Hi everyone I'm Svante Schubert, and I'd like to give you an update on the ODF toolkit To my person I might just say it's during the talk, but I also involved with Michael Stahl in the OASIS TC I'm a co-editor and a co-chair from ODFTC and With Michael Stahl as well a co-maintainer of the ODF toolkit and I'd like to give you an update on what's going on So the highlight first of all it's been last year November, but wasn't able to tell you that we did two releases Last year that was the last time JDK8 and then JD11. It's just there's a There was a there was a gap for for the tooling and Finally, I was able to re We established a code generation which was not used and broken after 11 years and also worked myself complete into this area and Made a release for the multi schema validator, which is an underlying it sometimes feels like you're working through old ruins of antique technology There in the in the flowering time of XML there there were validators flourishing and lots was going on and This is from this time and we took it over and I yeah made a build system from and to To Maven so it's up building out of the box without jazz inside and JDK enabled and yeah, and Michael did the first fix for for it and yeah, and we continue working that so basically We still haven't got a one zero zero, but I Always thought that have to be something something special and but I believe Nowadays I believe we we keep the the API stable so don't because there's no tooling in Java where you can say I have these API chains apply them to your libraries and everything is fine. Usually you use it and suddenly the build breaks Yes, so Even if we have package names with incubator, which is some IBM relic to when working together with them but we just kept them and Might do refactoring on a different bunch and also doing the final icing of The in document search API for for engine zero, which is basically despite of prior project that were mentioned the That were the sponsorship of the work that was ongoing the generation and all this all my time here in the ODIF toolkit and also the reason why I rejoined the ODIF TC back again So what's the ODIF toolkit? Obviously, it's not a silver bullet. It's a silver hammer here And now it's it's for ODIF the file format and it's for developers. It's it's in Java mostly and Just to give you a brief update on what's about ODIF. It's just a zipped file with XML there's something called meta in for manifest which is like a content table and In early days, it was meant to to be reused by by PDF and it was used by EPUB But unfortunately they forked or we forked. I'm not sure there was miscommunication and They used their own signature Which was different than an ODIF one two and we did a release on ODIF one three last year in 27th of April and what's special on that release was that we we bundled all the tooling for the ODIF release and this is Where this can help as well. So an ODIF Think about it. It's a blueprint where all ODIF applications Derived from so everyone who is able to read and write ODIF like Microsoft Office LibreOffice is an ODIF application so from history we started very early in the old two thousands and Staff is where most of us some of us came from and staff as you might know is Heritor the anchorster from Open Office LibreOffice the source base and there we we came together that it might be nice to have some Java We were some the inventors of Java libraries on the server just to have a low-memory footprint or Some tooling on the server and then we had a joint went away with IBM And they did a fork on on simple a bi that was rejoined, but unfortunately it was not merged again. So finally we Dropped it last year because there's a lot of copied code in there. Yes, okay, and What we might say as well is that I Continued working since my drop-off 2011 from Oracle as a freelancer and was working for open exchange on a web office Which used this again as a back-end for For a web office. The reason for this is you put a document in and it's being yeah and zipped the XML extracted and then Earlier at Sun we transform the to HTML, but if you have multi-collaboration This is a bad design idea because if you get much HTML back, you don't know what the others have done It's just like you have to find the changes. So what we did an open exchange was we we transform this document to changes, right and I Show you I show you about this later bit. Okay, so but it's a toolkit And there are more things and the only thing that has a GUI is the validator and you you can browse as odf-validator.org and this Basically comes I don't think the library of LibreOffice logo is within but it's very simple It's it's small funding from 2011 were the only Odf-validator very similar to that was within the firewall of open office But as soon everyone dismissed we had no online validator more and so and on that was providing a small funding for me to to to to build something in there and to clean this up so There's the online validator and you but also you can run it by command line and we have something Where you can run accessibility directly on on XML within it's not the most prominent use cases But the most prominent is of course if you like to edit the odf and you might Be certain you don't do it with a layout like in LibreOffice, but you can insert and Delete XML and later on now with 10 2010 I get a prototype funding for this I Merged the earlier for an open exchange where worked about three years on this topic and Whenever you now call Java this jar all included with an odt file it drops out a lot of changes like the user would have created this Oh, I will simply now show you how this looked like think think about this. You see this No, don't see it. Wait a minute. I have to finish Just a second. Yeah, I don't doing presentations often. I Think I have to move this over. All right. Here we go. Yes so we if you have a have a simple a simple file then You can I move this over Here we go. You have Java jar and this job file and this as parameter and this documentation of these changes then you will You will have Jason because it's a web thing and every line isn't is a change of user because Also something later on but We we're still living in the floppy disk paradigm It's pretty stupid like we exchange a document attached to email and cloud But if you want to collaborate really with other people you you have to ask them the main question What have you done was if I've changed to be able to merge the changes into the gold master and this is a totally Design paradigm change of of working. So Here's like at I don't see if you I'm not sure if you can see it. I just make tried don't do it so long Second no, I don't got I continue the slideshow So any every line is it is a change basically and it's like it's user changes. So the semantic something different. It's I Got here we go Here we go so Yeah, so This is what was needed to have collaboration. That's in the back end. It's working and And I use this for my search engine as well. I'm not my search and I use from Edward Zimmerman's search engine for the project I don't Deal with the XML directly but on a higher level on this Jason files and create their form searchable content For the search engine. So basically the what's the architecture? You say a couple camera from Maria What's the architecture? So There's the audience on which the core part which is loading the document the ODT or everything and it's upping it and And this is generated From a source code generator. So it's just a compile time operate Dependency and this source code generator was totally overworked for myself in the past months and And and improved a lot And can be used for other things as well. I chose a little later. So and the other thing is So what what is the source code generator? There's always the grammar. It's an relax and g-grammar and And this is being loaded from this movie schema by data, which is called this way because you can also load xsd's and DTD's and and then something like templates a patch of velocity templates where you have text files We have iterations on it where generate like every methods like for every child element Child methods has been dreaded or attribute. So so the idea is we have a simplification here by code generation the user get a type DOM tree and They don't know they have to know or read the grammar, but most of it has been generated so and this is very helpful and you you can use the other grammars for the grandfather things like You the question is a kind of text P ever be nested in a document and the funny thing is yes It can but the layout is only then it's not a lay out like a feature paragraph. They only know on the on the first level Yes, so And this can be done by loading this this document this graph. Sorry. There's this grammar into a graph So and that's there's something which on which constantly doing is We have to deal with complexity like here and one or two It was about six hundred elements and one of 300 attributes and this number raised was sorry This number Okay, this number was raised look here it was raised a little bit and It's very difficult to read this this XML if you just skim through it. So the first step was for one or three I I Used a little trick and transformation Now we have the the grammar file as an HTML with links So it's a bit easier and you see here. This is rex and G There's a definition element and optional and you find choices and these things also and The the thing what what's what really came clear to me last year or the year before was that rng is Really simplistic. It's like if you take a look at it The specification just take 21 pages and tutorial 22 But if you take a look at XSD then there are 360 pages for one zero or three hundred eighty more than this for the for the grammar and personally I can really Read the primer every as I'll throw a thing else. I have to jump to it. It's it's to me I'm not unreadable. I will try again, but and additional there are papers That's stated relax and G is more expressive than XSD and easy D so I really invite you to to take a look at it and Play a little bit around with the generation and what you can do with it And you might do it not only for you can create your own relax and G for what you like and create source code or documentation from it, so There's one thing that's also very impressive I really look at the bold one. It's called I call it regular expression the rate if is this the event of Bruce I don't know how to spell it this now. It's a paper from the 60s and usually the people know think that pattern matching regular expression you have to do it with a non-domestic finite ultima with backtracking search or Transformation to domestic finite ultima, but this is pretty simple and it's very intuitive.  It's being derived from it from what you find so the state You you you you're doing you having during the parsing is changing and this is the algorithm This James Clarke was using for multi-scheme of sorry for for Jing and KK I Can't I have to train this earlier. This is the the nice Japanese guy who is working for our Oracle and who invented also Jenkins and yes, and he gave this Basically to me over is now a CTO for some company and anyway, so so this is very simple this algorithm Yes, and I really have to wrap my hand around it more a little bit and why this is so cool and and Yeah, just to point it and It's it's quite genius So what we have currently in the spec is something like this like you see a form property, which is already fine Yes, you see the form property. You see the element. You see the the the child elements and sometimes you see the Property yes, so and we have links to it in HTML. You see like the the hashtag you can general generate jumps to it, which is quite fine, but And now we have a generation still actually alpha version We have also the to to understand the rex on g easier I generate this now I have the parent element and the the attributes child elements and and the child relationship and What's coming next end of the year really next year is sorry? is is to To see look here. You see it only You have certain attribute, but it doesn't mention that they have to come and pass right and this should be made obvious the rex and g like in a something which is I would say very similar regular expression that developers can understand what is the What is the relationship between the child elements, okay, so and The reason why we're doing this is just to that the documentation is easy out of the box But also I think because it's a blueprint. We should be able to generate improved source code from it yes to like You can have a choice of things in the in the dump for that and there are other things in this publication like Only if this attribute exist this value will be evaluated I would call it a trigger attribute, but we haven't it's just written text and we have not annotated We cannot extract this semantic and where I like to drive Drive through it is that blueprints Should be able to generate source code from as much as possible, okay So so that's where we're we're trying to heading. Okay, so Coming back to it you see there there for instance definition of a table the blue is now the element and yellow attributes not here but Attributes the yellow things are like definitions like intermediate numbers and I I create a graph from it and Put in a graph database.  So and This is something we like to or I like to move further This is exactly what I'm trying to do early in the in the documentation time. Okay, so Long story short the source generator is being totally overworked and Still there are some features there and the spec that cannot be generated and still ongoing worker Yeah, and it doesn't have to be only Java. Yes I really love to do this in Rust one time and maybe C++ their parts that can be That can be Generated from that as well from the schema Okay, so the Scott source code generator is now with with the grammar schema validator and and the stinker pop which is optional. Yes, just to To have a different angle on that. Okay, so Derived from the ODF thumb is ODF validator which been using this and of course it's so to runner because the T runner is just taking care of of Accessing the streams from of the zip and as I mentioned before we Deprocated simple everywhere and dropped it out because there was too much to placate a code So the architectures basically or what we desire to is to have a user API as a meant to get the high-level API But it's the ongoing work that should I first skate from the XML. Yes, but and currently this is plainly visible and Just something we will I would like to to move into it. Yes, because nobody would like to know what is the XML syntax, but just like to say hey open text Insert an image into the table three to three and And then a paragraph hello world and make the third to the seven character red. Yes, something like like this So very high level very user cement like that's what I meant. Okay, and what I'm trying to show earlier as well It's like this paradigm that been changed and I try to make this that we really need to think differently we all still define Documents and especially for change tracking would be nice to define a change prior to do that and Yes, as I said earlier, it's a merge problem that we are just in a world We have collaborating with ourselves with laptops and by sending emails or putting files on the cloud It's it's just like faster floppy disk and we are unable to merge and this should be part of the standard this changing And only if we do this we we are able to have coloration functionality And we have to think of changes like commits in a in a in a branch. Yes so This is something I showed earlier is like the idea that no longer documents or initially the document is being dispatched like you clone GitHub repository, but afterwards you just patch only only changes and You are able to merge them. Yes, and so That's the link that I showed earlier you put in an oddity document in and you get a transformation of the user changes It's totally equivalent. Yes, and that's currently working and being used for the for web offices in the back end or for the search engine For instance and new changes single things like and on the one minute paragraph on McRat You place in it's being transform or transformed to a new DOM. Yes, and And by this And and by this you're you're you're able to to to really do color a collaboration. All right So that's it basically So what's what's next of course we The generation is just a still a pull request and This will be will be finished there will be this famous one zero zero


Hey, I'm getting ready to go to my 4-H livestock meeting. Do you want to come? I can't! I don't have any animals and I live in town. That's okay. You don't need animals to participate. You only need to have an interest in learning about livestock. Let me explain a little more. When my livestock judging team gets together, we have a lot of fun learning about beef kettle, sheep, swine, and goats. Then we get to go to contests with other 4-Hers across the state to test our knowledge. 4-Hers who participate in livestock judging will learn the body parts of the animal, what the body parts are used for, and how to compare animals to decide which one is the best. Let me tell you exactly what happens at a contest. We take a look at 4 different beef kettle, goats, swine, or sheep from a front, side, and rear profile. I get to decide which animal is best by looking for specific features that are important, such as muscle tone. Finally, I get to tell the judge what I think. Each of my teammates does the same. If we all do well, we will get a ribbon. One of the best parts is getting to spend time with other 4-Hers. Lots of times, they end up being some of my best friends. So I don't need to live on a farm and I don't need to have any of my own animals? In fact, I don't have to know anything about them before I join your team? That's right! Just come and see what it's all about. I know you'll have fun while we learn all about animals together. For more information about 4-H livestock judging, contact your local NDSU Extension agent or visit our website.


Good afternoon. I'm Rowan Chemerinsky, the Dean of the Law School here. The highest honor that a university can bestow upon a professor is receiving an endowed chair. We decided here at UCI as part of this, as part of developing our intellectual community, when a professor receives an endowed chair to have that faculty member deliver a lecture to the law school and the community. We couldn't have a more deserving recipient today than Professor Rick Hassan. Rick today receives a chancellor's chair and in just a moment we will literally give him a chair. But before we do that, let me just tell you a little bit about Rick in his background. He got his undergraduate degree at Berkeley. Received a law degree as well as a master's and a Ph.D. at UCLA. After law school he clerked for Judge David Thompson on the Ninth Circuit. He worked at the appellate law firm of Porvitz and Levy. He then began a tremendously distinguished teaching career starting at Chicago Kent Law School, then Loyola Law School. We were incredibly fortunate to lure him here this year and he joined our faculty on July 1st of 2011. When I became the founding dean of the law school I said that the goal was to hire truly wow faculty. Faculty are outstanding, his teachers, his scholars, his institutional community citizens. We couldn't have done better than hiring Rick under our faculty. As our students, many in this room can tell you, he is an outstanding classroom teacher. This year in the fall he taught remedies and election law. This semester he is teaching torts. He is the top scholar in the country in the field of election law that's reflected in his nationally renowned blog, his many scholarly articles in the top journals, his books including a new book to be published soon by Yale University Press, titled The Voting Wars, and his talk today will be based on it. And all of us on the faculty can attest to the wonderful institutional citizen he is truly pitching in on every committee and every place that he's needed. So as I say, we could not have a more deserving recipient. I was just thrilled when the provost agreed and the chancellor agreed and they've named Rick to be a chancellor's professor of law. And so since it is a chair of professor Rick, if I can borrow you a second. You can join me in lifting the cover. And there is a plaque that says, Richard Lhassen, chancellor's professor of law and political science, and this was effective December 1st 2011 when the provost approved this. So congratulations. No one achieves any significant measure of success in life alone and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar or self-delusional. I have no such delusions. In particular, I attribute my professional success to the unwavering support of my family and to the institutions which have supported my scholarship. I begin by thanking my parents who encouraged me to pursue my passion and dreams from an early age supported me and ensured that I would have every opportunity to study and learn even as they sacrificed to make sure that I would do so. I'm so pleased that my mother Eileen could be here today and I'm sure that my dad would have been very proud to have been with us today. As an adult, it is my spouse, partner and best friend Lori who has enabled me to reach my potential, who has been a sounding board, confidant, cheerleader, proofreader and helpful critic, full of love and sage advice. Thank you. To our children, Deborah, Shana who's out of the country studying and Jared, you are the lights of my life and I am dedicating the forthcoming book to you. You and your generation deserve much better than the election system you're about to inherit. I am pleased that many more of my family could be here today, my brother Darrell, father-in-law Sam, mother-in-law Eva, brother-in-law Eddie and Lori's aunt and uncle Pat and Milt. I've also been ridiculously lucky in the professional support I have received. First at Chicago Kent and then at Loyola and now at UC Irvine I've been given complete freedom to pursue the academic areas which interested me and to share the fruits of my research in whatever ways I found appropriate and gratifying. And now I get to share my knowledge and learn from new generations of students. What could be better? I learn from my students every day. I thank Dean Chemerinsky, Chancellor Drake, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Gottfriedson for investing me with this chair. It's a sign of their confidence in me and I will make every effort to live up to the ideals that is embodied in this title. That's the hard part. So, this is based upon a forthcoming book This is based upon a forthcoming book called The Voting Words which we published this summer. And I want to start the way I start the book with a hypothetical situation. I want you to imagine that it is election day in the near future. A very hard fought presidential election comes down to the battleground state of Ohio and it's 10 electoral votes. Returns come in all night. Some of them are putting the Republican up. Some of them are putting the Democrat up. At the end of the night, in the middle of the night, the Democrat is ahead by 200 votes out of millions of ballots cast. The presidency rides on this determination. The Wall Street Journal's John Fund leads a parade of conservative bloggers talking about something bizarre going on in the voting in liberal Dane County or the University of Wisconsinous. He references a controversial Milwaukee police report from a few years ago suggesting rampant voter fraud in Democratic areas. There's much to build on. For years Republicans had been crying voter fraud clamoring for tougher voter identification requirements, tougher voter registration rules and other laws that could depress the turnout of poor minority voters. The next morning, the local election official in Waukesha County, Kathy Nicholas, says that she has been keeping all of the election returns on her personal laptop and she forgot to include all of the returns from a particular town, a very Republican town and Nicholas had worked for the Republican legislature in the past. When you add in all of those votes instead of the Democrat being ahead by 200 votes, the Republican is ahead by 7,000 votes. Republicans are suddenly quiet about their cries of voter fraud. No one cares about Dane County. But Democrats are now concerned about whether the election is being stolen for the Republicans. The liberal blog Think Progress says critics are saying there are only two possible explanations for this bizarre development, foul play or incompetence. The URL is a little more direct.  Standing behind Kathy Nicholas at her press conference is a woman named Ramona Kitzinger. She's the Democrat on the local board and she vouches and says everything Kathy did is right. The next day she issues a statement. I'm 80 years old and I don't understand anything about computers. I don't know where the numbers Kathy was showing me ultimately came from but they seem to add up. I'm still very, very confused. The story you have just heard is true. The only thing that's changed is that this was an election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court rather than for president. If it were election for the president we'd still be hearing about it This election took place in a heated atmosphere in Wisconsin as you may know Wisconsin's been having a very heavy battle over public sector labor unions. The law that limited the rights of public sector labor unions was appealed to the state supreme court and whoever won this state supreme court election would likely vote in favor of the position of their party. The Republican David Prosser would vote to uphold the law and the Democrat would vote to strike it down. David Prosser ran in an election and here's an ad that ran against him by a local union. It was a bitter campaign. In the end, after an investigation by the Wisconsin government accountability board Prosser was declared the winner and by the way he cast the deciding vote to uphold the new law limiting public labor union rights. So my question is 12 years after Bush vs. Gore could Florida 2000 happen again? If it happened would the next election meltdown be worse? And a little bird told me that the election meltdown next time is going to be much worse. That is the rise of social media has made what happened in 2000 actually be a precursor for something much worse. Why does it matter? Before I go on to briefly explain some of the core arguments in my book why does it matter? Here's a page from Wikipedia where I get all of my information. These are the Egyptian presidential election results from 2005. Hosni Mubarak got 88% of the vote compared to someone named Aiman Noor who got 7.3% of the vote. In the next election the rule of law depends upon fair contested elections. When we don't have fair contested elections eventually we have a social fabric that disintegrates. This is the summer in Egypt this is December in Moscow and this is this November. We are not as far away from a major social fight over our elections than you might think. So the book begins with what happened in Florida and I won't spend a lot of time on it now. We all remember Catherine Harris or some of us are old enough to remember Catherine Harris. When I teach my students now after a member it's almost 12 years since Bush vs. Gore, most of my students by the way cannot identify that picture just so you have a sense of how old you are. We remember Catherine Harris the butterfly ballot. So what are the lessons from Florida? First partisanship. Catherine Harris was not only the secretary of state, the chief election officer of the state she was also the co-chair of Bush's election committee in Florida. The Democratic Attorney General who had no purview over election issues was the co-chair of Gore's committee and he issued all kinds of edicts about what the election laws meant. On the local level the Democratic counting boards that were recounting the votes counted many more votes for Gore than the Republicans. It went all the way down fell in disenfranchisement lists Democratic counties were much less likely to accept numbers on that list than Republicans. Localism Catherine Harris didn't have as much control over the election system as she would have liked. We have 14,000 election administration divisions in this country. Technology problems the butterfly ballot was just the beginning. We learned about millions of lost votes across the country and not just in Florida. And of course we had an out of control Supreme Court that went crazy. Democrats and Republicans agree on this they just disagree as to which Supreme Court it was the Florida Supreme Court or the US Supreme Court. Courts have been involved in election issues and they too have divided along partisan lines. So why haven't things gotten any better? Well we know first that things haven't gotten any better. Every election season we have armies of lawyers and the number of cases decided by the courts about elections has gone from about 96 before 2000 to over 200 after 2000. More than a doubling of the amount of litigation. And voter confidence suffers. So here's a chart of people's confidence in the election process. Before 2000 about 10% of the people thought the election was very or somewhat unfair. Big spike in 2004 when Bush runs for election against Kerry 21.5% of Democrats think the election is run is very unfair compared to 3% of Republicans. But in Washington State where they had a contested gubernatorial election where the Republican was declared the winner then on a recount the Republican was declared the winner. Then on a court challenge the Democrat was declared the winner. 68% of Republicans compared to 27% of Democrats thought the election was unfair. The lesson is clear. If my guy won the election was fair and square. If the other guy won there was fraud or incompetence. And there's a racial element to this in 2004 Pew found that 63% of whites were very confident their votes would be accurately counted compared to 30% of African Americans. Huge disparity. So after Florida what have we seen? Massive allegations of massive voter fraud on the Republican side, allegations of massive voter suppression on the Democratic side partisanship and localism and election administration technology problems and the rise of social media. Together it's a dangerous situation. And so I want to focus for a few minutes on the fight over voter ID which is one of the most salient issues in the election. In 2007 Texas State Senator Mario Galagos was recovering from a liver transplant. The Texas Senate was prepared to vote to pass a voter ID law on party lines. Just about every state that passes voter ID law. All the Republicans vote for it. All the Democrats vote against it. Galagos was recovering from a liver transplant in Houston. He had to be kept in a hospital bed in the state rotunda and wheeled in to filibuster the voter ID law. This is how partisan our election fights have become. Galagos said that voter ID was a Carl Rove trick. The Republican Party sees that Latino community is voting in record numbers so they're grasping at straws. For three years the Democrats were able to use procedural tricks to stop the voter ID law from passing. Finally this year the Democrats luck ran out and Rick Perry passed a voter ID law calling it a necessary major step forward to preserve voter integrity. Texas passed one of the very toughest voter ID laws including a provision that will not allow student IDs to be valid for voting. Many college students go to Texas establish Texas residency but do not drive. They're going to have a hard time getting that ID. Meanwhile, because Texas has a history of discrimination. They're going to have laws on hold until it's approved by the Justice Department. Eric Holder gave a major speech and said voter ID is rare, voter fraud is rare, voter ID laws are not necessary. They've blocked the South Carolina law. They're about to block the Texas law. The matter is stuck in court. Tremendous fighting over voter ID. So where did this come from? What's the truth? So it begins in the early 2000s when in the aftermath of Bush versus Gore the parties realized that every vote's going to count and that fighting over the election rules could make a big difference. And so who was going to claim a lot of voter fraud? There were no organizations on the right, on the Republican side to make the claim that there's a lot of voter fraud. One day before Congressman Bob Ney who was chairing a House committee looking into election administration changes. One day before the hearing that he was going to hold a brand new group arose, the American Center for Voting Rights. It's a group that appeared and then three years later disappeared without a trace. In fact, the person who founded the group, Thor Hearn a major lawyer once in Missouri and now in Washington has wiped his resume clear of this group. His Wikipedia page has been wiped by people at his law firm of his reference to this group. But this group played a crucial role in making it seem plausible that ACT, ACORN and the NAACP are engaged in a coordinated effort. A significant component of this effort appears to be registering individuals who would cast a ballot for the candidate supported by these organizations. The voter registration effort was not limited to registration of legal voters, but criminal investigations and news reports suggest that this voter registration effort also involved the registration of thousands of fictional voters, such as the now infamous Jive F. Turkey senior, Dick Tracy and Mary Poppins. These individuals registering these fictional voters were reportedly paid not just in money, but at least in one instance in crack cocaine. Note the racial undertones of the remarks. And so it began an attempt to produce a belief knocked back by evidence that impersonation voter fraud is a big problem. So here's Michelle Malkin a conservative commentator just before the 2010 elections. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. It's the Democrats' coping mechanism for midterm voter election fraud. Faced with multiple reports of early voting irregularities and election shenanigans across the country, left-wing groups were playing death, them and blind. Voter fraud? What voter fraud? And Dick Armey, speaking just a few miles from here to the Lincoln Club, Armey claimed that 3% of ballots cast were fraudulent Democratic ballots. No evidence produced. I'm tired of people being Republican all their lives and then changing parties when they died, he said, to big laughs with no evidence. And then this Hans von Spikowsky. Hans von Spikowsky is at the Heritage Foundation. He wrote a report for the Heritage Foundation at a similar op-ed at the Fox News website where he said voter registration fraud and voter fraud happens all the time. One doesn't have to look far to find instances of fraudulent ballots cast in actual elections by voters who were figments of the actual imagination. In 1984, a district attorney in Brooklyn released the findings of a grand jury that reported extensive registration and impersonation fraud between 1968 and 1982. Put aside the fact that recent is not exactly 1968. Putting that aside, I wanted to see the report. So I wrote to von Spikowsky and I said, please, send me a copy of your report. No response. I wrote to the head of the Heritage Foundation and I said, I'd like to see a copy of the report. It's normal scholarly interaction that you share your data. No response. And von Spikowsky had been writing to me for years, sending me stuff that he wants me to post on the blog. Even though I had outed him for writing an anonymous law review article praising the Department of Justice's voter ID efforts while he was at the Department of Justice. But he was silent. The fight over the document got picked up by Talking Points Memo. I was scheduled to be on the Rachel Madab show to talk about this and then I can blame my shoemaker. The librarian at UC Irvine, who was after other colleagues of mine for years trying to track down this report, she was able to get this report. And I posted it online and everyone has this report. And what did the report show? Impersonation voter fraud. Someone writes, my name is Jaya Turkey. Shows up and votes and you get enough people to come and vote and change the outcome of the election. No, it showed that Democratic Party operatives, part of a local machine, hid in the ceiling posts of the bathroom at the Brooklyn Board of Elections went down in the middle of the night when everyone left and changed people's voter cards to create a record of voter fraud. No evidence of impersonation voter fraud. The only impersonation voter fraud that occurred here occurred with the help of election officials. Something that no voter ID law would prevent. The Bush Administration made pursuing voter ID law as a top priority. After five years of DOJ pushing, what did they find? 120 prosecutions for voter fraud. 86 convictions, not one for impersonation voter fraud. Lots for election officials engaging in fraud. We see real fraud, but not this kind of fraud. Why not? If I want to steal an election, what am I going to do?  It's also you pay people, you don't know that they're going to go up, you don't know how they vote. It just makes no sense. In Dallas, Texas, two-year investigation, no impersonation voter fraud. The very premise for voter ID laws. So what's it all about? You may have heard that a number of U.S. attorneys were fired in the Bush Administration. Some of them were not pursuing voter ID voter fraud allegations aggressively enough. Here's an email that was sent from a Republican activist to the U.S. Mexico, David Iglesias. David Iglesias who has a stellar career as a Republican. He's now in the Jagdcorp, prosecuting people in Guantanamo. This is a straight shooting Republican attorney. And what he says in this email is it's really going to help Heather Wilson who's running for Congress again if we could get an indictment before election day. It's a great wedge issue. So what is this about? It's about ginning up the Republican base telling them that there's a lot of fraud and maybe in as we'll see affecting the outcome of elections a little bit. A wedge issue. What about the voter fraud? So here's a Mickey Mouse voter registration application. You've heard about them. Here's a picture of one. Why do we see so many of these forms? Well, the simple reason is because Acorn had a flawed business model. They paid people to produce forms. And they hired low income people without any job experience and said if you don't turn in enough forms you might lose your job. So of course Mickey Mouse registered to vote. He just didn't show up to vote on election day. You got your $1.50 for turning in the form and that was it. Voter registration fraud though is picked up by the Michelle Malkins and the Dick armies and made into a concern about actual fraud. Well, what about voter suppression? How much suppression? How much does this actually suppress the votes? So the very first of the modern tough voter ID laws came out of Indiana. Here's how tough the law was in Indiana. If you were too poor to afford an ID to afford the documents you needed to get the ID of birth certificate you could go vote on election day at your polling place. And then within 10 days you had to go to the county seat and fill out an affidavit of indigency. You couldn't turn it into a polling place. You had to go at your own expense to the county seat and you had to do it every election if you wanted to vote. Sounds pretty tough. How many actual voters did the ACLU and the Democrats find who would actually be subject to this? None. They said it was a facial challenge. They said they needed to develop the evidence but they couldn't find any. So right after this case was decided there was a story about a group of 80 and 90 year old nuns who couldn't vote because they were old and didn't have birth certificates. They couldn't get the ID. They were turned away. The problem is if you're over 65 in Indiana you can vote by absentee without an ID. So is there exaggeration? The only good study we have of Indiana tells us that of the 2.8 million votes cast in Indiana in the 2008 election 1,000 people showed up without IDs. Some of those are people who just forgot their ID that day. 137 of them ultimately got their votes counted. We don't know how many. We don't know how many people were deterred, didn't even bother showing up because they didn't have an ID. But the best estimates are less than 1%. Because lots of people who don't have IDs are not going to show up to vote. So we don't know how much but we don't think it's massive. But this helps the left too. So here's the Brennan Center liberal think tank and advocacy group issued a recent report. New study. New voting restrictions may affect more than 5 million. How so? Well, for example, in Florida and Ohio, there's one less day of early voting. A million people voted on that day last time. Maybe they won't vote this time. They made it very easy to get to 5 million. What happened in the liberal blogosphere to May effect? This is the Huffington Post. Brennan Center. Millions of voters impacted by new ID law. Delhi Coast. 5 million votes have been targeted by the GOP school of election engineering. Rolling Stone. GOP war on voting. New laws could block 5 million from the polls. What's it about on the Democratic side? Here's a fundraising letter from Donna Brazil, noted Democratic fundraiser and commentator. Bringing up Florida. When my sister tried to vote in Florida in the 2000 election she was a victim of voter suppression. In Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Texas, extremist governors and legislators are willing to violate people's civil rights to elections. Send me your money. And we know that voter suppression efforts sometimes backfire. So when Harry Reid was locked in a tight race with Sharon Engel, a group called Latinos for reform, which was a Republican party front group, with very few Latinos in it, ran ads that said no vote days. Don't vote. Don't vote. Tell the Democratic Party they haven't made enough progress on immigration reform. What happened? The Democrats used this. Said it was voter suppression. It probably actually boosted Latino turnout for the Democrats. In 2002, in New Hampshire, a Republican party operative said, you know, it would be great if we could disrupt the Democrats' communications on election day. They hired a call center from the Midwest to call all of these numbers where people could call in if they needed a ride to the polls and block this from happening. Within an hour of the calls being blocked, the head of the Republican party in New Hampshire called it off. Years of criminal investigations, the Republican party ultimately settled for $350,000. How many votes were blocked? Probably none. Probably none. But it was great publicity for the Democrats who could legitimately claim a voter suppression effort. And then there are flyers like this. This was a flyer distributed at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Vote at the polling place of your choice. And of course, if you vote at the wrong polling place, your vote will not count. Vote on Wednesday. But they don't actually tend to depress a lot of votes. At least there's no good evidence that they do. So it's a partisan war and it's a partisan war that's used much for trying to get the base fired up. But in a very close election and razor thin election like we saw in Wisconsin in the summer, or like we saw in Bush versus Gore, less than 1% of the vote could make a difference. So that's the motivation for all of this. And we have the problems of partisanship and localism in election administration. You may remember Ken Blackwell. He was the Republican Secretary of State of Ohio. Among his many infamous decisions was to reject voter registration cards that were not on 80 pound paper. As though they would disintegrate before they could be input into the system. So you've heard of him, but you may not have heard of Jennifer Brunner. Jennifer Brunner came into office after Ken Blackwell and said, no one will know my name. I'm going to just be a straight shooter. I'm going to administer things fairly until she rejects, wants to reject absentee ballot applications that the McCain campaign had set out that said, check this box to affirm that you're qualified to vote, which was not required by Ohio Law. She said, if you didn't check it, I don't know if you're qualified to vote. The Ohio Supreme Court had to reverse her. Not know her name. The Ohio Republican Party ran an ad saying John Gibson, who told his Fox News viewers, someone is trying to steal your vote. Jennifer Brunner. Partisanship. We have 33 states where the chief elections officer is a partisan election official. No other country does, that's no other modern democracy does this. And then there's localism.  Let me tell you another story that just happened this last week. There's an election contest for a juvenile judge in Hamilton County, Ohio. 15 months after the election, it still hasn't been decided. Because the Ohio elections board decided to count some ballots that were cast in the wrong precinct, but not others. And the ballots that were cast in the wrong precinct were cast in the wrong precinct, which could be in the same physical location, just a different desk, because of poll worker error. What kind of poll worker error? This is from the court opinion that came out when asked whether the house number 798 was even or odd, the poll worker responded odd. And why do you think that's odd? I'm sorry, why do you think her address is an odd address? Because it begins with an odd number. It starts with an odd number? Yes, 9 is an odd number, 8 even. So on election day if someone came to you with the address 798, you had two ranges to choose from, you choose odd for them? Yes. Okay, is that how you did for all the ballots on election day? To determine if they were even? Yes. To determine if they were even or odd, you looked at the first digit of the address? No. I looked at the whole address. And if there were more odds than even, it would count as an odd address? Yes. That's who's running our elections. So one of the things that was done in the aftermath of the debacle in Florida was that we created a new commission, U.S. Election Assistance Commission. It was given virtually no power. The National Association of Secretary of State, which is the organization of all of these chief elections officers, from the very beginning I said that this group should be disbanded. Do you know that right now we're in the 2012 election? This is a screenshot from the webpage. Those two arrows are pointing to the words Resigned 2011. Of the four commissioners of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, we currently have zero. An advisory group that's supposed to be running practices for running our elections, no one is running the ship. A Republican congressman recently called it a zombie agency. They've had to disband their advisory groups because they don't have the power to do it. And then there's Bush vs. Gore. Some people said that Bush vs. Gore would be a great case to make lemonade from lemons. Bush vs. Gore may have been a terrible decision, Democrats said, but at least it could be used by voting rights proponents and court to have courts force fixing election systems. That would be the lemonade. No Supreme Court opinion has cited Bush vs. Gore since it was decided, not in its dissent, not in a concurrence. Very unusual. It took me a month to find another case decided in that time period that had not been cited for something. Supreme Court will not say the words Bush vs. Gore. The only time they said it was in the Citizens United case, they were quoting from my book which has Bush vs. Gore in the title. This is the time those words have been put together. Does the case have any presidential value? What about it punch card ballots, those terrible machines? Does using those machines in one part of a state and not in another violate Bush vs. Gore? The courts have slit but most courts have said no. But it's come up in every major election dispute since 2000 and it's going to come up again if there's an election dispute that comes down to absentee ballots or provisional votes. Alright. Technology. Florida said we got to get rid of these terrible punch card voting machines. They threw them all the way. They were the first to buy a bunch of electronic voting machines. They've now thrown away all of their electronic voting machines because of what happened in 2006 in a congressional race in Sarasota County, the 13th district. This was Catherine Harris's seat. She ran for Congress and won. Then she ran for Senate. Ended up losing that race. But in this race Sarasota County, this was the first screen. It was like an ATM machine, an electronic voting machine. This is the second screen. If you can see up here, this is the race for the congressional district. Here's the first page. Here's the second page. 18,000 people didn't realize they were supposed to vote on top and missed voting in the election. And we know because if you look at the absentee ballots and you look at people who vote in the same election but in a different, using different machinery, different county, because the congressional lines went over the county, they didn't make the mistake. But in Charlotte County, where there was an attorney general race on the bottom, the same number, same percentage of people missed that race. So voting technology, we still have problems with the technology of voting. And then we have people on the left who screen voter technology fraud, the same way that those on the right screen voter fraud. There's a group called the Election Defense Alliance saying that these machines that scan, the optically scan ballots, you know, we fill them out with a number of pens to fill them in. They've got a red color on them that gives Republicans an advantage. What's the proof? We cannot say with certainty that 97% of the votes counted on optical scanners were subject to manipulation, but we can fairly ask, whatever evidence exists, they were not. Spoken like a true paranoia. Even low tech problems, the Lisa Murkowski vote in Alaska, Murkowski is spelled wrong. Joe Miller went to court to argue that if anybody spelled Murkowski with a Y, their vote shouldn't count. Even with paper and pencil we have technology problems. What about internet voting? Could this solve all of our problems? Internet voting. Well one problem is we have a terrible problem trying to get ballots back from military and overseas voters. It takes a long time until we know who's going to vote, especially now, you know, we didn't know if New Kingdom would be on the ballot in Virginia or not. How are we going to get the ballots out? As part of a recent law said you have to give 45 days for military voters to be able to get their ballots out. So the Washington Board of Elections decided to run an experiment. And in that experiment they said we're going to have an internet election for the people who are in these overseas. I said before we do that, we're going to run a little experiment. There we go. Oh my That's the Michigan fight song. In the middle of their experiment, the Michigan fight song started playing. And the reason the Michigan fight song started playing is because four days earlier the University of Michigan had hacked in. Hacked the invitation. The Washington Board said try it. See if you can hack our system, it's unhappable. They broke in. Here's what they did. They collected all the data. They changed everybody's ballots of people who had already voted. They changed it so that they could capture every vote. They then left a calling card, which is that if they went to check on the machine, it would play music. Wait for the Acorn recounts and the absentee voter fraud in Wisconsin recall. Remember Wisconsin, not only must we get more voters to vote, we have to win beyond the margin of liberal voter fraud. And then it got worse. And then it got to violence. I'll let you read this one. The next election not found would be much worse. Because now all of these opinions are amplified by social media. And social media makes people more partisan. So here's Brad Friedman liberal provocateur does very good work exposing the work of the Republican voter fraud people, but has his own conspiracy theories. So when this happened he said, lame dems, you don't charge election tampering and evidence of fraud would you ain't got none? Want some? Try to kind of the actual balance in Wisconsin rather than rely on the off bail easy and inflated computers to do so. You might be amazed at what you'd find. Again, the paranoia of the votes are not being accounted. New studies of social media tell us that yes, people exchange messages, but they're less tolerant when they exchange messages on social media. Social media makes people more partisan shorter views and closer divides. So what can we do to fix this? We could say as soon as someone graduates high school or drops out of high school we're going to automatically register to vote. And we're going to follow you around wherever you go and change your voter registration for you. That's how many countries do it. Automatic voter registration. We don't have to have it on the national level so we can have it on the C level. We could have national voter ID. This is a proposal I've made that has united Democrats and Republicans against my proposal. The government should pay all the costs and give everyone an ID and they should take your thumbprint if you want to give it and you're not going to lose your thumb. If you show them at the polling place and you just use your thumb. Democrats don't like it, Republicans don't like it, but it would solve a lot of the problems. We can have federal election administration, non-partisan election administration in a way that we could do that. We can have uniform technology. In Australia no matter where you go on election day, the machines, the ballots are exactly the same format. There are lots of things we could do. But it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen for a while. And everybody's not going to for a while is that we are in one of the most partisan errors that we've had for many generations. This is a chart that shows the difference between the approval rating of the president by people who identify with Democrats and Republicans and the trajectory with a small dip after 9-11, the trajectory is up up and up. And it's not on this chart, but it could be an 80% difference between the approval rating of say Obama or Bush by Democrats and Republicans. In a partisan era, election administration changes are made by the party in power to benefit the party in power. Except for Rhode Island, every voter ID law that's passed has passed almost exclusively with Republican votes that have been opposed to almost exclusively with Democrats. In a partisan era, we're not going to get the change. So what's the saving grace? The saving grace is the odds of an election meltdown for President are pretty low because it would have to happen in a state crucial to the electoral context. And it would have to happen not 2%, it would have to be within a few thousand votes so the best thing we have going for us is not that we fix any of the problems the best thing we have going for us is that just the odds, I guess but if it happens again the answer is religion. This is the election administration's prayer Lord, let this election not be close that's what we have that's how we're going to check out yes Professor, first of all, thank you so much that was quite an informative lecture thank you Professor, I just wanted to have your opinion on section 5 of the voting rights do you think it is constitutional in this day and age to single out some states for pre-clearance and let others do whatever they want it's a great question and just to for those who are not familiar with this there are different parts of the voting rights act there's one part of the voting rights act passed in 1965 which says that states which have a history of discrimination racial discrimination in voting before they can make any changes in their voting rules whether it's as major as a redistricting change or as minor is moving a polling place across the street they have to get permission from the federal government they either have to go to the Department of Justice or they can go to a three judge court in Washington DC and the question is whether this law that was passed in 1965 is constitutional the constitutional question is whether Congress has the power to require states to get approval for their laws there's no other area where you have to get this kind of pre-approval the Supreme Court in the 1960s said this was constitutional because these states would engage in a cat and mouse game that could change in their laws and we needed to put the burden on those those kinds of racially discriminatory conduct the question is now whether 45 years later we still need the law since it's been in place there's no good evidence to know what would happen if it disappeared in 2009 the Supreme Court in a case called Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District versus Holder said the Voting Rights Act this provision may well be unconstitutional but they duck the issue and they kind of left it to Congress Congress has done nothing since then and now the cases are coming back up when Rick Perry was still running for president during one of the debates he was asked in South Carolina where the Department of Justice had just blocked South Carolina's voter ID law on grounds that members of protective minority groups were more likely than whites to lack the proper documentation to get an ID he said South Carolina is at war with the federal government which I thought was kind of ironic given the Civil War but he said that it was an intrusion on state sovereignty one of those cases that he gets to the Supreme Court my prediction is that the Supreme Court is going to strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act it's not a question of if or when it's not the result I would like I disagree with the entire line that requires coming forth with evidence by Congress though Congress is a litigant before the Supreme Court having to prove whether or not this evidence Congress is giving power in the 14th and 15th amendments to enforce those amendments but if you're asking what I think is going to happen I think the next time, within a few years when a state like Texas passes voter ID law will not be subject to pre-clearance because pre-clearance will disappear probably on a 5 to 4 vote as many things as the Supreme Court have done Do you think it would be desirable to abolish the electoral college to have a national popular vote for president? Well, from the point of view of election administration not about what's fair in terms of representation on the one hand if you move to a popular vote where you have hundreds of millions more than maybe 150 million votes something like that the chances you're going to have a very close election go down so here you just have to have a close election in a particular state whose electoral college votes are in play if you move to the national election system the margin is likely to be better but if there is a very close election in actual numbers of popular ballots then you have the problem that you could have recounts and fights everywhere in the country fighting over ballots so I think it's kind of a watch I wouldn't advocate abolishing the electoral college or not because of concerns about election administration there are far greater priorities on the list like moving to non-partisan election administration making it more state-based or even nationally based on the question of what's a better system and that's something that can be debated in part we have this long history and it's hard to know what elections would look like if candidates were appealing to get the highest number of popular votes as opposed to particular states certainly the ballot ground states wouldn't be as happy with this because they wouldn't be getting the same kind of attention yes has the attorney general blocked the voter suppression laws of all the states or just a few well we're talking about the voter ID laws in particular there are two voter ID laws that have been put in for pre-clearance one in the South Carolina that was blocked the other was Texas and DOJ has been stalling whether or not it's going to pre-clear it's keep asking for more information it's trying to put the issue up but Texas just a week or two ago went to the court to reach out to court and DC is trying to go around the Justice Department now so that case is now going to be heard probably before the Department of Justice makes the decision I think one of those cases could end up going to the Supreme Court and back to the earlier question one of the things that Texas is saying is if the Voting Rights Act actually blocks Texas from being able to assure voter integrity through a voter ID law then the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional so get a double win get the voter ID law held up and section 5 structure so on that happy note there's a reception outside invite you to join us at the reception please join me in thanking and congratulating our Chancellor Professor Wachman


Hey stampers, welcome to another week of Watch It Weekly Wednesday. I'm Aubrey, part of the Stampin' Jill Creative team, and today I'm excited to share with you some essential products that you may want to use for the beginning of your stampin' journey. Okay, so some of the basic things I think you could use is a black stamp pad, our snips, stampin' seal, stampin' dimensionals, and note cards and envelopes. These are a few basic items that come in our annual catalog. So these are great products for when you're just starting out, but they're still things that I use every day, even now when I've been stamping for years and years. So let me point out some of the great things about these things. The snips, these are some of the best scissors I have ever used, I'll be honest. They're just a small pair of scissors, but they're great for just cutting little pieces of paper or ribbon, they're incredibly sharp and they come with a little sheath that you can put over it to keep yourself safe. Our new stampin' seal, this is a new product that Stampin' Up carries now. It's an adhesive and it's incredibly strong and it adheres super well. Stampin' dimensionals, these are a must have for any project. It gives you just that extra pop that you need on a card. And those are something literally I use on every project. And the stampin' note cards and envelopes, these are a three and a half by five size note card and then an envelope that goes with it. It's kind of the perfect size for a beginning stamper. So these are what I kind of consider the basics to the stampin' world. The other thing I wanted to share with you is this Make Beautiful Things pamphlet that Stampin' Up has come out with. This is kind of a simple stamping brochure. So if you're not sure where to start and the annual catalog is kind of big, it could be overwhelming. This is a great place to start. So I wanted to show you one stamp set in particular. This stamp set's called Cute Fruit. I think it's adorable, one of my favorites actually. So the really cool thing about what Stampin' Up has done in this brochure is they have created this bundle that you can purchase of all these things you need to make these cute little simple cards over on this page over here. So in this bundle, you get the Cute Fruit stamp set, a Clear D block, Whisper White card stock, and classic stampin' spots. You get eight stampin' spots. So eight different colors, which is great to get your hands on multiple colors. So you can purchase all of this as one bundle. It has one code that you can put in. Or if, say you already have an acrylic block, or if you already have Whisper White card stock, you can buy these things individually too to make the card. So you don't have to buy those things again. So I wanted to kind of play with this stamp set and show you a fun card that you could make using this Cute Fruit set. So much fun. So I wanted to show you, this is what a stampin' spot looks like. This is if you chose to order that classic spots assortment. This is the size that you would get. This is the size of an actual stamp pad. And this is what I'm going to use because these are what I have for all of my colors. But look at all the fun colors that come in the stampin' spots if you were to order that assortment. Shaded Spruce, Real Red, Gorgeous Grape, Granny Apple Green, Flirty Flamingo, Daffodil Delight, Coastal Cabana and Basic Gray. So you've got all the colors in the rainbow there. So you can do pretty much anything with this. So let's get started. I'm going to start with this watermelon. And this is a photopolymer stamp set. So you can, that means you can see through the stamp set. It's not one of our rubber-mounted stamp sets. So these are really fun to use and really easy to use. I'm going to grab some paper here, my Whisper White cardstock. And I'm going to start with Real Red for my watermelon. And I'm going to stamp down. I'm going to just kind of stamp those all over my page, just like that. And then I'm going to clean off my stamp here. This is another great product to have in your Stampin' Essentials. This is one of our chamois. It's this purple chamois, and it's great at cleaning the stamps. We keep ours in one of our stamp cases. You can put it anywhere. You can put it in a DVD case or something else to store it. But we really like to store it in our stamp case. This is another essential that everyone needs. So I'm going to switch that out. Now I'm going to do the rind of my watermelon.  So simple, so cute. And then I'm going to clean that. And then I want to put a saying on here, so I'm going to grab some more white paper. I'm going to use my Shaded Spruce again for my saying. And I'm going to use this. You're one in a melon. I'm going to stamp that down. And then I'm going to take my snips, and I'm just going to cut this right out. Again, Dimensionals is one of my very favorite items. So you can see how these work. I'm just going to adhere them to the back of my saying. That'll pop right up. Cute little card that you could give to a friend or a family member. So much fun. So let me bring in a few other cards that I've made using this stamp set. Here's one with all the different fruits on there, wishing you a slice of happiness. This one, I love the cute little smiley faces in here, so cute. And you're one in a melon. So fun. So if you're just starting on your stamp and journey and you're not quite sure where to start, make sure to check out these essential items in the catalog or the new Make Beautiful Things brochure. If you have any questions, you're welcome to comment below and give us a thumbs up if you like what you saw. Thanks so much, and we'll see you next week on another Watch It Weekly Wednesday.


Austin Schaefer.  Swear to God. I don't normally say that, but I will say that in this context of which we are talking about, he knows a lot. I don't know as much. So what are we talking about? What are we talking about? For those of you don't know, I am a reservist in the Marine Corps, and so I have to run this thing called a PFT every year. What does that stand for? Physical fitness test. Wow, there it is. Oh yeah. Physical fitness test. But what it involves involves we have to do some pull-ups, we have to do crunches, although it added a plank alternatively this year, and then a three mile run. So I have a little loop. I've been running around my neighborhood and I would say I'm inconsistent in my training would be a fair assessment. Would you say that? You're consistently in consistent. That's a good one. At least you're consistent. Yeah, I am consistent in that aspect. You're doing it. I am doing it. I am doing it. And so I actually have no idea because I'm not technologically savvy and I kind of refuse to do things like download apps for most parts. So I don't know how long this loop is. Alright, so I was actually going to go old school the other day and drive it and see how and then you put the thing on your car to like see how many miles it is. And Dustin's assistant was here and he's like there's this app that I'll just put on your phone for you and you could just get you run with your phone and it'll track it for you for the next time. Okay, that sounds cool. I'll do that if you put the app on. Alright, so you basically what you're telling everybody is that you you run. Now you have to run, you're gonna do planks or sit-ups and then you're not gonna do pull-ups because you're I have a janky elbow right now. Janky. Spell that. Somebody spell janky. I don't know how to spell it. Spell janky, I wanted to know. So you try hard. You're actually, April's actually a pretty good runner, like naturally a pretty good runner. I like running. It calms my head.  She has like the amazing gift of running but yeah she never does it. It's like come on. So you ran it in you normally run that that loop at how far how long? You know the the last couple times I ran it it was like 26, 27, you know those it was not that many minutes 26, 27 minutes. Alright, how many of you all can run for 26, 27 minutes? I'm just curious without stopping you didn't stop. No, I don't stop. I mean that's that's exhausting. Somebody says can we talk about how good your skin looks the both of you. Yeah, it's called the the keto glow is what that's called the keto glow and not sleep at night. We have not slept well in the last few nights. Yes, kids are all getting up at all hours in the night. Lots of stuff going on here. Our daughter taught she could count to nine and ten not anything before nine or ten but all night. She throws an eight in there. So here's the craziest thing is you went for a run a couple days ago and then what happened? I want to explain this because I think it's really cool. Alright, so went for a run and I literally ran so I was I was running and I was dying to the point where I knew how I said I never stopped I almost felt like I wanted to stop and actually there's a turnaround where I can make it a little bit shorter and I almost wanted to do that I said no we're getting close to game time here you've got to keep pushing it all the way as I pushed it all the way and was dying and I I always take screenshot my times at the end and I took screenshot my time and I was like whoa that's like way faster and it literally was almost six minutes off my last runtime from Wednesday so it was Wednesday to was it Sunday? Sunday Wednesday to Sunday took six minutes off my time I have never had that great never that was huge. So here's the deal anybody know why she did but there's something else going on here so earlier Sunday she she goes doesn't I haven't been able to break through the 140 pounds she's on a body transformation maybe number three maybe number three is taking a little bit longer okay the road gets a little higher to climb as you have more kids and get a little older right and she's like I go I have a video that I'll teach you how to drop that extra body pad what happens when you plateau she's I'm not watching the video she goes you can just tell me hey there has to be a benefit right with us being married I shouldn't have to watch the third party validation and so it was kind of funny because in one hand she was not I wouldn't say frustrated but concerned or maybe a little frustrated that she wasn't breaking that plateau and dropping more body fat. I was a little I wasn't like uber frustrated I was more like okay what do I need to shift because I'm like I need to shift something right that's how I was kind of like I'm kind of been reasonably consistent at being low carb I've been you know but like I think I have I've been reasonably consistent at being low carb where I'm drinking my ketone unfortunately this is probably how she should live normally yeah she just I want to she goes I want to drop all my weight quickly so I can eat all the crap again that's what she said well I like bread I'd like to get to a weight where I can eat bread again brownies and topics of cookies why not who doesn't if you don't you're lying we live in a whole different world there and I okay so she runs her time and she comes back she shows me she's like blown away now this was different and now there's a couple variables that might have happened um one she's getting better shape why one of them that she's getting healthier she's getting more fit um April doesn't have a really good perception of time um and so to not know that you ran six minutes faster is kind of like for me kind of mind blowing that you're like oh I felt like it was really hard but yet it was six minutes faster she drank it was hard she drank keto up like what 10 minutes before you ran a little bit longer than that 10 20 minutes 10 or 20 minutes before she ran she drank keto up yeah right before she ran so I I'm almost out of keto up by the way and so I maybe will save a can for you when you do your test no you're totally gonna save a can maybe two I'm just gonna like double fist that stuff we're in 12 minutes faster my son stole some before she got to go run he always steals the stuff but um that's pretty cool I mean very impressive in 20 minutes we don't know how far this is my guess it's like two mile two I think it's two and a quarter maybe just based off of what I understand of your abilities yeah I would say that's probably sounds about right yeah you have no idea I've thought it was around two miles for like a long time all right so we'll see we're gonna you're gonna have to run it again and then you will know the track but and I gotta beat my new time now yes you should so how fast do you want to run your actual three mile because you run three miles in the military for for the Marine Corps every other service that you just run but if I ran 24 23 to 24 I'd be happy so three miles who can run three miles in 24 minutes just curious can anybody run three miles that's what she's she wants to go for 23 she won't be happy unless and here's the thing if she runs 2256 the first thing she's gonna say you know she doesn't know if I would have trained just a little bit earlier I would have ran it under 22 minutes guaranteed out of her mouth every single time every single time it's true she doesn't think I'm listening but I am a little bit earlier I would have gone a little bit better you ever have something crawling you or you think it's I'm crawling you like don't know what it's gonna be and it's just your pants I bet it's a spider because we've had a lot of those recently all right so here's the deal so you drink your keto up so she basically drank a form of our ketones before she ran now she doesn't normally drink this form she has our other flavor that she likes I actually don't normally drink ketones right before I run to be honest when the morning wow she doesn't watch my videos apparently so either way so she drank her ketones before and what it does is that you utilize scientifically you utilize less oxygen when you're exerting your body or not exerting your body so basically for every step let's say that she ran 100 steps and she would breathe let's say 20 times well with ketones she may take the same 100 steps but only breath had 18 breaths like she saved herself efficiency so she's utilizing she utilizes less oxygen for the same amount of work so she has more in the tank to give that actually explains a whole lot because during this run my muscles were fatigued but I never felt like I was out of air and I thought that was weird yeah so you basically feel like your lungs some people say my lungs gave up before my muscles gave up now they're actually all working together but but you there's a sense there and a lot of times this can be the case so that's one reason the other one is the ketones make your ATP which is an energy efficient energy producer in your body that your body uses for energy it uses more you have more of that so by having ketones in your system before you work out you're only going to increase your performance which is pretty remarkable and I truly believe that most world records are going to get broken the next six eight to ten years because of what's going on what we're doing and it's pretty remarkable it's pretty pretty remarkable so if you're working out definitely especially if you're competing definitely won't use ketones before you train it's only going to help you better now here's the downside the only downside is if you're obsessively working out and you're addicted to it and it makes you work out more not me keep in mind you still have to rest your body it's not really a downside but there's a small case of Janet's out there rolled my ankle in March so just finished soaking Janet there she is of course you rolled your ankle you're killing yourself I'm just kidding I like Janet's she's got a motor and it's awesome 50 years old and she's crushing it so that's why you ran more efficiently so if I'm going to summarize this and more like April speak what I'm hearing is that if I drink ketones before I run I don't get winded and I have more energy so I just run faster yes that's awesome yes like really awesome it only makes sense to drink ketones before you run yes how fast I actually hide in with my career so this matters yes it does matter like yes I mean it was she's doing math I mean you how long is the plank you have to do four and a half minutes you have to do that tonight yet I know I still have to do that so four now anybody can anybody do in a four and a half minute plank if you can do it I love you honestly I've only talked to one person who's been able to do the four and a half minutes if you if you uh so that's the Marine Corps if you're wanting to join the air force all you have to do is get off the toilet and you pass sorry sorry sorry just having some fun love all the services how many setups how many setups oh god for my age they may make any more crunches when you're older which is so weird but true um I think I'm at 107 I have to do 107 107 crunches now you have to do like the behind the heads like rip your head up now that we do them a little differently he's a little older they've advanced since then and they realize you don't want to hurt your neck old school right here that's what they call me the champ now we get over here the champ is here the ghetto crunches all right so then how many pull-ups do you have to do or push-ups I have no idea on push-ups because I I'm never gonna do those 50 probably 60 it's like 50 or 60 or something like that in a minute or two minutes I don't know I didn't read the paragraph because we don't know about push-ups but pull-ups I want to say I think to max out for my age range was eight or nine eight or nine pull-ups so dead hangs yes dead hang pretty cool right the Marine Corps bad ass that's why um and they're cooler because they're doing all these awesome like you know alternative ways to do it they used to not be able to do the plank I think when you get when you get really old they let you like row or something instead of front and we keep your knees are all jaky yeah yeah see I didn't have it we had it the hard way you know for us it was uphill both ways I mean it was through the snow it was just in Hawaii so here's the cool thing is there's a lot of lessons in this I you get thanks to you guys for for plugging in with us here um if you all want us to do more lives together let us know we'll do more lives together uh I actually way better with another person by myself um always the same thing so here's the bottom line is first off drink ketones before you work out if you don't have ketones get ketones um it doesn't make sense you wouldn't it makes no sense in the world that you wouldn't have to just doesn't make any sense number two is that if you're on a journey of health and better just keep in mind that you're getting better in a lot of ways and so April was looking at the scale and she plateaued there's a lot of reasons she could have plateaued we were talking about maybe her protein levels were down she's been eating kind of some different foods even though they're low carb potentially their calories were higher than she realized um not a calorie count she doesn't sleep well um mostly with three kids getting up well that's it's almost also well here's the deal it's sleep and April decompresses at at 11 o'clock at night till two and the kids get up so uh so so those are some reasons why her body's plateauing also she's older um why does that matter is metabolically your body shifting right she also has been very inactive over the last four years really since you transitioned to being a reservist you're way less active you're physically more active now than you've been in a long time so she is going to be more prone to gaining some muscle and that may be happening right in this little window because her basically since you started working out more is when you plateaued the most yeah so I was like straight muscle many years ago like almost all muscle and then I went to like almost all fat so that's like a big train it wasn't all it was a lot of muscle I got like I had muscle in my arms for picking up my kids nowhere else and she got pretty ripped when she was in her military training like in 2012 and 13 you're like shredded she was crazy it's actually a little bit like a little too skinny a little too skinny um so you got to have some courage you know um but anyway anyway so so she plateaued and she got kind of stuck at that scale and here she ran six minutes faster I didn't even tell you so today I was 139 what did I tell you and what did I tell you you said I was about to start losing some weight again you said that plateau was over and it was I was about to start doing it now so so April somebody when she sees the scale she doesn't get it doesn't really beat her up maybe a little bit but probably as a whole it doesn't she sees it as competition it's a reminder to get her butt off the in gear and get things taken care of most people don't see the scale that way so Michael Rutherford remind me of that and so if you're a person that sees that scale and you emotionally get stressed or overwhelmed or worried then you got to get rid of it it's not going to serve you or go work on your mindset to not let that scale have that kind of control over you and if you do have a scale don't go on it every day yeah once a week is the max that you want to go on yeah yeah if you get mad at that scale you it literally biochemistry wise will slow down your results and it's not worth it um so it's so there's some okay ladies out there if you've ever been trying to lose some some body fat right how many of you've ever gotten on the scale and been like what the f what is happening right now and then like the next day or later that day you start your period you're like oh that's why I gained three pounds like how many of you've ever experienced that before right yeah that's when I said this scale things bogus yeah we watched it happen then she came in she's like you know I would never want my daughter to go through that little I mean it was like I want a six eight hour emotional kind of like shift right yeah this was I was trying to lose weight after Sophia so no the bloody hormones what's up Chanel I don't remember yeah I was going to lose weight at some point and it's one of those things where you wouldn't want that to happen you know you just realized that something you know as arbitrary as a number on a machine that has no opinion or control of your life can actually have that much impact on you so um we went dark and then that caused something to happen but yeah so anything else you want to tell these amazing people you know I love that you know crazy amounts of shit a lot of stuff because like he knows the science behind it I'm just like oh my god I just lost nearly six minutes off my runtime like that's legit like that's serious stuff right now and I still have a couple more weeks to like train some excited about what's going to happen I love that he can explain like why that's happening in my body I just love that I experience it but uh we'll do some more of these lies we'll keep you updated on the uh the journey the fat loss journey and the the next crazy thing that happens in my exercise journey because I know something's about to happen because I'm going to take all the keto ups I'm going to seal them and drink them every time before I work out well you know what's funny you know it's funny and uh maybe we should do we could get if we could ever get on a schedule and do regular lives because you know apparently we bicker in a funny way uh to each other and so we were just doing a coc call earlier and and Mitch sets it up and here and I are just doing our little thing and so next time we'll have to do a live about how we want to decorate our backyard and you want to see the most crazy conversations it's probably the same conversation you have with your spouses but uh um you know April's obsessed with this crack that's an inch inch it doesn't even it never has to change and she's obsessed with that crack like like so we have to do something with this crack I'm like the whole ground is completely dirt like let's focus on that let's focus on putting something so we know what we're going to do with the dirt let's get that done let's get that over at that crack you're like it's a crack all right that fence needs support all right you'll see it you'll trust me you'll be all hey what's the moral of this live would you say the moral I don't know what I mean moral is the one way to or key to run faster drink it runs run through and if you don't run your drinking you might start running it's the crazy thing in the world um and then I if the scale kicks your butt then kick it back don't literally kick it back because I oh you did do that I didn't tell that story I did not tell that story you guys got to hear this this is funny this is funny I was gone he was gone it was it was baby number two two um and so legitimately Dustin's mom was here staying with us because I literally just just given birth like a couple like a week couple weeks I think it was like in Australia or something I wasn't in Australia he was in Australia and um so anyways so I'm in the bathroom and I had this scale it's like a glass like a clear scale and it had some like metal like you know the strips that you raise your blades on the outside yeah literally that's what that's what they were well anyways it's like I trip or something I don't remember what that's what I did and I slam my foot into the metal part of the scale and like slice like a big a big slice right here I mean pulls a blood like on the floor literally like my mother-in-law grabs like a maxi pad like the big ones and like puts it on my foot to stop all all of the bleeding and how many people have used a maxi pad for a bleeding foot if you have if you can use it for many types of bleeding but injuries they collect a lot of blood it's very it's very efficient way to to deal with an injury um but legitimately like I was like going like oh god am I gonna have to get stitches I've actually never had well no childbirth about stitches better than that I never had stitches and I was like dude this really blows right and then we had to go to the hospital emergency room with a newborn baby and my other child because nobody was there to because I couldn't drive myself to the hospital so she had to drive us with the babies and she had to go stay outside with them and but we get to the hospital and then they actually see us pretty quick because of the naval hospital and it's like literally my skin had healed back together like it wasn't even bleeding anymore it wasn't separated it like literally just went back together and I'm gonna throw a conspiracy theory out there but like I honestly think with my ketones could have been the maxi pad but I think it was the ketones I don't know that I mean the magic of maxi pads I mean and they heal you like you're like the doctor's like I know this was bleeding intensely because of the amount of blood on the pad so he knew I wasn't making up a story but he's like I've never seen any he was like I've never seen anybody heal like that well the truth is that after your c-section they were they like they couldn't believe how fast you held there actually is research being done on ketones and wound healing well I attest to my many wounds and I'm not making that up actually true story there's a healing aspect or an acceleration of healing and it makes sense scientifically or like primitively if you really want to get into the the root of it all but but uh that's pretty cool so I'm superwoman or it's the ketones I think it I think you're special I'm totally I think you're special I mean you know in special isn't always a good thing we're talking about me it's always a good thing all right y'all really we got to go stop stop bugging us we got to go um we got to go we got to go appreciate y'all thanks for plugging in and drink your ketones have a good night love y'all see you next time bye bye instagram bye facebook yeah you have to use my mouse


Our next topic is creating positive and conducive environment for early childhood and care education. So young children learn by interacting with their environment, with their children and with adults. Learning is an active and creative process in which children are working at making sense of the world around them. We need to give them the opportunity to engage in this process purposefully and actively. So by using all five senses and their imagination, it is very interesting that we can teach them a lot of things by creating a conducive environment for them. The thing is that children learn by interacting with each other. What do they interact with?  If they are in the classroom and there are many objects in the classroom, like we said, for math, for science, for English books, they interact with their children and they learn by interacting with this interaction. Now this is the responsibility of ACAC, that it creates such an environment that is safe, sound and it should be conducive to learning. That is, the environment for learning is to meet more and more children. Now let's take a look at our 2009 policy. In it, we allocated all the primary schools or schools that have primary sections. We allocated the rooms of ACAC to them. In those rooms, different corners were allocated for their activities. These corners were specially made up of material or equipment so that the children can be aware of it. When they go to a corner or a corner, they learn from what they like and what they are interested in. In it, there is a language corner where books are read, small story books are read. When they go there, their teacher sometimes makes them read aloud. And sometimes they look at the book they like, their page, their pictures, and try to read its words. And secondly, there is a library corner. In the library corner, there are all kinds of story books. When we talk about the language corner, there are books of Urdu and English. In the library, there are all kinds of pictures and all kinds of things. And there are some good ACAC rooms. There are some videos and so on that children can watch small videos. Then there is an art corner for them. Here, all the art that we were mentioning that there will be a mystery bag, there will be pencils, crayons, colors. There will be a lot of things that children can use and can make creative art. So, there are some books that can be made or written. And the drawing material is also present there. Then there is a maths corner. Now, what can be done in the maths corner? There can be blocks for counting. There can be shapes. There can be abacus. And there can be other small things that children can do with the help of real life projects. For example, there can be a map of which they can measure their height. Or there can be a weight machine where they can weigh themselves. And then they will be taught to read what the meaning of these digits or these hints is.  From which they will be able to understand math. Then there is a science corner. Small models can be kept here for science. And there are many such materials that children can make their own products themselves. If the problem is that there is air in it and it leaves it and goes upwards, then they can be told that there is air that is taking it upwards. The air comes down and goes upwards in its reaction. So, there are many things related to science that are kept in their corners to teach a lot of concepts. Then there is the home corner. The home corner is the most interesting. Where the children live, according to their culture. For example, our Pakistani children like the home of dolls and dolls. Or our boys like the different characters like the Superman. Or they want to be a good farmer. Or they want to be a doctor or engineer. So, these kinds of characters are present for them. They make homes, arrange different things in the house. And there are activities at home. Like having a small kitchen, cooking in the kitchen and such activities. There can be a small office in which the children can be a good engineer. With the help of an engineer set, with the help of blocks. They can make things in some blocks. So, for them there are different courses. And we will see how much time is given for those courses. So, in those courses, they learn what they like and what they like.