The 8th Delta State House of Assembly has been inaugurated with Imamo Timogowo, representing the Wally's South Merchant, a speaker. The state's governor, Sharif O'Berry Vori, proclaimed the 8th Assembly through the clerk. The session started with the nomination of the new speaker, Imamo Timogowo, and his deputy, Arthur, taking the oath of office. The speaker and his deputy pledged their loyalty to the state. Thereafter, the speaker administered the oath of office on the members. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel, and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Who says you can't have it all? Not Appalachian Wireless, we know what you want. Appalachian Wireless offers the hottest smartphones and unlimited data plans, all on the region's number one network. The University of Pikeville and Pikeville Medical Center announced a partnership today that representatives from both institutions believe will positively impact health and health care across the region. Pikeville Medical Center CEO Donovan Blackburn and University of Pikeville President Dr. Burton Webb signed a memorandum of cooperation Thursday between UPIKE and PMC. The document makes official a working relationship between the two institutions. Both Blackburn and Dr. Webb said the memorandum will not only impact the region's overall health but also its economic well-being. Without a healthy workforce, you can have a diverse workforce, you can have a trained workforce, but if you don't have a healthy workforce, then it's hard to recruit people to the region. We are going to be working together on bringing some more federal and state grant money to this area so that we can continue to do research on the health issues that are related and really plaguing our area. Today was a giant leap forward for the University of Pikeville Medical Center to show the commitment to the region as up to what our intent is to promote healthy initiatives but also to work together and collaborate with anything else that may benefit both the University, the hospital and the community. The memorandum signed Thursday does not bind to either PMC or UPIKE to any financial terms. According to the memorandum signed by Blackburn and Dr. Webb, both institutions can however work toward cooperative funding opportunities. The agreement also paves the way for UPIKE and PMC to develop new health care programs and to develop the region's health care providers and provide them a place in the workforce. Two years ago, we graduated 30 nurses, they hired 29 of them. Immediately they had jobs, well now we've moved to 45 nurses in this class and next year's class and then after that we'll move to 60. It's all been approved by the state and by the nursing association in the state and now they're developing a program that they're trying to get most of those nurses to stay local. That's fantastic. There'll be a lot of other things come out. There's millions of dollars available for research and development when you look again at some of the issues that we're faced with with the opioid crisis and our health initiatives. Being able to actually target those dollars, to be able to do research and development using our staff and the educational staff will be huge for the region. Also included in the agreement, work will begin to eventually include the city of Pikeville in the World Health Organization's Healthy Cities initiative. From the University of Pikeville, Chris Anderson, EKB News.


Hey, Psych2Goers, welcome back to another video. Have you ever shouted at your parents or argued with friends and then immediately regretted it? The people who we hurt or hurt us will likely be the people that we know best. Hurting the ones close to us is something that happens naturally for many different reasons. Please remember this video is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for professional advice. If you can relate to any of these signs, please do not take this feedback as an attack on your character. With that said, here are seven reasons why we hurt the ones we love. Number one, we hurt others in order to hurt ourselves. Has a family member or partner ever said, you'll never succeed in accomplishing your goals? According to psychologist Joanna Pantasi, one reason that you hurt the ones you love is because you're punishing and sabotaging yourself. This is founded on core beliefs of inadequacy. When you have an ingrained belief that you are unworthy of love, undeserving of happiness or that you're bound to ruin anything good for you, it's highly probable that you'll end up acting in ways to confirm these beliefs. Therefore, you have the tendency to hurt your loved ones in order to sabotage yourself and your happiness or because you feel you need to punish yourself. If you feel this way, try to ask yourself, what do you need in order to feel worthy of love and happiness? What would help you heal? What good qualities does your loved one see in you? Number two, we want to gain control for protection. Have you ever been scared of being emotionally hurt by a friend, significant other or family member? As an attempt to protect yourself, you hurt the person first before they have a chance. Many forms of betrayal and hurting others have a common motivation to acquire a fleeting feeling of power from the rush of hurting someone else before they can hurt you. In relationships, we tend to hurt the other so that we have the upper hand in control. If this becomes an established dynamic in your relationship, it will turn the entire relationship toxic and be the backbone for abuse. If you realize this behavior in yourself, think about what you're protecting yourself from. What can you find common ground in order to solve your differences peacefully without inflicting harm to one another? Number three, we feel more freedom to be ourselves and not censor our words or actions.  In any close relationship, you may feel inclined to behave and speak authentically. The more love and trust are developed between people, the more freedom you feel to just be yourself. However, this lack of inhibitions and boundaries makes it easier to unintentionally hurt the other person. You might think that your comment is completely innocent without any malicious intent, but it can be perceived as offensive by the person on the receiving end. Setting good personal boundaries is crucial to creating healthy relationships. Communicate with the person on the receiving end to let them know that you mean no harm. If they tell you that they feel hurt by your actions, try to change your behavior. Number four, we develop an insecure attachment style.  What you experienced during this first relationship can often determine how you act in relationships throughout life. When adults with secure attachments look back on their childhood, they usually feel that someone reliable was always available to them. As adults, they may enjoy close intimate relationships and are not afraid to take risks and love. On the contrary, people with insecure attachment patterns to grow up without consistent, supportive, and validating environments often struggle to have healthy relationships with others as adults. However, everybody has the ability to change and grow. A person who doesn't have a naturally secure style can work on earned security, which means developing a secure style through relationships and interactions in adulthood. Number five, we want to assert our own space and independence. Are your parents or someone in your life too controlling? Do you wish they could give you space and independence that you desire? You may lash out, be rebellious and utter hurtful words. This is an unconscious way to assert your own space and independence by pushing the other person away. Therefore, it's important to learn how to communicate your thoughts and feelings. Try to understand where the other person is coming from instead of lashing out immediately. Number six, we want to test the boundaries and see how far we can go before they draw the line. Have you ever tried testing the boundaries to see how far your friend, family member, or partner is willing to go before they draw the line, thus hurting them in the process? We generally can't learn what another person's limits are until we test them. Young children do this instinctively. Children are motivated by powerful impulses to get or do whatever feels compelling to them at the moment, until they're told otherwise. They will often relentlessly pursue the objects of their desire. Often, the person who pushes the boundaries of their partner desperately wants some clear and firm boundaries. Without realizing that this behavior can hurt the other person.  And number seven, we have idealizations and high expectations. Have you ever fantasized about a perfect relationship with a significant other or even friends? When we have unrealistic expectations about our relationships, we can feel disappointed or deflated when our expectations aren't meant. This may lead to abandoning good relationships or making negative comparisons and miss out on what works in our own relationship. The closer we get to someone emotionally, the more rules we attribute to them in our mind and the higher expectations we have of them and the more they ultimately mean to us. In a way, we idealize them. We think quite highly of them. Therefore, any small sign that might not line up with this idealized image we have of them may be perceived more negatively. So did these reasons shed light on a situation in your life? Of course, these may not apply to every situation. At the end of the day, many of us have hurt or been hurt by someone close to us. It's how we resolve the situation and communicate with the other person that matters. It's always best to do what you think is best after thinking through the situation. Did you find this video insightful? Tell us in the comments below. Please like and share it with friends that may enjoy this video too. Make sure to subscribe to Psych2Go and hit the notification bell for more new content. All the references used are added in the description box below. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.


to do some sous vide burgers. I'm going to try these out for the first time. I've read a bunch of about them on the Facebook groups, a lot of the sous vide groups. I've seen some videos on them, but I've never tried them myself, so I'm going to try some. It's a Memorial Day. I want to cook some burgers, so I figured let's go ahead and sous vide some up and show everybody how they're done. I've pattyed out some 80-20. I'm going to go ahead and put just some of my regular beef rub, which is salt, pepper, garlic, onion powder, nothing too fancy. I'm just going to go ahead and season them up before I put them in this vacuum bag so I get some seasoning in them when they're sitting in the sous vide. I'm only going to sous vide them for about an hour, maybe an hour and 20 minutes at 140. I want them to be medium when they come out. Then we're going to throw them on the grill and cook them up. I'm going to go ahead and back these up and get ready. Alright guys, I'm going to go ahead and put these all in one bag, so I don't need to make up a bunch of different bags for each burger. I just stuck four burgers in the bag. I'm going to go ahead and open it up, seal this up real quick. Like always, I'm going to go ahead and double seal it. I'm going to pick the moisture setting just because I know some of the juices from the burgers are going to come up there. Go ahead and let that tighten up, let it seal, and then I'm going to hit it with a double seal. Then we're going to throw them in the sous vide bath. Alright guys, I got the sous vide's all up to 140, 140 degrees. Like I said, I'm only going to drop them in here for probably about an hour, an hour and 30 minutes, maybe even just an hour, 15. I'll probably pull them a little early because all we're really doing is trying to get them to be pasteurized, so we can make them a little medium, medium rare on the grill without having to worry about it. It changes the texture a little bit from what I hear. So I'm just going to toss them in there. Then what I'm going to do is go ahead and get, I'm going to cook these on my Weber.  I'll be back. Alright guys, I'm just getting my grill up the temp. So I thought I'd throw some bacon on my griddle here. So while the burgers are in the sous vide still, they still got another 35, 40 minutes. I'm going to crisp up some of this bacon so we can have bacon cheese burgers with it. So I thought I'd show you that and that grill is getting up the temp pretty good. Bacon is starting to cook. See you back in another 30 minutes and we'll have those burgers on. I want to pull these out of the sous vide and just like normal, when you pull any kind of meat out that you're going to sear from the sous vide, you want to go ahead and pat them dry. They look kind of gray and ugly, but we're going to go ahead and dry these off. Put a little bit more of that beef rub on there, salt, pepper, and garlic. The reason you want to pat them dry so you can get all the moisture off of them so that they sear up better, get that crust on that you're looking for. So I'm going to go ahead and pat them dry, put a little bit more of this on, salt, pepper, garlic, onion powder, just a little bit, not a whole lot. You don't want it too salty, just a tad to get it back on with the moisture that it took off when it was in the sous vide. That's it. I'm going to go ahead and throw these back on the grill for a couple minutes, don't take long, and then we're going to eat it up. I've got all my accompaniments out here, lettuce, tomato, onion, got the bacon, mayo, the ketchup, mustard. We're going to put these on the grill. All right, I'll back out to the grill, got my Weber hole nice and hot. I got my burgers here, brought the cheese out because we're going to throw some cheese on them. Yep, the weather's all nice and hot. I'm going to go ahead and throw these on. It shouldn't take too long because they're mostly cooked already. We're just going to try to get that quick charge to them, so I'm going to throw these on here, probably just for about three or four minutes. I'm going to flip them and we're going to throw the cheese on. I'm back on the grill for about two minutes. We're going to go ahead and flip them. Yeah, they're cooking pretty good. All we're trying to do is get them a couple more minutes on here, then we're going to throw the cheese on, let that melt, and that'll be done. All right, it's been another couple minutes. Flip them over, put the cheese on, and we'll be done. The wife likes this. The kid is like American, so we're going to throw some American on there. We're going to take them off the fire, just let them cheese melt over on the side over there. I'm going to take about a minute, close up the grill, put that heat in there. We're going to throw these on the pan and we'll get them inside and eat them up. Matter of fact, the cheese is probably already melted. There you go. All right, it's on. You can tell the cheese is all melted, just fine. I'm going to go ahead and open up mine just so you can see what it looks like when it's done. You see, kind of wanted it a little medium, nice and medium in there, nice and juicy. And we're going to throw them on buns, throw the accompaniments on, go to the counter and eat them. Thanks for watching. Make sure you join us on Facebook and make sure you subscribe. I have a sous vide burger. Hey guys, it's Darren. I just wanted to follow up with this video. I tried this out because a lot of people I saw in some of the other Facebook groups were saying how great sous vide burgers were. I tried it. I don't think it was any better than just cooking the burgers on the grill by themselves. It would be good probably if you are somebody who likes rare burgers and you want to make sure they don't get you sick. You could pasteurize it, cook it at like 129, 130 degrees for an hour to help kill any bacteria in the meat. But as far as making the burgers taste any better, probably not. I just pretty much added a step. So try it if you want to. I always like to try new things, but I can honestly say it didn't really do much, any different than a normal burger. So go ahead and try it. But thanks for watching. Make sure you subscribe. Make sure you like this video. Follow us on Facebook and we'll see you on the next video. Thanks guys.


We're glad to know you're still there. It's still a breakfast on PLOS TV Africa. It's time to leave from off the price what made it to the front pages of national dailies. Some of the national dailies we're going to be looking at this morning are the nation, The Punch, The Guardian, and of course Nature News. Let's begin with the nation newspaper. But before that, my guest this morning is Mr. Tunde Kolawole, a legal practitioner here in Lagos State. Good morning, and welcome to the program. Good morning, brother. Thanks for having me. And a very good night as well. Yes, I hope you had a good night as well. Yeah, I did. I did. Good. He wants the lawyer to be going up to meet. Yeah. Read hard. Somebody might just tell you now to go and help him get perpetual injunction. So it will bring a lot of money. Okay, Mr. Kolawole. Yes, that's what brings the money. Let's go to the newspapers now. But the first newspaper we're treating or we're looking at is the nation newspaper. Let me just re-loud some of the headlines and then we zero in on one of them. Government took up rising inflation with a cut in money supply. That's what they are saying on the nation. I don't know how that is going to be the solution. Stock exchange joins B to boost forex availability. And APC declares our last group or groups caucus as a contraption. Okay, we also have UK Police Chargesiani with bribe taking fraud. We have president names NIMC boss because he has asked the other one to go on to resign. Or to retire. Medical consultants serve 21-day strike notice. But we're beginning with the builders headline on the nation. New twist in Niger crisis as Russian mercenaries arrive. And the rider on that story is Wagner group in Mali with arms ammunition. And Abdul Salami raises dialogue hopes, briefs Tinobu. Let's begin with that. Echoers is talking tough. And Niger also is saying, well, we die here, as we would say it. Mali and Burkina Faso are brothers in arms right now. And we heard a long time ago that an agreement has been reached with the Wagner group and by extension Russia to defend Niger. So this new twist has said that already the Russian mercenaries have arrived the country. What are your thoughts? I am not so proud that the Wagner group are already in Mali. And Puna and Lika will make an incursion into Nigerian public. The truth of the matter is that most of the leaders that we have in the Western world today they are ambitious. They are most likely, wants to kind of recognize Africa as a part of the Middle East. When you look at the leaders of the Pulai Putin, you look at the Donald Trump and some of the other leaders, you will appreciate what I am saying. More importantly, the African leaders have shown their attitudes and the capacity to cater for their people. And so people are using all forms of means to get into the Caucasian world, to get into the Western world. We have to buy up a chance to be better, whether they perish in the Atlantic Ocean or not, they are not really, they don't bother. And when issues are like this, the people want to protect themselves, protect their environment. And that is what is calling this news camp for Africa. First that, sooner than later, they might want to colonize Africa. And because Russia would not want to stand by, because of the investment it has made especially me in Africa during the struggle for the colonization. You remember the Soviet Union, when the Western world didn't want to give us independence it was the Soviet Union that became Soviet Union that supported us to resolve it without an elimination with much power and logistics. But after independence, they didn't benefit anything. Rather what they were told is that it's not only that the person that drinks the water, that will drink the water. So I suspect the Russian people sensing that Africa may be the colonized, they went and settled the war against us and are using it as a kind of exploratory impulse to either begin to get their food out on Africa or to begin to roll back the struggle of the Western world on the African country. The retreat from Ukraine by the Wagner group is just a tactical manoeuvre. Tactical manoeuvre to allow them to be able to go back to Africa to continue what they were doing there. Unfortunately, most of the Africans in there don't realize this. They have not appreciated this. I have written series of articles in the newspaper, on the social media, and not seen a black ray that sooner than later, if the African people, if the mythos don't get their ass together, the colonization may be re-digited on them. Because the people that are unable to cater for their own livelihoods, they are not better than animals. And those who are able to cater for their own will not sit by and want to come and navigate the consequences of their own soil. So the race for the colonization of Africa may have begun in a very, very subtle manner. And if we don't do anything about it, it is going to be tragic. Unfortunately, the most of the people that we have at the end of leadership in Africa today, they are very healthy people, very unperturbed people. People who are not good leaders, who are not good leaders of history. And even if they are good leaders of history, they have never developed the capacity to protect themselves. And I've also been saying this, who have reached the issue of all animals and plants that have gone into extinction? They are the ones that are unable to protect themselves from their predestined neighbors. They are the ones that are unable to manage their own waste. They are the ones that are unable to sign the danger that is ahead of them. If it weren't for the Wajna group, the colonization of Africa may have been in the open. Okay, another headline there just above this bold headline is that the UK police charges this area with bribe taking and fraud. And some other headlines are saying that EFCC is mum about this. They are not saying anything, but in the UK, far away UK, she has been charged with this. What are your comments, Grace? Well, there is an announcement by the General Secretary of the National Council, which I love so much. He said the person that steals a keg of palm wine, I mean, the person that I received, the receiver of a totally keg of palm wine, or palm oil, is a guilty person and told it. Look at the Western world. They will allow you, steal your people's money, take it to their bank. They'll start all these thinking rules and regulations that they have for receiving money, for tracking money, and then for saving money. But they will first receive it, put it into their system, use it to develop their own economy, and after a few years they will turn around, go for the patent, put in the money, and then pretend that they are investigating, and they want to punish the person. So many years, so many resources will have been lost in this process of investigation. At the end of the day, they might find the person who brought the money in guilty, and then they will not begin to negotiate with you what percentage they will return to you, and now you are able to spend their spend on what infrastructure or both of the sites you can invest the percentage that they are returning to you. So we are in a category, is it 22 or what do they call it? Is it good, like they said, and like somebody who was saying in the studio, that at least we should go for whatever we might be able to get back from the... the first money in the UK. But the truth of the matter is that some years when that money was stolen, the value is not the same with what it is. So the cost of litigation in those places will also take as much as almost 50% of that fund. So all you might get at the end of the day will be near future. But let's concede one thing, that at least they at the end of the day try to make effort. And then they also do very brilliant investigations. Unlike Colossea, where we will say, the Miss Feliz touched the billions in his house. He was financing terrorism and all that. And at the end of the day, we will bring him to court for illegal possession of the dendons. This report at the end of the day might convict Alishimaki AK, because they would have done the thorough work. Look at the numbers here, it has taken them to investigate her. But at the end of the day, what will be returned to us will still be beaten. And when we get it, our people are affected. They have to have been looted for that return to us. The one that was gotten, that was looted was looted some of it passed to Konefambu Yasuke for purchase of arms and ammunition for the military to fight Bokwara. At the end of the day, there is no evidence that those arms and ammunition were provided or were bought. The African youth should stand up to fight against the colonization of Africa. It is the official that is at stake. It's difficult when you are not in the corridors of power to fight except you go to the streets and you start to demonstrate which is not even allowed and all that. But you just mentioned the Mefele and it brings us to one other headline still on the nation and they are saying government to curb rising inflation with cut in money supply. When you talk cut in money supply, some of us who are not... That is the wishful thinking. Why do I say wishful thinking? We are told that in the economy the worth between the value and the expense of your money is your productive base. What efforts are they making to strengthen the productive base of the Nigerian economy? In my own opinion, there is none. We are only using financial instruments to curb inflation as never was anywhere in the world. We are talking about a country that is only about 83 years of Naira. We are talking about a country that doesn't even know how much of this oil which is the mono products, how much oil it produces, how much it sells, how much it's import to consume. So this breaching wood policy for continuing inflation would have worked if it is a vacation. Since it was introduced, don't know about the Naira, to Yara Dua era, to Jonathan era and now to Ajwaj Wola made to Nobu's era. We need a holistic approach, a very pragmatic approach to find solutions to the economic crisis that Nigeria, most of Africa and the Middle East are confronted with today. Let's move to the punch newspaper. Some of the headlines here on the punch are that AU plans, fresh sanctions and Abdul Salami warns against war. Federal government, states, local governments share 966 billion Naira July revenue. EFCC mom as a designer faces bribery charge in UK. We've talked about that. And some other headlines. But anger as states warehouse rise, delay palliative sharing. It's a story that is very funny to me right now. Anger as states, warehouse rise, delay palliative sharing. It's a deja vu as far as I'm concerned. There were palliative during the COVID era and there were warehouse as well. And then people had to break the warehouses before they could get a hold of it. Some people were even waiting. Some governors were waiting to share the palliatives at their bed days. So it will now be like a bed day gift to the people. Somewhere hoarding them to use during campaigns. And so many other things that you'll be wondering what is really going on. Now it has happened again. So the question is whether the states are warehousing the rise. The question is that are they really having a good plan for the palliative money that has been given to them 5 billion per state, which if you ask me anyway, is totally unagreeable. Lagos has more than 20 million. Another state, up north, might have like 5 million or so. And then you're giving 5 billion to every state. That's no equity as far as I'm concerned. But I don't know how they made that template to work for all of them. But this is it. They are warehousing the rise and they are delaying sharing the palliatives. In the first place what kind of palliatives will 5 billion do for the people and for how long? So the question of palliatives, do you think it's a good move in the first place and are the states ready to do what will be beneficial to the entirety of their citizenry? What the palliatives not like we have said before is a doesn't appear to be well thought out at all which is like putting the card before the house. Thoughts are for most less safe. If you say you want to face out a regime of subsidy then you will also not be distributed palliatives. If you begin to distribute palliatives it means you have mainly taken subsidy from one place and take it to another sector of the society or the government because the money you are spending to provide the palliatives are money you could equally have used to continue to sustain the so called subsidy on petroleum products. So that is one. The second issue is that it is unlawful for the federal government I can't remember specifically the particular section now but it has to do with the finality of the federation the consolidated revenue of the federation but I think it has to be the one of the construct the federal government cannot borrow any state any money and then the state cannot borrow the local government any money whatever money comes is the account of the federal government but in relation to the consolidated account of the federation which is to be distributed by the state and the local government as part of the money to run their respective state. So when the federal government comes up and says they are loaning the state for five billion to provide palliatives I dare to say that it is unlawful secondly that money has not been properly appropriated by the National Assembly and we do have enough time for the money to be sent to the National Assembly to be properly appropriated that will not be properly appropriated it is an illegal way of eliminating palliatives by regime thirdly when you look around the world there is no society where there is no one form of palliative or the other in places like Britain public transportation is subsidized in places like Britain agriculture you go to the UK and America some of those places are not there there are food banks where people who are poor who are unable to send for them are given at least one square meal in a day there are also a number of charity organizations churches and mosques that distribute foods clothes medication to people in crisis situations like this we don't have that in Nigeria and I don't know whether you watch a video on Tiktok on the social media which gives us a very graphic example of what this palliative is all about that video came from Iloni in which a bag of rice was given to the whole world in Iloni comprising of more than almost 10,000 people and the community gathered and were asking themselves that if just one teaspoon is given to one each household the one bag of rice will not go run and you must also know this palliative thing is not going to be forever it is all going to be for a certain period of time whereas there is no certainty that the prices of petroleum products will not rise in the future if it rise are you going to begin a new random palliative for the people so it doesn't make sense also remember that a year or two or there about before the body regime pulled out of power there was a jumbo contract running into billions of Naira to return Naira maintenance also they have to take the refinery what has happened and they paid upfront what has happened to that town Naira maintenance or the cessation of those refineries honestly speaking whichever way you look at this palliative is never going to work and so if it is not properly managed just like we saw I think in Adama war it could be a very serious crisis situation in which there could be a rise or there could be uprising against the government so they are better watching these politicians also want to use this lead to change to begin to this capital to begin to make sense to begin to do it and the other in Nigeria it was good by giving them a three school pool of rice then they are better watching the government should go back to the drone board and find solutions to this like in Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia doesn't impose any hardship on their people they produce oil and then the oil they continue to subsidize it they also subsidize housing and you also not see any tired when you are pressing on the streets in Saudi Arabia begging for harm or walking at an imaginary to fend for themselves at a very tender age these are the dangers of life in here well Saudi Arabia does Saudi Arabia practice democracy? it is not it is not so it is not a democracy it is not a perfect democracy anywhere in the world I was just going to the fact that they keep telling us that democracy is the best is that democracy or is nothing that the worst democracy is still better than any other form of government and all those sort of things but right now this palliative money, the 5 billion by the way we didn't hear we just heard that there will be 5 billion the time that we got to hear that the 5 billion has already been paid was when the federal government started telling the states that you have to return 48% to the state we are only giving you like 52% of that money the rest will be returned and the governors were kicking against it that if we have to return it then it's not palliative anymore that's when we got to hear otherwise as a person I didn't hear it had already been paid I still kept thinking that right now we found out that the palliatives themselves are being hoarded by the government it's really funny very very funny so, you know yeah go ahead under I think it was under Dr. Gulo Chinuchan in which monies were similarly giving to the states to address certain challenges that they were having remember the governor didn't tell anybody all the other people and the federal government also didn't tell the Nigerian people that money was made available it was through the present minister of war I mean, the federal capital territory he has some wiki that we got to know that the jumbu a month of money were given to the states and that he was using his own to construct overhead bridges in a state the death of governor was said not to have used the money for anything and the human rights body have not taken to court it was also to discover what is important in the media that some other governor used a large chunk of this money to buy cars and then improve their wardrobes in the respective states rather than using the money to provide for their people it went into keeping wife of the local government wife of public official buying cars for all manners of political appointees leaving the roads the hospitals and the schools in very deplorable conditions we require to be transparent in addressing whatever money going to the state, the local government and to the federal accounts I remember I think Yara Dua at the time was publishing whatever locations are given to the states and the local government each time money is shared at the federal level somehow that program I think under Dr. Gulok the Nigerian people should begin to hold their people accountable because in the way when you look at it the so-called removal of society is mere punishment for the Nigerian people for the indolence of the political elite who have been able to manage not just the petroleum sector but the society at large they say they take the petroleum product and cause the burden they say some people have been persuasive for where they didn't supply what is the responsibility of government is it not to ensure that the product are not put up what is the responsibility of government is it not to punish those who might steal a public fund in my humble opinion it is not to punish the Nigerian people I usually say the removal of fuel subsidy and bringing up palliative is like destroying the community bridge and then giving canoes to people to ferry themselves across the same river that the bridge was called so now the common bridge that everybody could pass you have destroyed it and now you have brought canoes and there are some people who cannot access the canoes well let's go to nature news there is a headline here WAPAN begins registration of waste pickers in Nigeria says that waste pickers promote clean environment and provide employment and reduce crime so would like to get your take on this registration of waste pickers well those who are saying this why don't they encourage young children too to be waste pickers if you look at the condition with those people men and women go to pick these waste and noras you will agree that they are opposed to all manners of diseases furthermore so some of those things especially electronic waste can be cancer genetic can be cancer cancer genetic because some of them they are component contain some manners of chemical and adjacent agents that could be templated to women existing so why are you going to be encouraging of people to be waste pickers in other parts of the world waste baskets are provided in homes in offices and on the streets there will be a waste basket for metals waste baskets for paper and waste baskets for plastics and for more items and then the waste people who go to the homes to the streets to some of these places to pick these things and take it to some rapists home where they are cleaned up and then recycled and recollect that a lot of the time they was building waste recycling plants all over Lagos there is some at Isola here one here at Isola here some on the Lagos island and some of these other places when the lipstick came to power when the overdue the government in 1984 they stopped all that project but fortunately when the civil and people came again other than to facilitate the project they cured it it's not impossible that some of those waste recycling plants have been sold to those who build houses for residential workers on them then why can't we also all those who generate this waste accountable for the waste that they generate those who produce drinks and which plastic is used before the discipline we could make sure or we could insist they must have a way of getting back all the plastic when they did their distribution those who produce bottled water those who produce the popular circuit water we could tie it to their agreement or contrast to the state a program of calling back of the economy of connecting the waste and they regenerate rather than encouraging and exposing our children so those who are in different places they are engaging in this furthermore also note that those waste dumps have become a kind of a center of breathing of criminality and have too many times read in the papers in which police have apprehended some of these army suspects and then the suspect will take them to the waste dumps where they are hiding their weapons or carrying out their nephalos or activities so also look at the state of those waste and they properly manage the waste is in fact the waste dump site do we close them up on time when they should be closed also that they don't begin to engage in this fighting what is the implication of those waste dumps on underground water that we have all over the places a short-sighted way of creating dump for the youth which we should not support all and call it the government would you rather have them because they are here with us now would you rather have them practice without any form of recognition because this registration seems to be something that will give will make it legal on the one hand it is possible to monitor them on the other hand and so much more whether we like it or not some youths are engaged in it whether they are exposed to diseases or not and this is what they see as their own form of livelihood so taking it away from them don't forget Okada riders and those who ride the Marua who are supposed to be registered at the same time as it works if it works most of the state will not be banning the use of Okada and then on the highways or in the communities most of the time we say we want to register people for one reason or the other to find out that in our climate it has not worked because when it works will be transplanted into the wheels of those who are profiting from the chaos and anarchy that all our societies have become Ok Well this is where we will have to wrap it up for this morning Thank you so much as usual coming to give us your thoughts on issues that have a reason Good morning Thanks for asking me permit me to quickly pay my condolence to Senator Adiola whose personal system was killed in Lagos may the soul of the departed PA to the senator and we want to employ the security agencies to leave no stone unturned to apprehend whoever is behind it I happen to know Senator Adiola who worked in the same place for some 10 years Precisely Adiola Thank you Thank you very much Ok the senator's aid was killed by what they are calling a killer soldier and the association that is mourning this aid is saying that this killer soldier should be brought to book whoever it is whether it is a soldier, a civilian or whoever is responsible for all these killings everybody should be brought to book crime should never be encouraged Well we have just been talking with Mr. Tunde Kolawole a legal practitioner here in Lagos State and we were looking at the headlines some of them that we were able to cover we will take a short break when we return we will go to our first hot topic for today stay with us


Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm talking with Marilyn Robinson, one of America's best and best known writers. She is also a non-fiction essayist and now she has a new book out called Reading Genesis by Marilyn Robinson, which I recommend highly. Marilyn, welcome. Thank you very much. Why is betraying a brother such a prominent theme in the Hebrew Bible? Well I think it's sort of a small model of the fences against ourselves as human beings that happen at every scale. And it seems in the Hebrew Bible the older brother typically does worse or is somehow dethroned or put down. Why is that? What is that telling us? I think that there's no necessity, no causality in the way that things work among human beings, that God is free to choose the younger brother. The conventions of human society, primogeniture and so on, are not salient in terms of God's intentions. So in your Calvinist view, is it elevating predestination over human institutions and human choices? I don't think, I mean, poor old Calvin always comes up, you know, but I don't think that there's any theologian who ever walked the earth who didn't say that David was chosen over his brothers because it was the intention of God, you know. I mean, a great deal of determinists, the language is poor, but God's choices are reflected continuously in the Bible. And if that's seen as predestination, it seems to me that that isolates it from the text in a way that's not appropriate. Do you think there's room in Catholic theology or even Armenian theology for human free choice to be the reason why these different events are happening, say in Genesis or the Hebrew Bible? That predestination is a bit less general than you're making it out to be in Christian thought or what's your view? It's pretty general in Christian thought. Thomas Aquinas believed in it, for example, wrote about it, you know, in Summa country, in Tulli's and also in the Summa Theologiae. You know, I mean, it's very difficult to conceive of an omnipotent God who is relatively powerless in the way that our conception of freedom would imply. I argue in the book consistently that God does actually restrain himself from, you know, intruding too far on our own nature at the same time that what he intends works his way through our nature. You write in your book and I quote, the great figures of scripture are not at all Homeric, unquote. What did you mean by that? In a Homeric character, well, they tend to be demigods, one thing, their nature is complicated by the influence of a divine parent.  In the Bible, there is no intention to make anyone exceed his humanity. That God is always working through people that are recognizably fallible, limited human beings, that part of the reason I think that we have so often God choosing almost at random among people is to make the point he's acting through them rather than they're acting out of their some singular quality of their own person. So that would be true, say for the elevation of Moses, who at first is a sort of a stumbling bumbling figure, a stutterer, not very confident, but God elevates Moses. And Moses says, you know, I'm really not the person who should be doing this.  He does not allow the absence of what appear to be a heroic qualities in Moses to be disqualifying of Moses. How has the book of Genesis influenced your fiction writing? You know, I think it has actually influenced Western literature, English language literature, to a point where it's very difficult to say where the influence begins. You know, I think that there's nothing in ancient literature that approaches it in terms of characterization, and there's very little in modern, you know, literature that also would approach it from that point of view, you know, these people who are rather obscure figures in the human world and overlapping generations of herdsmen, you know, they're incredibly strongly differentiated and characterized. And I think that that's something that has been an influence on all Western literature. How much do you feel that we moderns should feel free to do a kind of pick and choose from Genesis or from the Old Testament more generally? So you write quite a bit about themes of grace and reconciliation in Genesis, and they clearly are there, say, in the Joseph story. But if you look at, say, God destroying almost the entire world through the flood, or you look at some of the battles fought in Deuteronomy, it doesn't seem to be grace at all. Well, you know, that certainly is a problem.  That's true. It would be meaningless if it didn't because those things are so enormously important in human life and history. The fact that it doesn't give us an easy way to understand these things does not mean that they're not germane to its subject, you know, which is the nature of human being and the nature of God. The picking and choosing is certainly, certainly characteristic of the response that people have made to Genesis and to the Bible altogether. I think that if I could simply change emphasis and show that there are other ways in which things are to be understood and that there are words like vengeance and jealousy and so on that are bad translations and distort the reading of the text. I mean, I consider the Bible to be the most complex document on the planet, you know, the fact that its difficulties are not resolvable by me in every case or in a case. Perhaps I don't think is a criticism of the Bible. I once knew a Calvinist. His name was John Robbins, and he was what I call a bite the bullet Calvinist. So he thought the Bible was divine revelation. It was above human judgment. You simply had to latch on to whatever was in there and couldn't really very much use your interpretive faculties to override it. What's the view that you hold that leads you to differ from from John Robbins?   There's no no great likelihood that they will have read the the institutes or anything else that he wrote. You know, the need of interpretation taking into account what appears to be the overriding meaning of the text is what Calvin did. You know, I mean, he's a his whole career was an explication of the Bible by his lights using his Latin and his Hebrew and so on. He says, you know, we've read this wrong for a thousand years and and it will take us a thousand years to get it anywhere near right. You know, so he does not believe in an absolutely straightforward reading of the text. He believes very much in an interpretation that reconciles the text to the best understanding we feel we have about the nature of God. You're right in your book. And again, I quote Tuva Frayne to put aside power is Godlike unquote. What did you mean? Simply that, I mean, the ability to assert to the extent that one can control over another person is a suspect act in itself. You know, the way that we have been human, despite transgressions and all the rest of it, the way that that God has loved human beings in their humanity, in order to allow this to happen, we have to assume that God did not assert himself in a way that disallowed our nature. As a Calvinist, who would not in general dismiss the Old Testament, what do you make of a book such as Leviticus? It's highly legalistic, highly ritualistic. Some Christians read Leviticus and become a kind of split Christian Jew, almost other Christians, more or less dismiss the book. How does it fit into your worldview? I think that when you read like Herodotus, you know, where he describes these little civilizations that are scattered over his world, you know, he describes them as, you know, in terms of what they eat or prohibit or, you know, they paint themselves red or they shave half their head or they, you know, if there are all these kinds of very, very arbitrary distinctions that people make in order to identify with one client over against another, you know, at the point of Leviticus, which, of course, is an accumulation of many texts over a very long time, no doubt, but nevertheless, to think of it as being Moses, he is trying to create a defined distinctive human community and by making arbitrary distinctions between people so that you're not simply replicating notions of, you know, what is available or feasible or whatever, but actually asking them to to adopt, you know, prohibitions of food. That's a very common kind of distinguishing thing in Herodotus and in contemporary life, so that the arbitrariness of the laws is not a fault. It is a way of establishing identification of one group as separate from other groups. So you read it as a narrative of how human communities are created, but you still would take a reading of, say, Sermon on the Mount, that the mosaic law has been lifted or it's still in place? Oh, it's not still in place. I wouldn't. I mean, we've been given other means by which to, you know, create identity. Moses was doing something distinctive in a certain period of the evolution of of Israel as a people, you know, he didn't want them to be Egyptians. He didn't want them to to subscribe to the prevailing culture, which was idolatrous. And, you know, he's doing kind of like Plato in the Republic. He's saying this is this is how we develop the idea of a community.  Jesus very often says, you know, when someone says to him, how can I be saved?  Ritual sacrifice plays a major role in the Bible, as you mentioned in your book, including in Genesis. Is that a human universal? And it's still with us in some form, as Rene Girard might suggest. Or have we simply transcended the need for all this ritual sacrifice? I mean, in the books of Moses, he has adapted ritual sacrifice so that it's clearly a feast.  You know, I think that this is true also in Homer, that they give bones to the gods and eat the meat as a community. This is probably a huge public health measure for one thing, simply making sure that everyone within a group is nourished, you know, every once in a while. The idea of sacrificing the animal, I don't know. I think it always depends on whether or not the animal becomes, you know, the Thanksgiving turkey or not. I think that that varies from one group to another. But among the the Israelites, I think it was a feast, basically. The negative side of the sacrifice that you do away with something to achieve a kind of ritual cleansing of violent impulses so they don't turn more violent. That's not part of ritual sacrifice in the Bible. Is that element of ritual sacrifice still with us? I find ourselves very puzzling, frankly. I mean, I don't think that we have. I think that what has happened in our civilization as opposed to civilizations that have come before is that we have the appearance of a relative absence of violence by by historical standards. And then in reserve, in potential, we have a fantastic capacity for violence that would exceed anything that the world has ever seen before. Maybe if we had some way of releasing releasing this, you know, by littles rather than than making more missiles and, you know, more bombs, maybe would be healthier for us, ultimately. What's the role of the Antichrist in your theology? It's mentioned in Daniel. It's in the book of Revelation, but a lot of the Bible, it's just not there. Well, you know, I tend to think there's the Antichrist is probably an array of bad human actors and behaviors rather than being a single figure, as some people think that it is. You know, it seems to me that, for example, in the book of Revelation, what you have is this kind of cyclical pattern of history in which these Antichrist figures appear and kind of work themselves through an epic of history. And then it goes on to another epic of history. I mean, it seems to me as if you don't have to look far to see things that are very, very much opposed to Christ very directly, whether they acknowledge this or not. Typically, they do not acknowledge it. So I don't think that Antichrist is necessarily an unusable term. Well, I think that it is a term that should require scrutiny on the part of people who use it, certainly. So for you, it comes in cyclical form and it's a kind of matrix rather than say, I was singling out the Pope or singling out Hitler or some person yet to come. Is that fair to say? Right. Yeah. Well, you know, you look at history. There are a lot of terrifying people in history, you know. It's not just Hitler. For how many years did you teach literature at University of Iowa and other places? Iowa, about 25 years, and then I did lectureships or or brief appointments in other places. How hard was it to teach literature to groups of students who, I assume, very often were not familiar with the Bible? How was that for you? You know, that's an interesting and interesting question. Sometimes if you ask the right question, you find out that there are people in that room that know a lot more about the Bible than you would ever expect them to. You know, a lot of people tend to be rather private about their upbringing, perhaps, you know, and then, you know, often it turns out that they were brought up in a religious context. Many, many people are, you know. There is a really a sad phenomenon of Christianity having become identified with what are seen as very ungenerous positions and values. And so people are very reluctant to be identified with religion because they're afraid that they're also then identified with a kind of politics that they have no respect for. Where in the world have the students most surprised you in this regard with what they knew about the Bible or how they understood it?  I think this is actually a more widespread feeling than actual adherence to Christianity or acknowledged adherence to it. The imposter generosity, I think, insofar as it's celebrated in the Bible is the thing that attracts them. Now, you've also been a preacher for many years. Is that correct in church? No, no. There was a time when the minister was often called away and I would preach, and this must have happened three or four times. And my whole reputation as a preacher have come from those three or four times. I'm actually very anxious about being in a pulpit, I feel like an imposter. And so I don't seek out that opportunity. What did you learn from those three or four times preaching? That I had more to say than the 20 minutes of approves. The preaching could accommodate this. And also perhaps that people in churches have a kind of internal 20 minute timer and begin to notice when you're talking longer than they would have expected. Do you have a view on Bible translations? So it seems to me there's a new generation of translators. There's a John Tabor translation of Genesis just out. There's Sarah Rudin doing the Gospels. And the view there seems to be the earlier translations. They don't sound rough enough or authentic enough. They're all a bit smoothed over. What translation or translations do you prefer? Well, I like the revised standard version, but that seems to be a little bit difficult to acquire at the moment. I don't know why.  I have problems with the later Bible simply in the sense that they preserve words like jealousy and so on that reflect very badly as they are understood in modern English on God, you know? The Jewish Publication Society doesn't use the word jealous. They use the word passionate, you know? Which sounds to me like a vastly less injurious term. I mean, I think that likewise vengeance, it's a very bad translation of what meant judgment implying that one could be vindicated as well as condemned, you know? I haven't seen these terms criticized except with the one exception of the word jealous. And I think that they are carried over because they sound biblical, you know? People have been saying them since they were appropriate translations, but they aren't anymore. And if anything, but anything's gonna be changed, that kind of thing should be changed. You did your PhD on Shakespeare, correct? Yes. Do you think Shakespeare was a Catholic? No. Do you think he believed in the Trinity even? I wouldn't go into detail like that. The question of being Catholic or Protestant in Shakespeare's time was more a political question than a theological one, I think, you know? The denomination in appropriate word, but the church as it were that somebody in Shakespeare's period would be reacting against would have been the Anglican church, not the Catholic church, because the Catholic church had been effectively expelled from England for a long time, you know? I mean, since Henry VIII, on the scale between having the king as the head of the church, the Anglican model, and the kind of Protestantisms that were flourishing and that were publishing and that were preaching and all the rest of it, popular religion of the period, I think that's where Shakespeare would be found. Do you think his late play, A Winter's Tale, makes sense? It's often called a problem play. Is there a problem in the structure of the set up, the resolution, or do you feel you understand it? I don't know, I don't know if I understand it. I love the late plays, I love the problem. You know, I love the... He becomes very, very fascinated with grace and reconciliation in his late plays. In the Winter's Tale, of course, it's the reconciliation between the king and his statuished wife. The play makes you realize what has been lost, what has been harmed, what has been, you know, at the same time that it does also a reconciliation and embrace, you know, an undoing, a forgiving. The same thing happens in Symboline, you know? Same thing happens in, you know, the play with Prospero in it. I'm forgetting. Tempest sure, yeah. Yeah, Tempest, yes. Do you think there are hints in A Winter's Tale that the queen actually was unfaithful to the king? Or he just completely is imagining it? I think he's imagining it, yes.  I think that these women are to be understood as actually, you know, honest, virtuous people. Reading Shakespeare as a Calvinist, what do you feel that directs your attention to that say contemporary secular readers might not see? Calvinism, it was made to evolve. Calvin is making suggestions. He's not a trinal in the way that people seem to think, but he was making really valuable suggestions. And one of them was certainly that any encounter with another human being is an encounter with God. And that it is always a question. And the question is always, what would God want from this encounter, you know? In his boss and the institutes on, who is my neighbor, as I recall? But in any case, I think that's very beautiful. And I think that sense in Shakespeare of these enormously beautiful encounters where people recognize each other, people pardon each other, people embrace each other. I think that that could certainly be something that he explored as a suggestion taken from Calvin. Why do you think Calvin himself has lost so much popularity as a thinker? Of course, feel free to challenge that premise. But he has a reputation of being a nasty guy, not so thoughtful, very intolerant. The word is almost used as a kind of insult in some circles. What's your view on that? The evolution of Calvin's reputation. Well, you know, he was associated with virtually every early revolution in Europe. You know, Cromwell, the French wars of religion and so on, the Dutch revolution against Spain. So, I mean, he became so important in that sense that of course he was the object of polemic. He was, you know, I mean, the American revolution could be seen as another Calvinist revolution and so could the American Civil War, if you want to look at it from the point of view of the great awakenings and so on, his teachings introduced a great deal of volatility into the existing order anywhere. People defend themselves against that by, you know, speaking of him very harshly and also completely reversing the implications and the consequences of his theology. The cure, of course, is to read Calvin, which no one does.  So it's very self-perpetuating from that point of view when a negative reputation is established. There's one person who was associated with a physical martyrdom on religious grounds, Mike Servetus, one person, and then look at any other king in Europe at that time or any bishop in Europe at that time and so on. And you'll see that as sad as it is to have murdered one man, it's a very minor event by the standards of the period. The addition of institutes that I own, I think it's about 1,100 pages with relatively fine print. If you are making a case to people why they should read it, other than, well, you'll see what Calvin really thought, how would you try to persuade them? I say this as someone who, you know, wants to read Calvin carefully. You have to read him very carefully because for some reason are the kind of the familiarity of theological language if you're interested in theology. So much of that language comes from him, but it's very easy to read superficially, you know? At the beginning of the institutes, he says the only true knowledge of God is born of obedience, which is a very important situation of this, you know, the psyche, the mind in Calvinist terms. He says, if you want to encounter God, descend into yourself, then he says, if you want to understand yourself, then contemplate God, you know? So he creates with this sense of the possibility for very direct encounter between a human being and God, a whole sort of metaphysics of what God is and what humankind are, which is, again, very beautiful because it's a celebration of the brilliance of human beings. All this he does in the first couple of chapters. He can talk about human beings for a long time with ever mentioning sin or any of the things that are normally associated with him because he's of this sort of renaissance humanism of his celebration. There's also a few known or sometimes caricatured as hyper-Calvinism. Are you a hyper-Calvinist? I don't know any of these terms. All I know is I've read his books and I appreciate his metaphysics. As I understand it, which is very imperfectly, the hyper-Calvinists take determinism more seriously and they think, for instance, that trying to convert people or preach to them is futile and we shouldn't even bother doing it because God has settled everything. Well, you know, one thing that Calvinists, perhaps not hyper-Calvinists have done is produce thousands of volumes of sermons.  You can talk about, you know, people who have invented some theory that finds no confirmation in Calvin's own work. He'd preach several times every week, you know, and did a great deal toward what he considered to be, you know, the education of people in the scripture itself, started schools and so on. If somebody takes an idea and runs off with it and call themselves a hyper-this or hyper-that, it has nothing to do with your source material. How can we tell whether we're saved or damned? Can't. Can't tell. Oh, no, you can't tell about yourself, you can't tell about anybody else. Do you worry that the distinction between saved and damned leads to a certain tolerance amongst religious people for highly inegalitarian outcomes?   But Calvin never says that you can judge whether anyone is saved or damned, never. Because he believes that as we appear to God, you know, like David and his transgressions and so on, we cannot say that those are acts that have a certain value in terms of their impact on the fate of our souls. His cultures, the Dutch culture, the Protestant English language cultures, the America and the colonial period and so on are not marked by hierarchy by the standards of the period. If he were to say that there was an egalitarian energy in that period, it would have been Calvinism. Have you been to the Netherlands at all? Yep, yes, I've been there a couple of times. Now, when you go, do you feel this is a modern version of a Dutch Calvinist culture or do you feel it's an extreme rebellion against that? Because if you look at some metrics, say legal sex work, liberal use of drugs, the Netherlands seems to be fairly extreme. How do you connect that or model that in your mind as an outgrowth of an earlier Dutch Calvinism? Well, you know, the Dutch Calvinism I'm aware of tends to be from in the Middle West and it is not at all like contemporary Netherlands. You know what I mean? Sure, absolutely. You know, it's interesting with the Netherlands. I don't know, I mean, because I have talked with extremely erudite, devout, people in the Netherlands, you know, people are so attracted by the sensational that we know that things happen in the Netherlands that are surprising. But on the other hand, that's gloss, you know, there's a lot of seriousness and anywhere, it's a human tendency. If I think about this country, we used to have a stronger tradition of a devout liberal Christianity. The Quakers, William Sloan Coffin, Martin Luther King. It seems to me this is weaker today in relative terms, much weaker than it used to be. Do you agree with that? And if so, why do you think it happened? I think that it's probably fair to say that that's true. There's been a loss of certain kind of confidence, no question. One thing we did is disaffiliate ourselves from our own educational institutions, you know? I mean, Harvard, Yale, all these were Protestant schools founded by Congregationalists, Princeton by Presbyterians and so on. When they became, you know, major national institutions, they stopped being self-identified as Protestant institutions. And I think that the loss of, you know, dedicated intellectual institutions has been a sad thing for us, maybe a good thing for the culture at large. When you mentioned having taught, including at Iowa for about 25 years, surely you noticed that academics are amongst the most secular people in American society. Why do you think that is? You know, I don't think we can really tell. The thing about it is that, unfortunately, religion has become associated with inhumane values, inhumane episodes among the governing class and so on. That makes people conceal their religion or their thoughts that are of a religious character. I mean, when somebody calls you and whom you would always have taken to be secular and said, would you pray for me? Because I'm in some kind of trouble, you know? How secular is that? You know, I mean, people are private about religion, but I don't think that that means that they're as secular as they seem to appear. So you think we Americans are much more religious than it seems at first glance? Yes, I do think that. And do you think the Midwest is still considerably more religious than, say, most of the coasts? Well, again, that's the kind of thing I can't really tell. I mean, I spend a lot of time on the East Coast, which is where I am now. And I suppose that is, to all appearances, more secular than most parts of the country, but at the same time, you know, there's a flourishing church here of my denomination and so on that we don't know what we're comparing it against for one thing, you know? And that also there's just the fact that people can feel that they are sufficiently religious without affiliation with the church. I mean, many people feel that way. If we take your Iowa, which presumably, you know, quite well, when I was younger, I had the impression of it as a democratic party leaning, a highly educated, fairly tolerant, liberal Protestant state overall, with obviously a lot of diversity. Today it seems to be a state that, say, Donald Trump is going to win quite easily, electorally, assuming Trump is running. How did that change? And why did the former philosophies held in Iowa not satisfy people? Well, you know, we're talking about something that has happened over a brief period of time.  I'm very grieved by the change in the political climate in Iowa because I admired its generosity and civility and so on. And I hope that this is some weird temporary fluctuation, you know, because the kind of basic decency and enlightenment of Iowa was so well established over such a long time, it's hard to believe that this is a permanent conversion. Some thinkers, I think especially on the conservative right have argued that as America becomes more pluralistic, ethnically and religiously pluralistic, that that on net marginalizes the influence of religion, that it's easier for society to be fairly religious when there's mostly one or maybe two religions in question. But when you have people from all over the world with a variety of religions or just very different understandings of Christianity, there's a least common denominator effect where most of us become more secular. Do you think that's true? No, I think that one of the things that has been a resource in this country for many years is religious cultures that are derived from the place of origin, you know? In other words, the multiplicity of religious institutions, I mean, sustained religion as a phenomenon. I think that you would say without much fear of contradiction that if you're going to find religious people, now you would go to immigrant communities because they sustain many things for people who might otherwise feel that they are adrift. And some commentators have suggested that the current woke movement, say from the progressive left, that it's intellectually and ideologically an outgrowth of an earlier American Protestantism, that it has roots in a sense in the 17th century. Do you agree with that? Well, I'd want to know what you mean by the word wokeism. Lots of things in this country have roots in 17th century Protestantism. Well, say in San Francisco, there was an institution that was called a woke kindergarten and it taught American history a particular way. The New York Times segments, you know, emphasizing 1619, a particular kind of focus on issues of race, class, gender, trans individuals, me too movement, added up together as allied with the progressive left. I would take that to be one meaning of woke. Do you think that's an outgrowth of American Protestantism? No. I mean, having lived in American Protestants for 80 years, I would not necessarily say that that is a phenomenon that is in any way especially peculiar to us. Insofar as any social movement wishes to alleviate, it wishes to alleviate injustice, unhappiness, pointless cruelty, the way so many discriminations do. Insofar as the point is to reduce that kind of criminal misery, really, I'm perfectly happy to adopt it as a Protestant and say, yes, we did that, but I think in fact it just the generous evolution of a democratic society. What do you think of the Benedictine option to just retreat and tend one's own garden, be highly spiritual and not engage much with the world? Is that a cop out or is that a legitimate way of being religious? Well, you know, I would say it depends on circumstance. I would say that when people feel that impulse, it's probably because the world is in a bad way, you know, they were actually withdrawing from problems that could be addressed in theory in case, I think were responsible for each other. And my particular salvation is not as important as my honoring the sacredness of human beings and the world.  So you were born in Idaho, right? You grew up there. Yes. What led you to prefer Iowa? Well, you know, I went to college in Rhode Island lived in Massachusetts and so on. It's, you know, I was quite a distance from Idaho in terms of, you know, my experience by the time, by the time I was invited to come teach in the writer's workshop at the university in Iowa, which is such a classic phenomenon in American literature, you know, that I was very happy to go there and be part of it. How did the Iowa, what you might call writer's scene originally blossom? I must be 80 years ago by now. There was a lot of experiment, you know, at the university at that time. They were giving advanced degrees for physical art, you know, for sculpture and for theater and so on, which was very either unusual or unprecedented at the time. There were already groups of people in that city who met to discuss things that they wrote. The university just sort of embraced them at a certain point and that became the writer's workshop. And many, many very distinguished writers have come through there. Do you think there's any kind of unique Midwest or Iowa voice in fiction, the way there's arguably a Southern voice? I think not because Iowa is just, I mean, most of my students were from New York City or from California or, you know, people come to Iowa not to be Iowans, but to study at the workshop, whereas the Southern writers identify as Southern, you know, they want to be expressing that particular culture. So that's a very great difference. But why is it you think Iowa outcompetes so many other writing workshops? So people can and have set up writing workshops along the coasts in larger cities. Iowa very often still seems to do better. Is that just history and path dependence? Or is there some comparative advantage still in Iowa that makes it work? It's very hard for me to say because it's the only program that I've taught in of that kind, but people, it's a culture, you know? One of the things that I think is a definite benefit is that they learn how to be helpful to one another, the people that are students there, you know? They're very good critics of each other. That's one of the important things that they seem to learn. The status of the place, everybody's success, it kind of feels like everyone else's success, you know, because of the reputation of it as a community. And as far as the faculty are concerned, we were very autonomous. We simply taught as we felt was appropriate in whatever setting, absolute minimum of meetings or anything like that. And I think that that's part of the, you know, spirit of it also that we are, you know, we're trusted and not regulated. When your students would arrive, what is it you had wished they had known, but they hadn't? I was so much, you know?  And some of them are working with a great deal less than others in terms of, you know, educational background and so on, but that doesn't make them less interesting. That's one of the great equalizing things about writing as an art. If you do it well, you can make anything into an appropriate subject. You can make anything sort of blossom, you know, into meaning.  No, no, no, no, I'm just sneaking past, you know, I feel very fortunate that my lifespan did not incorporate these things, you know, and so that they became things that I had to actually be adequate with. Your very first book, which is called Mother Country, it's about nuclear pollution in Great Britain. Why did you write that book? Many people are surprised when they learn that's a book of yours. Yes. Well, my first book is actually the novel Housekeeping. Nuclear pollution came after, I'm sorry. Okay. It was my second book. Well, I was in England and, you know, frankly, I'd pick up a newspaper and read about, you know, how ingesting plutonium is considered to be harmful to children, you know? I mean, it was just very, very remarkable, the kind of information that was in the atmosphere about what was happening, particularly at this one reprocessing plant on the coast of the Irish Sea. You know, there are Americans all over England all the time and they can read a newspaper as well as I can and they don't see things. It's, you know, they see violets and, you know, geraniums and not the fact that things are very different there. Many conceptions of what is appropriate are, you know, economically and so on are very different. I could see what was happening. I could find information about it and all sorts of places. Why should I not write about it? Should the British just have done more and more expensive nuclear reprocessing the way the French did? Didn't that work out okay for the French? And France today is glad that it went nuclear? What is your source of information? That a lot of European nations due to the Russian energy price shock have reconsidered nuclear. Those that stuck with it, such as Sweden and France, seem to be glad they stuck with it and now possibly want to expand it. And there's better and worse ways of doing nuclear. Britain seems to have done a worse way. But aren't there better ways that some countries have done and we're happy they did them? I don't know if I don't know. I mean, there's a great deal of secrecy, shall we say, that surrounds these things, you know? I know that France built most of its reactors a very long time ago and just got us down was in power. Reactors don't have a very long life, you know? 30 years, 40 years. They're past that. It would be incredibly expensive to replace them in order to demolish them, whatever, decommission them. I don't think we're gonna know. I mean, the prestige of any country, for example, Russia, depends on the kind of information that we have about it. And frankly, you don't have to look far in many cases, for example, in Russia, to find that things are extremely problematic and that they are problematic as a consequence of nuclear power. The idea that somehow or other, there's something that can be done with these materials that were never meant to exist on earth is a polite fiction. It's not true. Do you watch movies much? Not a great deal. Do you have a favorite movie? No, no. I like serializations of 19th century novels. I suppose that's what I would say if I were to be perfectly honest. What other movies have I liked? Well, I'm drawing a blank. But the sense of, say, God's grace that is in many of your books, you might say all of your books, can you think of something from television or the cinema that when you watch it, you feel someone is thinking and feeling along the same lines that you are, and you think, well, that's reflecting my vision of God's grace? Well, nothing comes to mind immediately, but then I, as I said, I don't watch films very much. I love the ending of The Tempest, you know? Which is not a movie, or it's a movie. It's a good movie version by Julie Tambor, I think. It's quite good. If you haven't already seen it, you would enjoy it. What's the one where the great woman actor plays Prospero? Is that the same one you're speaking of? I think it's the same one, yeah. Yeah, that's very beautiful. What is your most unusual successful work habit? Well, I think it's becoming a use to the fact that it takes me a long time to get to the place where I can work on something. You know, that all this sort of frustration and depression that precedes my writing anything is part of the process of writing. Before my last question, I would just like to repeat to our listeners and readers, Marilyn Robinson has a new book out, which I enjoyed very much, Reading Genesis, which is about, of course, the book of Genesis in the Bible, but I'm very happy to recommend all of her books and, of course, her famous novels to you, housekeeping, I think, being my favorite. Last question is simply, what will you do next? Exodus. I look forward to that. I will read it with pleasure. Marilyn Robinson, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowan, and the show is at Cowan Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.


As a mobile developer, you can likely appreciate the benefits of automating your app's build, test, and deployment process. Unfortunately, getting this reliably set up isn't always as easy as it should be. I'm Jonathan Carter, and in this video I will show you how Visual Studio Team Services helps you quickly set up and maintain a mobile DevOps solution that lets you focus more on your app and less on your automation. Visual Studio Team Services makes it easy to set up a continuous integration server for your mobile client, regardless if it's built using Objective-C, Java, C-Sharp, or even JavaScript. It includes cloud-hosted build machines so you don't need to worry about installing any software, and we've partnered with Mac and Cloud in order to support your iOS builds as well. Integrations with Xamarin Test Cloud and Perfecto Mobile make it easy to run your automated tests against the breadth of devices your app supports, as well as the extensions for Hockey App and Code Push that make it simple to ensure your testers and end-users are always up to date. Let's see how this looks. Creating your build definition is simple thanks to the provided templates which can get you started for the various mobile app platforms, including Xamarin, Xcode, as well as Visual Studio-based templates. Your build definition can run based on check-ins from Visual Studio Team Services, GitHub, as well as whichever Git server your team may be using for version control. Once you've created your build definition, the catalog of pre-built tasks makes it simple to compose together a pipeline that is as comprehensive as your needs. Using the Xcode build task, you can easily build and sign your iOS applications. In addition, using the decrypt file task, you can choose to check in encrypted versions of your certificate and or provisioning profile, that way you can easily build ad hoc or even store distribution versions of your applications. Using Mac and Cloud, you can easily configure an OSX build agent to your Visual Studio Team Services account. That way, when your Xcode builds ultimately run, you can generate the iOS assets that you need without having to manage your own OSX hardware. Once you've configured your build definition and kicked off a few builds by checking in code to the configured repository, you can check the status of your builds easily to see where they've failed and where they've succeeded. For builds that have failed, you can drill in and see the specific task in the build definition that actually caused the issue. That way, you can easily diagnose what went wrong with your build and then understand how to best diagnose it. The built-in Gradle task allows you to easily build your Android applications, as well as configure the specific Gradle task that you want to run as part of that automated build. In addition, because VS Team Services already provides cloud-hosted Windows build machines, kicking off an Android build is as simple as simply queuing one up. You can easily build your Xamarin applications for Android as well as iOS using the built-in tasks in Visual Studio Team Services. In addition, the Xamarin license task allows you to easily automate the activation and deactivation of your license so that it's only active during the point that your build needs to occur. Finally, the built-in NuGet installer task allows you to restore and acquire any third-party dependencies your Xamarin application may have in order to successfully build your app. Once you've installed the Cordova extension from the new Visual Studio marketplace, your build definition pipeline will be able to add a new Cordova build task that handles automatically generating the binaries for your application for both Android, iOS, and Windows. In addition to just generating the build, it also has capabilities for handling the signing for each of the three platforms as well, which is great because that tends to be a pretty thorny issue to have to solve. Now, once you're building an application with JavaScript, it's likely that you're also using NPM to pull down dependencies. There's a built-in task to automatically acquire those as part of your build. And finally, it's also pretty common to use Gulp to run unit tests as well as do any compilation of languages like TypeScript or SAS, and the built-in Gulp task automatically helps you ensure that your application is fully built and ready to create your Cordova binaries. Beyond simply automating the build of your application binary, it's also very common to want to run unit tests as well. If those unit tests were published to Visual Studio Team Services, as part of the build's success or fail summary, you can also see the results of your tests. If you click into the test results, you can see a breakdown of all of the tests that ran, which ones passed, which ones failed, and you can even open bugs to track any failures that may have occurred during a specific build. Once your app has been built and passed all tests, you can automatically deploy it to testers via HockeyApp using the new HockeyApp extension, which provides a deployment task to automatically submit your Apex, IPA, or APK file from VSTS to your HockeyApp account. That allows you to easily continuously deliver updates to your testers without having to manually go into the HockeyApp portal to do so. When your app is ready for production, Cordova and React Native developers can automatically publish their JavaScript, HTML, and CSS assets to the CodePush service. This way, beyond simply automating the delivery of updates to your internal testers, you can also automate the delivery of updates to your end users. So as we saw in the demos, no matter how you're building your mobile app, Visual Studio Team Services can help you automate the build, test, and deployment process of your mobile DevOps solution. We hope you check it out. If you want more information on Visual Studio Team Services, CodePush, HockeyApp, or other topics that I discussed, check out the other videos in the resources listed below to go deeper into these areas. Additionally, follow us on Twitter and watch the VS blog in order to stay current on new functionality as well as new best practices, testimonials, and tips. Thanks for watching the video.


For this exercise for the ACP, we planned a air movement with the CH-47s and we moved over to a different location other than being at the same location as the main command post. We had to move out with only what we could carry on our backs for communication for class one in any of the other classes and then we had to set up a command post. We're getting some of the this headquarters back into a tactical mindset to be able to move out without support and be able to set up in a austere environment anywhere to be able to take over the fight. So CTAF, is the Army operational headquarters. We're subordinate to U.S. Army Europe in Africa and we focus on Army land operations in the continent of Africa. So the 53 African nations that comprise the AFRICOM area of responsibility are countries that we look at every day and our mission will range from crisis response, theater security cooperation, training exercises, building partner capacity. All those things that the Army normally does in different areas we're responsible for that in the African continent. So we're here at Hohenfels training area in Germany supporting exercise Saber Junction 22 which is a combat training center rotation for the 173rd Airborne Brigade as a primary training audience with some supporting units, 18th Combat Support Battalion and the 12th Combat Aviation Brigade and CTAF AF is here to serve as the division headquarters over the top of the exercise also called the high control high con. So we've been working on that for a little over a week and today we replicated deployment of our assault command post which is a small light rapidly deployable command post that moves light with full communications and computing capability and what we did today was replicated moving forward as a survivability move so we did a air movement using ch-47 helicopters moved about 40 kilometers and then set up our operations here at the omburg training center where we could then take the fight forward and fight as the division headquarters for a period of the fight as the brigades are in the defense. For CTAF AF and the assault command post one of the important pieces are this is our first command and control capability that we maintain as deployment ready so if there's a crisis in Africa if there's a humanitarian disaster we need to respond to or some type of security situation in Africa or in Europe for that matter this this team is the first that would be prepared to go so this is a great opportunity for us to to test our systems test our communications ability with a live training audience below us to send reports and to interact with so it was a great opportunity for us to do that importance obviously we'll continue to work through these we identified a couple of challenges today and we will go back reset figure out how to solve those problems and we'll get back to doing training again soon and do this again probably back in Italy at home station today is to see our new teammates get integrated into what we do to pick up what their roles responsibilities are and to help us solve the problems that we that we would face the agility of this team is always excellent and so seeing them work through this problem I and then self-identify where we make mistakes and how we need to fix that in the future you know one of the great things about being part of a learning organization is we're constantly getting better and so coming out here today to validate where we're at and then figure out how to fix it and have a plan to fix it it's always great to be part of a team that's that's that good so you know as a senior as a senior officer someone who's been doing this for you know a long time it's always a fun experience to see the excitement in some of our younger soldiers eyes the first time they ever get on a helicopter the first time they get to do something like this um the the excitement sometimes the apprehension but people work through their challenges to to get after the training you know it's not terribly hot but it was still we road marched it we know I forgot the helicopter we walked pretty heavy loads because moving communications equipment is not easy it's heavy and we do it all on our backs we don't have vehicle support out here with us but seeing all those teammates really throw in to help accomplish the mission and work through things that they've never done in their career before it's always rewarding to see the the team react and and and come together to get those missions accomplished it's interesting one of the things about being a good soldier a good non-commissioned officer a good officer's flexibility and agility and in a team like the assault command post team it's small but has to be able to carry the weight of a much larger staff for a period of time that means people have to multitask people have to be really good at things that aren't their day job and so we have a logistics non-commission officer that has one specialty but he's replicate or not replicating but he covers all of our logistics requirements our primary communications soldier is not a communicator by trade he's actually a combat cameraman but he is self-taught and learned to install our satellite communication systems and radios and he's excellent at it so he's able to pick that up on the side everybody in a small team has to carry their weight from me on down and it's always rewarding to see soldiers rise to that task to go work outside of what they're trained to do and be excited to be part of that and then to be able to actually to learn and contribute immediately and it's not a long learning curve for our soldiers the important things about this is again it was the opportunity to work with some subordinate units to help stimulate and drive the training we're doing but also in our main and in the field we have a great allied component that's participating in this exercise a CTAF as we focus on Africa and our African partners we don't get the opportunity to work with our NATO allies very often so this has been a great opportunity for us to give us lessons learned and help us develop skills and things that we can take back and apply to our day job focusing on Africa on behalf of US Army Europe and Africa and US AFRICOM that we can take to our partners on the continent and our and those that we work with to help make them better and help continue to make ourselves better