donate to academic programs. But Dennis Coates, an economist at the University of Maryland and a contributor to the Sports Economicst blog, says the concern that football is siphoning off potential donations for academic purposes is a frequent source of conflict at schools with teams. And he says that even many of the most successful programs struggle to turn a profit. “In many institutions the athletic departments get subsidized by the rest of the university — not the other way around, as the idea of football as a profit center for the university suggests,” he says.
The last point is clever obfuscation: Football is certainly profitable at many, many schools. But that money’s typically funneled back into the overall athletic program where it has to fund a myriad of money-losing programs. Like, for example, all the women’s teams except perhaps basketball at two or three schools.
Otherwise, though, I’m sympathetic to the faculty position, having been at Troy State (now Troy) when it was making the move from Division I-AA to Division I-A. On paper, it was the dumbest possible idea. Alabama has 4.3 million people and already had two entrenched football powerhouses in Alabama and Auburn and a third school, UAB, making the move. And Troy had 5000ish students on campus and 20,000ish people in all of Pike County, yet I-A required guaranteeing something like 25,000 paid attendees at every home game.
And, yet, it seems by all accounts to have been a good move. The school’s profile has undeniably been raised, which makes it more likely that alumni will donate money for buildings, academic programs, and the like.
Like it or not — and I generally don’t — college sports is the main thing that makes alumni enthusiastic about their school.
I’m not sure I quite understand this, given that cost is so important as a burden to taxpayers when it comes to health care. If Democrats want so badly to abort babies because of it, why are we bothering with someone who has a broken neck and back at 69? It sounds to me like she’s pretty well used up and has probably been living off the taxpayers for plenty of years to begin with. Aren’t we at least going to get a vote on it?
Come on, Harry – do your civic duty. The nation’s broke and counting on you guy. Pull the plug and get back to work. And don’t bill us for a full day today, either. This is no time to be sloughing off. Air freight her home, you can bury her during recess on your own time and dime. Or are you going to bill us for that, too?
Now, aside from it being poor form to try to score cheap political points off the suffering of politicians’ families — Lara Reid isn’t the Senate Majority leader — the argument doesn’t even make sense on its face. While I oppose the current health care reform plan, Reid and company are trying to extend care, not limit it. For that matter, while I’m passionately against abortion in all but the most extreme cases, who’s arguing that it should be performed more often so that we can save money? Certainly, not any Democrats I know.
Ah: Dan links to another post, titled “Stupak: Dem Leadership Wants More Children Aborted To Cut Costs.” The substance:
What are Democratic leaders saying?“If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That’s one of the arguments I’ve been hearing,”Stupak says. “Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America? If money is the issue — come on, we can find room in the budget. This is life we’re talking about.”
I don’t know Bart Stupak well enough to dismiss this as a damnable lie. So, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that maybe someone who is technically a “Democratic leader” said something remotely like that. Or that he honestly misunderstood someone as saying that. Regardless, it’s a ridiculous distraction from the real debate: It’s not a significant reason why Democrats support either health care reform or abortion.
In an update, Dan links to a post by Rob Port titled, “Rep. Stupak: Pro-Choice Democrats Say Abortion Funding Needed To Keep Too Many Kids From Being Born” which in turn links to an older post titled “Pelosi: Free Condoms And Food Stamps Better For Economy Than Tax Cuts.”
STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family-planning services. How is that stimulus?
PELOSI: Well, the family-planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now, and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those—one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.
Condoms reduce births and so do abortions. So, since Pelosi supports giving out free condoms to reduce births, she obviously wants to encourage more abortions! To save money! QED.
Surely, we can argue against the Democrats based on their actual policy goals and/or the implications of their actual policy proposals?
Other Humor: Icanhascheezburger welcomes you to the kitteh cult. V the K always has the best pictures at Caption This!
To join in, start a Caption Contest at your blog, edit it to add a link to this post, and then send a TrackBack. If your blog doesn’t automatically generate one, use the Send TrackBack feature below. For more information, see this post.
Reports that General David Petraeus is giving a speech at Saint Anselm College’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics on March 24 is ginning up speculation that he’s running for president.
News that Gen. David Petraeus is venturing out of his Centcom comfort zone late this month to the state of New Hampshire is catnip for a certain chunk of obsessives who believe that Petraeus wants to run for president (and be nominated as vice president) in 2012. Petraeus has said he’s not interested, in public. So do most would-be candidates at this stage. So ignore that for now. Here’s what I can add:
First, as James Pindell notes, Petraeus lives in New Hampshire. He’s registered to vote there as a Republican.
Petraeus attends a lot of fancy private dinner gatherings in Washington. I have never been to one of these gatherings, but I’ve spoken with several folks who’ve attended several of them, and they all seem to come away with the impression that Petraeus is far more interested in exploring his political options than he says publicly.
He’s speaking at St. Anselm’s College, the site of many historic political moments — Ronald Reagan paid for his microphone there. No one runs for president without speaking at St. A’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics.
I presume but don’t know that Petraeus will run as Republican. Maybe he’d run as an independent. How does Petraeus fit in with the Tea Partiers, the Libertarians, the Social Conservatives? He certainly upstages Mitt “No Apology” Romney by sheer force of conviction. He’s not a terribly good political speaker, though, even though he gets the politics of large institutions quite small. Also, he’s small in stature. Do not be mislead into believing that a candidate’s height — even a general’s height — doesn’t matter. Wes Clark can tell a few stories about that.
Laura Rosen and Ben Smith dutifully pass along the report without commentary. Matt Yglesias thinks a Petraeus run “slightly ridiculous” but,
At any rate, just thinking about it is a reminder that one reason these high-level military officers seem like appealing candidates is precisely because they get to be famous media celebrities without engaging in that sort of annoying political cut-and-thrust. But recall that as soon as Wesley Clark became a candidate, he started looking a lot more politician-y than he had before. It would be the same with anyone. Americans have a very low opinion of politics and politicians and people who act like politicians, but in practice the political system requires politicians to act like that. So anyone outside the arena looks appealing until he steps into the arena.
General Petraeus was the General George C. Marshall Award winner as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Class of 1983. He subsequently earned MPA and Ph.D. degrees in international relations from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and later served as an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the US Military Academy. He also completed a fellowship at Georgetown University.
Awards and decorations earned by General Petraeus include two awards of the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, two awards of the Distinguished Service Medal, two awards of the Defense Superior Service Medal, four awards of the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal for valor, the State Department Superior Honor Award, the NATO Meritorious Service Medal, and the Gold Award of the Iraqi Order of the Date Palm. He is a Master Parachutist and is Air Assault and Ranger qualified. He has also earned the Combat Action Badge and French, British, and German Jump Wings. In 2005 he was recognized by the U.S. News and World Report as one of America’s 25 Best Leaders, and in 2007 he was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential leaders and revolutionaries of the year and one of four runners-up for Time Person of the Year. Most recently, he was selected in a poll conducted by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals and was chosen by Esquire magazine as one of the 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century.
But Matt’s right: Petraeus is held in such high esteem precisely because of the contrast between his military bearing and the namby pamby styles of our political leaders. But one can’t run for president without becoming a politician. At least, not if you’re other than a vanity candidate running solely for the platform ala Alan Keyes, Dennis Kucinich, or Ralph Nader.
Petraeus is an enormously competent and successful general. He’s got celebrity on par with Colin Powell and has likely surpassed Norman Schwarzkopf. Right now, conservatives can view him as exactly the sort of guy they’d like leading their charge. We know very little about his political beliefs and, by definition, the more we know the less some will like. He hasn’t had to tell us what he thinks of health care reform, abortion, school prayer, campaign finance reform, capital punishment, torture, detainment, electronic surveillance, or pretty much any other controversial public policy issue. And, especially for conservatives who like him, the natural tendency is to presume that he holds exactly the same positions they do. (Then again, I said that about Barack Obama, too, and it didn’t bear out until well after the inauguration.)
MoJo’s Adam Weinstein notes that Bob Dole and others are touting Petraeus and that centrist Republicans are especially enamored of him.
But on further review (and ignoring the obvious concerns about militarism in electoral politics), a Petraeus candidacy might be healthy for the GOP—and for the country. He publicly supported the Obama administration’s now-stalled plan to shutter Guantanamo Bay’s detention facility and end torture. He holds a doctorate from Princeton and has surrounded himself with intellectuals, left and right, in and out of uniform, who embrace out-of-the-box thinking—no small feat in the military’s often stultifying bureaucracy.
Most important, Petraeus has reportedly identified himself as a “Rockefeller Republican,” a rare breed of urbane, educated, big-state social liberal that’s been excommunicated from the Grand Old Party of late (see also Crist, Charlie; Chafee, Lincoln). Since Barack Obama’s election, the GOP has sought to co-opt ultraconservative, right-wing, and Tea Party anger as its brand of choice, effectively marking moderate Republicans as Godless traitors. But who’s going to level such attacks on the uniformed, mythical superman who averted disaster and “pacified” Iraq? He could debate the ins and outs of health care policy without being labeled a socialist. He could shut down military tribunals and expand diplomacy without being called an Al Qaeda sympathist. He could discuss the finer points of social policy without being shouted down as a pinko libertine.
In effect, only someone of Petraeus’ unassailable stature could force mainstream Republicans back to the political center—and whether or not it’s enough to win an election in 2012 or 2016, his candidacy could be an undeniable victory in America’s protracted war with rightist extremism.
A noble thought but, of course, ultraconservatives, right-winger, and Tea Partyers are a large part of the Republican nominating electorate. It’ll be a neat trick winning their support while pulling the party back to the center.
Dana Carvey debuts his Obama impression on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno:
The bit about having to explain to the audience who Jimmy Stewart and Ronald Reagan were is amusing as well. And it’s not just affect: It’s true. Back in my teaching days, one of the things I always tried to remind myself is that anything that happened more than four or five years ago was completely meaningless as a reference point for the students.
Bonus coverage: Carvey does Al Gore and others:
Carvey’s as good with impressions as anyone since Rich Little. If he weren’t such a nice guy, though, he’d get accused (unfairly) of racism for some of his ethnic gags.
We’ve all had to get our PhDs in congressional procedure lately, haven’t we? In Schoolhouse Rock, it all seemed so simple: I’m just a bill, yes, I’m only a bill, and I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill . . . You get the votes in committee, you get the votes in the full House, you get the votes in the Senate committee, you get the votes in the full Senate, conference if they differ, and off to the Oval Office. Now we would have to add lyrics about the filibuster, reconciliation, sidecars, shell pieces, Gatorade, the flea flicker, the Palestinian Somersault, the inverted triple loop double lutz*, and this bizarre “Slaughter rule” where the House pretends that a majority has already voted for it, without making a majority actually vote for it.
In reality, of course, it was always more complicated than Schoolhouse Rock made it. The filibuster was long established by then. But there’s not much question that the proverbial sausage-making has gotten even messier. And, thanks to 24/7/365 news coverage and commentary, we’re not missing any of it.
Democratic leaders have claimed that they would have had a government run health insurance alternative (the so-called “Public Option”) if only those mean Republicans weren’t there to filibuster. But Glenn Greenwald believes this was a sham.
But all those claims were put to the test — all those bluffs were called — once the White House decided that it had to use reconciliation to pass a final health care reform bill. That meant that any changes to the Senate bill (which had passed with 60 votes) — including the addition of the public option — would only require 50 votes, which Democrats assured progressives all year long that they had. Great news for the public option, right? Wrong. As soon as it actually became possible to pass it, the 50 votes magically vanished. Senate Democrats (and the White House) were willing to pretend they supported a public option only as long as it was impossible to pass it. Once reconciliation gave them the opportunity they claimed all year long they needed — a “majority rule” system — they began concocting ways to ensure that it lacked 50 votes.
It may well be that there were never 50 votes for public option. Indeed, I tend to agree with Greenwald that there weren’t.
But even the most creative advocates of the reconciliation process don’t argue that it could be used to force a straight majority vote one something that far removed from budget and tax policy. This isn’t eliminating some pork barrel projects needed to get Ben Nelson’s votes or striking language preventing insurance companies from covering abortions but a massive new program.
In addition to uncertain healthcare services, economic disadvantages, and finding a place to call home, veterans certainly do not need any more challenges. Unfortunately, the wounds of war can be less obvious than those that we can see. Psychological disorders and sicknesses caused by toxic exposure can be the most damaging aspects of war that veterans bring home. Toxin exposure in particular is of particular concern as previous exposure to asbestos among veterans is causing incidence of the aggressive cancer mesothelioma to rise among former members of the armed services. We must not leave those who risked their lives for our nation in the cold. Our veterans have never questioned the right or wrong of war when it mattered most. They simply did as they were trained. We must now show the same unwavering determination, in all ways we are able, by affording those opportunities to which they are entitled, including financial, medical and emotional support to all veterans.
