The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Book Show. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Book Show on this Tuesday, July 18th. I hope everybody is having a fantastic week and having a good productive time. All right. We're going to jump in to our news today. We're going to talk about equity in math, the no labels movement, the new rights rise in Europe, and the heat wave affecting Europe and a lot of the United States. Just a reminder, we will be doing a show tonight at 8 p.m. The topic is going to be masculinity. We'll be talking about the Tucker interview with Tate. But more broadly, I want to lay out or try to lay out or speculate about laying out an actually idea of what masculinity is. And we'll do femininity in another show, but just focus on masculinity. Why men are having such a hard time with it? And what does it actually look like? Now, I know I've talked about this on past shows in greater or less detail. But we'll do something a little bit more detailed and a little bit more thorough in terms of what is the concept? What is the content within the folder called masculinity? Ankan Nicos just did a response video to Matt Walsh, what is a woman, which the video is excellent. And it, I think, articulates even in more detail than minded why Matt Walsh is... I mean, why Matt Walsh and why the whole...  All right, let's jump in.  It's become a new left concept. It used to be equality. It used to be social justice. It used to be a lot of things, but equity is a thing. And really, equity is focused in on equal outcomes. That is the essence of equity. Equity is how do we create a scenario? How do we help some and potentially penalize others in order to achieve? Achieve is a strong word. Equal outcomes. So it's all about equality, not equality before the law, not equality of rights, not equality of liberty, not even equality of opportunity, although equality of opportunity is kind of a messed up concept. But literally equality of outcomes. So this is the true egalitarian nature of the left coming out. When they use equity, what they're really talking about is ultimately everybody being the same. Everybody having the same amount of wealth. Everybody having the same amount of knowledge. And you have to really understand that they don't mean this in just a materialistic money sense. They mean equal. Equal knowledge. And it's some bizarre way of equalability. And yet this is the left that claims the genes don't matter. It really is amazing how the crazy left and the crazy right always converge, always converge. Because as long as both the left and the right ultimately fall down to the best you can do is what your genes provide for you. They all reject free will. So the egalitarianism here of equity is the real thing. They're not hiding it anymore. It used to be in some sense this was being hidden. It used to be that in some sense they were pretending that no, they just wanted to tell people out. And then of course, we all know how to achieve what they call equity.  It's just doing something great, equitable. And they're perverting it here into some modern leftist, horrible equality of outcome thing. So how do we make everybody equal? Well, we all know how to do that. And I explained that to all of you when I talked about LeBron James and how do we make me and LeBron James equal in basketball? Well, how do you make us equal, right? In wealth, we know how to do it. We tax some and we pay welfare to others and we don't make them completely equal. But that's because we haven't taken our egalitarianism really seriously. The really serious egalitarians want to make us equal. And these leftists want a serious egalitimate. But money as well is easy. You know, it's fungible. You can take it from here, take it from there. You can move it around. That's kind of easy to equate. But how do you equate knowledge? How do you equate ability? Well, I mean, I told the story in a book with Don Watkins Equal to San Fe about how Popat did it, right?   That's suddenly one way to do it. But, you know, we're not yet at the point, yet at the point in America where we're willing to kill the able. So what are we going to do? Well, one way to do it is to hamper them, to restrain them, to stop them from advancing, to stop them from moving forward, to stop them from improving, to stop them from gaining knowledge other people maybe can't because they don't have the capacity for it. So what we can do is chop LeBron James' legs off without killing him. But of course, that too is unappealing and everybody, nobody actually advocates for it. It's violence. Everybody's against violence. But if we manage to hamper people's brains, if we hamper their progress, if we hamper their soul, if we destroy their potential, well, you can't see that. There's no blood. There's no blood. And this is what the left loves. And this is why the dominance of our educational system is so scary and so horrific. So what do they do? Well, in California, and it turns out now that in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to Harvard and MIT, right? In Cambridge, Massachusetts in the city of Cambridge has recently removed algebra and all advanced math from its junior high schools. Let me repeat that. They've removed algebra and all advanced math from their middle schools. Why? You might say, why are they doing this?  Some kids can and some kids can't. And a way to close the gap between them is to not allow the kids who can to move forward. The way to make everybody equal is to paralyze or to restrain or to lower the standards. But it's not even the standards, right? Because you're literally holding back. You're literally not allowing the kids to advance. You're raining so that everybody can catch up and everybody can learn the same stuff altogether. And this is already prevalent in California. And it was supposed to be even harsher. It's all based on the work of a Stanford academic by the name of Joe Boala, B-O-A-L-E-R. Just so you know to be careful. So Joe Boala's proposal for California was a lot more radical. A lot of that has been watered down. There was some criticism of it. It was watered down. But the end of the day, the end of the day, it's California and now Massachusetts, at least in Cambridge, are basically committed to this idea of the way to achieve equity, the way to achieve equality. They figured it out. And I've known this forever and in equal as non-fair, we lay this out. The way to achieve equality is to rein in talent, ability, ambition. To destroy it. RIMO says just pure evil. Absolutely just pure evil. Unequivocally just pure evil. So the approach there is if not everybody can do algebra, nobody should do algebra. If not everybody can read, nobody should read. I'm extrapolating. If not everybody can read. I don't know. Lemme see Robles in high school. Nobody should read it. Lemme see Robles in high school. Maybe we should just burn the books that only some people can read. Maybe we should start teaching algebra to all ages because not everybody can do algebra in any age. Equity ultimately is lowering our lives to the lowest common denominator. Equity ultimately is the most evil. Most unjust. Most horrific. Literally most evil. Idea that exists out there. There is nothing more evil than the idea of equality of outcome. There is nothing more evil than what Paul Park did and why he did it and how he did it.  It's horrific. Now just to give you a positive counter, the Dallas Independent School District also noticed that not everybody is taking algebra. You know, not everybody is taking the more advanced classes, in this case, honors math enrollment in sixth grade. And indeed that there was a racial disparity. About 50% of white kids were taking it, but only 17% of black kids were taking honors math, were enrolling in honors math. And it said, you know, we'd like to get more kids to take it. We'd like to get generally more kids to take it because we want to raise everybody up. We don't provide more kids with more tools. So what the Dallas School Board did in the Independent School District is usually you have to opt in for honors math enrollment. But what they did is they made math enrollment something you have to opt out of and you actually have to get your parents to sign off on opting out of it. And it turned out that once they did that, enrollment in math, in the honors class in math, skyrocketed. Among white kids, it went up to 82%. Among black kids, it went to 43, from 17 to 43. That's like a three-fold, greater than a three-fold increase. So if you care about kids who are left behind, challenge them. If you care about kids left behind, encourage them. Because the truth is that many kids can take Algebra in sixth grade. Many kids can be good in math. And a lot of it is just about challenging them. Now you might think, oh, a lot of kids are taking this class, but they're failing. But it turned out that it didn't. That's not the case. Almost all of them are passing. They're getting good grades. 91% of the black students, this new cohort, 43% of all blacks are passing this course. And this is across all the honors classes. And they're not just passing everybody. These honors classes, they have standards. But if you teach kids well, all kids, almost all kids can get Algebra in sixth grade. So the way to deal with kids falling behind is to encourage them to rise up, to challenge them. I mean, maybe the story of Marvel Collins in Chicago where she had this private school and she had the poorest of the poorest of the kids attending. They were all black. And she took these kids in and it was a small classroom and they all went to college. I mean, 100%. And a huge achievement. And they would have died in public schools. Why? She challenged them. It was a, what do you call it? She demanded. She was incredibly demanding.  I don't think it's surprising, but it's still pretty horrific. All right, there was a new political party on the American political scene. At least maybe it's been around, but it's becoming more serious. Threatening to field a presidential candidate in next year's election. Only on one condition and that is if the election turns out to be between Biden and Trump, they will field, they expect to field a candidate. It's called No Labels, which is, you know, kind of weird name. And they already have what looks like their preferred presidential candidate and they have probably his running mate. The idea is that No Labels will run a Democrat and Republican as president and vice president. So that both parties are represented. And they will run people from the center who are both, who could easily flip between Republican and Democrat. They seem to be serious. They have real money behind them. They have put out their policy agenda, which is exactly what you'd expect from a centrist No Labels political party. It's neither here nor there. It's kind of status quo. Don't upset the cart too much. You know, we believe in climate change, but we don't want to do too much, but we'll do some. We believe in, I don't know, we'll restrict abortion, but not too much, just some. We want to deal with the budget. We definitely want to cut the budget deficit. No word on how. We'll reform entitlements, but not too much. Nobody will suffer. Don't worry. It's just a centrist, blah, meaningless document. But I have to say right now a blah, meaningless document with the prospects of Biden and Trump as presidents sounds pretty good to me. Right? It sounds pretty good to get away from Biden and Trump kind of agenda. So this is, this is what they're proposing. The candidate most likely to be their presidential candidate is a mansion from West Virginia, who is of a reelection in the Senate as a Democrat and has a Republican challenging him, who is the governor of West Virginia, who's incredibly popular in West Virginia. West Virginia is a massively Republican state. Manchin is likely to lose his Senate seat. So why not run for president as a third party? And John Huntsman. Remember John Huntsman? I don't know how many of you remember John Huntsman. He ran for president in the Republican primaries once, didn't get very far. He is a moderate middle of the road, nothing. He makes Mitt Romney seems like a radical for capitalism. Huntsman is from Utah. He's a Mormon. And he would be the Republican who represented on the ticket. Right? That that's who they want to run. I think they're purposely choosing boring centrists to contrast with, but at least who can verbalize a position as compared to Biden and at least not complete insane as compared to as compared to. Trump. So the people most panicking here are Democrats. The Democrats are convinced that a ticket like this would basically guarantee the Trump wins. Probably true. The reality is that Trump has a core of devoted voters that that I don't think Biden has. I don't think he has any core of devoted voters. And that a significant number of Democrats would probably vote for mansion over Biden in a coming election. Biden is very unpopular, even in Democratic parties, not very popular. And yeah, so it there is a possibility that mansion is a spoiler for Biden and he allows Trump to win. Now, the other news and politics that I'm reading is that there's a story going around that Trump is ultimately going to kind of deal with prosecutors in all his various different criminal lawsuits because the last thing Trump wants to do.  So a lot of interesting stuff is going to happen in the months to come. A lot of interesting stuff. But it does. There's no labels. Look, I mean, they are registering in all the states. They will actually be able to feel the candidate. And yeah, I mean, this could be a candidate that kind of gets the the the what happened here. Gets the gets the never Trump is of all kinds independence Republicans and so on, gets their vote instead of Biden and thus allows Trump to win that that of course is what everybody is really, really, really worried about. All right, no labels. Finally, you know, not finally, but I've been talking about this story for a long time. So not a lot to talk here about. But but there was a big story today, or there was a big article today about the global wave of populist nationalism. That is actually increasing, not decreasing, started with Trump and the perception is it started with Trump and Brexit. And there's now sweeping much of the world in Bolsonaro in Brazil, Bolsonaro last Trump last but other than that, pretty much everywhere else you're seeing a real right wing populist. Continue resurgence or surge surge, not research surge. You're seeing it in Tokyo, you're seeing it in Hungary, you're seeing it in Israel where where the kind of populist right did much better than expected. You're seeing it in in India with Modi and the BGP party, but more than anywhere you're seeing it in Europe in Germany. The alternative for Germany, which is a kind of a scary right wing populist party has recently pulled at 22%. I've actually seen it even higher. And 22% makes it the second largest political party in Germany. I've seen it pull as number one political party in Germany, the highest. Now, I don't know if that's real, but it is unbelievably popular right now. And very competitive in terms of winning in some of the states, the German states in the Eastern Germany. In many respects, pretty, pretty scary, pretty scary. So, you know, this is a nationalist right wing party that has its roots in neo-Nazis, they've kind of kicked the neo-Nazis out. But they're there, they're very, again, nationalist, anti-immigration, central planning and bringing, you know, in Europe, the combination right now, the main feature of these parties, the things that makes them most popular is economic problems, which all of Europe is experiencing, particularly Germany. And immigration, those are the two big things that are pushing this. In France, you've got the national, the right, far right national rally, which is Le Pen's party, which is basically in the lead. It's getting the most, it's got like 24, 25% of the votes together with the far left, the left wing party alliance, which is getting also 24, 25%. But then you've got also another far right party of Eric Zimmer, who's getting another five. So that puts the far right kind of at 29, almost 30%, almost 30%, which would make it the biggest block. Emmanuel Macron's party is only 22%, so it would make it the biggest block with the only alternative being the leftists. In Spain, we've got an election in a few days. This one's going to be really interesting. And you've got the right wing party, Vox, again, nationalist, anti-immigration, and all the negative characteristics of a far right party, they're doing really well, so well at 14%, that they probably will be in the next government. They'll probably be joining the next government. And one of the characteristics of many of these parties is religion. And then you've got the Netherlands. Now, the Netherlands is a little bit more murky because they have so many political parties. They have like 17 parties that get seats in the parliament.  It's not exactly what they stand for other than leave the farmers alone. But Netherlands is a complete mess. The current government has failed, again, as collapsed over the issue of immigration. So they're collapsing in Belgium. You've got the right wing party is a 22% in Austria, a 28%, and in Romania, you've got an ultra nationalist party, 20%. All of these parties also share a real suspicion of the EU. Many of them want their countries to leave the EU. But of course, once they get into power, they don't actually push for that. You can see that in Italy. You know, what is considered to be kind of a populist far right political party won the Italian elections. They've kind of really moderated since then. I mean, they're becoming one of the strongest members of the strongest participants in the EU. They don't seem to be eager to leave the EU. And of course, the reason is that the EU is basically a mechanism by which northern Europe subsidizes southern Europe, basically to mechanism by which Germany and the Netherlands and Scandinavia to some extent subsidize Hungary, some of the Eastern European countries and Italy and Spain. So once an Italian, you know, nationalist gets in power, they don't want to lose their subsidies. That's why Alban, with all this criticism of the EU and EU is the worst thing ever and EU is a disaster. He'll never leave because he knows exactly what will happen to the Hungarian economy if they leave. It'll fall off a cliff. And part of it is the EU is bad, regulatory bad, awful from regulatory perspective. But the reality is that many of these governments are worse. The reality is that to some extent for some of these government, the EU is actually moderate as compared to what they would do if they actually got into power. And they know it. It's like everybody complains about the euro, right? Why can't we have our own currency say the Greeks? Well, you know why? Because if you had your own currency, you would be ever thousand times worse than the euro. Your currency would collapse completely and your economy would be completely finished. The euro saves countries like Greece and Italy and Spain and other countries from their own, from themselves. If they had a central bank, they would have hyperinflation. So, and the same with the EU with the bureaucracy. You think the EU bureaucracy is bad, Italian bureaucracy and corruption is worse. And if Italy left the EU, it would have to live with its own bureaucracy, which is worse than the Brussels bureaucracy. It would be more statist, more socialist, more central planist than what even the EU. And, you know, the UK has discovered that. The UK left. The Conservative Party pushed it to leave. The Conservative Party is like the most, it's as unpopular as it's ever been. It's driven the UK economy to the brink of collapse. It is giving them inflation. It is also giving them a regulatory state that matches the EU. It is not deregulated. It's not freed up. It is not liberated. It has not done anything that it promised. So, why did they leave the EU? They lost the massive benefits the EU provided and didn't get any of the upside. And that's why, and the UK is not going back, even if the left wins. The UK is not going back to the EU. But neither the left nor the Conservatives know how to get the benefits from the UK for not being in the EU. They can benefit from the fact that it's completely independent of the EU. They have no clue how to extract the good that they can do. And I said at the time, I said at the time, and another one of these things I'm right on, I'm all for Brexit if the UK government does the right thing with its newfound liberty. And I'm against Brexit if they don't. And I predict that they wouldn't know what to do with it. And I'm right. They have no clue what to do with it. And as a consequence, the UK economy is really struggling, really struggling. And it looked like it looked like it was doing, it was doing fantastic. And then suddenly it kind of fell off a cliff. All right, let's see. Oh yeah, finally, heat wave. It is really, really hot out there. Not here in Puerto Rico. It's always hot. But it's really, really hot like in Rome. It's 105 degrees today. And it's going to be over 100 for a few days. It's supposed to be in some places in Spain, France. There's this massive heat wave all over Europe. Of course, Phoenix is over 110. I think for 18 days straight, I think they're going to break the record of the most days over 110 ever in Phoenix's history. But you know, Phoenix is always over 110. Well, not always. But a lot. That's why you never, ever, ever go to Phoenix in the summer. And if you live in Phoenix, you leave in the summer. It's insanely hot. It's kind of a nice heat. I like the Phoenix heat because it's dry. It's like, I don't know. I like it. You go out into it and the heat just envelops you. The good thing about Phoenix and American hot cities is they all have air conditioning. They all know exactly what to do with the heat. They have air conditioning and everybody's doing fine. The problem with Rome is, a lot of people don't have air conditioning. And the other problem with Rome is that Rome is packed right now with tourists. Tourists are walking from site to site because you walk a lot in Rome. In this heat, God.  When we were in Rome in May, it was cold. It was like everybody we talked to from Rome, the taxi drivers and everybody, was saying, we don't remember it being this cold in May. It was rainy and cold. And it was not pleasant to walk outside because it was rainy and cold. But this is ridiculously hot for Rome. And Rome was also humid. So not fun. So yeah, don't be a tourist in places that are really, really hot during the summer. This is why it went in May, but then May was cold. So I don't know, climate change is screwing up tourism. And one of the consequences of that is it could be that people start changing their habits in terms of tourism. July, August might be the best time to go visit Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Sweden, the Norwegian Fjords, like Scotland. If you're really feeling adventurous, you could also do Siberia. But there might be places where you can go in the summer where it's kind of pleasant because during the rest of the year it's impossible to be because it's too cold. Unless of course you live in Michigan and then it's just average. But people are shifting. Yeah, Iceland is beautiful. Why not go to Iceland during the summer? Canada becomes semi-habitable, moderately habitable. Even Michigan becomes moderately habitable in the summer. You can go to Michigan. They're beautiful lakes. It's really, really pretty there. Just be careful driving at night not to hit the deer. But yeah, so we might see as a response to climate change, a shift in tourism habits, which will hurt people in Rome and benefit people in Copenhagen. Not sure on balance what that does. People have to adjust. And this is the thing about climate change. People will adjust. They'll adjust their behavior. Businesses will have to adjust. Some businesses will not fare well. Other businesses will fare phenomenally well. As climate change, people adapt. Human beings adapt. We buy air conditioning. We spend more electricity, less on other things. We go vacation in Norway instead of Greece. We change, we adapt. And what will happen ultimately is that if we allow for economic growth to continue, of course, is that places like Italy and Greece and Spain will invest much more heavily in air conditioning. We'll invest much more heavily in air conditioning. So we do need to grow. We need to become wealthy and we need to become richer, particularly in those countries, so that they can access air conditioning because air conditioning is expensive. And the advantage of Phoenix is they already have air conditioning. Vegas. Vegas right now must be so hot. But it's the kind of heat I like. For a while, you know, at some point the dryness just starts killing you. But for a while, that heat is, I don't know, I find it comforting and pleasant. All right. Oh, way over time. All right, let's jump into the Super Chat. Wes, thank you for the $50 question. And by the way, we're only $24 short of the target. So hopefully with a few stickers, we've got about 100 people watching right now. With a few stickers, we can get to the $250 mark. Remember, value for value, those who are watching right now. Oh, if you're watching right now and you're not a subscriber, subscribe. Please press that subscribe button. And then you'll get notifications when I go live and I do these shows every day. News quick news round up on shows. Hopefully interesting. Hopefully saves you from watching some of the horrible news that are out there. So please subscribe if you're not a subscriber yet. All right. Wes says any thoughts on Hollywood and ongoing strikes. I think the system of a large studios and large unions is not sustainable. I think those involve need to think outside the box and come up with something new. Yeah, I mean, it's very difficult because it's very difficult to break the unions. It's very difficult to work outside the unions. The unions in Hollywood are particularly powerful and particularly nasty. And it's just everybody's bought into the system and everybody's accepted it. So even even many independent film and many independent producers are affected by the strike because they can't find writers. Writers are part of the guild and you're not allowed to write for the movies unless you're a part of the guild. And of course, you can become a part of the guild unless you write for the movie. So it's like a catch 22 very difficult to get into the union. And then the union does these kind of things where where they they negotiate these kind of terms, which, you know, maybe, maybe I'm very skeptical about whether the union is necessary here. Whether we could whether we would need whether if the union went away, smaller unions would arise that, you know, that dealt with this that dealt with the needs of actors, maybe actors in different stages of the career. I don't know. I don't know enough about the industry to know. But it doesn't seem rational to me, but we can have a Pellegrino on to talk about the strike. I don't know. I don't know if he wants to be public about this. I don't know. I'd have to ask him. But, you know, so it's, I don't know enough about what goes on there. And I don't know enough about the industry to say, I mean, obviously it's insane. Every few years or every decade, there seems to be this massive strike, everything shuts down, nothing gets done. It seems to be very, I mean, why is one organization negotiating for everybody? That seems wrong and disturbing. Why aren't people applying anti-trust laws against them? Huh? I wonder. So I don't know enough about the industry, but I'm suspicious because of the size of these things and because the whole industry can be shut down like this. And because of the insider, the fact that everybody plays around with this and nobody, you know, there are no films being made right now. And the system is broken in some very fundamental way. I don't know how to fix it other than to take away kind of the legal protection that unions have. But how did the union here get so strong? How did the union here get so powerful? I just don't know. I don't know. All right, Stephen, thank you for the $20 that took us over the limit. David, thank you for the sticker. Marilyn, thank you for the sticker. It's not Marilyn. She told me. Oh, God. Marlene, is that right? Anyway, no, Mary Ellen, Mary Ellen. There we go. I remember it's Mary Ellen. So sorry, Mary Ellen. I finally remembered that I've been mispronouncing it wrong all this time.  Mary Ellen. So thank you for the support. Wow, I can't believe I actually caught that. Let's see. Stephen, more Stephen, anonymous user, Paul, and Mary Ellen again, and Danny, and Catherine, and Jonathan Honing, and Robert Nacer. I got that right. Thanks. Thank you all for the support. All right, let's do the questions quickly. Remo says, I recently watched a documentary. Oh, by the way, somebody asked me about reviewing a movie. It's $500. I recently watched the documentary, Startup Nation. It claimed that the policy of Shimon Peres are backing VC losses and therefore attracting venture capital led to the current flourishing tech sector in Israel. Thoughts. No, I don't think, I don't think that's true. I mean, suddenly it made it a lot easier for capital to flow into the country. But the start-ups were already there. The technology was already there. The genius was already there. It smoothed out and accelerated the VC's willingness to invest and also the VC, the quantity and the amount of the VC coming to Israel and investing in it. But it would have happened anyway, maybe in a different time frame, maybe a little slower, maybe a little better. Who knows? But it suddenly accelerated at the beginning before Israel was kind of discovered. But I don't think it changed anything fundamentally. All right, everybody's trying to explain to me in the chat how to pronounce Mary Alene's name and I'm probably butchering it. So at least I got the Mary, you know, I'm separating, it's a combination of two names. At least I'm getting that rather than just my old pronunciation was completely wrong. So ultimately I'll try to get it right. Mary Alene, Mary Alene, Mary Alene. Friend Harper says, I can't make the show later but you can address the question then. Is masculinity that which is unique essentially to a male human? Like how nature is that which is unique to humans? No, my answer is no, but let me leave that there because I think you can be a female and masculine. All right, the Godfather. I just read a long expose about Peter Schiff's bank at DW. DW being what? I don't know what DW means. What is going on with it? Why is the government going after it? Can you shed some light on the regulatory side and shift side? I can't really. I mean, the bottom line is banking is the most regulated business in the country. Part of Schiff's approach to the bank, I think, and he was speculating, is to provide kind of an alternative way of doing banking, something a little bit outside of the box, something that provides services of a different kind and at a different level. Nothing shady, nothing scheming, nothing bad on the contrary, but different. And the regulators don't like that. And then it's also Peter Schiff with all the baggage that Peter Schiff brings to it with his vocal anti-fed and anti-regulation. I'm not surprised the regulators are going after it, but I don't know enough to say, to give you the exact reason why and I don't know enough to specify in detail, but it doesn't surprise me at all that they're doing it. This is what they do.  All right, I need to speed it up here at 15 minutes. Jennifer says, in a Twilight Zone episode, they forced everyone to have an operation to look alike. Yeah, remember that. Afterwards, the girl says, the best part is now I look just like everybody else. Yes, it's very scary. Twilight Zone episodes are generally very scary. But yes, the idea of complete equality should really, really scare you. Really, really scary. It's a really, really evil idea. Luckily, it's also an idea that people are likely to embrace beyond a few enclaves of crazy, nutty leftists. Not embrace fully. They embrace it in small ways, but not fully. Adam says, there is nothing wrong with a world full of both Eddie Willis and John Galtz. Suppressing higher achievement makes all of us inculcably less rich, incalculably less rich. Absolutely. It's a win-win world. The world is a win-win. Somebody else's talent, achievements, success, wealth are a benefit to us, to you, if you're willing to me, if I'm willing to be productive, if I'm willing to trade with him, rather than try to exploit him. So absolutely, absolutely. Frank says, do people psychologize because passions are still present in our lives? Isn't altruism an envy? A passion we have rationalized? Yeah, to a large extent, altruism and envy are passions, but they're passions that come from ideas. That is, the passions are not the primacy, the primary, the passions are not the beginning. The beginning is our conclusions we come about reality that then result in us having particular emotions, particular passions about the world that then, and it's a loop, right? Those passions certainly reinforce certain aspects of our thinking, certain aspects of our psychology. But yes, the idea, the altruism and the envy, because they're not really, the formal manifestation of them is not acceptable. People rationalize them and come up with excuses to justify them and hide them even from themselves. No one says the AFD here in Germany has a weird mix of nationalist and free market policies. I think there is still a good chance that they'll implement the more sensible ideas, especially in a coalition they would have to join. I hope so, but I tend to think it's the other way around. I tend to think that the world, basically the world is against free market ideas, period. There's basically a much bigger coalition that opposes free market ideas. And the national idea is actually a lot more appealing and a lot more interesting and a lot more, you can form a coalition around them because everybody out there is a collectivist and it just feeds into that collectivism. Whereas free market ideas are fundamentally opposed to collectivism, the individualistic. And for a collectivist culture to accept an individual premise is a lot harder than for a collectivist to switch from one form of collectivism to another. So I think ultimately it's the nationalist ideas that win out, not the free market ideas. And you can see that with all these right-wing political parties, when they win, they don't, including Trump and Bolsonaro and others, they don't really implement much of their free market ideology. That doodle bunny and non-objectivist world is a world I don't want to live in. All right, but it might be the world you have to live in. Socialism seems to be the position that slavery is wrong when done by individuals, but right done by the state. Well, yeah, but it rationalizes that in the form of, but it's better for people, but they're better off. But at least it teaches them all equally, at least it's more just. It has to rationalize it because it can't hold that what they're doing is enslaving people. James G. says, why have flights from the USA to the UK so high compared to previous years? I realized that we have inflation, however, price is almost triple from five years ago. At the same time, I do not understand it. I think because after COVID, a lot of people decided they want to fly, I think to some extent capacity on airlines shrunk a little bit during COVID and returning that capacity has been hard. And therefore there's less competition and there's less capacity in the planes of pact. The planes are packed, there are no seats. So people are returning to travel with a vengeance and maybe this heatwave will lower that. But yes, I mean, travel to the UK is very expensive. Just giving an example, British airways stopped flying the A380, the Airbus 380, that big double-decker plane. And they basically decommissioned the planes. And then when demand soared last year, they had to bring some of those planes back. But they haven't brought all of them back. So they brought a few of them back and they still, I don't think their capacity is up to what it was pre-COVID. And yet demand is still there. Hopper Campbell, for people who've never studied objectives and how rational can they really be? There's a limit to it, but they can be rational. They can be rational, certainly at the level of common sense. Logic is pretty much understood out there. But it's hard for them to be completely rational and integrated into every aspect of their life. But it doesn't mean that before Objectivism there were no rational people. They were. It's just how conscious were they of it and how integrated were they? Clark says, what's wrong with being entitled? Isn't that an aspect of selfishness? No, entitled is not an aspect of selfishness. Selfishness requires that you earn what you consume. It requires, selfishness requires that you earn it. That you pay for it. And being entitled is, I should get the stuff whether I earn it or not, whether I work for it or not, so whether I, in a sense, deserve it or not. Entitled separates consumption or receiving love or receiving anything from dessert. And that's anti-selfish. Selfishness is all about dessert. Michael says, suppose you became president while Congress was still controlled by traditional status parties. Could you video your way to shrinking the state? Probably. I shut down the government a few times. And it's quite possible they also, they would be so afraid of a government shutdown that they would compromise or at least allow for some shrinkage. You could do some stuff. It would be hard and it would be very difficult and it's not clear if the people would support it. But you could do much more than anybody's done in the past. Frank, I was reading that Italy is a social market economy. Or that it practices Ryan capitalism or Rainish mode. Can you explain it? How does this work? It just means it's a mixed economy. It just means it has elements of markets and it has elements of government control and it has elements of cronyism. It also has elements of corruption. So that's all that means. It's just they pretend as if there's such a thing as Ryan capitalism. There is no such thing. Italy, just like Germany, just like France are all mixed economies. They have some freedom and a lot of state control. And they have no for-born capitalists and they protect rights in certain limited respects and they don't protect rights in lots of other respects. And in that sense, they're a complete mixture. All right everybody, reminder tonight we're doing a show on masculinity. We'll talk about a few things about masculinity but also is the way people hold masculinity a frozen concept. What does that concept entail? What goes into the concept of masculinity? We'll talk about Andrew Tate and Tucker Carlson who definitely both have a frozen concept of masculinity. And that interview that they did and a few things to be learned from that interview and other stuff. Don't forget to like the show before you leave. If you're not a subscriber, please subscribe. And I will see you all tonight at 8 o'clock 8 p.m. East Coast time.


One o'clock on a Monday afternoon in wonderful Hawaii and you are watching Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host Pete McGinnis-Mark and today we have a special guest, Casey Hunnamole who is a graduate student at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at UH Manoa and Casey welcome.   Okay so can you just give us a little bit of an introduction. What is it that took you to Antarctica to be an astronomer or an engineer? So as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona I started working on an instrument called the stratospheric terrahertz observatory and it's a high altitude balloon telescope that flies at 120,000 feet in the stratosphere above Antarctica and it looks at the Milky Way Galaxy studying the molecular clouds and star formation. Okay and people here in Hawaii will be familiar with optical telescopes. You say it's a terrahertz instrument. Yeah. So you're looking at a different portion of the spectrum is that correct? Yeah so instead of looking at light that we can see with our eyes we look at what we call the far infrared or the terrahertz which is way beyond what we can actually see and it's more what you hear on the radio. Okay and what is it you were looking at? We were looking at a carbon and nitrogen in the Milky Way Galaxy in the interstellar medium. Okay you're just looking at the Milky Way Galaxy so you're not staring out to the remnants of the Big Bang or anything like that or not comparing one galaxy to another but how much of the Milky Way Galaxy were you able to observe? So while we're in Antarctica we look at about one fourth of the Southern Milky Way Galaxy and we did a survey. Okay and you'll be telling us I suspect how much you were able to observe or how long the telescope was airborne and that sort of thing. Yeah so the telescope launched right before December 5th and it floated at altitude at 120,000 feet for two weeks around the Antarctic.  That's correct. Let's take a look at the first image because when you're talking about a terrahertz observatory it's really hard for me to imagine what it is. So here for our viewers can you just describe what it is that you're looking at? So this is the stratospheric terrahertz observatory and you can see the big panels on the side are our solar arrays and that's how we get most of our power to recharge our batteries to keep the telescope running. The gold thing in the center is an optical 80 centimeter telescope and then there's a white cryostat at the bottom that looks like a ball sort of. And a cryostat was it cooled? It was cooled with liquid helium. And why is that? Why do you need cooling? We cooled our instruments so that when we our receivers need to be very very cold at 4 Kelvin or minus 299 Celsius. So that the noise from the receivers doesn't interfere with the signal from the galaxy. This improves the signal to noise capability of the instrument but minus 269 centigrade is very very cold it must be a challenge building an instrument that works at those temperatures. It is very tough challenging. We have to make sure that the liquid helium isn't being vented to the atmosphere or that the cryostat that holds the liquid helium isn't leaking in any way so it's under a vacuum. And all this to look at the molecular structure of part of our own Milky Way galaxy. And you as a graduate student presumably you're not the only person I believe the second image will show us part of the team. Where are you and you are you wearing one of the standard red Antarctica jackets there? This was actually the day before the launch and I'm actually not there this year. I was there the previous year and this year but not for the launch. So you've been to Antarctica twice? Yes. We'll get to working in Antarctica in the second part of this show but that sounds really exciting. Let's take another look. So you were in the next slide I believe you were part of the data reception team? Yeah so while I was down in Antarctica right after they had launched the telescope I went down and I learned how to control the telescope and what to look how to tell it what to look at. So I basically controlled and drove the telescope. But why go all the way to Antarctica to just sit in a computer console? I mean it sounds crazy you could do this from your office at Manoa couldn't you? Yeah so we can do it from the mainland or from the from Hawaii but while we're in Antarctica we have a better connection to the telescope than you do if you're somewhere else off continent. So it's easier for us to communicate with the telescope while we're down there. And when you say connection that's an electronic connection not on cables or anything like that. Yeah it's like Wi-Fi. It's just like Wi-Fi but you have to bounce it all the way from Antarctica back to the mainland. Yeah so we send our commands from Antarctica to a place in Texas and then from Texas it goes up to a satellite and then goes down to the telescope. That's remarkable and then off-screen you were telling me also you have to be there in case the telescope lands earlier than expected. Yeah in case anything happens with the telescope we need to be down there to coordinate with a bunch of the long duration balloon facility workers that control when you drop the balloon and where. And so we have to coordinate with them and also people that work for the Antarctic Treaty to make sure we don't drop it in a very sacred part. Penguins don't like it in other words yes and it must be a really challenging task to not only have the instrument working correctly but just to launch a balloon in Antarctica where it's really cold even during the summer. Yeah so the biggest problem is the wind shear. So before we launch we launch when moving at different levels in different directions. Yeah so we launch two smaller balloons and we tether them together so you have one balloon down here and a balloon up higher and you can see whether or not the two balloons are moving in different directions or what how calm the weather is because if there's any sort of differential movement of the balloons you can't launch. And I believe we've got a picture of the the launching of the balloon. We'll see a video in a few minutes but I recognize Mount Erebus in the background very scenic but the balloon is how big. When the balloon is fully inflated it's the size of a football stadium. Amazing. And that's filled with helium. Filled with helium. Which is also difficult to work with in those sort of conditions okay. And then the image on the right-hand side that's showing that the the telescope I think that's the correct term is being suspended on a long tether from the balloon. Is the balloon that size all the way up or what happens with the changing atmospheric pressure? As the balloon goes through the atmosphere you see that there's a kind of a red tether at the bottom that all of the white tether is the balloon. So the balloon will take up all of that tether and then there's the red parachute right there and that is where that tether really starts for the telescope. And the parachute is obviously how you retrieve the instrument if you're lucky right. Exactly. And I believe they were able to. Yeah we actually were able to drop the balloon telescope on this South Pole Antarctic Traverse. So on their way back from the South Pole they picked up the balloon. This sounds really exciting to me. Yeah. Let's take a look at the next slide. And for our viewers what we're looking at I presume is a satellite view of Antarctica and Casey tell us what exactly we're seeing with the blue and the red lines. So the blue line is our first trip around Antarctica and you can see where the blue line starts that is actually where we launched from and so it went around the South Pole made a couple loops and then the red line is where the second loop started and it ends on top of the blue line. And for those viewers who are not that familiar with the scale of Antarctica we're looking at a continent-sized landform which is bigger than the United States for example. So this balloon must have gone thousands of kilometers. Yeah. And all those little squirrely squiggles particularly in the red line is that due to changes in the wind direction or was were you able to control the path of the balloon. So we can't control the path of the balloon it just follows the polar vortex that it circles around Antarctica and around the South Pole. So whatever the winds are doing the balloon's gonna do. Sounds really scary if you've invested years of your life building this instrument and you just let it go. Yeah. And speaking of letting it go I believe you've brought along to show our viewers actually how you launch this balloon. Yeah. Can we run the video and Casey can you just give us a description of what it is we're seeing. This one's for about two minutes so hold your breath but what is it we're looking at here. So you can see that this is the balloon on the launch pad out in at the long duration balloon facility. You can see on the left side that there's a tiny white speck that's the one of the weather balloons that we use to monitor the weather. Up towards the top left. Yes. And then you can see that the large balloon the high altitude balloon is being filled with liquid helium and one of the helium fill lines is actually floating in the wind if you can kind of see it. Pretty soon it will they'll let the balloon go and it'll float up and if you look down. So you'll see it rise up and as soon as it's parallel or perpendicular to the surface of Antarctica or straight up and down it will they'll release the telescope. And of course a balloon looks as if it's just about to collapse. It's not fully inflated because as it's rising. It will inflate more. It will inflate more and more even though it's got the same amount of helium in it. Yeah. So pretty soon it'll be straight up and down above the telescope and they'll release it from the launch vehicle. And it's fortunate you can do this during the daytime if you had to do optical observatory. You'd have to be there at night time, right? Which would be much colder. It would be actually much harder because during this time during the Antarctic summer the sun never sets. And I guess we're soon going to get lift off. It's a very slow process. Right there. Yeah. Right there. It's taking off. Very slow process because presumably you only get one chance to. You only get one chance. And how much is that telescope worth? Any idea? A couple million. A couple million dollars and a few graduate degrees. Yes. We had about five graduate students work on this project. About five. And this was when you were working at the University of Arizona, correct? Yeah. So you've come to Manoa and you're still building instruments and you're working on data analysis. But this particular baby which we're seeing lifting into the sky. Yeah. This included investigators and graduate students from the University of Arizona. And what was your feeling when you see this? I was very thankful that we finally got to launch. The first year we went down we had such bad weather that there was no chance of launching. So we were very fortunate that NASA and the NSF allowed us to go down a second year when we had perfect weather and we were able to launch. Yeah. When I was in Antarctica we had whiteout days and we had really strong winds. This looks to be quite idyllic in comparison. Yeah. What I remember. That looks really interesting. And of course you're collecting new science data which astronomers might be working on for years would be my guess. Yeah. We're creating three dimensional maps of the Milky Way Galaxy. And that tells you what? We can look at the turbulence inside the interstellar medium energy balance. We can also look at star formation rates. And this helps us to connect the life cycle of the interstellar medium and star formation. Can you see individual stars with this telescope or is it star clusters? The sort of things Hubble telescope can observe? I'm actually not sure. I haven't actually had any chance to look at the data that has come from the telescope. You just build the instrument and work on getting the data back. Yeah. Which is a really important thing particularly for graduate students to be working on. Okay. Well when we come back I'm going to ask you a bit more about life in Antarctica. But let me just remind the viewers you are watching Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host Pete McGinnis-Mark and today our guest is Casey Hannibal who is an engineer instrument development graduate student at the University of Hawaii. And we'll be right back. Hello I'm Dean Nelson host of Planet of the Courages. From a Tibetan point of view we chose to be on this planet because we enrolled in a sort of graduate school for courage. Just that we may have chosen this adventure is a leap of logic. The question is how do we spend and make sense of this precious human life? We are as a species extraordinarily successful dominating the planet and now with planetary sized problems that our existence itself has created. It takes courage to face not only the uncertainty of life but also the challenge of sustaining the gift of life for future generation. Join us every other Monday at 3 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Hi everyone Ted Ralston here host of our Think Tech show where the drone leads and a lot of you of course have been sitting your clocks at four o'clock on Friday so that you can make sure you see our show. It's not changed it's not going to be at noon on Thursdays. Noon on Thursday is new standard time for where the drone leads and where the drone leads is two systems like this capabilities that we're using here in Hawaii these days and we need you to pay attention to this be part of it. So see you at noon on Thursdays. And welcome back. You are watching Think Tech Hawaii research in Manoa. I'm your host Pete McGinnis-Mark and today's guest is Casey Hannibal who is a graduate research assistant at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. And Casey before the break you showed us this wonderful video as well as some slides of the instrument that you were building or working on the data collection but it must be fabulous for a graduate student to go down to Antarctica. Is that true? Oh it was definitely an experience. Yeah. Once in a lifetime really. Except you've been twice. Except I've been twice.  There you go. And so you were visiting McMurdo station. Yep. And it looks as if this is sponsored by the National Service Foundation. Is that correct? It is. What sort of place is McMurdo? It's like a big town but small. Only about a thousand people are there during the summer time and then during the winter time it drops down to 200 people just to keep the base and the station running. And presuming it's quite cold. Very cold. Actually but during the summer time I could take off my jacket and walk around in a short sleeve shirt. Really? Colorado was actually colder at sometimes during the time I was there. Okay but I presume when I was there I went on to the High Plateau in Antarctica where the temperatures dropped to like minus 40 or something like that. So it's really cold. I actually never experienced anything below minus 20 when I was there. All right okay and there's other pictures that we can we can look at. So here's a split screen of two different views. What are we looking at here? So on the left we can see Discovery Hut which is where Scott yeah Scott's traverse. He's set off for the South Pole from this hut. Right and that's where they lived and then in the background you can see McMurdo Station and you can see some of the dorms that you actually live in and then on the right you can see more of the the landscape and the part of the Ross Ice Shelf. Okay I always thought McMurdo was more like a construction site. Our viewers have never seen it before. It's really chaotic. It's not like Mano or anywhere. We're familiar with here in Hawaii. Yeah you do have to be careful because there is a lot of big vehicles moving around moving heavy equipment but I felt it was pretty town-like. Yeah and do they have restaurants there or cafeterias? There's the galley which is the one cafeteria. They make breakfast lunch and dinner for you. Then they have three bars technically but you can't get food at them. Okay so you were there for how many days? In total on both trips I was there for about 60 days. How do you get there? So in order to get there I took a commercial flight from Hawaii to Christchurch New Zealand which meant that I had to stop in Sydney, Australia and then from Christchurch I took the LC-130 the Hercules military plane from Christchurch to Antarctica which was an eight-hour flight. And are there airports in Antarctica or where do you land? No we land on the Ross Ice Shelf so the plane has skis underneath it and along with the wheels so that's how they land on the ice. And you just hope that the ice doesn't melt before you take so. On the Ross Ice Shelf doesn't melt as frequently and they groom it so that it's like a runway. Did you notice what when we're talking about the ice sheet melting with global climate change is there any concern about ice in Antarctica melting? Yeah the the biggest issue for global warming is the penguins the penguin population is diminishing. When I was there the first year I was there long enough that I could start to see the Ross Ice Shelf melt which was on time but then this year it melted a lot later so I didn't get to see it and so the penguins never came and so it's a tourist penguin but yeah and I believe there's one more slide let's let's take a look at this and this looks quite mountainous. Yeah it's a it's quite beautiful up there that is actually an image of Hupp point crossed and then you can see McMurdo sound in the background. Because this part of Antarctica McMurdo station wasn't this where both Scott and Shackleton were in the early 20th century so there must be a lot of history. Yes there's a lot of history. It's actually pretty neat because you can hike out to Discovery Hut and you can actually go inside of it on certain days and see all of the the things that they left behind that has been preserved. The frozen supply. Yeah and there's even a dead seal outside the door that they were eating when they were out of food. It was closed when I was there. Oh that's unfortunate. But now Casey you're a graduate student. Yes. How do you get to do all this exciting kind of traveling and research? Yeah what skill sets are you good at? I am really good at working with my hands and building and fixing things and I just kind of got lucky. I stumbled into a job that taught me how to solder and make computer boards and PCB parts so I learned that I wanted to work with my hands and build instruments and that's I just pursued that. And even though the original work with this telescope was done in Arizona you've now started a graduate program here in Hawaii at UH Manawa. Tell me a little bit what is it that you're doing there which is different. You're not an astronomer. You build or you instruments or you analyze those data sets. Is that correct? Yeah so now as a graduate student here I am building a hyperspectral infrared detector that looks at gas plumes from the Kilauea volcano. Hyperspectral. It's high resolution. In terms of the size of the object you can see or the individual wavelengths of light. In terms of the individual wavelengths of light that we can gather. And as a graduate student you get to be involved with building this kind of instrument. Yeah so I've actually built the instrument and I've tested it to determine its sensitivity and how well it will work out in the field. And you're measuring volcanic gases so this is something quite new compared to radio astronomy. Yeah what would you hope to do once you graduate? Are there any jobs in this kind of field or what? My ultimate goal is to become an astronaut. Oh really? Terrific okay. And I believe when you're at a conference in Houston in March right? Yes. Didn't you get to talk to astronauts? I got to talk to two astronauts. I met Jack Schmidt who was the first and last geologist to walk on the moon. Unbelievable. Yeah. Okay he must be a really interesting guy to talk to you then. He was definitely interesting and it was a lot of fun to meet him. And what sort of discussion could you have with an astronaut? I know if I met an astronaut I wouldn't know what to say to this person. Particularly one of the 12 who have actually walked on the moon. I had to think of a lot of questions to ask him but the main one I wanted to ask was what color looks like in space because it looks different than it does here on earth because there's no atmosphere. His response was that it was just so much more vibrant. How interesting. So the colors on the moon that it seems to be a very gray planetary. Right but like they have the American flag on their arm. Yes. And so if they can see that then or like the American flag that they put on the moon. Yeah so the colors are very vibrant apparently. And did Jack give you any pointers on how to become an astronaut? He did and also I met Dean Epler who does space suit testing and both of them were great insights on things that I can can do and should be doing to make that goal come true. Now there's a high probability that in your career there might actually be astronauts walking not only on the moon but conceivably going back to Mars or going too much. Yeah. The first time is that part of your career goal? Yes I would absolutely love to do that. Okay and that means that what kind of classes do you take? How do you train to be an astronaut candidate? The main thing about becoming an astronaut is that you you do something that you enjoy and because if you enjoy it you're going to excel at it and if you excel at it you have a better chance of getting a position. So they look for astronauts to be well versed in multiple things and have multiple interests so that when you are training for different things you will be happy. So I take classes that are interesting to me that help broaden my knowledge of sciences so. Very good and I'm sure everything breaks in space or you've got to be prepared if it breaks in space.  Is that correct? Yes it's definitely a big advantage having the instrumentation side. Do you have to fly jets as well? I have a T-38. Yes. I can see that that has a great advantage as well. Yeah definitely. I'm actually looking into taking helicopter lessons. Helicopter lessons? Yeah. Not very useful for the moon but maybe for Mars. Maybe. Well this is terrific Casey. I mean so how long in advance do you have to sort of prepare your resume to be considered? When would you start applying for astronaut candidacy? So technically I qualify next year when I finish my master's degree and then start the PhD work. I see. I'll have the bachelors and then three years professional experience that qualify me.  This is terrific. Well I wish you great success. I mean I remember when I was a kid seeing the astronauts on the moon. I'm going flying and things like that but to have already met Harish and Schmidt the last one of the last astronauts on the moon as well as talking to all these people designing new space hardware and that sort of thing. So clearly your multi-talented. You're doing some engineering. You're doing some data analysis. You're doing some applied science in terms of looking at volcanic gases. Really impressive. So thank you very much Casey for being on the show today. Thank you. I just wish you every success in the future and we'll keep track of what you actually been doing. So let me just summarize. You've been watching Think Tech Hawaii research in Manoa. I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark and guest today has been Casey Hannibal who in addition to being an engineer working on astronomy programs in Antarctica is clearly set to be a future astronaut. So we wish you all the success in that. Let me also remind you that Think Tech Hawaii is seen here every Monday at one o'clock Hawaii standard time. So without more ado I hope you'll be joining us again next week. Until then goodbye.


Now the character of Kandee is a really interesting and very poignant figure. In other words He's a really important but yet melancholic a very sad character that Steinbeck use. Now He's the only old ranch worker on the farm. However, his Character is used by Steinbeck to essentially show just how brutal the capitalist order really is. People such as Kandee are Basically used the life force is taken out of them. They're used in their prime years But then once the ranch is finished with them once they're too old to give any more labor back They are basically discarded. Okay, so essentially you want to talk about Kandee and the quotations that you want to memorize in regards to Kandee's character you want to think about it in terms of how he illustrates the brutality of life on the ranch and by extension the brutality of life in what Steinbeck sometimes saw as a very brutal capitalist American society. Now as you can see behind me, there's key quotations to remember and of course word level analysis You want to do with these quotations? Now the first quotation actually relates to Kandee's dog But really to be honest when you think about how Kandee's dog is described The dog is basically an extension of Kandee himself. The dog is used as a metaphor and a symbol of Kandee himself Now the dog is described as gray of muzzle ellipsis moth eaten The word level analysis you want to do here first off is the adjective gray just like the dog is gray Kandee himself is gray Also, you want to think about the alliteration of M muzzle and moth and of course moth eaten It's been eaten away by years Even if the dog has been such a loyal dog on the farm Actually, ultimately the farm workers and the ranch workers kind of look at it with disdain and ultimately want to kill it It's been basically used up and now it's going to be shot dead and perhaps this could foreshadow So maybe for instance if mice and men the novella carried on and if there was a part 2 part 3 part 4 sequel Perhaps we could very well see that Kandee ultimately will also face the same fate as his dog Maybe he's not going to be shot dead But perhaps him being kicked off the ranch in his old age that basically signals his death He won't be able to find work elsewhere and ultimately he's going to die a very lonely miserable death So basically the dog's life and its path basically echoes the life and the path of older ranch workers When they were no longer useful in the ranch just like how old people in capitalist society in America's during the time When they're no longer useful, they'll basically just cast aside, okay? The second quotation relating to Kandee's character is once all the men on the ranch basically leave And they are in the brothel, so basically they are with prostitutes And the key characters that are left behind are of course Kandee, Crooks, Lenny and Curly's wife Now Kandee tells Crooks Nobody would listen to us and here the word of analysis you want to focus on is the pronoun us Of course he's talking to Crooks, Kandee is the only old man Crooks is the only black African-American man on the ranch Both of them realise the unique struggles that they face as outsiders And how actually all the other ranch workers really don't see them as worthy of even listening or believing in them, okay? And of course what this is illustrating is just the abject brutality That society treats older people like Kandee in that kind of disregarding way And of course obviously by extension it also treats people like Crooks as an outsider in a very brutal manner The third quotation to remember for Kandee's character is when it comes to how he tries to defend his dog from its death, okay? And he looks to everybody and he's trying to get slim, please, slim, spare my dog And of course the dog is still killed, okay? And the quotation here is Kandee looked from help from face to face The word level analysis you want to focus on is a repetition of the word face from face to face Even actually you can mention alliteration from and face alliteration of F, yeah? Now here with regards to this quotation, this quotation is really really powerful to show just the brutality of this system That chews up people like Kandee, ranch workers even like Slim Because once Slim gets old and he's no longer useful in the ranch right now In the novella he's quite powerful and therefore he's very useful But once he becomes old he's going to face the same fate as Kandee, right? And nobody will look to him for help, nobody will come to his rescue And this obviously, this quotation illustrates how Kandee is alone He stands as an old man and everyone doesn't really care for his say and of course they end up killing the dog The other quotation to remember for his character is when he states, when he confesses and he realises That he's not very useful anymore in the ranch, he states Very much good, and here you want to focus on the modal verb ain't Remember modal verbs are verbs that don't necessarily show an action, can, will, must, will All of these modal verbs for instance, they tend to go with another verb And they usually emphasise a state of being a belief even And of course the modal verb here ain't, I am not Illustrates Kandee's belief that and his internalised belief that as an old man He really is useless in society, which obviously as readers makes us feel a lot of pathos A lot of sadness and empathy for him The other quotation to remember for Kandee's character is when it illustrates When he realises that George and Lenny have this American dream, this dream of owning a farm And he basically says he has some savings and now Coupled with the money that George and Lenny are going to earn plus Kandee's savings This dream of owning a farm is actually potentially going to be realised This description is really powerful, they looked at one another, amazed, full stop This thing they had never really believed in was coming true So Kandee stepping in with George and Lenny to say let's all work together as a community Rather than being as individuals that we have strength in numbers Let's put money together and put money towards this farm This dream which is just an idea actually now becomes a reality All realising it dawns on them that they might actually have a chance at getting a shot of the American dream Now the key word level analysis you want to do with this quotation is a bit of a long quotation Now the first is you want to focus on the pronoun they, this is a collective pronoun Always remember that one of the things that Steinbeck wanted to illustrate And of mice and men is just how solitary and lonely life for migrant labourers is But actually also he's illustrating here through this collective pronoun As a group that in a community migrant labourers actually find strength They can actually escape the right race, okay? And of course here this collective pronoun shows that them working together George, Lenny and Kandee is going to give them the possibility The one shot that they have at owning land and attaining the American dream The other word level analysis you want to do here is the assonance of A So another amazed And of course this assonance illustrates just how they've realised that this dream is within their reach They can actually attain this American dream The other word level analysis you want to do is a litteration of T This, thing, they and true And finally the adverb really and the verb believed Okay and of course the adverb especially and the verb really believed Shows that these men subconsciously believe that something like getting and attaining an American dream Something like attaining any ownership of a farm They had subconsciously believed that it was for other people who were more lucky But now they're starting to realise that they might themselves have a shot at this And of course this realisation comes because Kandee throws in his lot with George and Lenny And therefore makes the possibility of them having enough money to own the farm a reality So those are the key quotations to remember when it comes to Kandee's character And the word level analysis that you should do So make sure you try and memorise these quotations


Hello, how's it going everybody? This is a video on CVE 2019 14287 I'm here with my buddy Caleb because it's dangerous to go alone So this is a vulnerability regarding pseudo or the super user do command that you will typically often run and see on Linux to have some administrator privileges run things as root or as another user and This is in regards to the patch that came in version of 1.8 point two eight They got released today at the time of recording October 14, 2019 so It's interesting in that The flaw that you might see was you're working that vi sudo or editing etc. Sudoers that file there if you happen to note that you have the ability or the user that you're working with has the ability to run commands Is it as other users? Is that right? Yeah, so it's as all users not root It has to specifically have all in the user specification So in this syntax that they showcase they have my host here is kind of a prefix which I haven't seen the need for in mine But the username that you're working with and then in that run as segment that specifies what user They could be as long as all is in there for whatever case and then a command that they might be able to run or again All you could manipulate that when you use tack you or tack tack user to specify what use you're gonna run as you can Normally run as another user, but if it has maybe an exclusion for root as in don't let this user run as root You can abuse that if you were to specify Let's use a user ID value negative one or Let's see you said it's other What is it? Yeah, is that two's complement? Is that the thing that does that? I mean it's it's just like the It's two to the 32 minus one. It's the equivalent of negative one. Okay, just because it's wrapped around Yeah, yeah, yeah, that will actually return zero which will let you use that Root user identifier or user ID and then we could essentially run commands So so what John said there he says I'll be about returning zero What it's actually referring to which this the actual CV talks about but basically when they actually change the UID so pseudo uses the function set UID And probably a couple of the ones as well But that whole family of functions to change the user ID of the currently running process to a different user ID And it just passes whatever you give it as the user ID if you give it a number to that function So normally what would happen because it says all it doesn't check to make sure that that User actually exists. It just is gonna pass it on and if it doesn't exist Then set UID will fail and it will fail In the case of passing negative one the actual standard says that set UID will not fail It will return zero if you pass it negative one So what that happens is that it thinks it succeeded and it continues on and since pseudo itself was running as root The UID didn't change because that was a valid and it will just continue on and run your command as root So that's kind of cool a neat side effect that John was just highlighting there is that Because pseudo thinks it's that it succeeded all the logs will say that it ran as a UID of negative one or four point Two billion or whatever all the logs won't actually say root They'll say that other UID that you passed it. It's kind of an interesting side effect So this patch was supposed to be just dropped today for pseudo one point eight point two eight and I have not updated yet So let's go ahead and see if we can kind of recreate that and play with it If I were to check out the version of my pseudo and see I'm running one point eight point two seven So if I were to fire up the user, let's add What is it you want to use temp or something? We were just tinkering with us. We thought like hey, that'd be cool to just throw it in a little video So yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. That's fine Now we can vice-sudo to edit our etc. Sewers and I was testing this with the user Doug So let's use temp and that specification was all right Yeah, so the actual CV it specifies in a weird syntax Yeah, normally host or the user is first and then host is second. So I don't know if that's There's something else. I'm missing okay, okay, so I'm looking case you're saying user temp space all so any host Equals and then that's Let's just use ID as an example. Does that work sure? Yeah, but not root in there. Oh, yes That's the whole point. Well, let's I guess showcase why that works It with a little temporary thing for those of you that are curious I'm just looking at Seclists org if you were to Google simply that CVE number you should be able to track it down and find some other articles or blogs Or stuff talking about it. So let me have this in a showcasing Syntax here just so we can understand why or what the vulnerability really does show it could do if that makes sense I'm not sure what you mean. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if I were in a another user Let's switch to SU to temp. Yep And then we'll use this password. So now I am that temporary user if I were to just pseudo I could run anything right so ID. Well, you can specifically run ID as anyone. Yeah But other commands like who am I would not be able to execute So I could do that as any user that I particularly wanted to if I wanted to use that as John My account and I knew that I could do that without prompting for a password But if that situation were different Let's exit out Where I had vi studio and we were specifically excluding a route Let's say anyone except that root user can run the ID command That's nice and dandy. Let's switch to temp now So I could pseudo attack user John and then I could run ID just fine But I would not be able to use that as the root user obviously However with this vulnerability that we just understood we can specify a number Yep Tech you and that number sign there if we were to use negative one or that like 4.2 billion you said 4.2 We have something like that two to 32 minus one negative one We do end up running that as root So obviously we don't have as much privilege with that as we would have if in that vi pseudo We had a little bit more access and we could just run any command as all users We could finish your thought and then I had a question swap out Yeah, cool. All right. We'll do some Ice-breaking so as pseudo attack you negative one And now we should be able to run in bash and just get a root shell. You can see my prompt over there Yeah, cool. I have a question if you Say if you had instead of not root if you did like not John Would the same thing work? That's peculiar if it just says not John. Would you then also be able to run as root? I would assume. I think it will work. Yeah Then bash root Cool, it's kind of interesting thing. Although. I guess you would be able to run it as root at that point Right, right. Maybe it's another exclusive thought. Yeah, so I don't know how much Mileage you might get out of this. Maybe you won't particularly see that exact syntax in an incentive suit a worse file But if you ever do hey now, you know one potential Avenue. Yeah, you could take advantage of that width So let me go ahead and get rid of that temp user Before I accidentally give someone some unintentional access to my machine But you should as we kind of discuss go ahead and update to one point to one point eight point two eight as That is released and rolled out. So Some current events some cool stuff. Hope you guys enjoyed this video kind of quick small showcase But I hope you liked it. I'll see in the next video. Okay


Thanks very much, Roderick. And first of all, I just also want to make kind of a shout out to all the people who are attending these conferences and doing science in the face of all the dynamic commitments of home. So not just children running in but, you know, having to do things that you wouldn't otherwise have to do at a conference. So, I want to talk today about comparative regulatory genomics and how encode has helped enable extensive studies of regulatory evolution by technology, both computational and experimental. So, one of the things that has been shown is that transcription factor binding sites when you look across evolution. They change rapidly and in fact the change is exponential with evolutionary times the drop off is really very quick. And this is true. Here's an example of transcription factor binding CBP alpha in liver and you can compare this with long branch lengths or short branch lengths and the drop off is actually relatively quick in the transcription factor binding site locations. And indeed, work from triaticers group a few years ago showed that the rates are indistinguishable regardless of whether you're looking at mammals or insects embryos or adult tissues, or different factors. This is just a common way that transcription factor binding sites change over evolutionary time they change rapidly. Now, at the same time gene expression evolves slowly and these changes are essentially linear. This is also from the combined analysis that came out of triaticers group. And we can see that we end up in this situation where we see an evolution of transcriptional regulation and multiple things are happening simultaneously gene expression levels are evolutionarily stable tissue expression profiles are maintained. But at the same time the tissue specific transcription factor binding is neither stable nor maintained. So if we are out looking for those sites of interest of regulatory regions for doing genome interpretation, we need to take this into account. And trying to understand more of how we can, we can decide these together and make sense of this has been a focus of research in my group over time. So one of the things we showed a few years ago is that in looking across 20 different mammals and mapping promoters and enhancers that conserved regulatory regions are really very rare. And these tend to be promoters. So if you look from the point of view of human there's roughly 41,000 human regulatory regions in the way we did the assay. And the next are roughly 1200 promoters and 30,000 or 12,000 promoters 30,000 enhancers. But of those, only about 10, or only about 20% of the promoters are highly conserved should shared across many species, but a very small number of these enhancers are highly conserved only about one 10th of 1%. This gives something to look at. The other thing that we noticed is across these 20 species about half of all the active enhancers and liver are found in a given species are found only in that species. And so we called those recently evolved. So the vast majority of, when you look across species the vast majority of the regular is in this recently evolved category, or the majority of the, the regular is in the recently evolved category and only a small amount is in the conserved category. So you can look at the origins of these, of these various categories and especially the recently evolved ones. As it turned out the recently evolved promoters tend to arise from young DNA. So, young DNA here means DNA that's not present in the, and the multiple alignment of these species, generally added in various places through duplication, or in some cases, transposable elements. The enhancers tend to arise from ancestral DNA that is DNA that was present in the multiple sequence alignment, but gets captured in only one of these lineages in an enhancer form. So there's apparently enhancer potential in the common ancestor, but it's only being instantiated down one of the lineages. It's important to note that the scales on these two are very different. There's many more of these recently evolved enhancers. There's 10 times as many as the scale. So this means there's actually thousands of, of enhancers that arise from ancestral DNA. And most of those, as you can see, or many of those arise tend to arise from transposable elements, which I think provides a very interesting avenue of future research. We've spent some time trying to connect these regulatory, the regulatory evolution to gene expression. You can see an example off to the side of, of gene expression and regulatory landscape for 10 species. There's a number of characteristics that are required to be addressed in this situation. So we address two of them, which is gene expression level and expression stability. So the expression level is relatively simple. It's how much the gene is expressed. But the stability is, is also important for evolution. It's how variable it is across species. Now these characteristics are confounded, highly expressed genes are more evolutionarily stable. Of course, the assembly quality, which was a larger concern when we were doing this study than it is today as, as more high quality assemblies are being produced also impacts the analysis. And we end up, you end up basically seeing that we need to take apart these these details of expression level and expression stability to get at how we can connect regulatory evolution to gene expression. And what we found from this is that the number of regulatory elements is the primary driver of both expression level and expression stability. What you see is that the gene expression basically works with promoters as if it's a switch from zero to one, the gene expression turns on there's relatively little additional expression with more promoters. But as enhancers are added the gene expression and indeed gene expression stability or the correlation, both increase. We had to do this I'm not sure if my pointer here we had to do this with a finding controls in various places that allowed it to to match various gene gene situations where we would match for expression level with different numbers of promoters expression level with different numbers of enhancers to determine these results. And this gets back to the point of regulatory complexity. If the number of regulatory regions is the primary driver, then more complex regulatory landscapes those with more regulatory regions are the ones that are under greater regulatory selection both from an expression level and from an expression stability point of view. So we did look into the effective evolutionary conservation. And although the primary driver, again, is the number of enhancers, those enhancers that are conserved are slightly stronger. So genes with placental conserved elements are more highly expressed. And here we did this by doing a control where we had the same number of enhancers and conserved versus non conserved. And genes with conserved elements are more stable. Again, in here we looked at conserved elements and double matched for expression level and number of elements. We also show that recently evolved enhancers are slightly weaker. And so, again, you can add a recently evolved enhancer and you can see that it does affect the gene expression, it does expect affect the gene expression stability. So we put a bit of evidence that we find from this that at least overall the recently evolved enhancers are functional. And they add, again, to the overall regulatory landscape, which leads to expression level and expression stability. And then investigate some details about how tissue specificity and different tissues come into play. Now I mentioned earlier that most of these recently evolved enhancers are present in the multiple sequence alignment, suggesting that they had enhancer potential in the ancestral sequence. We hypothesized that what might be happening is that the enhancer potential is being captured in different tissues down different lineages. And so to try to get some insight into this, we mapped regulatory elements in four tissues and 10 species. And, and try to make sense of this. Some of the results that come out of this is the tissue specific regulatory landscape is actually very consistent across species. You get approximately the same number of active promoters enhancers and prime enhancers in these four tissues, these four tissues are also quite distinct over time. You will notice some differences in the numbers that we are getting for active promoters and active enhancers. We sequence these libraries much deeper and use some different. We used an additional histone modification in our definitions to do this. But the results are largely comparable to the previous ones. So one of the things we see from this is that our initial hypothesis. So the initial observation of tissue specificity of these regulatory elements does play out a large promote portion of promoters are active across tissues, but the vast majority of enhancers are predominantly tissue specific and occur only in one tissue. So you can see that the, the gene expression activity up here in black largely follows the pattern of promoters as to how many tissues that they are formed in. Now this is taking from a one species at a time point of view, even though this is all species, some together so there's no exact evolutionary analysis here this is about tissue specificity and tissue shared activity. So what we could look at and this asked the answer or goes some way to answering the question of the hypothesis that that I suggested is that because there's enhancer and ancestral enhancer potential, whether or not we can see switching of this regulatory identity down over evolutionary time. The first thing we looked at was how often within a species promoters became enhancers in another tissue. This actually happens relatively rarely. It's also true that the active enhancers and the prime enhancers switch their roles relatively rarely across these four tissues. I think this calls into question some of the, some of the, the theories that suggest that promoters and enhancers are really on a continuum. They look more distinct from this analysis, although obviously there's more to do. Now between species. It's a different story regulatory identity changes are common between species, 20% of the promoters change identities and the enhancers and the the prime enhancers almost look like they're an evolutionary equilibrium. We also found these dynamic promoter enhancers. These are those up here that switch within a given species. These are not maintained by evolution. We're also looked into some characteristics of these inter species switchers. So regions are more likely to switch identity over longer evolutionary time, which I think is something that would be expected. We use the fact that we had a nice evolutionary structure with two in group and out group analysis to estimate directionality of of our switches. And what we can see from this is that promoters basically tend to stay promoters. And again, we have this kind of dynamic change between the prime enhancers and the active enhancers with enhancers likely to become promoters. So we're able to look at the tissue specific profiles of evolutionarily dynamic regions. And these are less typical than their non evolutionarily dynamic counterparts. The promoters that are evolutionary dynamics are the ones that are changing between species. They are less likely to be tissue shared and the enhancers that are changing between species to something else are actually more likely to be tissue shared. So, finally, we looked into some of the things that might be driving this tissue specificity versus this tissue shared versus tissue specific axis, as well as the inter species dynamic regions. And what we found in both cases is that lines. So retro transposons and line L2s, which are the more ancient of the lines seem to serve as a reservoir of regulatory potential. And this is true both for these those that are dynamic between tissue shared and and tissue specific, as well as those that are inter species that change between species. If you're interested in this, we do have a preprint up on bio archive that you can go and take a look at. And just before I'm done, I wanted to kind of make one comment about some of the things that we can build off of from here and and some of the future opportunities. So one of them is instantiated by a group of projects in Europe under the Fang consortium. So that's the functional annotation of animal genomes to essentially encode like analysis for farmed species. The European Commission has funded three interconnected projects aqua fang bow reg and gene switch, focusing on aquaculture species, beef and dairy cattle and chicken and pigs. And the goal of these projects is to generate functional annotation and do comparative genomics across them. And I'll just give you a quick example from aqua fang. So here are the six species that they're looking at. The goal is to create body maps of multiple tissues, developmental maps for these species and immunomaps to try to understand how the, how these things work together. You'll see from looking at the aqua fang assays. These are very familiar to all of us who have used and worked in the encode data and the types of samples that are being looked at are also actually very ambitious. And so to conclude, a million tissue regulatory profiles which we can see from doing comparative regulatory genomics are globally similar across species and somatic tissues. Within a species it turns out to be relatively rare for a regulatory region to change between a promoter and enhancer, but this is a common thing across species. L2s appeal to be something of a Swiss army knife of regulatory potential and regulatory genomes, and there's a host of exciting opportunities for genome interpretation within and across species as we move forward. And so finally just to acknowledge the people that did the work and the various results that were presented and our funding. So thank you very much. I'm happy to take questions if there are any. Yes.