seems to work right. Oh, well. Okay, there we have it. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another coordinating call of DM25, a radical political movement for Europe with subversive ideas you won't hear anywhere else. 2022 is upon us. I'm Meroen Kellele, and today we're going to ease into our usual discussion of what's wrong and how could we fix it by finding out what our panel thinks of don't look up. Yes, I'm talking about Netflix's satirical climate change movie that's hit Earth like a comet, Ho Ho, over the last couple of weeks. Is it a hellishly unfunny apocalyptic mess as the legacy media have put forward, or is it the wake-up call we all desperately need to get active on one of the critical issues of our time as the film's phenomenal success with everyday folk would suggest. Now you out there watching this, if you've got any comments, thoughts, suggestions, rants, anything you want to throw at us or tell us what you thought of the movie, then please do drop your comments in the YouTube chat and we'll read them out to the panel. Let's kick it off with Maya. Well, Mechad and I actually read what you wrote about the movie. It would be also interesting afterwards to hear your views on it. And the thing that I first thought about the movie when I heard that it was a movie on climate change, I have to say as somebody that also writes for film and TV that I was very in a way confused when I saw the plot of the movie with actually having a comet, deadly comet hit the Earth and that being the metaphor of climate change. And after I saw the movie, it really made me thinking about why they were saying that the movie is actually on climate change and not something else. When we talk about capitalism, we often say that it would be more realistic to imagine a meteor hitting the Earth than imagine the end of capitalism. And here we have actually a comet, a deadly comet meteor or whatever that is supposed to hit the Earth and that being a metaphor on us being aware of the climate change issues. The first problem that I have with this, of course not talking and spoiling the whole movie which we tend on doing in these talks is that I was thinking as we have a comet that is supposed to hit the Earth which is something very sudden and something that is like a deus ex machina coming to change our lives. More as this pandemic happened than the climate change because I think the whole situation with the climate change is that it's very gradual and very slow and that it's happening every day and that we are all a part of it and that we are the one causing it in a way. And here we have something from the outside that is supposed to open our eyes. And I think that this is maybe for me the biggest ideological problem with the movie that it is raising awareness of how people act and of course how capitalism and big tech and corporations and government act with the whole, with the big catastrophe happening. But I think that this metaphor of a meteor isn't in a way wrong because then we have the whole situation of us not causing the meteor and also the comet and also the other thing which I had a problem with was that we have a solution for it and that solution is actually very easy and we choose not to use it which I do not think that is the thing with climate change. I think that the solution for climate change is something that is not easy at all and it is not a way as we're going to stop it now or we are not going to stop it. I think that first of course we have to talk about how it is supposed to stop and I think that the good thing about this movie with the whole comet hitting the earth thing is the division, the problem of dividing. And I think of course that is the problem that we have as a movement have to face. How can we talk to people that are on the other side and that do not see the actual, if we can call it truth and the truth here is of course the comet hitting the earth which was a scientific fact in the movie that it's going to happen 99% or something like that. So I think that this is the question that is interesting in the movie and that it is actually for me a story about the media reality and about fake news and about the truth in media and how we can deal with it today and how we have to whenever we think of a movement that we always have to think about the free press and how can we make the press free? Because I was also thinking about the Iraq war logs and the collateral murder video and how the people saw this like don't look up in a very don't look up sense. And it was very interesting for me to think of how many people still think that the Julian Assange is in prison even though he showed a fact that even has scientific proof in a way. And we still have these divisions everywhere. And I think that this is a problem that we have to talk about. And I think that for me that was the interesting part of the movie. And also another interesting point for me was the character of the president of the United States that Adam McKay actually chose not to make a parody out of Trump, which I thought he would do but he made some kind of a parody that's in a way made like some kind of a combo version of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And in this way he really made this like creature this monstrous creature that consists also the Democrats and the Republicans. And in this way he may be in a way said, okay, this is not also a solution we have to think of another solution. So I think that is maybe one of the good parts of the movie. So yeah, these are some of the questions that I was thinking about, but yeah, I would like to see what others think about it also. Interesting, thank you, Maya. Patricia, what did you think? Well, we could say we could love or not the movie for sure, but there are two facts in my opinion to look at. The first one is that this is a comedy, I would say an horror comedy which push a lot, at least many of us talking about the movie itself. It push people to create a public debate on this movie. Now, the movie is about climate change, but never mention climate change. And that's it's interesting. And in my opinion, this is the point of the movie because we don't want to accept the reality of climate change for what it is in the reality. We are talking about our possible global extinction, climate change concerning our survival in the planet. So that's the element I love more in the movie and the way to approach it. And it's also interesting to look at Leonardo DiCaprio way of acting because it seems to act like all of us when we try to convey that the topic, it's not really a joke. We are running time and we really have to focus to target our aim soon, right now. So finally, in my opinion, I could say I love the movie. I would love to have so much movie able to create debates, like for example, we are doing right now. Thank you. Thank you, Patricia. I mean, you touched on some important points there. Climate change doesn't make good art in general. I mean, something which is a long-term problem, it's very difficult to make that something that really shakes people and wakes them up. And that's why that metaphor I think really worked. I think when you get the pitch right as they did and I was concerned when I first started watching the movie like, oh, am I gonna find this really offensive or just flat out frustratingly wrong? But when you tune into it, you understand what it's saying and you understand the seriousness of its message. And I think it's enormously powerful that way. And the reaction to it, I think was also very revealing. We can talk about that later though. Burrell, what's your take? I think it really made the people aware of what is really going between, I mean, the conscious people and the politicians. What are the priorities of the politicians and what are the priorities of people who are involved in science or in more disguised realities? In Turkey, it was not a big issue, this film, because Netflix showed another interesting movie in Turkey which is called The Club. And it really described what has happened to the Jewish community from 1930s up to 1950s. And suddenly, the people in Turkey realized that they were also very harsh and very wild against the Jewish community in Turkey. So this is the discussion at the moment. Why this look up was not so interesting because what is happening in that film, apart from this big issue is coming onto the world and will destroy the world. It really described what is happening here between the people, between the political parties. It really showed the reality in Turkey. So this part was interesting for the Turkish people. Thanks, Burrell. I mean, a couple of comments from the chat here. Matt is wondering why anyone would be interested in this when it's all about American reality. Not sure I agree. And someone else here quotes Adam McKay, the filmmaker, who said that the three biggest stories of our time are towering income inequality, the total takeover of government by corporations and the looming climate catastrophe, of course.  I think it works very well that way as a way of reflecting some of the critical issues of our time. Yannis, what's your take? I thought it was a great movie and very, very timely and very necessary. And Maya, I disagree entirely with you. It's exactly the fact that they chose an exogenous threat, a threat that is not caused by us. You see, what they're saying is this, on climate change, on a number of things that we are responsible for, there is room for debate, there is room for doubt. Is it man-made or human-made or not? But here is, look, this huge rock is coming to us, okay? There can be no debate about it. And yet, even if this was happening, right? Even if it was beyond doubt, the broken politics and the oligarchic economics is such that we were doomed because we have a completely and utterly broken system. It's the equivalent of what Marx once said that the capitalist in the end is going to be very happy to sell the rope by which he's going to be hanged. So this is the equivalent of drilling for rare earths on the comet that is coming. This is the Elon Musk character in the movie. So even when there is a clear solution, I mean, you're right, when it comes to climate change, well, we know what is going to do us, that is continuing to do what we're doing, COP26 and all that rubbish, okay? But here, there is this comet coming, you've got nukes, you can go and nuke it out of the sky and you're not doing it because of the fake news of the establishment which is serving the rope selling capitalists who will actually hang himself in the pursuit of short term profits. And I think that that's a great metaphor. And also there is something very important. The broken politics is depicted brilliantly in the movie because you have the establishment which is peddling fake news in the process of trying to enrich itself.  And the result is that you have cacophony. You have a complete, just noise, no signal, absolutely no possibility of having conversation. And I think the movie was brilliant at capturing that. And if I may end by alluding to a Greek movie that came out in 1974, which I'm sure nobody remembers except me, maybe another two or three people because it reminded me of it. The guy, the same delicious use of metaphor. The movie was called The Colors of the Iris, The Iris of our Eyes, okay? It was written in 1973, filmed in 1974. In 1974, we still had the fastest theaters. So this was a movie that was supposedly absurd and hugely subversive, but so clever that the censor didn't pick up the subversions. So the idea was this, there is this film crew, they're on a beach and they are filming an advertisement.  And there is a man who's not part of the set, just a man who walks past the actors and the crew holding an umbrella, okay? He spoils the shot by stepping into the shot.  He walks into the sea with the umbrella. He sinks into the sea. The umbrella floats away and he disappears, right? That's it. And, you know, some of them jump into the water to see where he is and so on. There is a big search for this man. And of course, they don't find him. And then there's a whole cover-up by the state, by the film company to pretend that this was part of the advertising campaign because the state could not handle doubt. The idea that people didn't know what happened to this man, you know, caused doubt and the state and the system could not afford doubt. So they are purging anyone who is claiming that this man actually walked into the sea and disappeared. I don't know why it reminded me of that possibly because the point I want to make is that you can take an absurdity and look, you know, don't look up is based on an absurdity and use it in order to expose the broken politics and the authority and the exploitative economics of the world we live in. Thank you, Ennis. Yeah, just to switch gears a little bit actually on that. Something that happened with Look Up was that it really offended film critics, establishment film critics, and yes, and really resonated with everyday people. So when the establishment film critics, when people were writing about this in the FT and the Guardian at the beginning of December, it was like, there's nothing to see here. There's nothing to see here. And then people actually did see it and they really loved it. And you can see that in the disconnect between the two ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. And some of the people that were in the film were interviewed and one of them, I think it was Meryl Streep who played the Trump character, she said that entertainment and comedy are anesthetics that can disarm your audience, various message. And it struck me that so much activism these days is it's so heavy and these are very important issues. I'm not suggesting that we make light of important things, but if you get the pitch right, you can really make an impact in terms of raising awareness that perhaps you couldn't do by telling people how bad everything is all the time. And I'd like to also know your thoughts on that, all of you, like what did we learn from this about activist messages and how to convey them? Maya, I'm gonna bring you in because Yanis mentioned you in the last part. So you say what you want and then we'll move on with the list of people who were... Yeah, I'll just be short because Yanis, you said you completely disagree with me but I do not think you disagree. I actually think you disagreed on me disagreeing on the metaphor. I actually did not say that the movie did not make a sense on showing the world and the problems, of course, the government and the corporations and the big tech that was, I actually said the complete contrary but you agreed that the metaphor was good and you said that it is good that we see that something from outside is hitting us and even then we do not know what to do about it but I think the problem with the climate change issue which was the thing that Adam McKay said that he was trying to raise the awareness of is wrong, it is an awareness for capitalism but not on climate change. It is awareness of a great pandemic hitting the earth and doing what it did much more than climate change. I think that the climate change issue is much deeper and in that way I think some of the reviews the film critics that were good were actually talking about that that it did not raise awareness on things that we don't know already and I think that the biggest problem of the movie is that it did not give any kind of an answer how we can do things differently and I think that's also a big problem with the movie is the ending of the movie because at the end the thing is that capitalism survived even the meteor and in my sense I think that also as somebody that is very pessimistic in things that I do I try to find some kind of a story some kind of a reflection that will give an answer that is different than what you just said showing only the bad things because here I think that this movie at the end really showed only the bad things and even the ending says that so I just wanted to say that. Okay, cool. Not sure I agree but let's, oh yeah someone else has got a little comment here which I quite like. Hell, satire has been long overdue when Facebook started putting warning labels on satire all was lost. Well said mate. Juliana. Well a lot has been said and I have to, one of my thoughts a bit but well it's not a hopeful movie obviously by the end to judge it's not a hopeful movie and it certainly doesn't provide the answers to the problems it shows but I think it is in terms of raising awareness it did a good job and I think the core topic of the movie is to show the people of the machine. So you have the presidents, the reporters it's all about how they act and how they don't want to give in to the thought that maybe having this media this news show for example being more serious about the topic is not even a question for them they're just going on with how they think it's right to present topics and they go like you have to be positive about things and it's just totally ignorant of the fact what they are just being told. So I think it's about zooming in into the characters of this whole machinery and not so much about climate change the movie is in fact not about climate change at all but we are comparing it to the disaster of climate change because we know that the ignorance there is the highest like in the movie. But I like like two characters in the movie I mean not like them but I like how they were shown was once what Maya already said was about the president that it was a female president being like a Trump kind and also the secretary of state which is her son and it's the role of Jonah Hill and it's so great that the I mean this is a huge spoiler so I'm sorry but kind of when at the end you see in his face that he's left alone and you know that he believed out of highest loyalty that those people, his mother who's the president of the United States is in charge and will handle it. I think in his mind it goes well she wouldn't let us all die, right? She wouldn't. And I think he's in real disbelief until the end and then she forgets him, you know she goes away to, I don't think anyone survived to be honest in this movie but let's say she goes away to survive and leaves her own son. So that is telling I think about the character of the people that are in fact in nowadays realistic and politics. So I like that they went into, you know the character of the problems and the humans and also the humans on the street were completely different in the bars. They were concerned actually. So whenever you saw people not from the machine I call it like that just for now whenever you saw normal people they were like, what's going on? We want to know what's going on. So it's not that everyone was ignorant.  They were just nobody cared about their opinion and what they're doing. So Juliana, you were one of these people who watched the entire thing and then watched the credits and then waited for the last thing. Cause that scene with Jonah Hill was the very, very last thing in the movie. Yeah. Now I think you make a good point. The regular people that resonated with regular people. So when you say Maya, look what we are we knew all this stuff already. Well, we're members of DM 25 here and activists but does regular people know all these things to the extent that we do? Do they know the ins and outs and what they can do? So I think there's a different audiences and different folks, strokes for different folks. Who we got next? Dushan, a fire in the belly activists. Thanks my friend. I liked how the oligarchy was stripped down and we could have seen how authority comes from money and formal power and not the knowledge.  And regarding the comments from the YouTube I liked it about that it's only contextual to the US. That's why I want to bring non-EU perspective even though I'm from Europe, I'm from Montenegro but here it's completely different. I was working with an NGO for animal rights and environmentalism and let me give you a brief update a brief story what happened. Basically, fur farms were banned in Serbia. That's why we rushed out of fear that they will move here to our ministry for agriculture and they took us they wanted to speak with us and we send them report with the scientific references.  It's one of the proportionally looking it's one of the most damaging practices regarding the environment. Also you need like 100 to 200 Chinchillas to be killed just for one per coat, sorry. So it's incredible and we went to talk there out of fear that those will move from Serbia. And then we just heard out of colonial narrative saying we are the leaders in this region we don't care what happened in Serbia and what happened in Bosnia but we want to know what are the laws in Benelux, Germany and the rest of Western countries. So yeah, we should and we need to strip down the oligarchy and then let's see that we are all subordinates to the billionaires, to Elon Musk, to Jeff Bezos, to Mark Zuckerberg and let's cry together then when we see that or not or join DM and help us bring them down. I prefer the second option Dushan that's dm25.org slash join if you'd like to become a member. You did. Yes, absolutely agree. I immediately recognized that this character, Peter Ischerwell is just a mix of all four of the big tech names which are somehow treated almost like saviors by our society as if they are trying to save us or to lead humanity into a new age when really even in the movie they're just trying to pull our hard strings in order to get money and for some people it's working. So I think that one of the things that this movie has shown is that our work as progressives or as people who want to change anything in the world our work has become more difficult compared to let's say the 60s because okay, it was always hard for scientists to get heard but now with the conspiracy theories and social networks distracting people all the time it's probably harder but that's not the big thing. The big thing is that we have now another boss another end boss if I phrase it that way. So originally the path to change might have been first the science needs to be heard needs to convince people then we have the obstacle of politicians wanting to do only that which increases their popularity and even if something increases their popularity they won't do it if the money says they must not do it and we still have these three obstacles but now we have a fourth obstacle which is that the money people can also not be as easily convinced because it might be just one young guy in the 20s who believes in the data that he sees and just risks everything. I mean originally we had money overlords in the let's say ExxonMobil a big corporation, right? Or Kruppstahl in Germany they still care about their legacy they still have boards with control of more than a dozen people it's not one person and especially it's not one young person that just believes that algorithms will solve everything and that is I think a huge problem that people have not quite realized that we give the power to these completely unqualified individuals. And it's one thing, okay in the movie this guy miscalculated his data told him something about exploiting the asteroid and the meteor and actually the data was different and then he just says sorry and steps on his spaceships and we all die and he doesn't. But now imagine this thing happening in another situation let's say Facebook, Facebook's algorithm somehow misinterprets the data and gets everyone addicted to conspiracy theories and right wing extremists or another case armed drones. I'm not sure how known it is but say Turkey and some other countries are actively using armed drones in conflicts like in Syria and in Libya and these drones are autonomously killing people. So let's say that one of these drones has some bad data fed into it and instead of attacking fleeing Kurds it turns and it attacks Amman, a major city. It flies back to Istanbul and attacks us here. What's happening then? Is there also like some programmer turning his back and flying away? Thank you, Judith. A lot to think about there and some comments from the chat.  It has an underlying synthetic left narrative of degrowth. Someone else environmental science is complicated stuff it's not just about CO2. There's no nuke like technical solution. The movie doesn't capture the complexity of the issue. True, but I'm not sure it would have been very effective if it had captured the complexity of the issue and got lost in debates. That's the whole point. Animal farm was not about animals. It could really be very simple. Even if there was no complexity we would fail. Even if we had a solution we wouldn't use it. Lucas February and then Juliana. Go for it. I think all of the major questions that the movie raises have been approached here. And I think we heard some brilliant points being made except for one which is why was the general charging for Free Snacks which is what still hasn't been answered to me. The Pentagon has a 700 billion dollar budget and the general has to go out and do that. Tells you all you need to know about them I guess. Good point Lucas, Juliana. That's a very good point indeed. And I don't know either but I think you're right. But it tells us just about where his position is. Yeah, I just wanted to say that I think the conclusion of the movie at least for me can only be that we cannot handle billionaires. We cannot handle these powerful, they shouldn't exist literally because how are we supposed to fight with activism or politics or in any way against someone like the movie maybe, I don't know how the guy was called but must and so on. So the only way for us to not run into this situation it's just to not have them in the first place having this kind of power and this kind of money. And when it comes to the politicians it's just the question of how do we stop electing those politicians? And I mean we have this vicious circle of either we vote for the neoliberal candidate or the fascist candidate and we ping pong between them but I'm asking myself like how do we break out of the circle and I don't have the answer because when it always comes down to having to support the neoliberal candidate because they have the money to run with a big campaign and having those people elected who won't do anything like the fascist candidate like Trump. I mean Hillary Clinton or Trump or Biden I think it's all the same in the end and so this is like a huge question of our societies. How do we get politicians who are taking responsibility and in terms of the billionaires getting rid of them to answer also Mehlan's question on what do we get out of it? And I think we have to be as we already are and we are more radical with what we want from the system and how to change it. Thanks, Juliana. Any other comments on don't look up? Maya, did you have your hand up? No, anyone else? There's the quick one if I may. Yeah, go for it. The big tech guy, yes, there are elements of Zuckerberg there and there are elements of Elon Musk and there are elements of Steve Jobs. But there is also, and I think Beryl would be interested to hear that, in my view, there is anti-warhold as well. This aloofness and charm that he has, that's not Elon Musk. Only Musk is, it's not Zuckerberg. It's anti-warhold. And if you combine the big tech with, you know, Pop Art of the 1960s, this is what you get. And I think that was a very clever twist that they added to the aesthetic of the movie. Right, yeah. He was a kind of amalgamation of lots of different people, I think that character. Something I really loved and I thought was really poetic was the, you remember when Peter Isherwalder, the Silicon Valley character, he just demolishes Leonardo DiCaprio by telling him how he's going to die because he's got so much data on him.  That's a bad take on it. But he says that and it's so brutal.  But in the end, he doesn't die alone. He had a final small victory against power as the comet is hitting the earth. Yes, I should have said before, we've totally spoiled the movie for all you guys out there that haven't watched it. But yeah, if you didn't know that the comet was gonna hit the earth, have you been living under a rock? Johannes, go for it. We were talking about the character of Peter Isherwal. I wanted to make one point which is actually, because I enjoyed that character the most, although it's also the most disturbing maybe in his fullness of different kind of things coming together and especially the power that such a crazy person has. But you can, I'm actually, lately have been, since I'm seeing a lot of commercials about crypto, crypto.com, crypto coins, bitcoins, non-fungible tokens, NFTs and so on. I've been looking a little bit into that sphere just out of interest. And so the craziness, this character, there's a bunch of them, there's a whole universe of them that you can, if you look into it on Twitter or whatever social network you wanna follow these people, it's real. They live in a completely different world. They are doing things that are a little bit contrary to solving a climate crisis or it's something I wanted to say for maybe everyone who wants to see the real part of this kind of world can find it nowadays now as we speak, if you look into the right channels. Thanks, Johannes. Burrell. I remember the last scene in the film, all the politicians naked and the atmosphere was heaven as described in Bible and Quran. I think this was also a comment on actually how the, how conservative and religiously speaking politicians imagining themselves in heaven. That's right. And then the Trump character gets her face eaten off by a bronzer rock. Okay, let's switch gears again and move to, well, away from satirical reality, well, let's start again, away from satire and into reality. Janice, bring us back down to earth. That's my job, right? It's your job. Nice plan. Look, on New Year's Eve, something remarkable happened. The members of the Eurogroup, the finance ministers of the Eurozone, of member states of the European Union that use the Euro came up with, came up, put together supposedly Colthard, a letter to Europeans in which they celebrated the 20 years since our ATMs in the Eurozone began to turn out euros instead of Deutsche Mark, Frank, Drachma's, Paseta's, Liresen's and all that. The reason I'm bringing it up is because think about it. This is a major statement by our finance ministers. What they decided to do was to celebrate triumphantly the Euro as a testament, they say to our European unity. And what I found remarkable, astounding, was what happened after the publication of the letter. Precisely nothing. No one actually talked about it. No one celebrated the letter. No one said, oh yeah, great. This is what our finance minister's saying. There was no commentary that was positive and no one dissented and no one criticized them. Silence. Now, where have we ended up? After 20 years of a common currency which constituted a clear and present danger for European democracy, which created humanitarian crisis all over Europe, which has inflicted a major blow at European capital as well as a whole, which was such a spectacular failure that the whole world has been taking the mickey of Europe for having created such a bodily designed currency. We have the 20th anniversary. This letter comes out at nothing. I think that is, you know, it's almost like don't look up. It's this kind of denial of the significance of the Europe. Now, how would have been less worried if there was a celebration of the Europe? But there wasn't even that. Our finance minister asked us to celebrate and it is as if we didn't have it. It was as if that letter was never published. So let me come up, well, let me sum up an article that I just wrote up for my usual monthly column for Project Syndicate. It hasn't appeared yet. It will appear in the next couple of days. But let me just tell you what I think is significant from the spare you having to read it. Our great and good finance ministers of the Europe group are celebrating their letter, the Europe, as a major achievement in the context of European integration. The truth is exactly the opposite. The Europe has contributed to the disintegration and the divergence.  Some of us are old enough to remember. What the Europe was all about. It was all about convergence and integration. The Euro by doing away with the cost of converting from French francs to Deutsche Mark and so on and doing away with the fear that a currency would devalue within the Eurozone area, that eliminating these risks and costs would bring us all closer together that we will create deeper integration terms of trade, more cross border trade. Well, between now 2001 and 2021 or 2022, cross border trade has been increased by 10%. In the rest of the world, it increased by 30%. Between European Union countries that didn't get the Euro and the ones that didn't get the Euro, it went up by 60%, 63%. So the Euro, if anything, it impeded cross border trade. The second great promise of the Euro was that it would create more greater convergence when it comes to living standards, not so, not so. There was much greater convergence and living standards between Germany and Poland, Holland and Denmark, Austria and the Czech Republic, that is, Eurozone countries on the one hand and countries that didn't have the Euro on the other, then it did within the Eurozone. There was this promise that there would be greater price stability, not so. Greece had greater inflation rate in the good times than Bulgaria that didn't have the Euro. And during the bad times after we came crashing down in 2010 here in Greece, we had massive deflation, falling prices, compared to the Czech Republic, compared to Serbia, compared to countries that were either outside the EU or in this IDEU and outside the Europe. Another great promise was that there would be investments, investment flows within the Euro area, not so. There were huge amounts of money being lent, debt being created. So German banks and French banks lending huge quantities of money to the Irish, to the Italians, to the Greeks, to the Portuguese, to the Spaniards, but that's not investment, that's loans. If you look at foreign direct investment, most of the foreign direct investment was between countries like Germany and countries like Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, countries that didn't have the Euro. So, and so on and so forth, productivity rates. No, there was no convergence in productivity growth between the north of the Eurozone and the south of the Eurozone. So in other words, every single promise made on behalf of the Euro was violated. The Euro failed by the criteria of its initiators, its architects, not by my criteria, not the criteria of the left, not the criteria of the end, not about equality now, and I'm not talking about social justice, forget that. Even by the criteria of the neoliberals, the Euro failed spectacular. Some may say that, okay, that may have been the case, but Europe learned its lessons since the Euro crisis, that the finance ministers in their letter watched lyrical about the extent to which Europe learned its lessons, and especially during the pandemic, we have proven that we were capable of creating new institutions that didn't exist before and therefore reinforced the Eurozone and overcame its initial problems. For instance, they mentioned the European stability mechanism, which is this bailout fund that allows countries that are going bankrupt to borrow. Of course, at the expense of huge austerity that crushes their civilization, there's populations even more. The banking union they mentioned, they mentioned the recovery fund that was created during the pandemic. I don't want to take too much time going through each one of those reforms. It's no doubt that these were large reforms and these were important institutions that were created, large-scale institutions. Yet, here is my verdict, personally speaking, which if I had plenty of time, I would be able to substantiate, I believe. Each one of these changes were only done or carried out or implemented at the very last moment, and they were the minimum they could do. So as not to do that, which was necessary, a political and fiscal union. In other words, to put it more rhetorically, if I may, they were prepared to change everything to make sure that everything stays the same. And they've succeeded in maintaining the destabilizing character of the Euro, a common currency that continues to create more divergence between countries and more inequality within countries. In other words, the Euro continues to be a failure, both by neoliberal standards and by progressive standards. Now, and this is how I'm going to end. If this is so. Oh, you froze the establishment of HACTA system. Can't get this off. Ah, sorry about that. You're back. Go for it. Go for it. I'm back. So the question is, why is it that even though, if I'm right, that it was completely failed, why are they so keen not to discuss this failure, to celebrate it and not to make the changes which are necessary in order to fix it, in order to turn it into a useful instrument as opposed to a destructive instrument? And the answer I have, which I'm sure you've heard me say this before, but I think it's pertinent to repeat it once again, is that the Euro constitutes a triumph for the oligarchy. Because it is the very first time in the history of capitalism that essentially they have eradicated even the possibility of a significant transfer of wealth from the oligarchy to the many. Now, in capitalism generally, the political system is created in such a way, is constituted in such a way, as to minimize the possibility that wealth will be transferred from the few to the many. How often is there such a serious redistribution of wealth from the few to the many? Not very often, but it has happened. Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 did it. Lyndon Johnson in 1965 did it with a great society. Poverty was reduced in the space of 18 months from 22% of the population in the United States to 10%. Willi Brandt in Germany ruled over a major distribution of wealth from the oligarchy in Germany, in Western Germany then to the majority. It didn't happen very often. What the Euro did was to ensure that it can never happen in Germany, in France, in Greece, in Spain. That is a major triumph for the oligarchy. They are prepared to hang on to this triumph, even if the Euro fails, even according to neoliberal standards, even if it deals a major blow at European capitalism. Because European capitalism is falling fast behind Chinese capitalism, American capitalism, Indian capitalism and so on. But this is our oligarchy. They've created a common currency in such a way by refusing to create a proper federation of fiscal union and political union that is a major clear and present danger to European society, but it is great for them. In that sense, Meron, and you will, I think, appreciate my conclusion. It's not that far away from, don't look up. Nice to loop that. Good. Thank you, Yanis, for that. The state of the Euro, 20 years on.  Thanks. Yanis already made this analogy, and I thought this is my punchline. But I happen to be in Croatia right now, and they are about to join Eurozone after already being European union members and now a member state. And now we are having this anniversary when we're even the founders of Euro are realizing it's not working, but Croatia is still going to enter the Eurozone and take the word on the street. I mean, people are just, it's like they're being cooked like frogs in warm water slowly, because it's just the way it is for them. They don't know what the solution is or what the solution could be. What's the alternative of joining the Eurozone as the same as the non-EU countries? What would be an alternative except joining the EU because quote, unquote, we cannot stand alone outside of this. Why can't we stand alone? That's what people say. Because even... Poland is successful because they don't have the Euro, because they have the Zloty. Bulgaria is better off without the Euro. Why can't you be in the EU without the Euro? Denmark, Sweden. I don't think Sweden is suffering because they don't have the Euro, okay? Sorry for budding in again, but think about it. Let's move away from Europe just for a moment. Take Canada and the United States. Now they are very integrated. They are very closely related societies and economies. Let me put it this way. If Canada had adopted the US dollar or they had a monetary union, Canada would be a death colony today, okay? To say about we can't stand alone. We can't have our own currency. It's simply idiotic. There is no rationale to it whatsoever. Take Norway and Sweden. Norway and Sweden are close. They're closely related economically, culturally and so on. The reason why Norway has done reasonably well, well, very well, is not only because it's got oil, but because it kept its own currency. Take, and I'll finish again with Germany and Poland. Poland has converged with Germany more than any other economy in Europe because it has kept the slotty. When the rest of us Europeans with the Euro were entering the Eurozone, the slotty devalued by 24% vis-a-vis the Euro. Then after 2004, it revalued by 50%. Then in 2008, when the financial crisis happened, it devalued by 30%. This is why they have converged because the exchange rate has been used as a shock absorber. So the idea that, oh, we can't stand alone is simply a lie by the oligarchy in Croatia, in Bulgaria, in Greece, in Italy, who care about only one thing. They want their assets in their own country to be valued in Deutschmark. That's it. And they are prepared to sacrifice everybody else. It's a bit like that character in the movie. One thing to drill the, what is it, the comet for errors at the expense of destruction. Peter Isherwell, the character that comes up often, I think definitely one of the most devastating depictions of power in that movie. And with that, I think we're going to wrap up. We're at the top of the hour. So thank you out there for watching us and for your comments. And I know we've done a lot of talk here today, but our core business is radical subversive confrontation of the establishment and bringing down the oligarchy. And if you would like to bring, to join us in that effort, then the address is dm25.org slash join. Thank you again. We'll see you at the same time, same place, two weeks from now. Take care and stay safe.


Appalachian Wireless has some of the best data rates in wireless on our plans and not to mention an amazing deal on one of our hottest smartphones, but that's all the time I have to explain. See store for details. Better service. Bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. Millions of dollars have been brought into the area to help treat people with substance use disorders, but next to nothing has been done to help those who complete treatment transition back into society. A lot of the people that we work with in treatment end up going back into the same situation that they came out of, where you have no safe place where there's no drugs. Research shows that if you do live in an environment that is conducive to your recovery, such as a halfway house or a sober living community, that not only does it help you stay cleaner longer, but it helps with employment, the rate of maintaining employment, and the fact that there are no new legal charges incurred. The person stays out of the legal system also. The need in this area for transitional housing is not going unseen. And now, thanks to a church in Preston'sburg, it's not going unmet. This is a building that's 50 by 100, and it's what we call the Grace Place, and it's going to be a rehab, well, not a rehab facility, but more of a people call it a halfway house, but I like to call it a full house because it's going to be a facility to help women. I had a dream one night, and I got up and I told my wife, I said, let me tell you what I dreamed last night. She said, before you tell me, let me tell you what I dreamed. And our dreams were identical for this place, and we just know it's God. If you would like to volunteer with construction of Grace Place, call the number listed on your screen. Reporting from Preston'sburg, I'm Shawn Allen for EKB News.


Hi. Thanks for coming to my talk. Who of you is only here for the matrix talk afterwards? Don't worry, I'll be talking about matrix a bit as well. So hi, I'm Marcus. I'm a free software developer from Berlin. I've been working on the free Android ecosystem for the last two or three years. What does it mean? It means I'm using an Android phone that was at any Google services or Google Play Store, and I want to make that a more pleasant experience. So I'm an after I'd co-contributor and app maintainer. It's a full while. So who of you here is using an Android phone? Oh, wow. And who of you is using the Google Play Store or apps from the Google Play Store? About half or something like that? Yeah. That's what I'm trying to improve. So push notifications. They turn out to be one of the key missing pieces for free Android apps, apps that want to be published on Android, because currently there's, if you Google how to do push notifications on Android, you get that, yeah, use those Google services. Get into that later. So push notifications are when a server, a web app, web server sends unsolicited content to an app on your phone. That is without the app specifically asking for give me this update. It's also used for marketing purposes by proprietary apps a lot. So all of those newspaper, CNN, whatever application to, not really helpful push notifications a lot of the time.  So we need push notifications. So how do you send information from a server to a client without the client asking for it? Well, we cheat. We ask beforehand, give me new information at some point later, so we keep an open connection, which the server then can use to send those updates to the client. The problem is keeping a connection open does require maintenance of those connections. And that means battery power on mobile. Even more so on the varying network conditions, Flaky Wi-Fi, Flaky GSM network. So that means in turn that keeping it one connection open for every app on your phone that wants to receive push notifications to every one of their different web services. Well, that works, but it's going to drain your battery really, really fast. That's why Google introduced, well, Google Cloud Messaging and later Firebase Cloud Messaging, which bundles all those push notifications into one connection, which goes to Google Service. So your phone is connecting to the Firebase Service, we're just for receiving push notifications, and all those web services send their push notifications to Google Service, which then forwards it to your device. But as a number of drawbacks, for once, it requires Google Play Services being present on the device, which is the non-free part of Android. It also requires every app that wants to register for push notifications to include a proprietary library distributed by Google. So that actually means when you get free or apps, you thought you were free on the Google Play Service, which do Google Cloud Messaging, they're not actually free software, because they include a proprietary library or multiple ones. Well, that means all your push messages are sent through Google Service. Your false apps aren't actually false anymore. That includes Riot, Conversations, Firefox, Jami, NextLoud, DruckerChat. If you get them from the Google Play Service, from the Google Play Store. And there's also one other key drawback, because, well, Matrix and XMPP and DruckerChat and NextLoud are decentralized by design, so you can ask your own instance, or people, you can use instance of other people. But when the developers of the app built the APK of that app, they register for the Google Cloud Messaging Service, and they get a key from Google to send those push notifications through those Google Service to your device. And that key is tied to the APK. And you can't make it public, because as a West Google will just block it. So now you have to send your push, receive your push messages through two hops. From your own NextLoud instance, you send a push notification to a server hosted by the NextLoud app developers who forwards it to Google Cloud Messaging, who forwards it to your device. So now for an actually decentralized system, you introduce two centralized hops, which is not good. Or the alternative to that would be if you host the NextLoud instance, you have to distribute your own APKs of the NextLoud apps, which works but is a real hassle. So what are the alternatives if you don't want to use Firebase Cloud Messaging? Well, everybody builds their own more or less reliable solutions. Some protocols can do it better than others, like XMPP. They can do in-band push notifications, because they have a persistent connection anyway, that works reasonably well. But Android makes it quite hard to run background tasks. So it's a struggle. And the battery life is still horrible if you have all the different apps with all their persistent connections. So what do we want to do differently? Well, first of all, it's got to be free software, including server client library parts. It's got to be decentralized because we want people to run their own instances. And then we want users to be in control, which means the user of a smartphone can choose to push server instance. They want to register with, they trust to handle their data and metadata. And this push server instance is then communicated to all the different servers for corresponding to all the different apps on their phones. And we can also do why with this developer key requirement, because it's actually only used for accounting by Google. And as we are, want to be accountable to the user, not to app developers, we don't actually need APK to account, push account pairing. So you don't need this in the media rehab. So how does the architecture of this look like? Well, we have Android apps on your phone installed by user. They want to receive push notifications and they talk to some web service, which notify some or which they want to receive notifications from. The web service, it receives, well, when the app registers for push notifications, it gets a token. It's called push token. It sends this to the web service. And the web service that saves this push token. And whenever it wants to send a push notification to one specific app instance, it uses that push token as authentication. The app services sends this push notification through the push server, which is part of the open push project. So the push server has an API for the push client, which will come in a second, to register for push notifications. It generates those push tokens and stores the matching of a phone or a push client to the push token. And then it provides the API to the web services for receiving incoming pushes and then it forwards them to the push client. The push client in this model is the app running on your Android phone. It handles the registrations for pushes by other apps. It registers this with a push service. It's a part where you can choose which push server to use. And it's responsible for keeping the open connection to the push server. And whenever it receives a push notification, it distributes it to the other apps which have previously registered with it. So does it look on a picture? So the green parts are the things from the open push project. And the red parts are basically the users of this system. So this is your phone. These are the apps on your phone and every app talks to one server. So when you install an app, it registers to the push client on your phone. Ask it for a push token. The push client registers with a push server. The server generates a token, sends it to the client, sends it to the app, which then sends to the app server. And then you want to, when the app server then generates a push notification, it sends it the other way around to the push server, which sends it to the push client on your phone, which forwards it to the app on your phone. This connection here from the push client to the push server is the one that's kept alive by your phone. And so when you receive a push notification from it, it wakes up the app and the app then can then talk to the app server again and get more information or whatever. So that's the current status. There's the open API specification of the server part. That's roughly done, probably pending a few changes as we go along. It's the corresponding server implementation Python, which is kind of meant as a prototype for seeing this whole thing as viable. It's relatively since implementing the same API in a different language would not be that hard. Then there's an Android client implementation, which is still work in progress. Android is not or especially Android IPC talking different apps talking to each other is not the easiest to work with. I found so this is still ongoing. And then there's the corresponding client library, which other apps would use to register with push for push notifications on your phone. This is developed alongside the Android push client. It's also still work in progress. And then when we have the system, we need to, of course, integrate it in other communication platforms systems. And well, this is a to do for after the client implementation are finished. So how does it work in more detail? The connection between the push client and the push server is currently using server sent events, which has been tried out for custom build push notifications on Android. Server sent events are part of HTTP, following a very simple text based protocol, which you can send Jason blocks over. It's really simple. It works reasonably well in first tests. But the choice of the protocol is deliberately transparent to all users of the system. So we can experiment with having a different transport protocol later on, without impacting like any third party implementations. The push client is currently a standalone Android app. It's possible to integrate it maybe in micro g later on. People don't know what micro g is micro g is open source implementation of the Google play services on your phone, which does allow you to use Google cloud messaging without using Google play services on your phone. But it's still using Google servers and still requiring the proprietary app library. So it's not a very good solution for from a privacy standpoint. Or from a free surface standpoint. But micro g is already integrated in some Android ROM builds. So having this integrated in micro g would maybe make sense in the future. And I said earlier that it's getting pretty tricky, hard to keep background connections alive or any doing any kind of background work on Android. So for this, I choose the easy option with which is running a foreground service, which has a persistent notification for the user, which you can hide. But this is, I think this is okay for when it's one app that does it and it gets annoying when 20 different apps do it. The alternative would be running it as a system service like micro g does currently. Then you have the same permissions as running as a foreground service without needing the notification. And the client library communicates with the push client via Android IPC that's using a bound servers and then for incoming push it sends targeted broadcast events. This is basically modeled after what Google does for their own messaging. So where do we go from here? Well, we need to integrate it in, for example, matrix clients and servers rocket chat next cloud and see how it performs in practice under interesting network conditions. It's going to be interesting. One thing I've thought about is adding enter and encryption. Enter and encryption in this case would mean from the web service to your phone, the message being encrypted. So operators of push services are not, so for them it's not possible to read the content of the messages. They'd still get all the metadata, but that's what Google gets at the moment as well. But actually, we already have less metadata than Google because apps register with Google cloud messaging with their identity as an app. And Open push doesn't do that. So you would just, the operators push server would just see there's a message, then it would also be encrypted in the future. So there's less metadata. And I don't think it would be that hard to add famous last words because we only sending unidirectional messages and we don't want to keep any history. So it's just encrypt one with a key the client can use to decrypt it. I also want to experiment with different transports and service and events. Just that goes hand in hand to seeing how it works in practice with actual networks. And one other interesting thing that came up is having existing systems be the push provider for your phone. So if you're already running an XMPP client on your phone, you already have this persistent connection to your XMPP server because that's how XMPP works. So why couldn't we use this connection and just implement the push server API on your XMPP server as a push plugin and include a library in your XMPP client that would allow other apps to register for push notifications using the same APIs. And then, well, you have one less connection and hopefully the longer battery life. The interesting thing about that is then how to figure out if the user has multiple apps installed that could act as a push provider, which one gets selected and so he'll tricky user experience to figure out. I think that's it. This project I've worked on this for six months last year funded by German Government Institute through the prototype fund. And you can find more information on this website. Thank you. Thank you for your talk. We have time for, we have about five minutes for questions. Yeah, hi. Thanks for the talk. I would think the number one worry that I would have is that you won't get away forever with the foreground service. You said another option would be being, I mean, the thing you technically would want to be is a system app, right? So you wouldn't have that problem. I'm not sure, but are you worried as well? That's a way to become a system app, right? So what, can you? Yeah, I don't didn't get the exact question. Yeah, I'd be, I know right now the solution for you is to be a foreground service and you get the annoying notification if you don't configure it away. But I'd be worried as Android is becoming more and more restrictive with background tasks that, you know, two versions of Android from here. You might, this might, might no longer be the solution. So if I would have thought that's the main worry that you will one day fail at keeping alive in the background and providing a push service. Yes. So I think the only solution to set is being integrated on a system level, which is a means custom ROMs and people figuring out how to pseudo move some APKs around. But more ideally, it would mean that actually phone vendors would distribute non Google Android phones, which we are severely lacking right now. I wanted to ask it by the way, it's great presentation. And thank you. Thank you. I wonder how easy it would be for Google to make your solution impossible to use on Android. Again, yeah, how, how easy would it be for Google to make your solution impossible to use on Android? Well, we, if say block foreground services running forever, that's Ben makes it somewhat impossible if you depend on the stock Android from a bot in the store. They can still be workarounds for doing smart things with checking in every 15 minutes, however, often you're allowed. But they only can do things through the normal Android distribution. If you're not using any Google Play services and you're not getting your apps from the Google Play store, they can't really enforce any anyone not using this system through other means. There's the web API for push notifications. Have you thought about using the same API for the push server connection? I haven't really looked into web push, which I think is partly because it's a different problem domain because on desktop, you can get away with a lot less battery saving solutions. So what this is modeled after is Google's solution for push messages on the decentralized and free because while they have thought about this probably a long time. I once heard that that mobile ISPs have have special contracts with push service providers like Google or Apple that their TCP connections are not terminated relatively quickly like all the others. So have you done any measurements, any benchmarks on how efficient your service is? How often do connections get terminated and is this different from the Google implementation? I've not yet done any measurements, at least not with this. I've heard this quite often as well. I have never seen or heard anyone actually providing any data to back this up. So I consider this a rumor to know. It might be different in the US. I don't think it's the case. I'd be happy to hear input from you for that. So how does the push client check for broken connections because I tried to do something similar a few months ago using Autobahn and Crossbar and that as well running as a foreground service in Android and ultimately I had to send these Pings after every few minutes just to make sure the connection was alive and Android would complain that it's killing the battery. So the user would end up uninstalling that. So that was my biggest fear. So have you found a solution for that? No, well, the solution is check every X minutes where you can be a bit smart about how big X is. I don't think Android would complain more than, well, this notification you get with the foreground service as well. It's a bit, well, on Android you can hide notifications by long pressing on them. If you do that with a foreground service that is still running, you get another notification by the system which actually tells you this app is killing your battery. User education is the solution for this right now. This is how we can work. Okay, thank you very much. We are running out of time.


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Rwy'n digwydd y mae'r cyffredinolion roedd yn unrhyw o'r cyffredinolion i'r ddweud ymennodd Llorna Suter, y minister o Cocpin yn Carinthon, Pareschurch, Llywid i Llywid i Roswell Pareschurch. Rwy'n credu'n amdaniad cychewyr o'r parlwyr. Rwy'n credu dechrau'r cyffredinolion i'r cyffredinolion i'r cyffredinolion i'r cyffredinolion to have been living through frustratingly uncertain times for a long time now. Always in life, there is a question of how we cope with uncertainty. In his book Canoing the Mountains, the American writer Todd Balsinger uses the example of the American explorers, Marywether Lewis and William Clark, who in 1804 embarked on their search for the north west passage. After spending 15 months paddling and carrying canoes up the Mississippi Missouri River to its source, Lewis and Clark were full of expectation that they were about to realise the dream of centuries of pioneers.  But in the next moments what they actually found was something entirely different. What they found were the Rocky Mountains stretching out for miles and miles as far as the eye could see, one set of peaks upon another. What next for them? They were going to have to go off the map into uncharted territory. All was uncertain. They might have felt like giving up and turning back, but they didn't. Instead, with courage, resilience, openness and versatility, they kept going. The true adventure had just begun. In the church too, we are facing uncertain times at present, having to head into uncharted territory as we explore new ways of being and doing church today. It can seem daunting, and in the Lord's leading we need courage and versatility to press on. In our wider uncertain times, I dare say that there are moments when you want to put head in hands and wonder what next. But I pray you will each know the courage, resilience, openness and versatility you too need to pursue paths of potential ahead. Before then, may you each importantly be able to make space for true rest in the recess to recharge your batteries and be refreshed for your task ahead. Thank you.