Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to New America. I'm Peter Bergen. I run the international security program here. It's a great pleasure to introduce Steve Cole, who of course was the former CEO and president of New America, and is now the dean at the Columbia Journalism School. Steve is the recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes, one for Ghost Wars, and I suspect he may be a third for this book. We're very lucky to have him here at the beginning of his book tour, and Steve is going to make some opening observations about the big themes and stories in the book for about 20 minutes, and then we'll open it up to a discussion for you, and also Steve will sign books afterwards, but he has to leave here at 5.10 so to get the train. So thank you. Great. Well, this feels like a formal setting with a very informal group, like a lot of friends and people I know very well, Andrew and Robin and so many Mark and so many others. I want to embarrass one person. If those of you who have books open to the author's note and take note of the first name there, Christina Setkowski, who is sitting there in the third row. If you put your hand up, please. So she was at New America when I guess we sort of, I was starting down this road. I don't think I'd signed the book up, but she started helping me and then became a researcher, a full-time researcher on the project for at least a couple of years and based out of Washington. It just did so much amazing work that is in the pages there, especially that chapter outside of Kandahar, Lives and Limbs Couldn't Have Happened Without Her, so I'm so glad she was here. I just want to celebrate her work. So yeah, it's, you know, there's a kind of plusage about this subject for a lot of us. I was thinking about it in reference to New America because I came to New America in 2007 and I was at the New Yorker and I was sort of working for myself and I wasn't sure I wanted another position like this and they were looking for somebody and they weren't sure that I was the person they wanted.  You'll see what I'm like and I'll get a feel for who you are. And my subject was ISI's role in the Afghan War. We sat around in some other building up on Connecticut Avenue and talked about it. So this book is, you know, the product of a really ten years of work and it starts, those of you who haven't cracked it open yet, you know, it starts with Ghost Wars which ends essentially with the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud on the eve of the September 11 attacks. It sort of starts there, right there, kind of replays that event and then moves to September 11th and then follows the story of American policy making and struggles in the war as well as Pakistani decision making and perspectives about the world, about the war as well as Afghan perspectives and decision making pretty much through the present day, the epilogue it set in 2016. It's a long book and I can't possibly summarize it in 20 minutes but what I thought I would do is just give you a taste of some of the themes that recur and some of the episodes that sort of give kind of flavor to these themes across this long and very complicated history. So Directorate S refers, of course, to the covert action arm of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency. It's a form that the U.S. sometimes uses in its cables to describe the covert action wing in Pakistan itself and not as S-wing or just S and of course these sorts of units change their appellations for various reasons at various times but this was not this organization and this aspect of ISI was certainly no mystery to the United States after 2001 because the CIA had collaborated with ISI during the 1980s in a covert action to challenge and ultimately defeat the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan. It was sort of a three-way partnership with ISI on the front lines providing the training and the weapons and the contacts and the money to Afghan Mujahideen guerrillas, the CIA providing technology, sophisticated weapons, supply lines, logistics and funding and then Saudi Arabia doubling the U.S. funding so that was kind of the structure of the history that the United States had with S-wing and so when the Taliban insurgency started to revive it was sort of remarkable that the United States was as slow as it was to recognize what was happening but of course this was a time around 2006 when the United States was very heavily bogged down in the Iraq war and distracted by the deterioration of that war. During the 1980s during the original collaboration ISI grew into the state within the state that it notoriously is today and it's I think important to recognize that it's commanded by the top army general in Pakistan. It's not a rogue organization. It is an instrument of the military services in Pakistan and the army of course has held power directly or indirectly for much of Pakistan's existence. So one thing that really unfolds in this history after the fall of the Islamic emirate and the return of the Taliban gradually in 2004, 2005, 2006 is a theme that continues right through the end of the Bush administration and into the Obama administration really a question which is why was the United States and NATO willing to accept or tolerate ISI support for the Taliban even when that accommodation and passivity about the Taliban sanctuaries and Karachi and elsewhere undermined U.S. interests and eventually started to cost American lives. There was certainly a view as reflected by CIA leader named Chris Woods who was a station chief and Kabul a few times and a lot of Congress people went in to visit him when they visited Kabul and there's sort of an account of his briefing that he would give around 2011 and his line was fairly stark. It said we either address the sanctuary the Taliban enjoys in Pakistan and we win the war or we don't and we lose the war. It's that simple. Now you might argue about whether it's that simple but that was the kind of debate that was recurring in these strategy reviews year after year. Despite the centrality of this argument and this analytical problem of how do you defeat an insurgency that has such a deep sanctuary not to mention some self-financing capacity. Despite the centrality of this neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration could find the will or the means to change the equation. So why did we fail to achieve our goals and why are we still in Afghanistan. So I want to just kind of pick out four themes that recur in the narrative and maybe give you a flavor of some of the episodes. One is the problem of our war aims at various stages of the war. The second is the failure of our relationship with Hamid Karzai and the fragility of our investments in democratic Afghan politics more broadly. Third is the illusions that built up in our counter insurgency war in Afghanistan. And finally the failure of political and diplomatic strategy to sort of compliment all of the investments in military strategy. So I'm just going to do this really quickly so we can have more of a discussion based on your questions. War aims. Okay so toward the end of this project one of the sources that I was fortunate to be able to rely on said I think it was during the fact checking said something like you know one thing I'm really glad about is that we probably won't get the Pentagon papers about this war for a long time but this is probably the closest thing we're going to have as to exactly how all these decisions got made and got missed you know at least for a while. And I hope there's some value about the comprehensiveness and the kind of sequencing of this. I felt aware as I was writing you know as a narrative writer you don't like repetition but a lot of the failures were so repetitious that I had to kind of keep coloring up the atmosphere to make it feel like it was still moving forward even though it sometimes felt circular. So you'll see in the narrative that the Bush administration, the Obama administration carried out more than half a dozen secret or classified interagency reviews of why they're fighting in Afghanistan and how to achieve their goals, how to define their goals. And one thing that happens in the book is that almost all these reviews happen in the same fourth floor conference room at the Eisenhower executive office building. They keep coming back you know the intelligence community comes over in the morning keeps briefing the white papers about you know here's what the order battle looks like here's what the demography looks like. Here's our analysis of the politics on both sides of the border. You know here are pathways to negotiation. Here's what the military equation looks like. The CIA would produce these colorful maps that were a big hit in the in the community the so-called district assessments. They were updated every six months and they color-coded each of the approximately 400 administrative districts in Afghanistan as to whether they were under government control, Taliban control, independent control or contested. And they're very colorful. Everyone loves maps but especially colorful maps that move around and so every six months they bring them back and roughly between 2007 and 2014 the proportions of control really didn't change despite the presence at the peak during the Obama years of 150,000 international combat troops trying to roll the Taliban back. Part of the problem was in this area of war aims was exemplified by what happened in 2009 during the Obama administration's pair of reviews one in the spring and then again in the fall which is the fundamental question when you're sending young American men and women into harm's way what are the vital interests in Afghanistan that justify our escalation there our fighting commitment there. And the reviews identified too one was al-Qaeda international al-Qaeda which was still very active out of the at that time reaching across oceans carrying out attacks in different places. The second one was less publicly announced typically because it's sensitive was the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons more than a hundred nuclear weapons in a country with dozens of militant groups. But neither of those problems in 2009 was actually in Afghanistan. They were both in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda had migrated to Pakistan to the tribal areas but also to the cities and hooked up with local groups and were in the midst of the worst terrorism inside Pakistan that the country had ever known destabilizing it which of course raised intensified concerns about the security of their nuclear weapons in the midst of a insurgency that was so intense. You remember that spring of 2009 when the Pakistani Taliban rolled out a swat to Buna'ir. People were worried they were going to march into Islamabad. Tens of thousands of Pakistanis died in that period of time between 2007 and 2014. Really only last couple of years has it returned to a level of 500 civilian deaths a year which is still high compared to where Pakistan was before 2001. This same dilemma was surfaced in the last Bush administration strategy review. Last month of 2008 president receives as he's going out of office a 40 page classified review about strategy in the war and President Bush notices that what's being recommended is an increase of U.S. investments in Afghanistan on the basis of analysis that locates almost all of the vital problems in Pakistan. He says at this meeting, can't we do more in Pakistan? The CIA at this point is leading the drone campaign. The strikes have been stepped up in that summer of 2008. President says, well, yeah, but you're telling me that the Taliban's leadership, the real sanctuaries are in Quetta, maybe in Karachi. Can't we go in there? Michael Hayden who's running the CIA points out he says sir, buildings blowing up in the midst of one of Pakistan's major cities is a lot different than an isolated mud hut getting struck out in the mountains somewhere. The point is they were stalemated. They were constrained by Pakistan's own instability even as they surged into the country next door. I think for President Obama you know he could not figure out how to resource the war against the Taliban enough to win it or on the other hand to define his war aims narrowly enough to focus only on al-Qaeda so that the Taliban problem could be avoided all together. The White House really didn't want to fight a war against the Taliban but the Pentagon in for the most part was more interested in such a campaign to stabilize Afghanistan and support the constitutional government. There's a scene in the in the book from one of I think the late Obama 2009 review in the situation room where they get into an argument about whether the United States has ever really pledged defeat the Taliban in the past because the original formulation was we will attack al-Qaeda and its affiliates and they got into all these arguments about whether the Afghan Taliban was really an affiliate of al-Qaeda after 2001 and so there was a sort of sense of well we haven't ever really said that we're going to fight the Taliban to the end of time and the Pentagon got so spun up about these claims that they they went back and the next day they came in with a powerpoint deck and they put up like all the statements by American presidents and political leaders basically saying we're going to defeat the Taliban. They say you may not like it but we have said that this is what we're going to do but in the end even Bob Gates you know hold over from the Bush administration someone with a fair amount of professional experience in about the Afghan war you know he's they all knew that the goal of defeating the Taliban on the timelines and with the and at acceptable cost was infausible and Gates said you know the Taliban are part of Afghanistan and so they ended up coming out of that review with war aims that were you know to degrade the Taliban or to reverse its momentum you know this very subjective and loose language you know as an editor you would say I'm sorry can you be more specific and this was language that was sending American men and women to war so now you can say there was something more coherent than that we were going to hand off the war to the Afghan forces and that this kind of vagueness in the interim phase was just a kind of time building exercise but it wasn't really very clear to the American to the American people I don't think it's one other thing I'll mention and then maybe we can do the rest with your questions the relationship with Hamid Karzai he's a big figure in the book and the deterioration of his trust in the United States and his relationship with the United States is a is one of the you know seven or eight stories that kind of recur in the narrative you know I think sort of a beat reporter like Peter in the sense I was doing magazine stories I was out there pretty regularly after 2005 or so I interviewed him a couple of times I felt like I understand I understood where he was coming from but when I went back for this research and tried to go down a layer get as many records and and you know well sourced accounts of private discussions with him as I could at different stages of the of the conflict in the history I was really struck by something I did not understand when I was out there at the time which is that basically every time an American came in to meet with him he said why aren't you doing more to pressure ISI why aren't you doing more across the border with Pakistan that's where the where the war is located now of course this was an evasion a way to evade accountability for his own problems of governance and his own his own cabinet's performance and and a lot of other ways that you could describe it as an evasion but he was absolutely clear and convinced and consistent across many many years that that this was the number one priority for his relationship with the United States and he took it for granted that the U.S. of the world supreme superpower you know could force ISI to stop aiding the Taliban if it really wanted to and since the U.S. didn't do this since we didn't take decisive action that he could see eventually he came to the conclusion had to be some other explanation and he sunk into conspiracy thinking he said you know well you must want ISI to destabilize Afghanistan so that you can justify keeping military bases here for you know for an indefinite time and of course the Americans tried to persuade him that he was wrong but you know when Obama sent Joe Biden out to meet with him you know he said Karzai he told Karzai you have to do your bit you have to address address corruption and the drug trade and Karzai says well Mr Vice President well you should do more about Pakistan you should do more about the sanctuaries and and Biden answers you know Mr President Pakistan is 50 times more important than Afghanistan for the United States and the next day Karzai is with his aides and that's when he starts with this you know the U.S. can just leave what they're talking about is unacceptable I'll declare jihad and go to the mountains this is the kind of loose talk of I'll bring the Taliban back he became so convinced that the U.S. was engaged in a complicit conspiracy with Pakistan to either influence or destabilize Afghanistan in order to have a long-term presence in Central Asia that it got in the way of almost every other negotiation that the U.S. attempted with him right down to the to the end with the you know the kind of strategic partnership there's this during this period Karzai goes for a walk in the Ard Palace gardens with one of his ministers he says to this minister you know if we can't run the government we should bring the Taliban back to punish both the Americans and the panchiris Karzai's young son Mirwise happens to be with them the minister asks him do you want this boy to grow up under a Taliban regime I don't want that for my son the minister goes on you know Mr President I believe the United States was not fair to you they first they called you an Afghan Mandela Mandela now they call you an Afghan Mugabe that's not fair but we should take some responsibility too for the things that have gone wrong and then he went on you know if the Kabul government collapses the U.S. will not be threatened but we will be wiped out and that was the reality that kept Karzai on side increasingly bitter increasingly resentful that he was unable to influence the United States in the way it fought its war that he was unable to change the equation that he saw across the border in Pakistan James Dobbins who many of you will know has been here before was a late special envoy in 2013 when the things got so frustrating and this this kind of recurring position that that Karzai took was getting in the way of a bunch of things so he goes out to visit with Karzai at the arg and he says to him you know Mr President by now you have the snowed materials you have millions and millions of wiki leaks cables to look through can you see in all of these documents even the trace of evidence for this conspiracy that you're crediting Karzai paused and looks at him says maybe you don't know about the plan he says there's a deep state in America as I understand it so anyway I'll just finish with you know one last contradiction about political strategy which is such a broad subject and reconciliation lots of other things we can talk about when we turn to your questions but you know one of the repetitions that was I think evident to any of us who are out there as kind of beat reporters but then becomes more explicit in trying to excavate this this story and put it together in one place is that at every phase of the escalation really from 2007 until 2012 2013 when there are debates about the extent to which military action or troop increases should be resourced versus political strategy regional negotiations direct negotiations with the Taliban at every stage of this debate and it recurs again and again the the generals who rotate out to command this you know to command the NATO effort ISAF they all say quite explicitly in public you know there is no purely military solution to this war against the Taliban ultimately this war is going to have to end politically and yet and I think it was you know David Petraeus who said you can't capture and kill your way out of an industrial strength insurgency but despite this acknowledgement again and again it is military action that is prioritized it is military action that is resourced and it is political action that is trailing you know you have election efforts that do get some attention though not successfully not they don't produce successful results but overall there was a huge contradiction between the acknowledgement that this kind of war requires extraordinarily active and persistent political approach and the actual facts on the ground which you know even today prioritize military action expecting a different result from this stalemate that we that we have you know it is I'm afraid at the end of it all we're doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result so thank you for listening about Karzai was was there an inflection point where he the 2009 election the Holbrooks maneuvering around you know to kind of sideline Karzai was that a big inflection point for him to turn against the United States yes I mean I think he was drifting in 2008 in the last year of the Bush administration he was disturbed by civilian casualties he was disturbed by the special forces raids he kept complaining about these things but you know President President Bush did achieve a very successful relationship with Hamid Karzai you know he he kept him on side had him on the conference and Karzai was very loyal to Bush and reluctant to break with him fully and it it's sort of dispiriting having been present at the time that this happened and you know sympathetic to as many people as I could be in working this forward you know there's this habit that we have that I think you know it's evident today in reverse this way which is maybe it's because our politics is just so polarized or maybe it's always been this way but when the new administration comes in they come with this very powerful instinct that everything the old administration did was wrong and needs to be fixed because they've spent the whole campaign saying this I guess rhetorically and so it's necessary to to kind of believe it and internalize it and in this case one of the things that the Obama administration came in you'll see lots of scenes in the book you were present at one of those scenes where they come in and they just say we are going to break this relationship this dependency with Hamid Karzai they assumed that Bush's kind of engagement with Karzai the bi-weekly VTCs and so forth was a form of dependency it was a you know


A few years ago I made a video titled Super Nintendo-like Steam games, and by that I don't mean that the games themselves can run on Super Nintendo hardware, or if that's even feasible or whatever. I'm just referring to retro-styled games that fit the same styles of gameplay that were prevalent in the 16-bit era, like turn-based RPGs, 2D action platformers, top-down Smash TV-style shooters, things like that, all presented with a 16-bit visual style. So let's revisit that idea for a part 2, because if you're like me, you might be so caught up in catching up on older stuff that you might not even know that these newer games exist. Starting with Undertale, it's a turn-based RPG and everyone and their mother loves to compare this one to Earthbound, and it's easy to see why, with the art style, the goofy sense of humor, both of which put you off the scent of a surprisingly affecting story. The combat system also has some interesting quirks, like how each enemy's attack is their own Atari-style minigame, where you have to dodge what's coming at you. That's if you decide to fight any enemies at all. Undertale is one of those games where the less you know going into it, the better, so I don't want to spoil too much, I'll just say it's definitely worth checking out. Undertale is available on Steam, PS4, Vita, and Switch. Another obvious one is Stardew Valley, which takes the simplicity of a game like Harvest Moon and expands it a thousand fold. It's a farming sim, but there's so much more. There's combat, crafting, cooking, fishing, relationships and side stories, all sorts of stuff. This part is that it's all presented in such a simple, straightforward manner, with a really easy to use interface. The soundtrack for this one is outstanding, to the point that I find myself listening to certain tracks on their own just to relax. So yeah, if you like stuff like Harvest Moon or Sim City, or any kind of strategy or sim game, then you gotta check out Stardew Valley. It's available on Steam, PS4, Vita, Xbox One, and Switch. The most obvious of the obvious games is Cuphead. You'd have to be living under a rock nut to have heard of this one, so I won't spend too much time on it. From a visual and sound standpoint, this game clearly has nothing in common with Super Nintendo, but the gameplay and difficulty are reminiscent of stuff like Contra 3, Earthworm Jim, and the treasure run and gun games on Genesis. It's a pretty standard run and gun game, and I will point out that a lot of people seem to complain about the difficulty, but if you're already familiar with and are already playing stuff on Super Nintendo Genesis NES or whatever, and you're already used to nut kicking difficulty, then I don't think you'll find this one all that out of the ordinary. The main selling point is obviously the stunning visuals, but you don't need some guy on the internet to tell you that. What you see is what you get here, a great looking game and a massive challenge, and it's well worth it. Cuphead is available on Steam and Xbox One. Cosmic Star Heroin is a retro-styled, turn-based RPG that looks and feels like a natural successor to a game like Phantasy Star 4. It's got that same late 90s anime sci-fi style to it you might see in the cowboy bebop universe, for example. This game really looks great. The combat has some unique twists, sure there's the usual physical attacks, magic spells, and items, but everything can only be used once per battle, and each attack is hinged on a style meter, which you have to build up to make sure you get the most out of that particular attack. My main nitpick with this one is that the story moves along way too quickly, it definitely feels rushed at certain points, but this is still a worthy playthrough. Cosmic Star Heroin is available on PS4, Vita, Switch, and Steam for Windows. Hyper Light Drifter is a top-down action RPG that plays like a cross between Zelda and Diablo, but what really jumps out here right away is the visual style. I'm not sure I've seen another game that looks quite like this one. This is a pretty typical adventure game structure here, you have your central town, you wander off in any direction and find a dungeon which culminates in a boss fight, you're equipped with an energy sword, which you can gradually level up, and each time you make contact with an enemy it grants your other more powerful weapons more ammo. So it's a nice balance of risk and reward. This game is really tough though, and demands you be as quick to dodge as everything as you are quick to attack. Overall, it's a great balance between typical dungeon structure and open world freedom. I should also mention that there's no dialogue here, but the game does manage to tell a good story without it, kind of like Super Metroid in that regard. This is definitely a unique experience that everyone should try out, whether it be for Steam, PS4, Xbox One, or Switch. Lord knows there's about a gazillion Metroidvania games floating around out there, everything from the Guacamelee games to They Bleed Pixels to Ori and the Blind Forest, on and on. And most of them are very good, but there's a few I want to call attention to starting with Hollow Knight, mostly because of how ridiculously deep every aspect of this game is. The game's wiki page has over 350 articles and over 10,000 pages. If you love stuff like Super Metroid or Symphony of the Night, then this is a must play. The atmosphere here feels similar to something like Limbo, the music and sound design are spot on, but the best part of Hollow Knight is the level design. This is one of those games that's hard to put down because I just want to see what's next. And it definitely helps that the user interface is well done also. For instance, to heal yourself, there's no cumbersome menu, you just hold the button and use however many potions you need. Even with warping to different parts of the map, you don't just simply appear there, you ride a giant beetle underground. Yeah, obviously this one's a bit advanced when it comes to what you'd see on the Super Nintendo, but sometimes it's just nice to see what a game like Super Metroid started and where we are with that style of gameplay nowadays, and Hollow Knight is a perfect example of that. It's available on Steam, Switch, PS4 and Xbox One. If you'd rather play a game with a more colorful and vibrant aesthetic, there's games like Fox and Forests. No, Fox News did not start a nature program, that's the name of the game. This one's much more straightforward than Hollow Knight, and it's more reminiscent of games like Monster World 4 for Sega Genesis, as in an action platformer with some RPG stuff thrown in. The main thing this game has going for it is the ability to change seasons at will. Yeah, there's obvious stuff like freezing water with winter and such, but they get a bit more inventive with it. For instance, no way to cross this area, change the season to autumn, and you can jump across falling leaves. No way to get off this platform, change it and climb the ripening fruit. Plus the levels are huge with lots of hidden areas and multiple paths. This game isn't perfect, I mean you can't run and fire your weapon at the same time, which kind of sucks, but it's still well worth checking out if you dig this kind of stuff. It kind of reminds me of Mickey's Magical Quest if it were a run and gun. Fox and Forest is available on Steam, Switch, PS4 and Xbox One. Yet another Metroid-ish action platformer I want to point out is Owl Boy. It stands out not only because it's primarily story-driven, but because the story itself can get pretty bleak. You play as a young owl humanoid named Otis who was born Mute, and because of that, the poor kid has next to zero confidence in self-esteem. It didn't help that his parents just up and vanished one day. But despite being Mute, Otis is very expressive. They did a great job with the sprite work here, and there is tons upon tons of NPC dialogue here. This is one of those games where you'll be rewarded for talking to everyone, even multiple times. The gameplay is about what you'd expect from a game of this ilk, but I should point out that Otis gains allies that compliment his abilities well, so the gameplay fits together nicely in that regard. Make no mistake though, the story is the selling point of this one, and it's well told. Owl Boy is available on Steam, Switch, PS4 and Xbox One. Maybe you want a more straightforward platformer, maybe something in the way of Sonic? Then there's Freedom Planet. Sure, it looks a bit like a blatant Sonic clone, and development did actually start out as a fan-made Sonic game, but it is its own thing. Plus there's the usual modern amenities in this one like split paths and hidden items that can be found with each of the three playable characters' different abilities. It does look and play an awful lot like Sonic, but there's an actual energy meter instead of the whole ring thing, and a special ability meter as well. This is a pretty good balance between the traditional Sonic Twitch controls and level design with traditional platforming. So yeah, if you like what you see here, then go check it out. Freedom Planet is available on Steam, Wii U, PS4, and was just released on Switch. Finally, the Kunio-Kun series started out on NES with River City Ransom being the most popular title. The series continued on Super Famicom, but none of the five games ever left Japan. Developers Konadus Creative said screw it and bought the rights to the series to create their own follow-up, River City Ransom Underground, and it is extremely faithful to the original River City Ransom. It's scary how accurate the artwork, movement, and animation is here. It definitely fits right in with the rest of the series. As you might expect, this plays a lot like River City Ransom, but just more of it. More characters, more moves, more weapons, and the same leveling system as in place. This is a fun beat-em-up that's a must-play if you enjoyed the original US NES game. It's available on Steam, and it may get console ports in the future. Alright, that's 10 titles for you to chew on. Obviously, there's a lot more out there, and maybe I'll get to some of them in part 3. I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.


The Loxford Research Centre is going to form a really important integral part of our research and development going forwards. Armours form an integral part of this region I think. It brings in about $200 million to South Australia. What we're hoping to do is collaborate with scientists to see if we can produce armours on a smaller footprint. Currently we tend to do them in 50 to 100 hectare lots. We're hoping that we can get it down to 10 or 20 hectare lots so if the scientists can help us with perhaps some rootstocks and get a more intense farming method if you like for the future that could make us more sustainable.


By the way again, should I show you my snack? Watch this. Winter is an amazing time for certain fruits. Eat fruit seasonally, right? This is persimmon. It's big persimmon, right? They, in the Western world, in Canada anyway, where I am, they usually sell the little persimmons. They're smaller like this, right? And you can eat them when they're hard. This guy is hard.  It's gritty. It doesn't taste good, right? You can't eat this like this. You buy them when they're like this because they transport them like this.  And this is what they look like when they ripen. They get squishy, right? Take a look, right? They get squishy. And then what you do, I have to show you this, and then what you do, you cut this baby in half, right? And it cuts easy, right? See? It cuts easy. You just have to go through the bottom part of it with your knife, and that I need to put it down on the table. Okay. It is the most amazing fruit you have ever eaten. One of the most amazing fruits you've ever eaten. Take a look. Now, it's like this, right? Take a look. It's gooey. Very gooey. And then you, it's like eating a kiwi, right? You scoop it out. It's like the flavor is unbelievable.  Okay. The texture is insane, like so good. Very unique, very unique. It's called a persimmon, persimmon, right? And this is the long version of the persimmon. The Persian stores have it. When it's ripe like this, you can leave it out when it's warm, but I like putting it in the fridge. When it's cold, it's phenomenal. And then you've got two halves of it, right? You can take it off. Don't puncture the skin if you can help it. And then you can scrape the skin and get more of the meat. In this process, you might accidentally puncture the skin, which is okay, but don't eat the skin. The skin's not edible. It's amazing. Have a napkin at the end because you're gonna have a little bit of spillage, right? Well, a little bit getting on your hands anyway. A taste, a temporary priest says a taste kind of like crossed between peach and mango. Maybe, maybe texture. Yeah, texture of a peach and a mango. The taste is unique though. It's, and then when you're done, the skin is like you're taking all the meat out, right? Just the skin left. And then you have another one that you can eat. And what I do usually, I eat a half at a time. And then put the other half in the fridge. Let it cool down while you're eating that. And then maybe eat the whole thing, maybe more. It's very good. Very delicious. Leon on SensorTube. Leon Moore. Gicho, have you tried tamarillo? I don't think I've tried tamarillo. I don't know what that is before. Is it like a citrus? Bannister, hey Chicho, came a little late. What fruit is that? It's a persimmon. It's a persimmon. It looks like this. These are big ones. In Canada, you usually get the smaller ones like this. And the smaller ones, you can eat when they're hard. These ones, you can't. You gotta wait until they go ripe. They go squishy. Otherwise, it's really gritty.  Right? Yeah, there it is. Greg J has spelt it out on SensorTube. Really delicious. Really delicious. And of course, pomegranates in the winter. Tamaran, yeah. Tamaran, in Persian, we call it tamarind. It's like black. It's got the seeds tart. You use it for cooking as well. Super good. Super good. Super good. Persimmons are good. Yeah, yeah. And never tried before. Definitely gonna grab some. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Try some. Make sure if you grab the big ones, you wait until they're ripe. Okay, make sure you do that. Make sure you do that. Shoe blues. Just broken skin. One with a soom. And by the way, when you're buying these, when you're buying these, don't buy any that are have what do you call it, have bruises on them. Right? When they're hard, don't buy any that have bruises. Because the bruises will ripen way faster while the other stuff stays hard, the other parts. So you want to buy these when they're not bruised, no cuts to them and stuff. Because you want it all to ripen sort of together. You don't want one part to ripen. The other part doesn't. Okay. The black spots, they don't really do anything. Like they, you know, I have ones that are like totally black. And they don't really affect the flavor. There are times when they have black spots on them. And the black spots, sometimes they go into the fruit as well. So you don't eat those. But the black color here, it doesn't really affect it. It doesn't really affect it.


I'm the last one. Thank you everybody. I'll be happy to flashlight. You can scan if you want. And if you have any questions. Okay, thank you Lali. If you have questions you can just approach Lali earlier because we are introducing the next session or the next speaker and it will be a panel with Rosie, with Emma, and with Lucy. So the title of their panel is Collaborative on Wiki Events Planning at Women in Red's Virtual Ideas Cafe. So while they are setting up, I would just like to share a trivia that we introduced and shared Wiki Women in Red Virtual Cafe at the Google event yesterday. Yes, you're welcome. So while Lucy's getting us set up, and I guess you did get us set up, I want to say hello and thank you everyone for joining us. I'm wearing red. I'm the co-founder of Women in Red. And my name is Rosie Stephenson Goodnight. I hail from the state of California in United States, North America. But my colleagues come from very far away other places. I'll let them introduce themselves. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Emma. My username is Chock Milk 03. I'm from Aotearoa, New Zealand. And yeah, very happy to be here and meet you all today. I've been editing for about three years now and involved in events planning with Women in Red only very recently. Hello, everyone. My name is Lucy. I'm from England. And yeah, I'm another editor as well. There are 8,100 page views of Women in Red's on Wiki main page in the last 30 days. 8,100 page views. That's a lot of people looking at what our community does and wondering how do we do it? By the start of this month, August 2023, Women in Red had facilitated 280 on Wiki events. Most of them were one month events. Some of them last a quarter. Some are contests. Some last a year. Some last longer than a year. 280 of them. And how do we do it? All of it on Wiki. No video calls. No emails. No telegram group. No WhatsApp. No in-person meetups on Wiki only. So how do we do it? Well, Women in Red has a robust on Wiki talk page with more than 31,000 comments made on it since our establishment in July 2015 at Wikimania, Mexico City. Planning events requires a special focus and we manage this on Women in Red's sub-page. We call it the Ideas Cafe. There we come up with ideas for our calendar of events. Some events, like I said, last a long time, a year. Some are collaborations with other Wikimedia communities such as our friends at Art and Feminism, Afro Crowd, Wiki Asia Month, CEE Spring, Wiki Loves Folklore, and so many more. We sort out needed tasks and then editors volunteered to complete the tasks. There's a list of common tasks so we don't forget what needs to be done. Promotion of our events happens each month via mass messaging. Next month, repeat. Boring. Let's hear some stories from the other members of Women in Red that aren't so boring. I would never describe you as boring, Rosie. So I just wanted to talk a bit about how I became involved because, as I said, it was very recent. I'd always assumed that there was some kind of hierarchy behind Women in Red and that very important people organized the events and decided what would happen and set them up. And I didn't even know the ideas cafe existed until earlier this year when I think someone tagged me in a question. And when I came across it, I was really interested to see the behind the scenes and I began watching the page and occasionally commenting. People would, you know, say, here's a new logo for the next event and I would say that looks fabulous. But I still didn't really contribute much. And then, so somebody asked a question, what does CEE Women stand for? And I was like, oh, I know this one. It's Central and Eastern European Women. And they said, great, can you create the event page for the editor phone? And I was like, oh, am I allowed to do that? And I was and I gave it a go. It was very easy because now that we've had 280 events, there's a lot of templates to follow. I created the page, someone else proofread it, like anything on Wiki if you make a mistake, someone else can fix it. And since then I've really enjoyed just contributing to Wikipedia in a bit of a different way by some of the behind the scenes stuff. And yeah, it turns out there is no hierarchy of very important people. If you're interested, go to the page and you can get involved as much or as little as you like, just like Wikipedia in general. So kind of similar to Emma. So I got involved with organizing through basically someone who's already organizing saying, oh, hey, can you can you set that up? So I care really deeply about Wiki Women in Red having a spread of geographical focuses. We have a geo focus every month. And I was suggesting lots of ideas. And then someone said, hey, could you just make these event pages for us? And very similarly, I thought, oh, am I allowed? And then I realized, well, yes, we're all around. We're all equal. And we all bring our contributions. I edit a little bit less at the moment. But what I do do is send our mass message every every month. So if you receive that, that will be coming from me. So thanks. And again, that came out of someone saying, oh, we need more people to send a mass message who can learn. And I thought to myself, oh, I do have less time. But actually, that's probably a task that I can do that I can take on. And and it's really important to me that I do make a contribution. And you don't have a community if you don't build it. And you don't you can't build a community if you're not doing things and taking on tasks. And so this is the thing that I feel that I can bring most concretely at the moment. So we thought it'd be really interesting for us to talk a bit about how we achieve consensus on our ideas page with Rosie. Do you know how many people are signed up to the project at the moment? Something right under a thousand. Yeah. So there's potentially a thousand different voices kind of bringing their ideas and their points of view as to what we should cover month by month and year on year. So how do we when when there is different points of you, how do we manage that within our ideas page? So Emma and I have got two examples to talk to you about. So the first one comes from 2021. And that's the image on the left hand side of the screen. You can go to the talk page and find it. And basically one of our, you know, editors that we're really fond of suggested that we had a focus on North America. And then if you look at the discussion, immediately another editor says, oh, I'm not sure. So much sure we do a lot of North American focus. How about territories of North America, which have a much less of a focus and much less content. And then in the discussion, which is always respectful, the idea kind of moved and transformed itself. So we ended up with a six month focus on former territories of all current territories of a range of different countries. So we looked at America, we looked at Hong Kong and Macau, we looked at the Dutch Caribbean, we looked at British territories, and we looked at Greenland and the Faroes. So an idea that kind of started as let's do something for places that are quite well covered already, quickly morphed into something that was more specific. And another example comes from the organization for one of this month's events. If you're interested, go to the page, have a look, contribute. It's the Indigenous Women Editathon, which has run in previous years. And it's one of my personal favorites to contribute to because coming from New Zealand, Maldi and Pacifica women are underrepresented on Wikipedia. And I noticed a discussion where one of the regular contributors was asking whether we should be doing this event at all. And so what that came out of was last year, some concerns had been raised about people creating articles without properly vetting claims of Native American or Indigenous Canadian identity. So this is something I hadn't personally had any familiarity with, but I understand that in those cultures, your Indigenous identity is not a personal choice that you define by your own ancestry, but it's about whether the tribe or tribal nation that you belong to recognizes you as a member. So a lot of people might say, oh, I'm one 16th Cherokee or something like that, but that doesn't mean they can call themselves a Cherokee woman. So someone was concerned that this might not be a suitable topic for an editathon because in the past there have been problems with people creating pages without properly checking. And there was a really, I wasn't involved in the discussion because when I saw it, it had already reached consensus. But I just thought it was such a respectful discussion, everyone was listening to each other, understanding concerns.  That's an absurd concern to have. But then there were other people pointing out very respectfully that, you know, there's a lot of Indigenous cultures around the world and without this editathon, many women would go unrepresented. So the decision was reached to put a note on the editathon page basically alerting people to these concerns and where they could go for more information, including another relevant Wiki project. And I just thought that was a really great outcome and really demonstrated how respectful and kind everybody is. We'd love to have more of you join us. Join us in any way that's comfortable for you. Of course, create more biographies and articles about women's representation. Create them in any language that is convenient for you. Women in red appears in 33 language Wikipedia's. Let's add some more to that. If you don't want to actually write the articles, but you love doing organizing work, we'd love to have you help us organize events. So just reach out to any of the three of us. We'd love to chat with you more. We're here through Wikimani and otherwise you can reach us. The way we always do on Wiki. Thank you very much. Now it's time for lunch. So let me give you some explanations. Lunch is out the doors and over towards my left where the concourse area is. That's place number one. But place number two, you can go right up to the main hall. The main hall is on the fourth level. We're on the third. So go up to the fourth level room, 401, 401. It's a huge room. It's got lots of food. It's got lots of drinks and it's got a big stage in the front. Join us up by the big stage in at 215. 215, see you there. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Wiki women in red. But before we let you go, can I please request everyone to please come forward for a photo session. May I request the AV team to please project on this projector, the Wiki women summit slide. So yes, you can have a background. So please come forward, everyone, and have a photo groupie groupie session. Thank you for a solid warm meaningful and informative morning session. Please come back at the plenary in 215 for our afternoon session and meet our distinguished fellow Wiki women later. So have a wonderful lunch. But before you go for lunch, let's have a group photo. I can be the one to take the photo. We will share the photo later and we will upload it on comments. Okay. Yes. I'm quite shy to ask, but can the guys take a picture of us? Oh, really? Okay, okay, okay. And one more, one more please. Thank you so much. So since we are going to be cranked up okay, okay. Let me do the choreography first. Okay. The others, the tall ones go up, go at the back. The, yes, the others can go just sit in the front. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe we will have to remove the slide because it's getting in the face of other participants. So we can do without the, yes. Okay, so much better. So kindly compress yourselves. And if you don't want to be, you can do the Miss Universe post.   Okay. So let me see if the visuals is good. Okay. Let's hope everyone gets, come here in front. Yes, come here in front. You can sit down here. You can sit down because you can't be seen. Come on, Miss Aloha. You can't be seen here. Yes, yes.


Okay well it is seven so I will call the meeting to order it is seven o'clock first order of business are the minutes of July 9th 2018 to approve the minutes of July 9th 2018 with any missions and amendments are to second page one page one under number item number two the minutes that should the voting should say three eyes and one abstention and Ted's county abstained from that vote on the minutes yes the anything else on page one if not page two and page three so hearing no other corrections to the minutes all those in favor of approving the minutes of July 9th 2018 say aye aye any opposed one abstention enjoy and this is time for public comment they wish to speak on this is your time yes sir please if you adjust identify yourself and you can be over there or if you wish hello thanks for having me here I'm Steve Meese I live with 2361 North Wilson Road and I'm here to talk about the project that popped up in my basically my front yard this morning they started installing the speed table right on the my southern property line they've got half of it installed I guess I'm here to just sort of talk about already I mean two hours they've got half of it one lane installed the noise and the level of noise that's increased in just the time since they've done that one lane is brought me here tonight during all the traffic studies that were done and the scoping and all the meetings that were held here that I've attended at no point was it ever indicated or implied that they were going to put a speed table at that point on the maps which I have copies of they were all down past the railroad tracks or they were up on the top you know by the cemetery so I'm just I just here to sort of go on the record that I feel like it's a bad place it's very loud it increases you know it really is impacting already my you know quality of life in my house you know I sat on the front porch today watching it and when the trucks go over rumbles one truck went over so hard that the back door went up and a fruit tray flew out and planted in the middle of the road which he then had to stop and come back and get anybody with a trailer it's a complete rattle loud rattle and most concerning for even just the average car is that right in front of my house directly is an acceleration point that's where you know when you come over a speed table you've slowed down and you take off you know to you know I think average out your speed so you know considering the level of mufflers in Vermont it's it's really of concern so I'm just here to sort of go on the record I'd love to see a reconsideration of its placement especially since I mean there was no indication there was no notice in the town or anything that we were going to be you know that was the placement of it as a follow-up to the traffic study so in my understanding from talking to the road crew and I spoke to Bruce Bruce whore this afternoon who very kindly listened to my concerns and I you know I don't want to be the nimby guy or in this case the not in my front yard guy but it just it feels like the wrong place for it to be and it might my understanding is they're going to put one up by the cemetery on North Wilson Road as you know if anything perhaps do it there and get people used to the fact that there's some sort of speed bump or traffic calming coming into it and getting used to that rather than doing it in front of my house I mean I ask the town manager to talk to Bruce about the the placement and to see if there's anything that we can can be done just as a question is there any reason why that wasn't done going like down the hill I mean I know right where Steve's house is and there's like three houses right in a row there I'm surprised that it was put there as well and I can't remember the what the scoping study and what we agreed upon where the locations were didn't seem to be like it was down that far but I don't have the maps that were in the scoping study if you would give those to Rick or we would probably have those any way up to public works now to take a look at it and see whether it's been done right or not what was your understanding of given what my understanding was that they were they were looking at putting in three speed tables from the bridge to the railroad tracks like the Chapman Lane and then the only thing that was indicated from the railroad tracks to this bottom of the hill there was a welcome Williston sign to sort of indicate that this is a neighborhood and to slow things down they were also looking at putting speed table just down from a fontane lane where you go to the sandpit and then there was it appears to be one more down maybe closer there's another one I'm not sure which the house that's sort of on the curve there so I mean watching traffic patterns just for afternoon seeing the way people drive you know they rush up to it and then they slow down there's a psychology to it they either like creep over it and then take off or they just kind of keep going or there's a couple people who just like you know I don't care I'm just going to go but it does kind of back up the traffic as you you know especially in the rush hour tonight you know you have five or six cars coming one slows down and they all kind of slow down and so it might create an issue on the curves to you know if you're coming down the hill you know to all of a sudden coming to a line of cars are slowing down for a speed bump so that might not be the best place for it either so there's no easy solution but I hope you will reconsider or at least look into the choices that have been made so far we will appreciate it thanks any other person who wishes make any public comment on any issue tonight if not then we'll move on to the by law violations