Monthly Archives: July 2021

Eighty-five years since the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War – WSWS

Posted: July 18, 2021 at 5:25 pm

Eighty-five years ago, on July 17, 1936, the Spanish army led by General Francisco Franco launched a fascist coup aimed at toppling the elected government of Spains Second Republic. Workers and peasants across Spain responded with an armed insurrection, setting up factory committees and forming militias to fight the fascist troops. The Spanish Civil War of 19361939 had begun.

The Spanish Civil War was one of the great battles between the international working class and European fascism in the 20th century. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy sent tens of thousands of soldiers to join Franco. While the British, French and US ruling classes maintained a policy of non-intervention, blocking military aid to the Republic, there was mass sympathy in the international working class for the workers uprising against fascism. Tens of thousands travelled to Spain to fight Franco. The anti-fascist International Brigades numbered nearly 60,000 volunteers from 53 countries.

On the Spanish Civil Wars outcome hung the fate not just of Spain, but of Europe and the world. In France, Premier Lon Blums Popular Front government was stepping up the police repression of workers after the MayJune 1936 French general strike, while a powerful strike movement unfolded in the United States that led to the formation of mass industrial unions. A victorious socialist revolution in Spain would have galvanized tens of millions of workers internationally.

The outcome, however, was a defeat of the working class that strengthened the fascist powers, paving the way for Hitlers regime to launch the Second World War in Europe, five months after Francos April 1, 1939, victory speech. This war would claim 75 million lives, including six million Jews murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

In Spain itself, 500,000 people died in the Civil War, out of a population of 23.6 million. Half a million were forced to flee into exile, and 150,000 workers, artists and left-wing intellectuals were murdered behind fascist lines. After the wars end, 20,000 supporters of the Republic were shot and an estimated one million people were interned in 300 concentration camps and prisons. Francos regime would survive for four decades, only falling amid mass protests and strikes in 1978.

The defeat of the working class was not inevitable. It is impossible to discuss this defeat, however, without discussing the irreconcilable conflict between the Trotskyist movement and Stalinism.

As the civil war unfolded, Trotsky, the co-leader with Lenin of the October Revolution and commander of the Red Army, explained that victory was possible if the workers took power and prosecuted the war against Franco via revolutionary methods. He stressed, moreover, that this strategy required building a new international revolutionary leadership of the working class, the Fourth International, to fight against Stalinism. The Fourth International was founded during the war, in September 1938, in Paris.

The Spanish Civil War provided a devastating confirmation of Trotskys warnings of the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism. The Spanish Civil War broke out as the Soviet bureaucracy prepared the Great Purges, using the judicial frame-ups of the first Moscow Trials in August 1936 as a pretext to murder the surviving Old Bolshevik leaders of the October Revolution. In Spain, as well, the Soviet bureaucracy and the Stalinist Spanish Communist Party of Spain (PCE) waged a bloody struggle against revolution.

While arming the Spanish Republic, the Kremlin demanded that workers support the ruling Popular Front alliance of liberal bourgeois, social-democratic, Stalinist and anarchist forces. It worked to disband workers' organizations such as factory and supply committees, and subordinate anti-fascist militias to the capitalist state. And while Stalins secret police murdered the surviving leaders of the October Revolutionculminating in Ramon Mercaders assassination of Trotsky on August 20, 1940, in exile in Coyoacn, Mexicoit systematically tortured and murdered revolutionaries in Spain.

The Spanish Civil War is a confirmation of the revolutionary role of the international working class and, in the negative, the critical role of revolutionary leadership. The lessons of the civil war are of burning contemporary relevance. Once again, the ruling class is turning to openly fascistic and authoritarian forms of rule, from the threats of a coup by neo-Francoite officers in Spain, to the rise of neo-fascist movements throughout Europe, to the transformation of the Republican Party under Trump into an ever-more openly fascist organization.

Francos coup was a preemptive attack on a growing revolutionary movement in the working class. The social crisis caused by the 1930s Great Depression and an army revolt had brought down the monarchy in 1931, installing Spains Second Republic. This only intensified the growth of the class struggle, which erupted in 1934 with an insurrectionary strike by miners in the Asturias. Franco led the army in drowning the strike in blood, with at least 2,000 killed, another 30,000 taken prisoner and thousands more sacked.

The Spanish Popular Front won the February 1936 elections on the basis of promises of social reform. The Popular Front was a coalition of bourgeois Republicans, the social-democratic Socialist Party (PSOE), the Stalinist Communist Party of Spain (PCE), and the left-centrist Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), supported externally by the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (CNT). While the Popular Front sought to contain the class struggle, the masses forged ahead, occupying factories and farmland, freeing political prisoners and launching a wave of strikes against poverty wages.

As terror at the prospect of the loss of its privileges and profits gripped the ruling class, sections of the officer corps launched a coup to drown the growing mass movement in blood. On the morning of July 17, 1936, Franco flew into Morocco to take over the 30,000-strong Spanish Army of Africa. He then radioed a manifesto to garrisons in mainland Spain, calling on them to seize the cities.

The Popular Front government had prior knowledge of the coup, having been alerted to unusual military drills in Morocco and northern Spain weeks before. However, it kept this information from workers out of concern that it would fuel the revolutionary movement of the masses. After the coup, the government turned down requests from workers who demanded weapons to confront the fascist rebellion.

However, the workers, who on many occasions were equipped only with hunting rifles or knives, mobilized to fight the coup. In Barcelona, which was one of the most industrialised cities of Spain, the working class organised itself into armed defence committees and confronted the army with arms, explosives and motor vehicles. Workers also called on the soldiers to refuse their officers orders. In 24 hours, the Barcelona workers blocked and disarmed pro-Francoite forces in Catalonia.

Workers in Madrid, Valencia, Bilbao and Gijn followed the lead of the workers in Barcelona. The Asturian miners sent a column of 5,000 dynamiters to Madrid to assist. In Malaga, the workers initially had no arms and used petrol to set fire to barricades surrounding the military barracks. The Spanish sailors shot many of their officers, and sailors committees took control of the warships in the Spanish Republican fleet.

While hoping for a quick military triumph over the working class, the fascists had in fact provoked a revolutionary response. With workers committees and militias active in cities and on the front, a situation of dual power emerged between these organizations, on the one hand, and the capitalist state led by the Popular Front government, on the other.

Neighbourhood committees, defence committees and workers' control committees in the factories ruled Barcelona and much of Catalonia in all but name. These workers' organs expropriated factories, buildings and land; organised, armed and transported militiamen; formed patrols against fascist provocateurs; resumed factory production without managers; and requisitioned cars, trucks and food. The revolutionary atmosphere was captured in George Orwells famous Homage to Catalonia:

It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black.

The fascist coup had failed in its initial objectives and initially did not have the upper hand. It held one-third of SpainOld Castile and Galicia in the north, parts of the south around Seville, Spanish Morocco, and the Balearic Islandsmostly agricultural regions without major industries. Its army was composed of peasants conscripted by force and Moroccan subjects of Spanish imperialism.

At the time, Franco himself remarked pessimistically that the Civil War would be immensely difficult and bloody. We havent got much of an army, the intervention of the Civil Guard is looking doubtful, and many officers will side with the constituted power.

The conditions for victory of the masses in the civil war against the army exploiters, Trotsky wrote, are very simple in their essence. Fascism, he noted, is a form of bourgeois reaction. A successful fight against bourgeois reaction can be waged only with the forces and methods of the proletarian revolution. Based on the lessons of the Russian Civil War, which had ended in the previous decade, Trotsky insisted that The strategy of civil war must combine the rules of military art with the tasks of the social revolution. He explained:

The revolutionary army must not only proclaim but also immediately realize in life the more pressing measures of social revolution in the provinces won by them: the expropriation of provisions, manufactured articles, and other stores on hand and the transfer of these to the needy; the redivision of shelter and housing in the interests of the toilers and especially of the families of the fighters; the expropriation of the land and agricultural inventory in the interests of the peasants; the establishment of workers control and soviet power in the place of the former bureaucracy.

The loyalties of Francos army could have easily been shaken. The 30,000 Moroccans in the Army of Africa had no vested interest in fighting for Spanish imperialism. As for the Spanish peasantry, it had been fighting for land ever since the Republic was proclaimed in April 1931. Around 1.5 million small rural proprietors held only 2.5-acre plots of land, forcing them to work on large estates to survive. In contrast, 50,000 members of the gentry owned half of Spains total acreage, and 10,000 landowners owned 250 or more acres. Millions more were landless and employed on the big estates.

The Popular Front government, however, refused to grant land to the peasants or the right to self-determination and independence to Spains colony in Morocco.

While the Popular Front parties used their ties to the Soviet bureaucracy to pose as sympathetic to the October Revolution, the Soviet Union, and the workers, they were in fact irreconcilably hostile to the unfolding revolutionary movement in the Spanish working class. Having blocked a revolutionary settlement of the class struggles that had erupted in Spain after 1931, they turned violently against the revolutionary struggle mounted by the working class against Franco.

Trotsky drew a parallel between Spains Popular Front and the bourgeois Provisional Government that emerged in Russia after the initial overthrow of the tsar in February 1917. Lenin and Trotsky led the Bolsheviks in opposing the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries who backed the Provisional Government and opposed transferring power to the workers and soldiers councils (soviets). After the Provisional Government made itself complicit in General Lavr Kornilovs failed coup attempt in August 1917, the Bolsheviks led the working class in overthrowing it in October.

A day before Franco launched his coup, Trotsky published an article on the Spanish Popular Front and the POUM, returning to the experience of the Russian revolution of 1917. He wrote:

In reality, the Popular Front is the main question of proletarian class strategy for this epoch. It also offers the best criterion for the difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism. For it is often forgotten that the greatest historical example of the Popular Front is the February 1917 revolution. From February to October the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, who represent a very good parallel to the Communists [i.e., Stalinists] and the Social Democrats, were in the closest alliance and were in a permanent coalition with the bourgeois party of the Cadets, together with whom they formed a series of coalition governments. Under the sign of this Popular Front stood the whole mass of the people, including the workers, peasants and soldiers councils. To be sure, the Bolsheviks participated in the councils. But they did not make the slightest concession to the Popular Front. Their demand was to break this Popular Front, to destroy the alliance with the Cadets, and to create a genuine workers and peasants government. [The Dutch Section and the International, July 1516, 1936]

The Stalinized Communist International had turned sharply to the right after the German bourgeoisie installed Hitler in power in 1933. This catastrophe had been made possible by the role of the German Communist Party (KPD), which had with criminal light-mindedness dismissed social-democratic workers as social fascists, rejecting a united struggle of the working class against the danger of Nazi rule. Dropping this policy in the face of the growing military threat from Nazi Germany after Hitler took power, Stalin now sought political relations even with bourgeois counterrevolution.

Calling for alliances with democratic imperialist states like Britain and France against fascist Germany and Italy, Stalin ordered the Communist parties to support and, where possible, join capitalist governments led by the liberal bourgeoisie. Local communist parties assumed the task of suppressing working class struggles against capitalist governments designated as anti-fascist.

In August 1936, the Stalinist regime launched the first of the Moscow Trials, charging leading Old Bolsheviks like Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev with forming a terrorist organization working with Trotsky in exile. All the defendants were framed based on lies, sentenced to death and shot. This was the beginning of the Great Purges, which involved a political genocide directed against representatives of revolutionary Marxism in the Soviet Union. Nearly one million people were murdered.

Trotsky summed up the Popular Front as the alliance of bourgeois liberalism with the GPU, the bloody Stalinist secret police. The Soviet bureaucracy and the Popular Front intervened in Spain to strangle the developing revolution, murder its leading representatives, terrorize the working class and prevent its struggles from acquiring a fully conscious revolutionary form.

Throughout the Spanish Civil War, as the imperialist democracies isolated the Republic, the Soviet Union was the only weapons supplier to the Spanish Republic. The Kremlin provided sub-standard arms, demanding payment in gold or raw materials. Through its influence on the Republican government, the Stalinist PCE ensured that Soviet supplies like artillery and planes were sent only to PCE-controlled centres, at the expense of other important areas like the Aragon front, controlled by workers militias.

The Stalinists used their position in government to sabotage CNT and POUM militias, transferring them to the most difficult fronts and using the resulting defeats to call for the dissolution of the workers militias and their replacement with units under Popular Front control. In Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain, the Trotskyist writer Felix Morrow explained how the Popular Front sabotaged the war effort as it waged a deadly struggle against the working class:

General Pozas initiated what was ostensibly a general offensive in June. After several days of artillery and aerial conflict, orders to advance were given to the 29th (formerly the POUMs Lenin) division and other formations. But on the day for the advance, neither artillery nor aviation was provided to protect it Pozas later claimed this was because the air forces were defending Bilbaobut the day of advance was three days after Franco had taken Bilbao. The POUM soldiers fully realized that they were being exposed deliberately.

The Soviet bureaucracy instructed the PCE to agitate against the workers committees. Under the slogan first win the war, then make the revolution afterwards, the PCE became the most fervent defenders of law and order, aiming to quell any independent action by the working class.

The Stalinists spread rumours to demoralise the workers and call for the murder of revolutionaries. They claimed that the POUM and CNT were infiltrated by fascist agents, declaring that both were objectively fascist. PCE secretary Jos Diaz wrote: Our principal enemies are the Fascists. However, these not only include the Fascists themselves, but also the agents who work for them Some call themselves Trotskyites If everyone knows this, if the government knows it, why doesnt it treat them like Fascists and exterminate them pitilessly?

On this counterrevolutionary political line, the PCE developed a social base among affluent social layers who desperately feared socialist revolution. In his 1991 work The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution, historian Burnett Bolloten writes,

[T]he PCE gave the urban middle and rural classes a powerful infusion of new hope and vitality these new recruits were not attracted by Communist principles, but by the hope of saving something from the old social system. [] Thus, from the outset, the Communist party appeared before the distraught middle classes not only as a defender, but as a champion of the Republic and orderly processes of government.

With the aid of the Stalinists, the Popular Front was able to disband the workers militias, strengthen the Republican Army, reinstate press censorship and hand back to the bourgeoisie the farms and factories seized by the workers and peasants.

Stalinism was able to push through its counterrevolutionary program only because none of the major workers organizations opposed the Popular Front and fought for a revolutionary policy. Responsibility in this lies above all with the centrist POUM led by Andreu Nin.

The POUM refused to lead a systematic struggle against the Popular Front or to advance a revolutionary perspective for the struggles of the working class under the Popular Front government. Nin had known Trotsky for over a decade and a half and had belonged to the Left Opposition, the precursor of the Fourth International. Had he sought to link the POUM to Trotskys struggle to found the Fourth International, this would have given a powerful impetus to the development of the Trotskyist movement.

Instead, Nin cut the POUM membership off from Trotskyism and formed opportunist alliances based on tactical national considerationsan orientation that led him into the camp of the Popular Front and the capitalist state machine.

The POUM signed the Popular Front agreement in January 1936. When workers rose up in Catalonia against Francos coup, Nin joined the Catalan regional Popular Front government as Justice Minister in September 1936 and sought to subordinate the working class to the government. Nin even travelled to the city of Lleida to dissolve the citys workers committee, which was led by POUM members.

At that point Nin had served his purpose for the counterrevolution, however, and after a Stalinist campaign denounced the POUM as Trotskyist, the POUM was expelled from government. Even after this, however, the POUM continuously petitioned to be allowed back into the capitalist government.

The bankruptcy of Nins Popular Front orientation was again exposed during the 1937 May Days, when the Catalan regional state and the authorities in Madrid, supported by the Stalinists, launched a military assault on the Barcelona telephone exchange, occupied by the workers since July 1936. This assault came amid mounting working class anger at growing levels of hunger, the lack of housing and pro-market policies. It provoked a renewed workers insurrection.

The working class spontaneously rose up in defence of the gains of the revolution, seizing most of the city except a small pocket in the centre controlled by Stalinist and Republican forces. For four days, the workers effectively controlled Barcelona. The working class could have taken power in Barcelona and fought for a revolutionary seizure of power across Spain.

The critical problem that again emerged, however, was that of revolutionary leadership. The POUM and the CNT leaders, who had been surprised by events, called for a ceasefire during the week of street fighting, pressing workers to lift the barricades. Only the small group of Bolshevik-Leninists affiliated to the Fourth International, together with some rank-and-file members of the POUM and the Anarchist Friends of Durruti, called on workers to take power and opposed calls for a ceasefire.

Had the POUM adopted an intransigently revolutionary policy, calling for the creation of a workers government and the overthrow of the Popular Front regime, its 40,000 members would have placed themselves at the head of the working class. Through the May Days uprising, the working class was signalling its readiness for a revolutionary policythe forming anew of independent workers organisations and a struggle for power. Instead, the POUM converted itself into the left flank of the Popular Front, which then brutally dispensed with the POUM as soon as it felt able to do so.

Once the barricades were lifted after the May Days, the Popular Front directed mass counterrevolutionary violence against the working class. The POUM was outlawed and its leadership arrested. Nin himself was kidnapped and tortured barbarously, skinned alive and then executed by Soviet GPU agents.

Thousands of militant workers were detained in makeshift secret prisons run by the PCE, and some 20,000 prisoners were sent to labour camps. Hundreds were murdered. Trotskys secretary Erwin Wolf, the Trotskyist Hans David Freund, POUM member Kurt Landau and CNT anarchists critical of the CNTs collaboration with the Stalinists were all assassinated. Historian Agustn Guillamn writes in Insurrection: The Bloody Events of May 1937 in Barcelona (2020):

By 1938, the revolutionaries were under the soil, in jail, or in hiding. The antifascists in prison numbered in the thousands. Hunger, air raids, and Stalinist repression were lords and masters in Barcelona. The militias and work had been militarized. Bourgeois order now prevailed throughout Spain, in the Francoist camp and in the republican alike. The revolution was not crushed by Franco in January 1939; Negrns Republic had done that many months before that.

The war was to last another two years, but it consisted of an uninterrupted advance of Francos forces, as the Popular Front government implored Franco for peace negotiations. Barcelona fell without any significant resistance. In March 1939, Colonel Segismundo Casado launched a coup within Republican territory and called for a peace deal with the fascists. Franco would only accept unconditional surrender, however, and the following month Francos troops marched into Madrid, ending the Civil War.

The working class mounted a heroic struggle, but Stalinist counterrevolution and centrism opened the way to a fascist victory. Trotsky refuted those who blamed this defeat on the working class. Found at his desk in Coyoacn after his assassination by Mercader in August 1940 was an article titled Class, Party, and Leadership. Replying to a French Stalinist periodical, Que faire, which blamed the defeat on the immaturity of the working class, lack of independence of the peasantry. Trotsky wrote:

The historical falsification consists in this, that the responsibility for the defeat of the Spanish masses is unloaded on the working masses and not those parties which paralyzed or simply crushed the revolutionary movement of the masses. The attorneys of the POUM simply deny the responsibility of the leaders, in order thus to escape shouldering their own responsibility. This impotent philosophy, which seeks to reconcile defeats as a necessary link in the chain of cosmic developments, is completely incapable of posing and refuses to pose the question of such concrete factors as programs, parties, personalities that were the organizers of defeat. This philosophy of fatalism and prostration is diametrically opposed to Marxism as the theory of revolutionary action.

Eighty-five years after the Spanish Civil War began, and over a century after the October Revolution, these events speak more directly to contemporary politics with every passing day. Three decades after the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, none of the contradictions of capitalism that underlay the rise of fascism in the 20th century have been resolved. The working class still faces economic crises, growing social inequality, imperialist military aggression and growing police state rule.

The response of the ruling class to these problems, enormously accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic, is to turn back towards the political heritage of 20th century European fascism.

The starkest expression was the January 6 coup launched by former US President Donald Trump, supported by factions of the US state and the Republican Party, when several thousand right-wing extremists stormed the Capitol in Washington, D.C. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently described it as a Reichstag moment, referring to the 1933 Reichstag Fire, which Hitler used as a pretext to assume dictatorial powers and impose mass terror against the working class.

This was not the product simply of Trumps deranged character but is rooted in a mortal crisis of US and world capitalism. Every imperialist ruling class is turning to the far right. The German political establishment elevates the far-right Alternative for Germany as the official opposition and showers right-wing extremist professors like Jrg Baberowski with funding while they minimize the crimes of Nazism. In both France and Spain, cabals of far-right officers are publicly agitating for a military coup and calling for mass killings.

The defence of social and democratic rights and the struggle against war require a political struggle of the international working class, based on the lessons of the bloody defeat in the Spanish Civil War. These are Trotskys emphasis on revolutionary internationalism, the political independence of the working class, and irreconcilable opposition to all forms of bourgeois nationalism, Stalinism, social-democracy and petty-bourgeois radicalism.

The defence of democratic rights can proceed only as a struggle of the working class for socialism. This requires building a revolutionary leadership irreconcilably hostile to the political descendants of Popular Frontism, which the ruling class has for decades falsely promoted as the left. While they have entirely lost the social base their Stalinist and social-democratic political ancestors had in the working class, their violent hostility to the working class and socialist revolution remains.

In Spain, the accelerating collapse of the parliamentary-democratic regime cobbled together by the Francoite regime and Santiago Carrillos PCE in 1978 has exposed the pseudo-left Podemos party. It has been in power for two years, implementing a programme of bank bailouts, pension cuts and building concentration camps for refugees. It helped implement the EUs herd immunity policy, placing profits over lives, leading to 100,000 deaths in Spain and 1.1 million across Europe.

This filthy record is based on the legacy of Popular Frontism. Indeed, former Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias was on a first-name basis with Carrillo before Carrillo died in 2012. A PCE youth leader during the Civil War, Carrillo played an important role in the counterrevolutionary violence against Trotskyists and the working class. Shortly before his death, Carrillo boasted that in the 1930s, no communist militant asked to assassinate Trotsky would have refused to so. Iglesias responded with a sympathetic obituary of Carrillo in Pblico, writing: Despite everything, Santiago was one of ours. Now and forever.

Unsurprisingly, Podemos downplays the Spanish Civil War. Its cofounder Iigo Errejn in fact stated that he was opposed to bringing public debate back to the memory of the Spanish Civil War This is a scenario that scares the elderly, and which doesnt mean so much to the young, as it happened a long time ago. While were clear on what side wed take in such an argument, we also know that nostalgia doesnt win battles, but that defeats unfortunately do build defeat. In fact, Podemos is clear that in the Spanish Civil War it takes the side of Stalinist counterrevolution.

The lessons of the 1930s must be learned. The critical task today in the struggle against fascistic authoritarianism is the building of a revolutionary leadership to continue Trotskys struggle for socialist revolution against both the far right and the pseudo-left. This means building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) in Spain and internationally to mobilize the international working class in a struggle for socialism.

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Focus on maintenance to increase hog building life – Clinton Herald

Posted: at 5:25 pm

Many hog buildings are starting to show their age, but focusing on regular maintenance could stretch out their shelf life.

Brian Dougherty, Extension ag engineer with Iowa State University in eastern Iowa, says many confinement buildings were constructed in the 1990s and have out-lived their predicted life span.

But he says areas like roof erosion should be addressed as soon as possible.

The pit fans send gas into the eaves opening, and when that condenses on steel, it causes corrosion, Dougherty says. Thats a very standard design issue with a lot of buildings.

Dougherty collaborated with other ag engineers to produce five publications that offer tips on how to properly maintain buildings.

Another potential problem is the re-circulation of undesirable gases during periods of minimum ventilation in winter. The ventilation fans pull the gases out, but these gases can often recirculate through the soffits, causing premature damage to the facility roof. One solution is to close the soffit air intakes and install new air intakes on the gable end of the facility.

Putting a large opening on the gable end is going to send in quite a bit of fresh air, Dougherty says.

Another area to check is concrete slats. Dougherty stays many of those slats are also deteriorating.

They are cracking, or you have re-bar exposed, he says. Those slats could collapse and send everything into the pit.

Dougherty says in some case, concrete piers built under the slats were not properly centered, causing one area to bear more of the weight burden than others, and thereby resulting in some cracks.

He suggests the use of an inspection camera that can be placed under the slat to check for damage. Dougherty says the camera can be operated with a smart phone.

Despite their age, some buildings remain in great shape even after three decades of service, says Kapil Arora, ISU Extension ag engineer in central Iowa. He says the rapid rise in the cost of building materials will likely prompt producers to extend building life as long as possible.

One area to address is ventilation. Arora says inlets need to be checked regularly, especially if they are part of an automatic system.

Some are going to get stuck. You want proper air circulation and no dead spots, he says.

Arora says all aspects of the ventilation system should be checked regularly, including curtains and fans.

As the ventilation needs go up, those multiple stage fans should be kicking in, he says. You need to keep an eye on them.

ISUs publications are free of charge and available to download for future use. They may be found online at https://bit.ly/3xI3jQU:

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Armyworm infestation hits Leander neighborhood, experts say wet weather may be to blame – KXAN.com

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AUSTIN (KXAN) An infestation of hungry caterpillars, also known as the armyworm, is invading a Leander neighborhood.

Whenever I was walking across the grass to go across the yard I noticed the grass was dying, which surprised me because we put a lot into the yard, then my eyes adjusted and I noticed on every single blade of grass there was a worm, said Katherine Gonzales, who lives in the Larkspur neighborhood.

These caterpillars dont do too much damage when they are small and just a few of them, but when they grow to about an inch and a half and a lot of them, they can devastate plant life in your yard or garden.

Usually, infestations take place in late summer or early fall, but the weather can play a big part. Experts say the rain can help with egg survival and it can also delay predators from feeding on the eggs.

The good thing is we have a lot of predators which are going to help us with a lot of this stuff, said Wizzie Brown, an entomologist with Texas A&M Agri Life Extension Service. It can be anything from small animals like armadillos, or skunks, or things like that which would be eating the caterpillars. We also have various insect predators like ground beetles.

Texas A&M scientists declared war on the fall armyworms back in February. A professor there received nearly $500,000 to track these worms behaviors and genomic traits, and that way they can learn to control the pests. The project will last three years.

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Armyworm infestation hits Leander neighborhood, experts say wet weather may be to blame - KXAN.com

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See garden ideas come to life with the Kane County Master Gardeners – Chicago Daily Herald

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Get offline and get outside to see inspirational gardens at the Kane County Master Gardener Idea Garden in St. Charles.

This summer, join these University of Illinois Extension volunteers to experience creative concepts and ask questions each Tuesday, 9 to 11 a.m., weather permitting.

Learn about straw gardening which starts with a 10-day conditioning process for the straw bales, involving watering and fertilizing.- Courtesy of University of Illinois Extension

"The Idea Garden is back this year, and once again, it showcases innovative designs and new ideas you can replicate at home," said Sarah Fellerer, Master Gardener program coordinator. "Visit the garden to learn about sensory and elevated gardens, native plants, bug habitats, growing garlic and phytonutrient-rich produce, and more. Plus, the garden features an Olympic-themed bed of grasses, ground covers, and flowers."

One of the "Idea Gardens" is inspired by the Summer Olympics, using a ring design into a 6- by 6-foot hexagonal raised bed.- Courtesy of University of Illinois Extension

The Kane County Master Gardener Idea Garden is located at 3480 Route 38, at the intersection with Peck Road, in St. Charles. Visitors can enter via the Route 38 driveway. You also can follow the Idea Garden at http://www.facebook.com/KaneMGIdeaGarden.

This year's project includes ideas and tips for:

Elevated beds

Straw bale plantings

Insect habitats

Gardens with garlic or phytonutrient-rich produce

A sensory patch

Native species

An Olympic-themed bed of grasses, ground covers, and flowers

Learn about native species at the Kane County Master Gardener "Idea Gardens" off Route 38 in St. Charles.- Courtesy of University of Illinois Extension

If you need a reasonable accommodation to participate, contact fellerer@illinois.edu or call (630) 584-6166. Early requests are strongly encouraged to allow sufficient time for meeting your access needs.

Do you have questions about your garden, lawn, or trees?

The University of Illinois Extension Master Gardeners also host a seasonal Help Desk in DuPage, Kane, and Kendall counties:

Kane County: Send questions and photos to uiemg-kane@illinois.edu, or call or visit 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday through Friday at (630) 584-6166 or 535 S. Randall Road, St. Charles.

DuPage County: Send questions and photos to uiemg-dupage@illinois.edu, or call or visit 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at (630) 955-1123 or 1100 E. Warrenville Road, Suite 170, Naperville.

Kendall County: Send questions and photos to uiemg-kendall@illinois.edu, or call or visit 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at (630) 553-5823 or 7775B Route 47, Yorkville.

"Incredible Edibles" features native and nonnative edible plants at the Kane County Master Gardener "Idea Gardens."- Courtesy of University of Illinois Extension

For more information about submitting help requests via email or finding a location near you, visit go.illinois.edu/HelpDeskMGdkk.

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First Improved W88 Nuclear Warhead For Navy’s Trident Missiles Rolls Off The Assembly Line – The Drive

Posted: at 5:25 pm

The Department of Energys National Nuclear Security Administration has announced the completion of the first production example of the improved W88 Alteration 370 warhead, or W88 Alt 370, after 11 years of work, and a major, costly delay that was first revealed more than a year ago. This modernization program is aimed at mitigating issues relating to the age of the existing stockpile of W88s and maintaining the readiness of these warheads, which are among multiple types presently available for loading into the U.S. Navy's Trident D5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

The first production unit of the W88 Alt 370 was completed at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas on July 1, 2021. Specific details about the warhead are classified, but the Alt 370 upgrade package replaces the arming, fuzing, and firing subsystem, adds a lightning arrestor connector, and refreshes the conventional high explosives within the weapon to enhance nuclear safety and support future life extension program options, according to an official fact sheet. In addition, the effort is concurrent with "planned exchanges of limited-life, or routinely replaced, components, including the gas-transfer system and neutron generators." National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has estimated that the total cost for the program, which is expected to continue updating W88s through 2026, will be around $2.8 billion.

The original W88 was developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which began producing the warheads in 1988 and delivered the first units in 1989. The warheads have an estimated yield of 475 kilotons and can be deployed in either airburst or contact detonation methods. The warheads measure just under six feet in length, making them small enough for use aboard multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs). It's estimated that around 400 W88 warheads were manufactured.

Dr. Charles Verdon, Acting NNSA Administrator, stated in a Department of Energy press release that the completion of the first production unit is proof of the NNSAs effectiveness when it comes to maintaining the nuclear stockpile:

This accomplishment is the culmination of over a decade of work, featuring contributions from several sites within the NNSA Nuclear Security Enterprise, members of the NNSA federal workforce, and members of the DoD. The W88 Alt 370 is a crucial part of Nations strategy for the sea-based leg of the nuclear triad, and a testament to the Enterprises ability to execute major modernization programs. As we continue to modernize the stockpile, the successes and lessons learned from this program will bolster our future warhead activities to provide a safe, secure, and reliable deterrent.

The Nuclear Weapons Council, a joint advisory group staffed by the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense, first approved the W88 Alt 370 program in 2012.

Flight testing of inert prototypes of the W88 Alt 370 began in 2014. The fourth and final test was conducted in November 2015, when an unarmed warhead was launched aboard a Trident II missile from the Ohio class ballistic missile submarine USS Kentucky at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii. After that launch, the NNSA concluded that the weapon system alteration is functional and in line with NNSAs commitment to complete development on schedule.

Each Trident II can carry up to 14 individual warheads, but the missiles are generally only loaded with five or six at a time due to a succession of arms control agreements between the United States and Russia, including the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which the two countries agreed to extend earlier this year. In addition to W88 series warheads, the Trident IIs can also be loaded with W76-1s, which have an estimated yield of around 100 kilotons, as well as the new W76-2 variant. The W76-2 is a lower-yield design that reports have suggested could have a yield of just five kilotons and you can read more about it and the controversy surrounding it here.

NNSA had previously planned to have the first round of the W88 Alt 370 units completed in December 2019, but concerns over a $5 off-the-shelf capacitor found in each warhead caused significant delays. By September 2019, the decision was eventually made to replace those capacitors with more durable versions that cost nearly $75 each, a change that added $850 million to the total price tag of the entire effort and pushed the schedule back considerably.

Despite those delays, NNSA called the completion of the first unit a major milestone for the United States, claiming the successful first production unit was achieved one month ahead of schedule after more than 11 years of design, development, qualification, and component production.

Efforts to modernize and maintain Americas nuclear arsenal are expected to cost $1.5 trillion over the next three decades. However, because of the secrecy surrounding Americas nuclear enterprise, the astronomical costs of these programs can often avoid the public attention and oversight that more public defense programs receive, as you read more about here.

President Joe Biden's Administration has asked for approximately $15.5 billion for various nuclear weapons-related activities in the proposed budget for the 2022 Fiscal Year. This is $139 million more than Congress appropriated for the relevant accounts in the 2021 Fiscal Year, but $460 million less than President Donald Trump's administration had projected for the upcoming fiscal cycle.

NNSA is clearly hopeful that, having made it past the parts issue, the W88 program will now remain on track and on budget as it continues to upgrade these warheads over the next five years.

Contact the author: Brett@TheDrive.com

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Managing risk in the submarine transition: the latest on the Collins life-of-type extension | The Strategist – The Strategist

Posted: at 5:25 pm

The Royal Australian Navy is in the early stages of a long transition that is notable for its strategic risk. Both its core surface and subsurface combat fleets are ageing but are planned to be replaced by vessels that are still in the design phase and are years away from entering service. Many commentators have remarked on the capability risk presented by replacement schedules that are better suited to an era of strategic stability rather than our current one of growing instability and uncertainty. Not only does the current plan not increase capability for a decade or more, but it also provides little margin for error in simply avoiding a capability gap as the existing fleets age out.

Some transition risks are already being realised. The overly ambitious cut steel date for the first Hunter-class frigate has already been moved from 2020 to 2022, but the Defence Department has been indicating for some time, both at Senate estimates hearing and in its own reporting to the government, that even that schedule is under pressure. Defences acknowledgement that the weight of the frigates has grown substantially from 8,800 to 10,000 tonnes confirms that the integration of new weapons, sensors, combat management systems and helicopters into what was already an immature reference ship design is difficult. That lends credibility to recent media reporting that the government has agreed to delay the start of construction even further to 2024. That likely means that the entry into service of the first vessel will also be delayed from the planned date of 2031and the Anzacs will have to serve even longer, probably well into their thirties.

So far that doesnt seem to have generated much interest for a Plan B for the frigate transition, but there has been much discussion of a Plan B for submarines. Originally that occurred outside of Defence, but its become increasingly clear that the problem is being considered inside Defence. But its a very confused and contested space. Lets assess what weve learned over the first half of the year.

Plan A for the future submarine program currently involves an Attack-class submarine entering operational service every two years from 2034. Since there will be 12 boats, the final one wont be operational in the mid-2050s. Because the first Collins-class submarine is due to retire in 2026, followed by a sibling every two years, the fleet would be down to one boat by the time the first Attack-class boat arrived. Thats why Defence has been planning to extend the life of the Collins fleet to give it a further 10 years of service.

Thats the first confusion to clear up. The Collins life-of-type extension is not a Plan B as some have suggestedit is an unavoidable, essential element of Plan A. Its already built into Defences transition planning. The key decision for Defence and the government was not whether to do a LOTE or not, but whether it would focus on availability or capability. If the former, they could minimise the technical and schedule risks but ensure they kept submarines in the water. If the latter, they could seek to enhance capability but run the risk of having boats in sheds as technical risk materialised and upgrades schedules blew out (see here and here).

Since Defence virtually always prioritises quality over quantity, its already picked its sweet spot on that spectrum, stating at Senate estimates, for example, that it intended to preserve the Collins as a regionally superior capability until their retirement and insisting that the technical risk of doing so was manageable.

In short, despite some media commentary suggesting that new Defence Minister Peter Dutton was going to make Defence do a robust LOTE, the department had already been preparing for a substantial upgrade for several years, including three of the five major systems on the Collins (main motor, diesel generators and electrical distribution systems). In essence, Defence is aiming for a son of Collins.

Its possible that Dutton could push Defence to go further, but replacing the remaining two major systems would entail significant risk. The first is the weapons handling system. Some kind of mega-tube such as Sweden has installed on its submarines that could launch and recover larger uncrewed underwater vessels would certainly have its uses, but it would probably require a complete redesign of the front end of the submarine. The final major system is the batteries. Dutton could direct Defence to use an early LOTE as a test bed for a lithium-ion-powered submarine, but considering Defences consistent rejection of the idea of putting lithium-ion batteries in the first batch of Attack-class boats because it sees the technology as immature (despite Japan having installed them in two Soryu-class submarines already), he would have to overcome significant resistance from the department.

The other confusion to clear up is the view that, because the government hasnt made any formal announcements about the LOTE, Defence has done little or no work on it. Its been clear from numerous Senate estimates hearings that design work for the LOTE is well underway. Whats new is that the government has now committed to acquire the first set of equipment for the LOTE. ASC has confirmed that those systems have been ordered for the first boat. Its not clear why the government hasnt made an announcement about this, instead allowing public confusion over the status of the LOTE to reign, but it seems to have given up in general on sharing with the Australian parliament and public what Defence projects it has approved. That doesnt help build confidence in the overall submarine transition plan. Nevertheless, preparation for the LOTE is well advanced.

Of course, that doesnt mean it will all go smoothly. The greater the scope of the upgrade, the greater the technical risk. So, its extremely strange that ASC also stated that it hadnt yet engaged with Saab. Not only is Saab the designer of the Collins class, but it has just put Swedens own submarines through a very extensive upgrade. If you were planning to put your own Swedish-design pedigree submarine through an extensive and technically risky upgrade, wouldnt the first thing youd do be to talk to the people who have just done the same thing and identified and mitigated a lot of the risks already?

In fact, there are already some hints that the scale of the LOTE might be overly ambitious; ASC indicated in June that some scope has been moved out of the core package into later tranches for which design work has not commenced. As more technical risks materialise, impacting cost and schedule, its possible that more scope could move off into the future and potentially never be delivered. The sooner Defence and ASC can draw on Saabs experiences, the better.

The other new news with the LOTE, again according to media reporting rather than any formal announcement, is that the government has decided it will put all six Collins through LOTEs. That makes sense, but it was already a foregone conclusion if the government wanted to avoid a capability gap. Indeed, over time as the Attack-class schedule has developed, Defence has progressively changed its messaging on the number of Collins needing to undergo LOTEs from one to three to at least five.

Agreement to six provides some risk buffer against further delays in the Attack class. And even if the future submarines are delivered on time, doing all six Collins means more capability at a time when we desperately need it, plus having more submarines gives the navy the capacity to train the much larger number of submariners that will be needed for the future fleet. But its important to note that even if the LOTE and Attack-class programs are delivered on the current schedule, the navy will be capped at eight submarines until nearly 2050 unless it finds a way to accelerate the build of the Attack boats.

Agreeing to upgrade all six Collins also provides more certainty to industry. The Collins are meant to get similar main motors and diesel generators (made by Jeumont and MTU, respectively) to the Attack class. That means industry is now supplying a combined Australian submarine program of 18 boats, which is likely the largest submarine program in the western world outside of the United States. That creates the economies of scale needed for overseas suppliers to establish production facilities here. If Defence isnt seeking to assemble those three main systems here, parliament should be asking why.

On the location of the LOTE, theres nothing new to report. The government refuses to announce whether its going to move the site of Collins full-cycle dockings (and by default the LOTE, which is essentially a more comprehensive FCD). With Defence and ASC having done all the analysis they can on the pros and cons of Adelaide versus Henderson, the only explanation is that the government is saving its decision up for an election campaign announceable.

So, now that weve gained a little more clarity on Plan A, what about Plan B? Ill look at that in my next post.

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Capturing the artistic beauty of rural life | Opinion | hpj.com – High Plains Journal

Posted: at 5:25 pm

Whether they capture a lake surrounded by majestic mountains, ocean waves crashing onto a beach or waterfalls spilling over a cliff, the best photographs tell a story. In rural America, we may not have scenery as dramatic as that, but we appreciate the colorful, artistic beauty of a sunset against a wide-open sky, rolling prairies, calves playing in a pasture and even wildflowers blooming along a ditch.

Those are the kinds of images we would like to see for our 2022 Down Country Roads calendar contest, which is now open. High Plains Journal invites you to share the beauty of rural life through all seasonswhether youre on a road trip for a much-needed vacation with your family or in your own yard or the pasture out back.

We challenge you to look at your surroundings with a different perspective and show us the art in the rural landscapes around you. Previous calendars have featured farms, crops, livestock and poultryas well as the people, young and old, who work and play in the heartland.

Use your imagination and show us familiar farm scenes in a new way. Photos of rural art like barn quilts or murals are also encouraged.

For the calendar contest, we are looking for high-resolution digital photos with a landscape (horizontal) orientation, not a portrait (vertical) or square orientation.

Grand Prize and Monthly Feature winners will be selected by a panel of judges at HPJ, but you may vote online for your favorite entry for the Readers Choice award.

The Grand Prize winner will be featured on the 2022 calendar cover and receive $200, a special award, a 1-year HPJ subscription or extension, and one free 2022 HPJ event registration.

Monthly feature winners will receive $65, a 1-year HPJ subscription or extension, and one free 2022 HPJ event registration.

The Reader's Choice winner will receive a 1-year HPJ subscription or extension.

Visit https://www.hpj.com/calendar_contest to read the complete rules, see last years calendar contest winners and upload your 2022 contest submissions. The entry deadline is Aug. 1.

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Scientists are demystifying aging funding could add decades to our lives | TheHill – The Hill

Posted: at 5:25 pm

The Biden administration deserves accolades for their proposed $6.5 billion Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, referred to as ARPA-H. ARPA-H would aim to deliver breakthrough treatments for diseases like Alzheimers, cancer and diabetes.This is an ambitious goal, but one that is achievable if the administration takes bold action.

Unfortunately, for now it appears Congress is headed toward a watered down ARPA-H, funded at less than half the requested amount. It also appears the new agency will largely continue the outdated disease first culture of most National Institutes of Health-funded research. To me this suggests, at best, incremental advances. What we need is an ARPA aimed toward 21st Century medicine that tackles biological aging: a geroscience moonshot.

Geroscience is the field of scientific investigation that seeks to understand the biological aging process and how it contributes to all of the various pathologies that come with old age. Its no secret that nearly every major cause of death in the United States has age as its greatest risk factor. Just going from 40 to 70 increases your risk of dying from cancer by about 40-fold, heart disease 30-fold, and Alzheimers disease by a whopping 300-fold. For perspective, high blood pressure and obesity increase your risk by less than threefold.

Over the past two decades, scientists have learned a great deal about the biology of aging. At the same time, we are also learning how to tweak those processes to slow, or even partially reverse, many of the functional declines that go along with old age. Yet, less than one percent of the NIH budget goes toward studying this. Instead, the vast majority of research funding and, by extension, drug development focuses on individual diseases in isolation. As a consequence, our entire biomedical enterprise is geared toward waiting until people are sick and trying to cure or treat their disease. If our bodies were commercial aircraft, this would be akin to skipping maintenance and waiting until the engine is on fire at 35,000 feet before you take action.

Geroscience seeks to maintain optimum health and prevent disease by attenuating the molecular causes of biological aging directly. Excitingly, there are now several geroscience interventions that increase healthy lifespan by 10 to 30 percent in laboratory mice, with early data indicating at least some work similarly in people. If validated in clinical trials, that could be equivalent to about 20 years of additional health.

The economic case for a geroscience moonshot is compelling. Healthcare is among the most pressing challenges we face as a nation and, by far, the greatest fraction of healthcare expenditures comes from caring for the sick elderly population. The disease-first approach has been quite successful at keeping sick people alive longer than was possible 50 years ago, which it turns out is really expensive. In contrast, if we keep people alive longer in good health, they can remain productive members of society. In fact, one recent study estimated the cost savings from a conservative geroscience intervention that increases healthy life expectancy by only one year would reach about $38 trillion annually. Given the proposed ARPA-H price tag of $6.5 billion, that equates to a 5846-fold return on investment.

Equally compelling is the social impact of targeting biological aging versus treating individual diseases. While some people maintain relatively high quality-of-life with one or more age-related disorders, for others the consequences of prolonged ill health are an enormous burden. Chronic pain, fatigue, and invasive medical intervention can rapidly lead to depression and serious mental health consequences. All of this takes a heavy toll on patients, caregivers and family members. Wouldnt it be better for everyone to maximize healthspan and spend those extra years free from disease? This is the promise of a geroscience moonshot.

As a scientist with more than two decades of experience in aging research, I believe that targeting an Advanced Research Projects Agency toward geroscience would fundamentally change the trajectory of human health. The field is at an inflection point where investment at this scale is likely to yield outsized economic and social benefits. Its a near certainty that clinical interventions capable of adding much greater than one year of healthy life expectancy would be developed within the next decade, resulting in returns of many trillions of dollars.

The Biden administration has an opportunity to lead the world into a future where we come to expect our loved ones will maintain good health well into their 80s, 90s and even past the century mark.

Dr. Matt Kaeberlein is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, CEO and chair of the American Aging Association, and a professor of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the University of Washington School of Medicine, where he directs the Healthy Aging and Longevity Research Institute, the Biological Mechanisms of Healthy Aging Training Program, and the NIH Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging.

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3 Ways to Get Life Insurance When Your Policy Term Has Ended – Money

Posted: at 5:25 pm

Term life insurance is great while it lasts, providing relatively simple and inexpensive coverage for the time you need it. But if the policy term ends and you still need protection, youll have to look carefully to find the most cost-effective options for replacement.

In contrast to permanent insurance (such as whole life and universal policies) that never expires, term insurance covers you for a specified term of between 10 and 30 years. In an ideal world, the term length and the time you need coverage line up neatly. But several factors can drive that timing out of sync.

For those who buy policies early to protect their young family, the term could run out in middle age, when youre still carrying middle-aged obligations. And a tight budget could prompt you to get a shorter term than you really need, since policies that run for longer have higher monthly premiums.

Whatever your reasons for needing insurance longer than you anticipated, heres a step-by-step rundown of what to do if your insurance policy term is over and youre weighing continued coverage.

Because the same death benefit is almost sure to cost you more when your current insurance expires, buy only as much continuing coverage as you really need. Any of the options allow you to insure for less than the death benefit of the original policy.

You can figure out your required amount through answering questions such as those posed by the Insurance Information Institute. The industry group recommends a three-step process to determining your life insurance needs.

First, establish what financial resources will be available to survivors after your death. The Institute advises totaling your expected support from three sources: Social Security and other retirement-related survivor benefits; group life insurance (received as a job perk); and other assets and resources.

Consider not only how much these sources will yield, but also when they will pay out. For example, Social Security survivor benefits are payable immediately to a surviving spouse with dependent children, but are delayed until after age 60 if there are no children.

Next, calculate your survivors financial needs after your death, the Insurance Information Institute suggests. Again, there are three categories to consider: final expenses; debts; and income needs.

Finally, subtract the first total (your survivors financial resources) from the second, representing their financial needs. This calculation should be more reliable to determine how large a policy to buy than some other formulas, such as simply buying a multiple of annual income. That can especially be the case when youre older, and retirement complicates predictions of your annual income.

The simplest but not necessarily cheapest way to continue your insurance is to extend the term coverage you had. Thats an option on many, even most, term life policies. However, an extension is not considered a renewal of the coverage, and so lacks some advantages of getting a new term policy.

The main advantage here is skipping the need to medically re-qualify for coverage, provided you arent seeking to increase the death benefit. That makes extending the policy an especially appealing option if youve developed serious health issues that could preclude getting a new policy elsewhere.

But youll have to take or leave the new premium the insurer offers, without the benefit of shopping around for the best rate available from all companies. And the rate is sure to be higher than youve been paying, probably dramatically so.

For example, a 30-year-old seeking to extend a 10-year, $500,000 policy on expiry could expect the premium to rise from, say, $20 to anywhere from $40 to $75 or so, according to Scottsdale, Az. life insurance agent Chris Huntley.

The hike in premiums can be higher still if you extend coverage when youre older. For example, Guardian Insurance reports that a 50-year-old male who extends a 20-year term policy bought when he was 30 years old would see the premium jump more than tenfold, from $20 to nearly $250 a month.

And the figures cited by both Huntley and Guardian are only for the first year you extend. In contrast to the level premium you pay every month during the term of a policy, premiums during extensions are likely to rise every year, in step with your age and the statistically greater chance that youll die in any given year.

Still, despite the sticker shock of extending your term policy, its a leading option for those who are not able to get another policy because of health issues, Huntley says, including those facing a bad prognosis from a serious illness.

Its also worth considering, he says, as a stopgap measure if youre among the many people who wait until the last minute to shop around for other options when their term insurance ends. It allows you to have coverage in place while you are getting approved for another policy.

A proper life insurance policy will protect your loved ones from the unexpected.

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Some term policies supplement or replace the option to renew with one to convert the policy into whole life insurance or another form of permanent life coverage.

This option allows you to turn your term policy into one that not only delivers a benefit upon your death but also accumulates a cash value as well providing an asset you can use as collateral for a loan or use to pay your premiums. And as with renewal, conversion allows you to skip the qualification process of getting a new policy; instead, you retain the (probably better) health rating you received when you first acquired the coverage.

Conversion also provides cost stability. Unlike with renewal, premiums after converting your term coverage will be steady for the lifetime of the permanent policy. And where renewing term insurance requires waiting until the term expires, you can convert a policy earlier than that date. Indeed, depending on the policy, you may need to do so within the first five,10 or 20 years of taking out the coverage, as examples.

But conversion otherwise shares most of the disadvantages of renewal. Your policy options may be limited, with not even all permanent policies offered by the insurer available to you, let alone cheaper policies offered by other companies. And your premiums will go up: Prepare to pay between three and five times as for your old term policy, according to Barb Pietrangelo, a financial planner and insurance expert at Prudential.

Keep in mind that premiums will also rise if you extend a term policy rather than converting it. If both options are available to you, compare the hikes for each while also considering how each move meets your other needs.

If youre looking for tax-sheltered investments, your preference might lean to conversion because you can add extra funds to a permanent policy and have the interest on those investments shielded from tax, as with a 401(k) or traditional IRA.

If you still need coverage after your term insurance expires, the decision on whether to renew or convert your policy may boil down to two key questions: How old are you? And hows your health? If the first answer is a relatively low number (say, under 50) and the second one is positive even mildly so you should shop around for a new policy, say experts.

I would say in most cases, if youre young enough and healthy enough, its going to be cheaper to just to go get another 10- or 20-year term policy, rather than convert or renew your existing coverage, says Huntley.

Online broker Quotacy echoes that advice: If youre still even a little bit healthy, we recommend you look into buying a new term life insurance policy if you still want more coverage. This is the most affordable route by far.

A caveat here, though: Even if your health is as robust as the day you bought your first policy, your new coverage will be more costly. No matter the policyholder, the cost of life insurance rises with age. But getting a new term policy at least allows you to pay premiums that are level for every year, as opposed to facing the likely annual hikes if you extend an existing term policy.

Pursuing options other than renewal or conversion doesnt have to involve submitting to a medical exam, although you may wish to do so to get the broadest range of premium quotes. If your health is good, you can increasingly buy life insurance by allowing companies or an independent broker to get access to your online medical records.

Neither is a term insurance policy a binding contract. Youre free to cancel at any time, should your needs or finances change. Of course, youll then end your protection, too, and essentially forfeit the premiums youve paid to date.

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Plant life along the Hudson River | News, Sports, Jobs – The Express – Lock Haven Express

Posted: at 5:25 pm

PHOTO PROVIDEDAbove, mapleleaf viburnum, when in flower, adds a nice touch of color in shady landscapes. At top, Norrie State Parks River Trail allows one to explore plant life and catch some fantastic views.

(Editors Note: This is the second in the series of articles exploring trails in the Middle Hudson Valley Area.)

While day-tripping for horticulture activities in the Hudson Valley region is doable, it is best to stay overnight at least so as not to feel rushed. Lodging is readily available, but a great way to mix plants, travel, and adventure is staying at the Mills Norrie State Park.

Its a large park (over 1,000 acres) that runs parallel to the Hudson River with plenty of activities for young and old alike. One attraction is the miles of hiking trails that populate the park. Most of the trails are relatively easy on the joints as elevation gain/loss is minor.

The best bang for your buck would be the River Trail. The hike takes you the length of Norrie Mills and Livingston Mills Memorial State Park (adjacent to Norrie), with expansive and scenic views of the Hudson River. If young ones are along for the hike, keep a watchful eye as there are a couple of drop-offs to the water.

For those interested in native plants, there is more than enough to keep one interested in the hike. A species that interested me the most was the white cedar (Thuja occidentalis). Its not a rarity as this tree is commonly used in our Pennsylvania landscapes, as hedges but occasionally as a specimen. But it is the exposed trees to the extreme elements; in this case, the river environment makes it appealing. In a typical landscape, branches run the length of the trunk, but in this setting, lower limbs are missing. The graying bark shines as it separates in long, vertical shedding strips.

PHOTO PROVIDEDA white cedar hangs off a cliff along Norrie State Parks River Trail.

Also tucked in the riverbank, on rocky outcroppings, is ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius). It is a shrubby plant that gets to about nine feet in height with an equal spread. Foliage is not showy as it is green during the growing season and doesnt turn any attractive fall color. Its bark also peels in strips but is a little more obscure with the dense mass of stems.

The main interest is its white flowers with purple stamens, typically late May or early June. But nurseries have found a way to make this plant more appealing by releasing cultivars with purple-colored foliage, such as Diabolo and Summer Wine.

Both white cedar and ninebark perform well in open, exposed areas, typical of the trail edge along the Hudson River. But away from the river, it is a bit shadier with towering oaks, maple, and pine. And that is where the mapleleaf viburnum (Viburnum acerfolium) thrives. It will tend to sucker and form loose colonies. Flowers appear in early June and are showy white, with black fruit appearing in September. It is a good plant for a naturalized landscape as it will attract birds and butterflies. But do remember its native habitat; it will not perform well in an open, sunny setting.

If feeling ambitious, you can hook up with another trail to take you to the Sttaatsbugh State Historic Site. Plenty to see with the historical mansion and towering copper beech trees (see Express edition, July 10).

In the next segment of this series, well leave the low elevations and take a plant walk that will give young and old quite a workout and visit The Gunks.

PHOTO PROVIDEDNinebark, covered in blooms, sprawls over the rocks along the Hudson River.

Tom Butzler is a horticulture educator with the Pennsylvania State University Cooperative Extension Service and may be reached at 570-726-0022.

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