Welcome to the Endless Knot. Today, I'm looking at the tangled roots of chauvinism. If you heard the word chauvinist today, you probably either think of a quaint term for a man who looks down on a woman as inferior, or of someone who is blindly and excessively patriotic. The second meaning is the older, so let's start there. The word is in fact an eponym, meaning it comes from a person's name, and in this case, the possibly legendary Nicolas Chauvin, a soldier who supposedly served in the French Army under Napoleon. There isn't any evidence that he actually existed, but nevertheless he became famous as a figure of blind patriotism and fervor for Napoleon, long after the Emperor's ousting, and thus a figure of ridicule. The word in French goes back to the 1830s and makes its way into English at least as early as the 1860s. Towards the end of the 19th century, the term broadened to refer not only to excessive patriotism, but also to other forms of excessive loyalty or belief in the superiority of one's own kind. It was then picked up in Communist Party circles in phrases such as race chauvinism and white chauvinism, in particular to counter racism in the United States. And following the model of those phrases, women in the Communist Party seemed to have coined the term male chauvinism in the 1930s. After a brief vogue, the term mostly disappeared from view, that is until the feminist movements in the 60s and 70s. The children of former Communist Party members apparently revived the word, and from 1968 it took off again. However, the term didn't seem to have much staying power and began to decline in frequency from the late 1970s. The phrase had been further expanded to male chauvinist pig, perhaps initially to soften its effect through humour, though this was soon picked up by mainstream media to mock feminists. In fact, the earliest citation of that full phrase in the Oxford English Dictionary is in Playboy magazine, so perhaps it's not surprising that the term fell out of favour.  Greek misogynia and misogynes used originally in reference to a disease or to a comic trope of a grumpy old man who hates his wife, are composed of the elements misos, hatred, and gyné, woman, distantly related to the English word queen. Misogyny and misogynist make it into English in the 17th century and develop an extended meaning of prejudice against women in the 20th century. But as we'll soon see, starting much earlier, Greek misogyny played a significant role in the development of Western misogyny. But first, we have to finish looking at the word chauvinism in related terms. It was around the time that the term male chauvinism came into vogue, specifically 1970, when the word patriarchy started to be used by feminists to mean a society dominated by men at the expense of women. The word actually goes back to Greek, coming from Pater, father, and arcane, to rule, and was used in various Christian senses such as referring to certain bishops in the early church, with patriarchy first appearing in English in a 1561 translation of a text by Protestant reformer John Calvin, after whom the Calvinist church is named. John Calvin, or Jean Calvin, as he is known in his native French, is tied into this story in another way, as the name Calvin is the northern French equivalent of the name chauvin, from which we get the word chauvinism. It should be further noted that the name chauvin is derived from the French word chauve, meaning bald, from Latin calvas. So I suppose you could say that this etymology, along with the paternalistic fatherly patriarchy, at least coincidentally, highlights the fact that we have old men to blame for sexual discrimination. And it was this coincidental connection between Calvin and chauvinism that inspired me to look at the religious roots of misogyny and the ties between chauvinism and other types of discrimination. It turns out that the confluence of the Christian tradition and Greek philosophy created a toxic environment for women in western society for 2000 years. Of course, the West doesn't hold the monopoly on misogyny, which can be found in many cultures around the world, and all available evidence suggests that misogyny is the oldest human prejudice. But since we're looking at English vocabulary, we'll have to stick with western culture. And to do that, we'll have to first turn to the Jewish tradition which would later become the foundation of Christianity. That early Jewish society was patriarchal is not particularly surprising in the context of the ancient world. What is notable is that they had a monotheistic religion with a fall of man creation myth. In the Book of Genesis, Adam was created by God in his image and placed in paradise, the Garden of Eden. Eve was more of an afterthought made from Adam's rib. Now of course, different churches which share this story, which is found in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, interpret the culpability of Adam and Eve in their expulsion from Eden differently. But as the story in Genesis goes, Eve gave in to the temptations of the serpent and ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Then shared that fruit with Adam, and following this, they both became ashamed of their nakedness. Thus, many have held Eve doubly responsible or at least more responsible than Adam. In addition to their expulsion from paradise, they are made to live mortal lives and Adam must work for the necessities of life. In other words, engage in agriculture. And Eve and all women who follow her are given the extra punishments of being subservient to their husbands and suffering the pains of childbirth. So, this story both justifies a patriarchal society with a lower status for women, but also figures women in terms of their role in sexuality, remember the shame of their nakedness, and childbirth. Interestingly, the ancient Greeks also have a fall of man myth, the story of Pandora, whose name means either all gifted or all giving. In the story as told by Hesiod in the 6th century BC, men, and only men, had a trouble-free and happy existence, though they didn't have the secret of fire and had to eat their meat raw. The Titan Prometheus illicitly gave fire to men, and as part of the punishment for this, Zeus ordered the creation of the first human woman, Pandora. Not just as an afterthought, but specifically as a punishment, and she is endowed with seductive qualities as well as a deceitful character, and she is referred to as Calon Kakon, beautiful evil. Pandora has with her a sealed jar that she is not supposed to open, but overcome with curiosity, she opens it, releasing pain and evil among men, leaving only hope in the jar. This myth, and the fact that the king of the gods, Zeus, is depicted in many myths as a serial rapist, provide a backdrop to Greek society. Now outside of Athens, there is a lack of evidence of what life was actually like for Greek women, but it's Athenian culture which became the most profoundly influential on later western culture. Perhaps paradoxically, along with democracy, Athens in the 5th century BC developed an exceedingly misogynistic attitude. It's important to remember that that democracy was extremely limited, including only adult male citizens, and supported through a slave economy. In this society, women remained legally children always under the guardianship of a man. They were, at least ideally, kept in a segregated part of the house and were not allowed to leave the house unaccompanied, and received little to no education. In addition to the practical reality of women's social inferiority in Athens, Athenian philosophers developed a theoretical basis for misogyny, and the two most responsible for this are Plato and Aristotle. Somewhat paradoxically, Plato is sometimes taken as almost a proto-feminist, since in his work The Republic he describes an ideal society in which women receive the same education as men and are among the ruling elite with the same responsibilities, and men and women only differ in their biological roles in reproduction, but this comes at the cost of the denial of their sexuality. His is a sterile imagined world in which breeding is regulated and the parent-child relationship is denied in favor of communally raised children. However, it's Plato's idea of dualism which was to cause the most harm in the long run. Plato developed the theory of forms in which he makes a distinction between a higher reality in which exist ideal forms of which physical existence is an imperfect reflection. Only the intellect could engage with that higher reality and all the stuff of physical existence, including sexuality, was lesser, a falling away from perfection. This dualism then becomes the philosophical basis for misogyny, with men associated with the intellect and women with sexuality and the imperfect physical existence. And the standard understanding of the nature of women in the ancient world, both in Greece and later in Rome, is that they are sexually rapacious as a result of their connection to the physical world. So the misogynistic response to this was rooted in fear of women and of their sexuality, hence the need to regulate and control them. Plato's student Aristotle doubled down on this misogyny in scientific terms. He explicitly held women to be inferior to men and believed that women were mutilated, undercooked, or imperfect males. Oh, and in an odd connection to the roots of chauvinism, he believed that the lack of baldness among women was proof of their childlike, undeveloped nature. Moving forward, it's during the Roman period that Christianity grows out of the Jewish tradition, while also being heavily influenced by Greco-Roman philosophy. It's a terrible irony that Christianity would become one of the systemic drivers of misogyny, given that in its early years women played a key role in its formation and spread. Jesus' statement is about women in the Gospel are free from misogyny. He frequently defended women, and there were women among his followers. And women seem to have played central roles in the activities of the new religion as it grew and spread. The apostle Paul's contributions to the nature of Christianity are perhaps only second to those of Jesus, and his attitudes toward women are somewhat contradictory. Though he states that there is neither male nor female, for you are all one, in Jesus Christ, he also doubles down on the story of Adam and Eve, saying that women should be subservient to their husbands. And from Paul we get the notion that sexuality is sinful, and that celibacy is the ideal, but that if one couldn't handle chastity, it was better to marry than to burn. So early Christianity provided the opportunity for women to choose a life of celibacy, which at least provided women with some control over their own fertility, giving them perhaps for the first time institutionally sanctioned reproductive choice. By the way, the word celibacy comes from Latin chylabs, unmarried, of unknown origin, but perhaps connected to the Proto-Indo-European roots Haiello, alone, or Kehilo, whole. And only in the 1950s came to refer not only to remaining unmarried, but also to voluntary abstinence from sexuality. But we'll come back to this later. The early Christian theologian and philosopher Augustine was influenced by Neoplatonic philosophy, seeing his own struggles as a contest between the desires of the flesh and the striving of the will. And Augustine is largely responsible for the concept of original sin, that that first trespass in the Garden of Eden caused human beings to fall away from perfection, and ever since, humans have carried the burden of that sin at least until the crucifixion of Christ. Over the course of the Middle Ages, that dualistic divide would continue to be the source of misogyny, and paradoxically, it would come along with the increasing elevation of the figure of Mary, mother of Jesus. In AD 431, the Roman church declared Mary was not only the mother of Jesus, but the mother of God. She had also been declared a perpetual virgin. If God was thought to be perfect, the mother of God couldn't be tainted by sin either. It's actually kind of a domino effect. The early churches first argued about whether Jesus was human or divine, or some combination, and Mary's status rose as a result of Jesus' elevation. She was also deemed not to have suffered death, but to have been assumed body and soul directly into heaven, a notion traceable back to at least the 5th century, and she became known as the Queen of Heaven. But in the long run, that wasn't enough. To explain her perfection, theologians eventually came up with the notion of the Immaculate Conception, that from the moment of her conception, God acted to keep her free from original sin, so that she existed in the state of perfection that Adam and Eve had before the fall, effectively removing all notions of sexuality from her, thus giving women an impossible standard to live up to. Be perfect like Mary, or you'll be the source of sin like Eve. The 13th century theologian, John Dunn Skotis, so named because he hailed from Dunn's in Scotland, did a lot to develop the notion of the Immaculate Conception, though it didn't become church dogma until much later. Skotis, by the way, is also known for engaging with Plato's notion of forms, specifically the metaphysical problem of universals, arguing that universals, basically qualities, actually exist and are not just mental constructs. His philosophical followers, the Skotis, were later derisively referred to as Dunn'ss, by humanists and Protestant Reformation theologians, thus giving us the word Dunn's, which like Chauvinist is a pejorative word derived from a person's name. Dunn's Skotis is tied to the word Chauvinism in another way, since Skotis' idea about intuitive cognition influenced Chauvin's name double, the Protestant reformer John Calvin, to argue that God can be experienced. Speaking of the Protestant Reformation, it would have mixed consequences for women. The Protestants, who by the way downplayed the significance of Mary, allowed clergy to marry, doing away with the rule requiring priestly celibacy. This idea of celibacy had been gradually developed in the Roman Church but only became an absolute rule in the 12th century. The Protestant view contradicted Paul's teachings about the sinfulness of sexuality even in marriage, and by doing so, raised the status of marriage and therefore women. But they also got rid of monasteries and convents, thus removing options for women who could no longer choose a life outside of marriage and have control over their bodies in terms of reproduction. The Protestants stressed the importance of direct access to scripture, which meant it was important for both men and women to be able to read, thus improving education for women, but they doubled down on patriarchal family structure with the father leading the household in daily prayer. Reformers like John Calvin felt that women's place was in the home, and John Knox, the founder of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, wrote a polemical work with the fiery title The First Blast Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, even attacking the idea of women holding any civil authority. In the 19th century, and even later, some churches such as the Presbyterian Church of Scotland opposed the use of anesthesia for women giving birth, since that meant they wouldn't suffer the pains prescribed as their punishment in the story of Adam and Eve. Now of course, different Protestant churches had different ideas about women, such as the Quakers, who did sometimes allow women to preach, and in more recent years, many Protestant churches have supported social reforms like women's suffrage and in the 20th century women clergy. To date though, women are still barred from the clergy in the Catholic Church, and again, views differ around reproductive rights such as birth control and abortion, with not only Catholics, but also many Protestants digging in their heels. Getting back to the Middle Ages though, when more progressive ideas about women and sexuality did arise, the Church unsurprisingly tended to crack down on them. One dramatic example is the Church's reaction against catharism from the south of France. The Cathars, from Latin Catharii meaning the pure, ultimately from Greek Catharos, pure, thus related to catharsis, literally a cleansing or purging, took the idea of dualism to extremes. They believed that there were two gods, the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament. The Old Testament God created the physical world and was evil, while the New Testament God created the spiritual world and was good. Catharism had almost proto-feminist beliefs, believing that gender wasn't part of the spiritual realm, and thus allowing women to preach and become part of the spiritual elite. They gave special significance to Mary Magdalene, who in the Bible was the first to see the newly arisen Christ and reported the news to the apostles, thus earning her the title Apostle to the Apostles. Pope Innocent III cracked down on the Cathars, calling for the Abulgensian Crusade to wipe them out. It was called the Abulgensian Crusade after the town Albi in the south of France, from the Roman personal name Albius from a root meaning white. This word may have another tie into our story in the word bigot, related in sense to the word chauvinist, though the more common etymology has a different connection. The usual theory about the origin of the word bigot, which had the earlier sense of sanctimonious person or religious hypocrite, is that it came from the Germanic expression begode by God. The story goes that in the 10th century, the Viking Rolo of Normandy, upon receiving his dukedom from King Charles the Simple of France, refused to kiss the king's foot, saying n'est-ce begode, or no by God? Thus the French derisively referred to the Normans as bigots. In support of this theory of labeling a group by its favorite swear words, it's been pointed out that in France during the time of Joan of Arc, the English were referred to as god-dams, and during World War I, American soldiers in France were called laissomabiches, but the story does still have an air of folk etymology to it. Alternatively, in a less well-known, but perhaps more plausible version, bigot might be an abbreviation of albigo in reference to the Albagencian heresy, in other words, the Cathars, and the word does first appear in French at around that time in the south of France. Now we're returning to more recent words for misogyny, though as we've seen, the concepts it describes aren't new, it's in the 20th century that people have noticed them from enough to need new words to label them, such as sexist and sexism. These words are surprisingly recent, at least in their modern sense of gender-based discrimination, and like male chauvinism, have their origins in racial discrimination, again highlighting the important connection between sexism and racism, and I suppose at least retroactively demonstrating the importance of intersectional feminism. Sexist was introduced into feminist discourse by Pauline M. Leet in a 1965 speech given at Franklin and Marshall College, in which she explicitly proposed it as a term parallel to racist. The text of the speech was privately distributed among feminists, until sexism appeared in print for the first time in Caroline Bird's 1968 book Born Female, and that same year, possibly independently coined, the words sexism and sexist were used in a pamphlet written by Sheldon Van Alken, again with the parallel with racism explicitly made. Van Alken recommended sexism and sexist as better terms than male chauvinism and chauvinist, and in the end, it looks like his advice was followed. Of course, the countering of sexism had its own terminology, and we can see a trajectory similar to that of male chauvinism with the term women's liberation. The earlier term had been feminism, which first appeared in the 19th century, originally as a generic term equivalent to femininity or in biological or medical senses. But soon enough, feminism and feminist were adopted by 19th century advocates for women's rights, and it should be pointed out that feminism, when used by feminists themselves, doesn't mean hatred of men or discrimination against men, but instead equality of all people. After women's suffrage was achieved, these words went into decline, and in the 60s and 70s, feminists often preferred the terms women's liberation, which had been around since the end of the 19th century. But soon enough, women's liberation was adopted by their opponents in such formulations as women's lib and liber, and by the mid-70s, it too went out of fashion, with feminism reemerging to fill the void. And so, from this historical and etymological trail, we can see the foundations of misogyny in modern Western culture. We see the battle for control over reproduction informed by Eve's punishment, not to mention body shaming and calls for female modesty and dress codes that frame girls as an irresistible temptation for boys, drawing them away from intellectual pursuits in schools. Thus, women are the target of slut shaming, and the word slut provides an informative example. A word of uncertain etymology, slut originally meant a dirty or untidy woman, and still can in some dialects. It gradually gained more pejorative senses, such as a woman of low character or a bold or impudent girl, but could also be used in a playful way without implying serious criticism, much as we use the term scamp, originally meaning a highway robber, to refer affectionately to a mischievous boy. But there's always a double standard, and by the 20th century, the word slut developed the disparaging sense of a sexually promiscuous woman.  And women continue to be thought of as a sexual commodity, as we can see so explicitly with the rise of incels, short for involuntary celibates. The term, coined in 1993 by a college student known only as Alana, to refer to a website and mailing list that offered a support group for lonely people who felt marginalized by such things as rigid gender norms, mental illness, or social awkwardness, has since been co-opted by often violent and dangerous misogynistic men, calling themselves incels, who are driven by their resentment at not having sex with women, and who call for forced sexual redistribution of the resource that is women's bodies. Ironic then that a word which originally meant unmarried, and was associated with an opportunity for women to have reproductive choice, should now be associated with the most extreme form of misogynistic control, basically government enforced rape. Now of course, in this video I've only briefly summarized one strand of the story of misogyny, which is a deep and complex phenomenon, but hopefully looking at these etymologies and their historical connections to philosophy and religion can provide some fresh insight into this ever-present problem.


In forestry, we commonly measure horizontal distance with a loggers tape or an open reel tape. These can be at various lengths, but 50, 75, or 100 foot lengths are common. When measuring horizontal distance, it's best to get a tape that measures in feet and tens of feet. This allows for decimal recording of measurements. It is also important to know where the zero mark is on your tape. For example, the zero mark may be at the end of the loop found at the end of the tape or it may be marked further up. Taking a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the measuring tape you have will help you make more precise measurements in the field.


So, Amy Klobuchar has, what, five, six, maybe seven supporters in total if we're being charitable. And we definitely know that one of them is Bill Maher, which is strange considering in 2016 he claimed that he supported Bernie Sanders even if he kind of downplayed Bernie's chances. But after the 2016 election, I think in early 2017, he said he wanted Bernie Sanders to run again. And Bernie Sanders is now running again and he is supporting Amy Klobuchar. A person polling a little over 1% overall who once ate a salad the entire thing with a comb, who threw a binder at her staffers, who is incredibly boring, is not energizing the base, wouldn't energize the base, that's who he's backing. And look, we knew that this was probably going to be the case because a couple of weeks ago, actually about a month ago, he said, I'm looking closely at Amy Klobuchar. And he brought her on the show and essentially tried to make the case for her and have her make the case for herself. But as you're going to see, his audience wasn't really feeling it. And if you look at the like to dislike ratio on that video, nobody else was feeling it online either.  And it's just, it's embarrassing.  Obviously, this is a fight between two wings of the party, which is almost every election. There is a center in the Democrat, a center left wing. You're plenty liberal. You're plenty progressive. And then there's a far left, which I think would be represented by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Okay. Yeah. Okay. We all like them too. They too left. Is Elizabeth Warren too far left to get elected in a general election? Again, I want to win big. And if someone is looking to kick 149 million Americans off their current health insurance in four years, then I'm not your candidate.  And just because people say ideas are bold doesn't mean they're bold. They may be bad. And so my bold ideas are this, make it easier for kids to afford to go to college, but don't forget that there are many paths to success. And that right now we have a huge need in our country for jobs that require one and two year degrees. And we should not leave those people behind. Remembering that we need to take on farmer prices, public option, take on climate change in a big way, something that this president has just gone backwards on. Work with the rest of the world. Not leave our allies behind. Don't coddle dictators. And when I was listening to the panel before, I was not in Washington, but I was not for the Iraq war. But I would never leave those Kurds left for slaughter like this guy has done. That is not what America does. Right. That's not what you do. You honor your commitment. You keep, you make your promises and your threats and you keep them. And this is, the whole world is watching right now. So I think to get back to the center left argument, I think you're probably more in the, again, center left, not far left, and that is going to come down to one candidate from each. Now, right now it's Joe Biden, who is the leader of the center left part. One applaud. And I've always said, I like Joe. I never might my favorite, but if he's the guy to beat Trump, I was like, let's not kill him because if he's the one. But I must say, my confidence that he can beat Trump is waning. He looks like a depreciating stock to me. And I've always said to ulcers, we're talking about age with Howard, a voice fought against ageism because it's a judgmental thing that, you know, very few, you can do that by very few other things in America anymore. It's a case by case basis. Elizabeth Warren is 70. She looks 50 and acts 20. She took selfies with 4,000 people. I don't even know if I trust someone who wants to be president that much. Joe, I don't know. And Bernie, you know, just had a heart attack. I think that, you know, I'm not trying to get Joe out, but we do need someone in the center who's, say, younger and female or... I honestly, you know, I... Right. So my case is this. Yeah.  These guys always say they've won everything, so when my slogan I discarded was all the way with Amy Kaye. Yeah, that's not good. Is that true? Yeah. And I've done that. And what was the upshot of that? What happened after? By going not just where it's comfortable, but where it's uncomfortable. Right. By bringing people with me, by reaching out to people, by unifying them and seeing that common ground. And that's how I've gotten things done in Washington as well. I think you could be the dark horse because, you know, it is going to come down to that battle. I swear to God, neoliberal elites, they are incapable of learning. It doesn't matter that 2016 just happened. That was the last presidential election cycle. They pretend as if it happened a hundred years ago. And there was nothing to be learned about that election cycle. Nothing to try differently. Try the same thing again.  He described Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as far left. That's inaccurate. Bernie Sanders is center left. He's a social Democrat. Now he describes Amy Klobuchar. Bill Maher does as center left. But she would be centrist to center right in actuality because it's easy to like view everyone who is just center left in America as far left when the Overton window is shifted so far to the right. And we kind of just view everything through that lens. But in actuality, if you look at it from a different perspective, but in actuality, if you look at the average leftist and right-leaning politician throughout the world, Amy Klobuchar is a right winger. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, they are center left. Bernie Sanders is slightly to the left of Elizabeth Warren. He's more reliable on left wing issues. But I mean, these are center left candidates. They're not far left at all. And he says here is Elizabeth Warren too far left to get elected in a general election? No, I would worry about her electability just because I don't know that strategically she would have what it takes to go up against Donald Trump. Certainly I would hope she beats him. But is she too far left? No, I would be worried that she's not going far left enough to be Donald Trump because here's the thing. Whenever we see elections, this is about who can energize their base the most and Republicans love them or hate them. They do a good job at throwing red meat to their base and energizing the base. They never try to win over moderate Democrats. They never try to pander to the center. They go as far right as they feel as if they need to to energize their base and it helps them. They win. Donald Trump is president. So it is just astounding that neoliberal elites, political pundits who talk about this for a living can't grasp that what Democrats need to do to win is energize the base. So by going too far to the left, you're not making your electoral chances less likely. You're likely to be more successful if you energize the base by going to the left. He doesn't get that. Klobuchar responded to that by lying about progressive policies. She says if someone is looking to kick 149 million Americans off their current health insurance in four years, then I'm not your candidate.  Either she is so uninformed that she doesn't know anything about policy or she's lying. Now, we all know that this is a smart human being. This woman knows her stuff. She knows about policy specifics. So that tells me she's lying. This is how she framed Medicare for All, kicking 149 million Americans off of their health insurance. Well, let's reframe that to what's accurate, Amy. If you don't support Medicare for All, you support people dying if they don't have health insurance. That's what you support. So you support a public option. OK, well, if you don't have money to pay for the public option, then you still don't get health insurance. So you support people dying because if you want to try to disingenuously frame Bernie's plan as kicking people off of their plan, then let's frame your proposal for what it is. It's a pro-death proposal. You just want less people to die by making it easier for them to get health care with a public option.  So your plan is pro-death. Bernie's is pro-life, for lack of a better word. So if you want to be disingenuous, you don't have the moral high ground here. So I would advise you to not lie about this really important policy that the Democratic Party base supports.  How many rich people are going to go to a public college? I mean, maybe a couple of them. But if you are rich, you're probably going to go to a private school. This is what Hillary Clinton said in 2016. Well, I don't want to pay for Trump's kids to go to, you know, public colleges. That's crazy. Except Donald Trump's kids did not go to public schools.  They went to private schools, as all elites do. So they're lying in order to make themselves seem as if they're more progressive. But really, they're just hiding. They're trying to distract you and make it seem as if they have the moral high ground. Make it seem as if they're more progressive, but they're not. And Bill Maher called Amy Klobuchar center-left. No, she is not center-left. At best, she is a centrist. At worst, she's right-wing. Because I'm sorry, if you, as a Democratic politician, are to the right of Tories in the UK, then that doesn't make you center-left. That makes you a right-winger. Because you can ask any conservative parliament member in the UK, do you support your national health system, meaning you think healthcare should be free at the point of service? And they're going to say yes. In fact, they can't go against it. Otherwise, they know that they're going to get their asses handed to them in the next election. Now, certainly, they try to undermine it. They try to chip away at it. But publicly, they are going to say they support it. Amy Klobuchar isn't even where the average Tory is. So for you to say she's center-left, it just communicates to me that you think politics in America occurs in a vacuum, Bill. And you can't see what other countries are doing. But in actuality, if you look at other countries and where their right-wing parties are, they're already on board with single-payer. I mean, the Conservative Party in Canada, they support Canada's single-payer system. So the fact that Democrats don't even support that, it shows you that they're not center-left. They're centrist to right-wing. I would argue that they're right-wing. Now, Bill Maher also, at least he kind of started to realize that Joe Biden can't beat Donald Trump. I was shocked when he actually said this, but he says we need someone in the center who is younger and female or dot, dot, dot. So, I mean, if you put two and two together, we're really looking for someone who is a little bit more pragmatic, who can win over independence and possibly Republican voters, dot, dot, dot. And what is he opting for, someone like Hillary Clinton? Because the characteristics he is looking for in a candidate, they're applicable to someone like Hillary Clinton. We all know how she fared against Donald Trump. We have Donald Trump as president. Now, Amy Klobuchar said that she wants to bring people together after he said that. So, I mean, at this point, why doesn't she just make stronger together her slogan and choose Tim Kaine as her running mate? I mean, this is why I say neoliberals, they're incapable of learning their lesson because we just got a pragmatic female candidate that wasn't enough, right? That wasn't enough to beat Donald Trump. Sure, you can say Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and maybe she just had a failed campaign strategy.  They're never going to learn. They are never going to learn. They're just going to continue to impose whatever strategy on all of us that they say is the best, and they're never going to listen to people outside of their bubble. Hence why they're going to keep losing, because people in the Democratic establishment, if they're going to watch any shows, do you think they're going to watch me or secular talk in the rational national? No, they're going to watch Bill Maher. So they're going to listen to what he says and take his advice when this is disastrous advice. If you want to beat Donald Trump, you go left and excite the base. This shouldn't be rocket science, right? But for some reason they just can't grasp it.  I gave her credit before for just being a boring centrist who didn't lie about policies like Medicare for All, but now she's doing that. Now she's getting desperate. Now she's lying about Medicare for All. So this is where you become my direct enemy because you're attacking policies that would literally save lives.  You're not going to win. So just drop out. And Bill Maher should be ashamed of himself.  Perhaps the only person who fell further from grace than Bill Maher is Rachel Maddow. But I mean, these people, they are clearly in a bubble. They don't know what will make a candidate successful. They don't know what voters want because they're rich. They're out of touch. They don't realize how important issues like Medicare for All are. So if Democrats take their advice, Democrats will lose. It's as simple as that.


Hi Mites, since we spoke about Australia last Friday, riots and protests have broken out over the weekend. Who knows if they're fake and staged, but they might be just what the government wants.  Listen, I know it's horrible, I can't do accents, I thought my Australian one at least sounded like I was trying to do an Australian accent, and I even tried to do a French one from Macron, but I can't even fake it. So this brings up one of the most significant things to be aware of, disinformation.  And I'm curious, when are they going to stop counting the waves? In Canada we're on the fourth one now, I mean double digits sound silly, so I can't imagine them going past six or seven. It's very difficult to discern the one truth bundled in with the 99 lies, their future plans versus the fear mongering. If it's popular, if it's in the news, in the media, they want you to see it, whether it's because of natural law and they have to tell you some truth, or because they're trying to mislead you and scare you into thinking negative all day. We did a video on Ice Age Farmer a few months ago, how he's a complete shill, a good example of one of their agents, his goal being to spread fear throughout the public about food shortages and crop losses and all that stuff. Here's another example, someone hearing that a Canadian hospital isn't scheduling appointments in September because the government is planning a lockdown. Is this true inside information or simply intentionally leaked as part of predictive programming so people expect it when it actually happens and don't question it or go crazy? Like all of the conspiracy theories that end up true less than a year later. We are set to find out on Monday details of the province's vaccine passport plan, but our Richard Zussman who's joining us now from Victoria has gotten some leaked information about what will be announced then. So Richard, what have you learned? Neetu we know that organizations and interest groups have been briefed on what is happening on Monday and we understand that the province will be moving towards a vaccine certificate program, something a lot of people have been waiting for. So we have a few details. So let's have a look at what we are going to expect for Monday. So we know that this will mean that for people to access non-essential services in this province, they will be required to be fully immunized. That will include movie theaters, sporting events, potentially include restaurants as well. It does not include hospitals and schools. The date of activation we will find out on Monday, but the province is expected to give time to people to get fully immunized and here is the big reason why. We know that cases are rising. We also know there are a lot of people who are still not immunized. These are the vaccination rates for adults. Those 18 plus fully vaccinated in this province, 75.5%, one dose, 83.8%. The province knows with the Delta variant in our communities, those numbers need to go up and we'll get all the details on exactly how this is going to work, how people will prove they are fully immunized and how businesses are expected to implement it on Monday when Premier John Horgan makes the announcement alongside provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry. There will be a lot of eyes and ears on that announcement for sure. Thanks for that preview. Again, our Richard Zussman in Victoria tonight. You know, that reporter is pretty cute, but her tailor must have used a king-sized bedsheet from Bed, Bath and Beyond to make a pink blouse that would fit over those deltoids. The young lady doesn't seem too excited about announcing leaked information, like at least pretend to be excited. This leaked information, not a regular news broadcast.  It's never anything positive. Oh, we just leaked that everyone's going to be able to go outside next weekend. Imagine that happening. These people are all in the club, the newscasters, the ones at the top don't have to worry one bit because they have billions of dollars, private jets, everything in luxurious privacy. I like to refer to them as big-nosed rats eating caviar on caves. The millions and millions of minions of society members that work for them that make less than me or you are simply getting selling shots, having underground gatherings, helping their agenda, ruining your lives and controlling you while being exempt from the rules themselves because they know what's really going on.  That's not a serious enough analogy for this, but you get the point. This relates to the reason I started my YouTube channel, improving people's health so their body and mind works properly. People have such short memories from the poison in the food and water that they can be easily herded as the sheep they resemble. It would be nice if we didn't have to spell it out for the sheep, but that's what this compilation is for. I understand that holding out the, hey, if you want to go to a ball game or a concert, you're going to need to get vaccinated as a motivator for people to try and force them to get vaccinated. But like I said, what do you do with someone with an allergy? What do you do with someone who's immunocompromised or someone who for religious or deep convictions decides that no, they're not going to get a vaccine? We're not a country that makes vaccination mandatory, for example, but we want to encourage everyone to get it. We have made the decision that federal public servants need to be fully vaccinated. That is something that we're also applying to everyone who gets on a plane or a train in the coming months in Canada. But what about Canadians who want to go travel internationally? Like if you don't get vaccinated, could we see a scenario where you're not allowed? That is really going to be up to the country of destination. We intend to ensure that the public service gets vaccinated, that anyone on a plane or a train be fully vaccinated. I prefer to encourage people positively and sort of say, you know what? If we don't hit that, whatever it is, 80, 85% threshold of vaccinations, nobody's going to go to a Raptors game. Nobody's going to go to a concert because we won't be able to get to that level. And that as an encouragement, I think, is the right way to go. The bottom line is, if anyone who doesn't have a legitimate medical reason for not getting fully vaccinated chooses to not get vaccinated, there will be consequences. We know that the goal is not to punish people who don't want to get vaccinated, but it is to protect Canadians from being infected by people who are unvaccinated. But there may be places or institutions that do decide that saying, no, no, no, you need to have a vaccine to get here and proof of vaccination will be important. I'm just concerned about the fairness aspects of that as well. The idea of certificates of vaccination for domestic use to decide who can go to a concert or who can go to a particular restaurant or engage in certain activities does bring in questions of equity, questions of fairness. There are some people who, because of medical conditions or other reasons, will not be able to get vaccinated. There are others who are not on priority lists who will have to wait much longer before getting vaccinations. These are things that we have to take into account so that, yes, we're looking to try and encourage everyone to get vaccinated as quickly as possible, but we're not discriminating and bringing in unfairness in the process at the same time. You deserve better. You deserve a government that's going to continue to say get vaccinated and you know what? If you don't want to get vaccinated, that's your choice, but don't think you can get on a plane or a train besides vaccinated people and put them at risk. We've seen situations where conservative backbenchers have referred to some of this government's decisions as tyrannical in terms of how we're creating mandates for vaccination of public servants or vaccination of people on trains and airplanes. No bigger thing out there than making sure Canadians are safe right now, and they don't even think that everyone getting on a plane or a train should be vaccinated. Or even that their own candidates should all be vaccinated. That's unacceptable. Well, the answer to tyranny is to have an election. And I think people who disagree with this government or disagree with this direction should have an opportunity to make themselves heard. And that's what this election is all about. It's allowing Canadians to weigh in. It's allowing Canadians to be heard. Allowing Canadians to in this moment where we are so strongly vaccinated and looking towards the future, not just the end of this pandemic, but how we build back better, looking for an opportunity to make sure the decisions being taken in Parliament and by government are reflected, reflective of the hopes and dreams of Canadians. Doesn't it seem odd that Trudeau is using the term build back better, that Biden brought up some month back? Anyone following the global news not living in a bubble should see that all countries leaders are simply puppets working together to achieve the same end goal. They are all complicit in your misery. Seems kind of cute that they use the 666, the satanic symbolism and everything, like some goth kid that thinks being evil is cool. I mean who knows if these leaders just want to enact their high school fantasies of playing with cute emo boys while listening to Green Day.  Are you trying to be cool? Yeah.   I mean I feel like a broken record, but we made a video about China's social credit system as well as one on Skynet, so many videos on the Wi-Fi surveillance. The average person is incapable of understanding how evil and sinister these people are. Believing the government has good intentions while every aspect of their being has been tainted by their own government for their entire lives. The average person is generally good. They do the right thing. But these people that have gotten to the top are the worst of the worst. Everyone acknowledges there's evil people that do bad things, but it can never be my own government doing it to me. You know, at least vegans will have a high social credit score avoiding meat than staying inside all day because they can't leave the toilet. So thank you guys for joining me today. If you could please drop a like on the video.  I guess go to frank-definite.com and support me through my businesses before I keep saying I'm going to lose it in every video, but we're getting closer day by day.


You publish every day. You never run out of ideas. You work your full-time job. You exercise daily. And you still post exciting content every day on your blog, right? Right? Yeah, me neither. Days go by and then weeks. You think about how good posting would feel to write, to publish, to get those likes and comments. But you don't actually do anything. The longer your blog sits there, the more you feel like your next post has to be awesome to make up for being a slacker.  So you don't post. Your visitors leave. Your views trickle to zero.  It doesn't have to be this way. I found a way that you can make room in your life for your blog, and also a way to have something to write about every time you put your fingers to the keyboard. My name is Andrea Badgley, and I've been blogging for four years on my personal site at andriabadgley.com. When I first started blogging, I was a stay-at-home mom. And I published multiple times a week. I had a healthy online following, and I was making more friends every day. But when I started working full-time, I didn't have time or focus for my blog anymore. I stopped posting, and my visitors left, and my views dried up. And I felt bad about myself for abandoning the blog that I had grown to love, and that also helped me find my career path with WordPress.com. So I tried to figure out what was keeping me from writing. And I determined that I had two blockers, time and topics. During my blogging drought, I'd think, I just don't have time anymore to write. Or if I made time, I'd sit down and think, I don't have anything interesting to say. So I figured out a way to make time, and I devised a tool that ensured I would never run out of topics. So first, let's talk about time. I was once a member of a group who met weekly to write together, and we'd often do what's called a free write. We would set a timer for 10 minutes. We'd write without lifting our pens from the page, and when the timer dinged, we'd stop writing, and we'd share what we wrote. To make room in my life for blogging, I decided to iterate on this idea of the free write and carve 10 minutes out of my day every day to write. 10 minutes is so little. It can be done after an early morning workout when a run has gotten your creative juices flowing, or you can do it on your lunch break, or you can do it with a cocktail, or you can do it in bed at night when you realize, oh crap, I haven't written yet today. The main thing to remember is that 10 minutes is short enough that you can squeeze it in anywhere. To really make this work, though, here's a pro tip. Create a trigger. Carve a time out of the day, a specific time, that you want to write. Set yourself an alarm to remind yourself, and then give yourself a reward for following through, whether that's the piece of an early morning house before your kids wake up, or whether it's an afternoon cup of coffee to go with your writing time.  So the 10 minute write takes care of the time issue. But what about topics? Again, I'm gonna turn to a writing group strategy. When I worked with my writing group, we'd always put a box filled with folded slips of paper on the middle of the table. Whenever we started a free write, one of us would pull a slip of paper from the box, and we'd read the words written on it aloud. We'd then write about whatever was written on the piece of paper for 10 minutes. This same strategy can be used for blogging. To create your own prompt box, just take a slip of paper and snip it into 30 little pieces. On each piece, write a word or a phrase that has meaning for you. Examples of summer mine are thunderstorms, rolling pins, salt marshes. If you work right for a blogging site, I mean a business site, you could write down employee names or materials that your business uses or anything about your business that is unique. Once you've written down your prompts, fold those slips of paper and put them in a box. Then any time that you wanna write, if you can't think of what to write about, you can just pull one of your prompts from the box and start writing. To overcome writer's block and start publishing again, pair the 10 minute write with the prompt box. So during the time that you've carved out for your writing time, just grab your box and your timer. Pull a prompt from your box, set your timer, write for 10 minutes, and when the timer stops, stop writing. And that's it. I have a feeling that some of you may be skeptical. What about editing, right?  During the month of April of this year, I dedicated to publishing a 10 minute free write on my blog every day for 30 days. Each morning beginning March 31st, I poured myself a cup of coffee before my work day started, set my timer, pulled a prompt, and wrote for 10 minutes. When the timer dinged, I did a quick scan for spelling and punctuation errors, and then I scheduled my post to publish the following morning. The scheduling delay gave me a little bit of extra time to edit if I wanted to, but to be honest, I rarely did. And the reason that I didn't was that I came to live by the motto, perfect is the enemy of done. Publishing this way is really liberating. Some of your posts will bomb, but then some of them really take off. It's like shooting 100 frames to get the perfect photograph.  So by pairing the prompt box with the timer, I was able to publish every day in the month of April. My blog got really active again. Visitors climbed 26% and my views climbed 45% from 3,700 in March to 50 or 400 views in April. Visitors really loved the spontaneity of it, and in fact, they started sending me prompts. And whenever I wrote from a reader's prompt, I would give them credit and link back to their site, helping build community. By giving yourself meaningful topics to write about and by carving time out of your day to write, you not only get practicing again, you get publishing again. As soon as you start publishing, that writer's block wall starts to come down. As soon as you start doing your 10 minute free writes, pulling a prompt, setting a timer, and just writing without worrying about what you're writing about. Getting started is the hardest part. So how do you get started? Go home and create a prompt box. Make a list of 20 things that you love, moss, mountains, bacon, brioche, martinis. You can start here at WordCamp. If you are at a talk that sparks an idea, jot down a note so that you can write about it later.  Put the mementos in your prompt box and then the next time it's time to write, you can write. For more tips on publishing in 10 minutes a day, I posted this talk on my blog at AndreaBadgley.com or tweet me at AndreaBadgley and if you have any questions or just wanna chat about it, I'd love to chat. Thanks.


Okay, we're recording. All right. Hello everybody and welcome to the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee meeting. Everybody is welcome to attend and participate as long as you abide by the anti-trust policy and our community code of conduct. Jumping right into the announcements this morning. Salona, do you wanna take the first two there? Sure, just letting everyone know that the Sao Paulo Brazil bootcamp is happening next week. In fact, Rai is in the air. I'll be in the air tomorrow and Dave is flying in this weekend. We ended up having some issues with the venue and some others in regards to marketing. So we've capped attendance at 70 and we'll be reaching that. So, and the agenda is actually looking pretty full for the event at this point and that a lot of people stepped forward to do presentations. In fact, it's so far, it looks like it's gonna be very active in regards to session leadership. Fantastic. Thanks. But it presents a problem for TSC next week and basically the majority of us will be either having flown in extremely late the Wednesday night before or will be flying at the time that the TSC meeting is next week. So I would like to request that someone record the meeting and take notes so that my team can sleep and not try to do anything from a plane. Hart, you're used to kicking recordings off for some of our meetings. Would you be able to kick off a recording? I would love to, but I'm gonna be gone next week. Here, I thought I had you pinned down right away but you were one step ahead of me. I should try, Dad. Let's see here. Who else is used to kicking that off? Hey, Simone, this is Daniela. One of us on our team can do that as well. Dad, I think Mick is used to this. Can he do that from a dunk tank? I can do it if I'd need the host code to do it, that's all. I got it. I got it. You got it. All right, great. Thanks, Mick. Okay, and then we still have the ongoing call for comments for input to the board for 2020 planning. The sooner you get those in, the more likely that we can get the board thinking about those. And then we're coming up on the 4th of July holiday in the U.S., so I think we'll be canceling the TSC meeting on that day. All right, Saloni, you had some traction on the thread that you submitted about chairs or points of contact for projects. Yes, so the reason for this is basically I could give you all a really long list of questions that the CAs handle and take care of in regards to contacting the projects and helping organize a bunch of different things and things of that nature. And as the projects grow, we have a really hard time figuring out who always to talk to for all of the projects and when. And so this was basically an attempt to formalize it. There was no, the only reason we honestly chose chairs and vice chairs is because that's what we call the work groups and sakes. There is a precedent in LF projects for projects having this. And I posted some links to some of the ones that I wouldn't found on the Google search.  And so it was basically the reason my team was asking for it is just to facilitate us to help you better so that we knew who to contact because a lot of times when we do ask the maintainers I feel like they're normally busy coding and such and we don't get responses. So that's why we were looking for someone who is more of not necessarily a lead developer but a project type person. Or one of the even one of the other things was like a volunteer lead or something along those lines. So that was the point about doing that. And because of the fact that it was seen like such a big change that it did seem like something that should be voted upon. But there's a lot of discussion but I didn't see any clear thread and my misunderstanding that there is a clear thread and that there is something that some of them want to pose as something that is ready for a vote. I don't know that there was a clear thread or not but one thing that stuck out to me is it looked like there is a need for a security point of contact, a marketing point of contact and maybe a TSC point of contact. That I guess the latter would be about making sure that the reports get out in any decisions that come from the TSC get back into the project. So I think that maybe something along the lines of listing those points of contact on the Wiki or something should maybe satisfy that. Were there other sorts of points of contact needs? Well, so that there are, there's a lot in regards to documentation, certifications, things of that nature and just general where to go, especially on some of the larger projects in that people come in and they're like, we don't know exactly where to go and find things and who to ask and who should be in charge of those things. And so that's why we were asking for something kind of generalized. And Dave mentioned that he maintains already a set of security contacts or for each of the projects. I think in the spirit of trying to be minimal, you could always have on a webpage for a project. Here's other people to talk to if you have questions about documentation or something like that, right? Other people who could be volunteer, points of contact, we're just trying to, in terms of kind of formal tracking and just trying to make sure it's something that each project has. If it was one POC per project, that might be just enough, minimum viable governance or minimum viable structure. Well, questions should be going to like the mail list of the rocket chat, right? You don't want to designate one person, because that person will get swamped. Oh, absolutely. We always try to direct people to those lists. It's just sometimes they do, they go on a list and they ask a question and they don't hear a question, not that this point of contact needs to be somebody chartered with answering every question that goes unanswered. But I, you know, it's still sometimes, it feels like there's a lack of a human. I don't know. Well, this is something we've found with the Indie project is often you'll want to ask a question to see what the status of something is or maybe ask the community architects for a request of some place to put something or some infrastructure. And if we have a point of contact like it was described, it helps make sure that there's not, you know, any phishing attempts going on or that the general consensus amongst the maintainers isn't undermined by one of those kinds of requests because that person can help point things back to the right mailing lists and make sure that all the maintainers are aware of what's going on. I'm confused. So is the point of contact everybody on the planet can use that? Or, I mean, again, I think, you know, as Mark said, the mailing lists are, that's what they're there for. I mean, the security contact makes tons of sense because they have a specific role. They're vetting security vulnerabilities and then they're managing the vulnerability through the life cycle. It's a very different thing than somebody that's just, again, I don't really quite understand what we're trying to accomplish here. Is anybody from the marketing committee on that could speak to the needs for a marketing contact? Let me ask a question a bit differently. I mean, how do you suggest that we identify those people? How would we describe their role and ask for volunteers? So I can give you an example. It's Marta here. Just few days ago, we were contacted by CoinDesk. It was clear that they didn't quite understand Hyperledger and we needed to clarify some things and the reporter became very responsive and now is asking if he could interview some maintainers to get a better understanding of all of the projects and ask some questions and features and so on. So of course, in a week try to keep up to date. Community architects are keeping up to date but having someone who is that point of contact for instance, for that would be wonderful for age-recessed projects. That's kind of the role of the TSC chair. You try to give me more work. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, I didn't, just giving you the follow-up question is specific to a project and you could go to a mailing list publicly and say, hey, there's a reporter from the newspaper who wants to do a story and that's fine that sometimes you wanna go to an individual and kind of those of us who've been around some of these projects for a long time would know to go to certain individuals who know that part of their job is kind of advocacy to folks like that. But I think there's been a few times we've gone to lists and everyone's been busy. That's just human nature, that's fine. Sometimes when three people are responsible for a thing you kind of get less engagement than if one person is and I know they can delegate out to the other three. Not that that one person has to answer every need themselves entirely and bear that burden on their back. Yeah. So Sawtooth has adopted a governance structure from Rust and there's separate teams broken out that are sort of discipline-based and that might be another model to take a look at for the larger projects. I am hearing still though there's two or three rules that need points of contact, security, marketing and then I'm not clear if there's another one for TSC matters or something like that. Maybe that's really just all the maintainers. How does the Hyperlegia staff view this role compared to like a chair on a prom working group or CIG? We were looking at it as a similar perspective like normally if we wanna know something about interoperability or someone comes up and says, hey, we're doing this paper on blah, blah, blah, who do we talk to? One of the things we sit there and do is we're like, oh, you should go talk to the chair of the scale and performance because this is a scale and performance issue and they can probably point you towards some of those topics as to what's going on here at Hyperlegia. And so we do stuff like that all the time. The hard part becomes when it becomes a project. We don't always know exactly who to do it, who to ask for it. And sometimes, so we can either send it to the entire list which sometimes isn't appropriate or we can try to cherry pick certain individuals but then sometimes people's feelings get hurt but they were not the person picked. And it becomes also where some of the stuff is so specific that even when we generally, we can't generally post it to the list, it still also doesn't get responses. A lot of this has to do with honestly the lack of responses and then the fact that the CAs literally go and chase down individuals to get things done. And so things that shouldn't take a huge amount of our time can become incredibly time consuming. And we can't be quickly responsive to any of those people who are coming in with those requests. Okay, so generally all technical quests go to chat or the mailing list and the communities should be handling that as best they can. But I'm hearing on individual marketing. It's not really always technical requests, Dan. Like if someone has a normal question, question, yeah, we send them to chat or we send them to the mailing list and honestly we send them to chat the majority of the time because we found chat to be more responsive than the mailing list. But these are like broader questions than that. It's like a company going, we're thinking of using blah, blah, blah, should we? And or I'm doing a paper on blah, blah, blah, who should we talk to? Or we need to work on something like certifications or we get training or we need to validate that we're doing something with the press but we need to validate that the technology is correct inside of it and maybe it's diverse projects or there's just a really wide swath of things that end up happening. Yeah, so the things that I heard in that that might require more individualized responses are requests from the press where you need one or two people engaged there. So that makes sense to me. Most of the other questions sound like questions to the maintainers. Or to the TSC, right? I mean, something like interoperability is not a project thing. It's something that should be addressing from the TSC or the TSC chair. There's not just one individual that's gonna necessarily know all these things anyway. And so I think it may make sense. In fact, it probably does make sense that a project identify from a marketing perspective what do we talk to? But even then it's gonna be a little bit dicey because if you have projects that are truly diverse then you have to be careful that whoever it is that you're reaching out to isn't going to be necessarily putting their own company spin on it and so forth. So that's obviously something that you probably want to have actually multiple contacts. And but again, I think that that, and maybe we can ask that that be part of when you're trying to establish a project who do we talk to from a marketing and PR and analyst perspective, right? Is that person may not actually be a maintainer. I can appreciate that. But that's a different story than again, some of the questions are coming in are of a technical nature. Some of them are really the TSC chair and or members or just bring it to the TSC. And then we can figure out who maybe needs to talk to. Yeah, okay. I think at the TSC, if the TSC feels strongly right now that they rather not vote to have a point of contact recognized as something between the TSC and the projects or some other official part of the infrastructure, that's fine. I mean, we'll just continue to take issues that are inbound either to the maintainers or the TSC as we see appropriate or just internally amongst the CA staff try to maintain a sense of well, who on a given project tends to be most responsive to our queries and we'll just go from there. And maybe there's just one other footnote here. It sounds like with the larger projects having lots of repos each project should probably already have a maintainers file. But maybe it's not clear across the many repos because you're gonna have different subsets of maintainers. But I would think that each project tends to have like a core repository. And people can check me on this but I'm thinking that the maintainers listed in that core repository is probably the best single source of identifying the current set of maintainers for that project. Yep. And again, I mean, that's one of the things that actually I put in my note and that is maybe we should make it a sort of a policy or a best practice to have, I mean, and just about every one of them does. I think I only found two or three that didn't actually have a maintainers file. But have a maintainers file that lists who the maintainers are and gives their contact information, that would be, I'm fully supportive of that, making sure that those people are easily found at the top level repo or in the wiki for that matter. Okay, well, I don't think we need to belayer the point. We can move on. It sounds like there's strong opposition to it. So that's fine. We'll manage. Okay. Hopefully still some good outcomes from that discussion and clarifying roles and responsibilities. Moving on to the life cycle committee updates. Arno, I kind of put you on point for this. Looking right now for just sort of a feeling of how things are going and whether you feel like you can predict some sort of end date. Can you hear me well? Yes. Okay. So yeah, so we have set up a wiki page. We have invited everybody to go and at least issues that we thought we were to tackle. And we kind of, I waited a little bit, took a little bit of time. And then I decided to try and move the ball forward by pushing forward with a bunch of proposals for resolving those issues. Admittedly, some of them were kind of blunt and maybe to an extent provocative, maybe in some ways. But it did get some reaction. I have to say, using the wiki as a bit of a challenge, I try to not get to schedule calls. I think we already have too many calls. I'm keen on having more calls and trying to figure out the time slot that will work for everybody. But using the wiki, quite frankly, is a bit of a pain. And inline comments, we started with that, that doesn't really work. And to my dismay, I have to share with everybody that inline comments are pain in the butt. You can't have them all open, visible, and there's a very long-standing open issues against confidence wiki.  So everybody's crying about this, but they don't seem to care. So anyway, we are using comments against the page itself. So they're all at the bottom. And I've tried to organize things by hand on issues so we can have a threaded discussion. But the response has been, I would say, fairly mild. Some people, as you would expect, are pretty vocal or there is not so much. So my plan is to try to take another path at the proposed resolution based on the input that was already shared by some of the members and try to see if those proposed resolutions work better. Some of the ones that I put forward were rejected by different people or amended in different ways. So the plan is to have another go at it. In terms of the timeline, because I know and I understand the need to try to basically set some targets, that's much harder to do, honestly. But my goal is to not try to solve everything and get back to the TSE with the whole list of issues resolved or proposed results. But to try to find some of the ones we can at least agree on and bring those up to the TSE for approval by the TSE. Because all of that is, of course, just legwork for the TSE. So I think that the TSE calls the final decision on any of those. And we may also have some discussion in the TSE when we come with our proposed resolution. But so realistically speaking, I think in two weeks from now or three, now, it's the 4th of July, canceled, quite understanding of me. I'm hoping we can have at least the first batch of proposed resolutions. OK, that's great progress. It does look like quite a bit of work in that conversation. He's been doing a great job. Thank you, but if anybody wants to see what's up, I mean, as I said, from the week, everybody has access to the week, so feel free to pick and contribute if you want. I wonder if it would help put all the try to split those resolutions onto separate pages and then have the comments at each one of those pages? So quite frankly, that's part of the challenge is everybody has their own way of wanting to address this. And I tried to split them. The next one answers several of them together. And it's hard to keep everything organized. So I don't know what the best structure from the week keep one of you with me. It's part of the experiment to try to use the week as effectively as possible and have some kind of attention among the group, right? For those of you out there who do use Wikis a lot and that incorporates a lot of commentary and such, I mean, Wikis are great as kind of, I think, documentation tools, but don't necessarily sell themselves as like brainstorming tools so much as well. But for those of you who do use Wikis and other tools at the same time, what are like the best tools for that and what are some processes that you'd recommend? Salona here, I would recommend what Dan said about breaking each issue into a page because we've also got the feature in regards to polls and some other different things. And a lot of the features WikiWise are normally per page because that's how they normally consider it to be about how to break out. Our note, I can show you easily how to make sure that that first page is an automatically maintained directory of all the child pages so that you don't have to worry about keeping them in sync or anything along those lines. If you wanted to go over what some of those features are, I could help you organize a little better. All right, sounds good. So just grab it. I'm happy to try, I mean. Okay, well, great. Thanks for the update and for everybody who's contributing on evolving the process there. Moving on to Caliper. We have maintainer contributor from Caliper to take questions. Okay, sounds like we probably don't have somebody to take questions so maybe we can leave Caliper on the docket for another week in case there's other questions to be satisfied here. I did throw one on just now looking for checking that we've got an alignment between Caliper and PSWG. I think we wanna make sure that the metric definitions and so forth are well aligned. I think maybe since we don't have somebody live to answer questions now, please make sure that if you do have questions on their update that that gets onto the Wiki and we can handle those asynchronously. I know a lot of the contributors for Caliper are in a time zone that's probably not convenient with this meeting. All right, and then let's see here. When I was looking at the calendar of upcoming reports, there is also a report due from Quilt. I have reached out to the Quilt. Yeah, it actually looks like Caliper was a week early and getting their report out. So maybe that's why they're not here today to answer questions, but it looks like Quilt is overdue. I've sent a note to the maintainers and most active contributor that I saw on that project to see what their status is, but we haven't had an update from them for a couple of quarters now. And so I think we need to start thinking about where this falls into the life cycle. We're gonna have a specific proposal right now, but I think it's something that the TSC members should start thinking about so that we can have a discussion about that if we need to make a resolution within the next few weeks here. So Quilt's in the middle of a rebooting process, which is why they're not doing the reports yet. And there's been some different things that Brian and I have been trying to address in regards to that before there's an official report out. Okay. So I guess that's the report. Basically, the report with Quilt right now is the only people that you'll see is the ILP people, but we're working right now to figure out how to make Quilt be more about generalized interoperability, which was the original proposal. And in fact, there's meetings about that that are currently happening. Yeah, I guess in general, I think when we have a project that may have run its course, I don't think it's a bad thing for that project to follow that life cycle through and be end of life. And if there's similar work coming in that wants to be created as a project that we see a regular project proposal for it with a new set of maintainers or if there's an overlapped set of maintainers. But I think that we shouldn't be afraid to shut things down. That seems to be a part of a healthy life cycle that we're gonna have things that graduate and things that don't graduate. Hey, Dan, this is Rosie. Hey, this is Dave here. So I'll go first. So forth, Rosie. Thanks. So Accenture is looking to bring in some of the interoperability work that they've done and we're thinking about bringing it to Quilt. So based on what you just said, should we be instead thinking about putting together a project proposal? Yeah, yeah. And I think if there's a collection of interoperability things that would wanna be an amalgam, then getting that as part of the project proposal is appropriate or if it's a standalone project with just that individual interoperability piece, then that's also good. And I think that some of the direction that I see in the project life cycle discussion is getting code into a lab first. And that might be another precursor if your work isn't already in a lab. I mean, what we were talking about doing with Accenture stuff and some other stuff coming in was coming back to the TSC with a proposal that was essentially something that was substantive enough for a vote that I would say here's a collection of code. It is, we're all still at an incubator stage, right? It's why Quilt is still in the incubator. There wasn't a question of kind of getting things into a non-incubator status that should still be considered incubator. Also, it's definitely not about removing the TSC's role as an approval step in kind of being a gateway, I'm sorry, being a gating factor for new code as it comes in. So the idea was we'd come and we'd say here are basically two or three additional kind of pieces that play together in the same way that say the piece of the Versa play together. They're kind of thematically connected. They're at the same level of maturity perhaps as the existing ILP Java implementation, which is all that we know of as Quilt today, and that having them together still benefits from whatever brand equity we might have put behind Quilt as an interoperability thing, the same way that Ursa is kind of where we're parking, share security libraries. And that helps prevent some bloat, or not bloat, it's not the right word, but creating too many new top-level projects for those who might be concerned about kind of this car at that level, right? So that's a preview. We weren't ready to, I think, make a proposal on that front yet. I, and there's also some of the subtext of the thing was if you have an amalgam project like Ursa, somebody who's roast these different, think about how to represent them here for them to do the organization and such, might it be easier to, you know, ask out for a different? I don't know if it's my audio inbound or your audio outbound, but I'm having trouble making you out. Out of our car. Yeah, me too. Okay, we caught some of those syllables, Brian. Got a referred syllable, yeah. Yeah, so I think it sounds like a good discussion, probably a good part of the life cycle discussion that Arnaud was leading. From my perspective, if it's mostly about branding that we've got some brand behind something like Quilt or maybe it's Composer, that's maybe where we want to think about, are we using the incubator the way that we want to use the incubator? Because it should be okay for projects to go away. We shouldn't, I don't think like that we should be too concerned about building a lot of brand equity in incubated projects. And the, yeah, I don't know. That's probably enough for now, but. Yeah, I'm kind of in agreement with that, Dan. I think projects should follow their own course. If people lose interest and they go away, that's the way the cookie crumbles. But if something's coming in from the outside and we're gonna try and do a lift and shift kind of a thing, I'm not sure. I think that should go through the regular process. Yeah, I would be against the lift and shift. I mean, if it comes in and enhances what's already there in Quilt and fits in, then it should become a part of Quilt. But if it's like, we'll throw this out, put this in and call it the same thing, that's not the way to go. Yeah, just from the perspective of what we're looking at. You know, obviously when Quilt was brought in to the entire hyperledger and the technical steering committee voted on it, right? There was some concerns about making it a wider interoperability sort of project. And so when we were considering at Accenture bringing in the work that we've been doing, it made sense that it should end the Quilt. But if what we're saying now is that it makes more sense to bring it in separately, that's fine. I wanna make sure I'm following the right processes. And so that's why I brought the question up. Hey, Tracy. Thanks, Tracy. Didn't you invent the process, Tracy? No, I think the process was in place before I showed up. Just out of curiosity, do you know when you'll have a document on that? So I guess not all would have to start working on that document based on the conversation that I had. I didn't actually realize I needed to put together something because I did think I was just bringing it into Quilt. So I will work on that with the team and we'll get that in place. We're just about through all the processes internally. And so this is a good conversation to have come up now. Good. Yeah, I think that if the maintainers on a project are still active and they want to welcome in more breadth in the functionality or scope, then that's a different situation than if the maintainers have sort of dwindled away and they're not active in a project anymore. Then in that latter case, it really feels to me more like new code should be a new project. The maintainers? It's a bit above both, right? Because when we had the conversations with Adrienne and the other name is escaping me at the moment. When we had the conversations with the maintainers of Quilt, they were definitely looking forward to having more being contributed, right? And so that's kind of why, that's the process that we had went through, right? Talking to them first, because it made sense. So I think it's just a matter of making sure everybody's on the same page and doing the right thing. Okay. That is the end of our official agenda here. Since we've got just a little bit of time, if there's any opens, we can take those quickly. Otherwise, we will wrap up for the day. So I saw that one of the six is putting out a white paper and I didn't know since that is outside the purview of the TSC. I just didn't know if there needs to be some better coordination or review or whatever. Don't know how other TSC members feel about that. Hey, Mark, can I comment? This is Daniela. We are aware of that. We've actually had been working with Bobby from the development and training working group to make sure that the template was done and we're advising or even the point of contact on the telecom, say, which is David Boswell on the Ecosystems team is working with Vipin and the rest. That white paper is an interesting one because they're also working with the technical leads in the LF networking project, the Linux Foundation networking project. So we are aware of it. Salona and I actually and the teams spent some time talking about putting together, there's a template, there's a white paper template that Bobby and the rest of that working group, technical working group that falls on the TSC as put together to put together some more guidelines around the white paper. So we are aware of it. We have a draft where we're doing it. We'll get back to the TSC and particularly the learning and developments working group around what things we think are important to make sure that we're using the right language and have the right standards and review process. So we will get. Actually, we discussed this yesterday and we were gonna put it on hopefully for next week so the week after is TSC call. But happy to answer any additional questions that the TSC has. Yeah, so this did come up in the governing board meeting just, I think it was this week. And my position is that the SIGs are outside the, it's outside their scope to generate work products that if they're gonna generate work products, then that those need to go through the governance process that we have established for the TSC. And so we've probably created a little bit of an awkward situation in moving the SIGs out from underneath the TSC and finding that there is some interest there in generating work products. But I think we wanna make sure that those stay clearly under proper governance and community development. Yeah, to be clear, the SIGs are creating work products that are hoped that they would create quite a bit from light papers to blog posts, to use cases on a Wiki, all sorts of non-coding things. They're not creating software. The hope is that if they do that, they come in through the ordinary process and to elaborate into a project proposal. And I think whenever they are making technical kinds of things that could be interpreted as some sort of official position of hyperledger, then that makes a ton of sense to bring to the TSC for input and make sure it's accurate. If it's something that describes policy, I don't think they're really, they're not designing policy for any of the technical projects of hyperledger. So, and if they were to recommend one, it obviously makes sense to bring it to the TSC. But the kinds of content they bring are, it's about, I think all the things that we'd agree upon are useful anyways to have. So, yeah, I think the TSC has always been kind of encroached when there's been appropriate things. So, and if we want a more interesting policy than that, let's talk about it offline and bring something back. I think if they're gonna generate any sort of technical product that has to go through either a technical working group or a technical coding project. Is a blog post a technical product? No, I think we've been pretty free-form with the blog posts that anybody can submit a blog post. And I guess it's sort of at the discretion of hyperledger marketing, whether those go up. Okay, and if you want to call to the right- If you do technical reviews. Oh, I think it's fair to say the blog post. I'm sorry, go ahead, go ahead, sorry. I just wanted to make one quick point that we do technical reviews of technical blog posts. They, I do them all the time. They get sent to me quite often, actually, and Rai and other developers in the projects, if they're very specific to a project, we tend to loop in people who could review them. A lot of times the technical blog posts are coming from developers in the projects and we just do a quick pass. So you're like, yep, looks good, right? And it's mostly around just cleaning up language and making sure it aligns with existing policy and things like that. And we'd love more help with that if somebody wants to volunteer to help with that. It just tends to be time critical. Hey, I'd like to put this up sometimes this week. Can we get technical reviews? So that's something we're more than happy to put input on. And I think, as I was gonna say, I agree if you call something a white paper, asking that that be something that the technical steering committee has had a chance to provide input to and approve, I mean, sure. I think they'll find it just the all work product thing. I just wanted, if we wanna get into that conversation, let's talk and bring something back to the TSC. Yeah, it sounds like we're similarly aligned on that things that sound official like white papers should go through governance and things that are a little less formal like a blog post in kind of stay the course. That's all pretty reasonable. All right, well, we got one extra item in. Mark, you had something? I was gonna say as Daniela, you know, eloquent we put, she was gonna write something up and, you know, bring it up for discussion in a week or two. So we should probably see. On screen, I'm showing the Wiki page as to where all this is being documented when they've been working on it. If you, I know many of y'all don't have the ability to view the screen, but that's where it's all being worked upon. Okay, well, that's interesting because the working groups, presumably, would want to be aware of or follow that process. So that sounds like a good point of collaboration and discussion amongst the working groups as well. Maybe that's a proposal in and of itself that should get circulated here at the TSC. I was gonna say something like that. Maybe we just need some form of notification to the TSC. Hey, we're planning to post this, you know, let us know if you have any issues. By default, you assume everybody's okay with it, but at least, you know, people have a chance to interject and they feel like it. Yeah, the publication thing gets really hazy. I mean, if you write a research paper that mentions Hyperledger, do you have to get that approved by the TSC too? If you're gonna put something out that is under the Hyperledger brand, then it needs to go through Hyperledger processes and those might be marketing ones. If it's purely marketing content and if it's technical content, this is the governance body for that. So how do we define... Okay. But you could conceivably do a performance report on Ursa libraries and put that out.  The fast fabric paper, they... Right, it just becomes nebulous. Like, Mike Lauder and I made a blog post about Ursa. Is that like Hyperledger or not? Did you put it out on a Hyperledger website? Yeah, I was going to tell you... It was at a Hyperledger claim about something. I mean, you can make the claims you want, but Hyperledger cannot make a claim without this. Gotcha. Right.  I think, you know, I think this was brought up previously when we were talking to the smart contracts, going through the smart contracts working group review last week. And in fact, it looks like there is a sort of a loophole in the sense that we didn't explicitly say that, you know, a work group would bring forward its stuff and maybe we need to codify that. That, you know, deliverables that are going to be published by Hyperledger coming out of a working group for us saying should be, if they're technical in nature, should be reviewed by the TSC. So, I mean, I know we're getting towards the end of the call, but I'd be happy to have my proposal for that. Yeah, I think we're all in agreement on that. And I think that's been how we've done things in the past, right? Yes, right. They're just not reading down anywhere. Right. Yeah. And that's the slide that, the thing that Solani just posted the link to is white paper standards. And I think we just make sure that white paper standards, part of that is, you know, submission to for, you know, early on for feedback and, you know, co-creation and invitation, right? All that sort of thing. And then later on for review and then for final approval. And that's worth restating, worth clarifying, worth making part of the official standard and towards, and I think to everybody's point, calling something the paper, you know, is perhaps that's where, that's where there's an officialness to it that for, you know, individual messages and wiki pages you don't have. And I think even blog posts, because when we put blog posts up, we put them under people's names, you know, they're not anonymous.  They are, you know, this is Hart's take on, you know, what he's done with performance on this project, you know, and it's his name attached to that. And so I, you know, we keep those kind of personal names. And if there's errors in them, we certainly would correct them quickly as you can do with a blog post. You don't tend to want to do with a paper, right? Yeah. There might actually be some inconsistency there. I think a lot of times they're just go out, post it as by hyper ledger, even if the article itself says by heart or whomever. Probably just some nuance with the way those web pages get generated. Okay. Certainly the intent is, you know, when we put them out just by hyper ledger, that would be the ones that are more official. But okay, we'll look at that. I'm guessing it's whoever clicks the publish button. The word press stuff just automatically tags it that way. I don't think it's anything. Direct. Okay. But. Okay. Well, I think this, this conversation has run its course for right now. So we'll go ahead and wind up for today. Thanks for the good discussion from everybody and continue to update the various wiki pages that we have on these topics that we have discussed. And thanks again for the contributions. See ya. Thank you. Thanks.


Here we are in Mumbai, the commercial capital of India, one of the most vibrant cities in the world, a city of enterprise, ingenuity and vibrance and creativity. All in one pot, the highest level of wealth and the worst form of poverty, everything in one pot. Here we are passing next to Chowpatty Beach, thousands of people in the evening with their families and children, trying to get a glimpse on the ocean and a whiff of sea breeze. Congested and crowded, but many mumbakers, the residents of the city. For some reason they won't want to live anywhere else. In the next two days we are here, the events here will be big because the awareness in the city is very big. Maharashtra has gone through many cycles of drought and flood. Mumbai itself has seen a recent flood, so the awareness in Mumbai is very high and the events will be very vibrant too. This is Mumbai for you. Mumbai, Bombay, Mumbai, when we were children they used to call it Bombay, Bombay. Then in English they said Bombay, now it's Mumbai. But one thing is whatever the name you call it by, this is a live wire of a city.


Dagestani soldiers refused to fight in the Russian army and destroy weaponry. In Zaporizhia Oblast, around 50 ethnic Dagestanis have refused to fight in the ranks of the Russian army and have destroyed or broken their weapons. General staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported it on Facebook. In light of the successful military operations undertaken by Ukraine's defence forces and Russia's significant personnel losses, desertions in units of the Russian occupation forces are on the rise, with troops increasingly leaving their combat positions without permission. General staff said. The general staff reported that about 50 ethnic Dagestani soldiers from the Caspian flotilla had refused to take part in hostilities near the village of Dorosnyanka in Zaporizhia Oblast. The deserters had also rendered their units' weapons unusable and the arms available in the unit were put out of order. The general staff said. The general staff further reported that Russian forces were continuing to use the civilian population as a human shield. For example, Russian military leaders are housing their soldiers in Topolivka, Kursan Oblast, in private houses where civilians still live.